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Chapter 1
Torin
“We will announce the engagement in six months. Do what you need to in order to prepare.”
I bite back the first four things I want to say and consciously work to make my tone calm, almost bored. “You mean, tell Samuel to get my best suit dry cleaned? Get a haircut? Hit the gym? That kind of thing?”
“I’m not in the mood for your jokes today.”
The thing is, my grandfather is never in the mood for my jokes. He doesn’t find me amusing in the slightest.
I assume he finds humor in something, but hell if I know what it is. The man hasn’t smiled in my presence since I was about thirteen years old.
I’m now thirty-two.
“So, then I assume you mean that I should actually discuss this with a woman? You know, propose to someone so that there’s an engagement to announce?” Now my tone is much less bored and calm. There’s a definite edge to it.
He appreciates my sarcasm even less than he appreciates my humor.
He turns from the tall window behind his desk and clasps his hands behind his back.
The man standing in front of me is wearing a light blue button-down shirt and navy blue pants. He’s not wearing a tie or a jacket. He’s not wearing a crown. But I have no question that I am talking to King Diarmuid. Not my grandfather.
He’s not scowling at me, however. He’s giving me a look I hate even more. He looks at me with a condescending lift of one eyebrow as he says, “That’s not really necessary. That was taken care of years ago. She’ll be ready.”
I grind my back teeth together.
She is Lady Linnea Olsen, the eldest granddaughter of the late Alfred Olsen. He was a billionaire, a duke, and my grandfather’s best friend. And favorite man to sit across from at a poker table.
She’s been my sort-of fiancée since I was five.
When my grandfather lost me in a poker game.
The agreement was written up on the back of a whiskey-stained playbill when my grandfather got too far in on a poker game and had to come up with something of ‘value’.
Alfred won, and the fate of King Diarmuid’s heir was sealed.
The “arranged marriage” has always been something of a family joke.
Until now.
Until I returned home to take my place as crown prince and my grandfather determined he didn’t trust me and couldn’t take me seriously, but that Linnea really would make a fabulous queen.
Oh, and Alfred died.
So there’s no going back on the agreement. Linnea and I will be married.
That’s what my grandfather has told me approximately a thousand times in the past two years.
We won’t, though.
We definitely won’t.
“I’m not marrying Linnea,” I tell him, pushing up from the chair in front of the monstrous desk that has been in this office all of my life. Four generations of kings have sat behind that desk.
I’ve said exactly those four words to him repeatedly over the past two years I’ve been back in Cara.
“The day you marry her, the throne is yours.”
