His Royal Prize Read Free

heiress whose every move was catalogued by the press, but a woman who’d sat in the dirt and comforted a child who was crying. A woman who’d spoken the local language to the people who were collecting the water and medical supplies that their group had brought with them. She’d casually mentioned she’d learned the language on a trip years earlier to the same region.
    Seeing that side of Amelia had intrigued him. But seeing her tonight in full form had reminded him that she was a complex, confusing, beautiful woman. One that he was suddenly hell-bent on getting to know better.
     
    Amelia Munroe smiled at Cecelia, Lady Abercrombie, and nodded as the older woman talked about the fiasco at her dinner party a week earlier. Amelia wished she were indeed the careless person she was portrayed as in the tabloid media because then she could just walk away from Cecelia. But she couldn’t. Lady Abercrombie was one of her mother’s closest friends and when she wasn’t rambling on endlessly, Amelia genuinely liked her.
    “Well, to make a long story short,” Cecelia said, “be glad you didn’t come.”
    “I’m not glad I missed your party. It sounds like it was very interesting.”
    “If you’d been there, it would have been more than interesting,” Cecelia said. “How was Milan?”
    “Wonderful. Mother has designed a new line that is going to be simply spectacular. I can’t wait for the world to see it.”
    “I’m going next week for a sneak peek,” Cecelia said. Though in her early fifties, Cecelia looked at least fifteen years younger, with a trim, athletic build and perfectly coiffed blond hair. But what really made her look young was her smooth skin—something that Amelia’s mother, Mia Domenici, attributed to the spa treatments Cecelia had twice a year in Switzerland. Something Amelia’s father never approved of.
    “I’m sure you’ll have a lovely trip,” Amelia said.
    “I can’t wait. Oh, I see Edmond, Malcolm Devonshire’s man of affairs. I want to find out how Malcolm’s health is, dear, do you mind?”
    “Not at all,” Amelia said and watched the other woman walk away. Cecelia was a gossip and always knew every detail of the personal lives of their set. She turned to survey the room and saw a man walking toward her.
    She knew him in an instant. Geoff Devonshire. They attended many of the same functions and served on the board of the International Children’s Fund together.
    There was something about the man, with his dark, thick curly hair and piercing blue eyes, that she couldn’t resist. She thought back to a photo she’d seen of him once, standing next to his Learjet in a pair of slim-fitting jeans—and no shirt.
    Yummy. The man had chest muscles like the Italian models that her mother hired for her fall shows.
    But unlike most men, Geoff had never paid her much attention. It was maddening, actually.
    “Good evening, Geoff,” she said, as he stopped in front of her. She stood up to give him the customary kiss on each cheek, but he startled her by putting his hands on her waist and brushing his lips against hers. Her mouth tingled from the contact and she tilted her head to the side to study him, trying to hide the fact that he’d caught her so off guard.
    She was the outrageous one!
    “That was a bit friendly,” she said.
    “I can be a cheeky bastard,” he replied with a half smile.
    “As can Hubert,” she said.
    Geoff laughed as she gave the older man a wave.
    “Scandalous,” he joked.
    It was an apt choice of words, Amelia thought. Scandal might as well be her middle name. Though she had been born to a world of wealth and privilege, she’d also been born into scandal. Her mother had been the mistress of Augustus Munroe, a married New York hotel mogul who had changed the way that people traveled. He’d revolutionized the hotel industry with his signature luxury-themed hotels.
    “But I don’t want to talk about Hubert,” Geoff said, staring her down with his impossibly