The Accidental Heir Read Free Page A

her bacon—or at least her butt from getting frostbite.
    ‘Thank you,’ she managed tight-lipped, which wasn’t as easy as it sounded when faced by a curving smile and wicked eyes. The worst of it was Karl made her want to smile back.
    She broke eye contact first. ‘If you don’t mind, I’d like you to turn around while I get ready for bed.’
    ‘Be my guest, Princess.’
    She might have to be, Astrid realised in horror when she unzipped her polar sleeping bag.
    ‘What’s wrong now?’ Karl demanded when he heard her dejected sigh. ‘Not another accident, I hope?’
    He came to look over her shoulder. ‘Oh, that’s good, Princess,’ he said, attempting to curtail the choked laughter that threatened to escape his tantalising mouth.
    ‘Good? How do you work that out?’
    ‘It gives me a chance to teach you another lesson.’
    ‘Why, you patronising—’
    Karl held up a warning hand, and in the interest of having somewhere to sleep, she braced herself for another lecture.
    ‘Fill the bottle. Tighten the bottle. Wait. Then invert the bottle and tighten again. Repeat.’
    Repeat! How could he make even that sound sexy?
    Her mind was all over the place. ‘Now he tells me,’ she muttered, rolling her eyes to try to mask her sudden and very violent arousal. ‘But what am I supposed to do?’ she demanded, staring at her sodden bed.
    ‘There’s only one thing you can do.’
    ‘And what’s that?’
    She didn’t like the way Karl was thumbing his stubble as he attempted to hide his smile.
    ‘You’ll have to sleep with me, Princess, or risk freezing to death. It’s your choice.’

CHAPTER FOUR
    O H , THIS WAS fun, This was the best fun ever. This was at least twice the fun of erecting a polar tent in a polar blizzard, Astrid sarcastically thought to herself. She had squeezed into half of the sleeping bag and now Mountain Man was going to try to shoehorn himself in too?
    ‘I don’t think so,’ she snapped as he moved to climb into the sleeping bag next to her. Turning her back on him, she huddled in a ball with the bag zipped up to her chin.
    ‘We’ll have to spoon,’ he growled.
    Spoon with a man who rumour said was a raging sex maniac? Oh, yes. That was likely. ‘Over my dead body,’ she grumbled, wondering if she had ever felt quite so hot with embarrassment or so consumed with lust, and at the same time.
    ‘That can be arranged, Princess. One thing’s for sure, we’ll both be dead if the water heater fails and we don’t keep each other warm tonight.’
    She didn’t have much choice, Astrid concluded as Karl wrenched the edge of the bag out of her death grip and unzipped it. She held her breath as he climbed in. Ignoring her muffled squeaks of shock and growls of warning, he lost no time throwing one arm around her and arranging her in a position that best suited him.
    And, okay, it wasn’t all that bad. In fact, it was shockingly wonderful. It didn’t matter that she had her back to him. Her body was rampantly overeager for his touch. And it was cold outside the bag. So there really wasn’t an alternative, she consoled herself. Forget polar freeze. This was polar meltdown. Global warming had definitely reached their tent.
    Now. Concentrate. She could usually forget sex and think about something else....
    She could usually forget sex because the available suitors for a princess, even an impoverished princess, were about as appealing as last week’s rice pudding—and about as limp. But as Karl was more of a banana split with a double helping of chocolate ice cream...
    ‘Relax, princess. There are more layers between us than there are in a strawberry-cream millefeuille.’
    ‘Like you’d know about patisserie,’ she grumbled, struggling to find some way of disentangling her yearning body from his.
    ‘I would, as it happens, as I employ one of the world’s top pastry chefs in my kitchen at the palace. Hmm. I thought you’d like that.’
    Could she help it if she was drooling and