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“Do you remember what the week leading up to the coup was like?” He shoved his fingers through his hair as if he could wipe the memory from his brain. “I was twenty-two and home on holiday from university. I thought I was about to take over the world—then everything crumbled.”
The reports in the beginning had been sporadic rumors, but they could only be contained for so long. Elskov was a small country, and on their island word traveled fast.
The heated pink in Elle’s cheeks drained until only a ashy pallor was left. She clutched her hands together in front of her. “My father tried to hide it from me as long as possible, but everything was so tense there really wasn’t any way. There were paid protestors outside the castle gate. Someone had to taste my food before I could eat it. In the last few days, I wasn’t allowed to leave the castle, even in the armored SUV.”
In those last few days, the country was obsessed with sightings of royalty, false or not. “The Fjende claimed your lack of visibility was proof your family had abandoned the country.”
“My father would never have done that.” She shook with indignation as disgust wound its way into words. “He bled for Elskov, for all the good it did. The coup won anyway.”
Her words slapped him in the face, and he nearly flinched. “The war isn’t over yet.”
“What war?” She spun around to face him, her eyes blazing with fury. “No one in the international community cares about Elskov. They gladly eat up the bullshit that I’m alive and sorta well, that no coup ever took place, and that my father died of a heart attack and everything is business as usual.”
“We can change that.” The frustration of being so close to what he’d worked so hard for and discovering there was yet another hurdle to climb ripped a hole into him. Moving forward could be done without her cooperation. He’d committed to doing what needed to be done, no matter the cost. “You can change that.”
She opened her mouth, but nothing came out. Instead, she let out a deep sigh, closed her eyes, and the fight went out of her. For a moment she stood there, her shoulders slumped, before opening her eyes and hitting him with a question he’d skated around answering for years. “You don’t need this. Why do you want it so fucking badly?”
“You’re wrong. I do need this. I’ve been waiting for ten years to make it happen.” The words came out before he could stop them, even if he’d wanted to. “You’re right on the accent. I had the best language and dialect tutors, but they weren’t good enough for someone with your ears. I grew up in Elskov as a registered foreigner. My family was wealthy but still waiting to become official citizens. Despite that, my parents were loyal royalists. They were not quiet about their support of your father and pledged to do whatever it took to help him. The wrong people heard about this and decided to make an example of them.” He fisted his hands, pushing past the agony the words brought to the forefront. “The night your father was shot and you fled for America, they were murdered. Their mutilated bodies were displayed in the square near Elskov Castle to serve as a warning to other loyalists. It worked.”
He didn’t know when she’d walked over to him, but suddenly she was there standing in front of him and taking his large hands into her own small ones. “I’m so sorry.”
Stopping the story there was the smart thing. It allowed him to hold a little bit of the pain back, but he needed to tell her. He had to let her know that although she might have been alone, she hadn’t been abandoned.
“Their names were Sabine and Rasmus Vinter,” he said, his parents’ names so long unspoken that they seemed foreign on his tongue.
She gasped and released him as if he’d burned her.
“Yes, the same Sabine and Rasmus who were supposed to meet you in Harbor City and keep you safe after you’d escaped,” he said. “It took me a year and you don’t want to know how many bribes to track you down. You’d hidden yourself well.”
“I didn’t have a choice.”
“But you do now.” He took her hands in his. They disappeared in his grasp, reminding him that behind the larger-than-life image of her he’d created, she was in many ways the lonely stylist working a nine to five, surrounded by luxurious trappings that probably only reminded her of how her former life had ended in tragedy. “You said yourself that you always have a choice. I’m asking you to make the right one.”
…
Elle looked down at their hands. She was trapped. Not by him, but by his expectations and his agenda. If she said yes, that would be her life until she ended up alone, like her father, her blood soaking the ground of the country he’d loved that had betrayed him, because that’s how it would end. The Fjende wouldn’t give up power without a fight, and she was no one’s idea of a warrior queen. She was just Elle. She’d fail, and what would that do to her father’s legacy?
Hating that it was so hard to do, she pulled her hands from his. “No.”
Dom snapped to attention, an icy contempt freezing out the emotion she’d seen in the blue depths of his eyes only moments before. “What do you mean, no?”
“I’m Elle Olsen.” She wiped her palms against her pencil skirt, trying to numb the electric tingling touching him created. “I’m a stylist. I live in a tiny one-bedroom, rent-controlled apartment in Harbor City. Find another way. I can’t be your queen.”
“That’s bullshit.” Anger roughened the low timbre of his voice until it was like sandpaper against her last thin string of control. “It’s time to stop hiding who you really are.”
“Fine advice coming from you.” And there it went. The string tethering her to a place of calmness snapped in half, and her temper erupted, heating up her insides and melting the bone-chilling, furious fear holding her in place. “You haven’t been hiding at all, have you, with your fake last name and all-too-convenient information blackout on all things related to your Elskov history?”
“This isn’t about me,” he said through gritted teeth. “This is about you taking your rightful place as queen. It’s time you accepted your duty. You’re being selfish.”
“Selfish?” The smug bastard. As if she wouldn’t be giving up her life—her freedom—as soon as she put on that crown, but she should just accept it like a good little girl. She hadn’t been a good little girl since the night her father died. She couldn’t bring him back, but she damn sure wouldn’t help the country that destroyed him. “Elskov took everyone I loved and abandoned me in a foreign land.”
“You were never alone,” he said.
The statement was so demonstrably false that she laughed, laughed, right at that big, broad chest of his, but there was nothing joyous in her voice. Instead there was the hurt and fear and despair of a seventeen-year-old girl who, within a twenty-four-hour time span, had seen her father murdered, left the only home she’d ever known, and found herself alone on a bench outside the Harbor City International Airport, totally ill prepared to function in the real world outside the castle walls.
“Now who’s full of shit? Were you there when I spent a month holed up in a cheap hotel because I was petrified that if I left someone would kill me?” She jabbed a finger hard into his unrelenting chest, the frisson of attraction mixing with the emotions swirling around inside her like a tornado no one could control. “Were you there when I realized no one was coming for me and that I had to create a new life for myself? Were you there when I was turned down for every job I applied for because the only thing I knew how to do was wave, smile, and put together a killer outfit?” She fought to get the words out through her tightened throat. “Were you there when I pawned my mother’s gold locket, the last tie I had to her, so I could buy forged identification papers and actually create a new life for myself?” Biting the inside of her cheek to head off the tears threatening to spill, she straightened up to her full height. “No, you weren’t. No one was.”
Raw emotion squeezed her lungs as she stared at him. Large and imposing, he loomed over her, the cold fury of his
