Princess Annie Read Free Page B

couldn’t have named those things with any real exactitude. There weren’t many other things to do, after all, if one’s sex was female, and besides, she’d thought of little else from the time she’d first laid eyes on Rafael. He’d visited her parents’ home on the coast of France when Annie was just twelve, and changed the whole course of her life.
    “Like what?” Phaedra challenged. She and Annie had come to Bavia, barely a week before, after leaving school in Switzerland, to plan a royal wedding—Phaedra’s own—and the celebration was to be a fairy-tale affair, suitable for a princess. Naturally, given her current occupation with matrimonial matters, Phaedra was an outspoken proponent of wedded bliss. Which didn’t keep Annie from thinking, on occasion, that her dearest friend was whistling at shadows.
    Annie sneezed again, with spirit, just in time to evade the question. “I’m freezing,” she said, then fled into her bedchamber and closed the door behind her. Fortunately, the fire was still burning on the hearth, and she hurried toward it.
    Once she was certain Phaedra wouldn’t follow, determined to make her point, Annie tore off her wet clothes and undergarments. Her legs and arms were badly scraped and bruised where she’d bounced off the castle walls during the rescue, but remembering that Rafael’s hands had been bleeding, she couldn’t summon up a lot of self-pity.
    Trembling with cold, Annie fetched a towel from the washstand and dried goose-pimpled flesh, then pulled a nightgown over her head. She had just finished doing that, in fact, when a soft rap sounded at the door.
    Expecting a maid bearing brandy, which would have been most welcome, or a repentant Phaedra, which alas would not, Annie called out, “Come in!” without a moment’s hesitation.
    Her heart stopped, missing several beats—she was to swear to it, forever after—when Rafael stepped over the threshold. His clothes, the same ones he’d worn to bring her in off the parapet, were sodden, his dark hair was beaded with rain and showed evidence that he’d raked his fingers through it a number of times in the few minutes since they’d parted. The undersides of his hands were streaked crimson with dried blood, the backs already swelling visibly.
    The firelight cast a sinister, flickering glow over his countenance and, to Annie’s fanciful eyes, at least, Rafael St. James looked more like the devil than the reigning prince of a small, doomed country.
    She felt his gaze sweep over her, with a certain grand dispatch, leaving a peculiar, achy heat in its wake, and realized that the glow of the fire was probably shining through her nightgown and thus outlining the shape of her body. She stepped away from the hearth, taking refuge behind a high-backed chair.
    The silence lengthened.
    Finally, Annie could bear the thunderous tension no longer. “If you’ve truly come to carry me off to the dungeon,” she said, in a small and shaky voice, “as you threatened before—I warn you, I shall resist.”
    St. James stared at her for a long moment, as if confounded, and then, suddenly, he laughed. The sound was purely masculine, deep and rich and intoxicating, and it spawned feelings in Annie that were at once delicious and terrifying.
    She looked around for some better shelter than that velvet-upholstered chair and, finding none, stood her ground. “I think you should leave,” she said, with polite belligerence.
    Rafael’s amusement had distilled from a husky laugh, from low in his throat, to a rather demonic smile. He arched one dark eyebrow and studied her at his leisure before responding. “No doubt you’re right,” he conceded. “I should leave. However, I am the master of St. James Keep, as well as the ruler of this godforsaken country. As such, I go where I please.”
    Annie swallowed hard to keep herself from pointing out that he was about to be overthrown. It would have been cruel and disrespectful and, anyway, she owed