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The creature before him scowled, her wild blond hair bobbing slightly from where it was inadequately knotted atop her head. “That is not afunction.You say it like you’ve made toying with sad women your own cottage industry.”
“I do what I can,” Zeus murmured, as if attempting to be humble. A state of being he did not recognize, personally. What purpose could it serve? “No, no, your gratitude alone is my reward.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” huffed the little brown hen. “I was nothing but a servant. You, on the other hand,were not only a royal prince, destined for a throne—”
“Not just any throne,” he added helpfully. “The humbly named Throne of Ages. It’s right down the hall if you want to take a peek. Maybe snap a few pictures? I hear that’s all the rage.”
“You were also engaged,” Nina continued doggedly.“To be married. Sincethe very day of herbirth, ifI remember it rightly, as set up by your fathers in an agreement that all of Europe knows inside and out. Given how many times it’s been trotted out in the tabloids while one or the other of you was caught entertaining someone outside the bonds of your arrangement.”
“Such busybodies, fathers,” Zeus murmured. “Don’t you think? Forever arranging things on their own and then acting surprised that no one wishes to be anarrangement.”
“I wouldn’t know,” she replied coolly. Censoriously, even. “My father died when I was five, and the only arrangements that were ever made for me involved orphanages or princesses.”
“Neither of which you liked all that much, if memory serves.”
“We have already established that you have pervasive memory issues,” she shot back, her chin tilting up. “I will remind you that you were not only the Crown Prince of Theosia that night. You were not only engaged. You were engagedto my mistress.”
That had rather been the point.
Though, admittedly, Zeus had gotten sidetracked. How could he have known that Isabeau’s little hen was hiding the curves of a goddess beneath the outlandish and unflattering things she wore?
And Zeus was, at heart, a connoisseur of the female form.
He had spent six months assuring himself that was all he was, especially when it came to her.
“Darling Isabeau, the most poisonous viperin all of Europe,” he said now with a sigh, fairly certain that Nina would not care for any rhapsodizing about her charms. She looked as if she might bite him. “Such a tender union that would have been.”
The fact that Isabeau was fake and unpleasant, at best, had not been the reason Zeus hadn’t wanted to marry her. Zeus didn’t want to marry anyone. He had been making his sentiments known for years and had questioned the arrangement he’d had no hand in making—but his royal fiancée had been nothing if not ambitious. Her kingdom was little more than an uppity ski slope, and that wasn’t enough for Isabeau. She’d had big dreams of what it would mean to be the Theosian Queen.
Fidelity hadn’t factored in.
Zeus had needed to find a way to make her break things off before her thirtieth birthday, as stipulated in the contracts his father had signed a lifetime ago. It was that or pay outrageous penalties. Like ransoming off one of the outlying Theosian islands, which even Zeus, for all his game playing, could not justify. Or countenance.
His ancestors would have risen from the dead in protest. And really, his father was quite enough. Zeus couldn’t imagine having more family around to shout at him about bloodlines and duties and the debt he owed to history.
The perfect solution had come to him in a blast of inspiration during a deathly boring dinner engagement on one of his trips to Haught Montagne—the trips he put off as long as possible, until Isabeau’s father began to make threats of violence. Which in their world could lead to war—whether in the markets or the streets. Neither was acceptable, for obvious reasons.
Or so Zeus had been constantly told by his father for the whole of his life.
Though Zeus had been entertaining himself by imagining otherwise at that dinner. Then he’d spied Isabeau’s pet and his plotting had gone off in an entirely different direction. Zeus had been deeply pleased with himself.
But that night had not gone according to plan.
He was blessed with the ability to see the beauty in any woman he encountered. And so he did, and had. Yet what he had not anticipated was that Nina was wholly unlike the other courtiers and ladies who circled his unwanted bride-to-be. Her innocence had awed him. Her enthusiasm had left a permanent mark.
And it turned out a man did not have to look hard for the beauty in Nina. She was hiding it. Deliberately. But he’d found her out.
The truth he did not intend to share was that he, Zeus of Theosia, had actually thought about her in the months since that night.
More than once.
And at the start, he had done more thanthinkabout her—
But he barely admitted that to himself.
“You are welcome, Your Royal Highness,” Nina was saying in that sharp way he remembered from that evening in Haught Montagne, when he’d found his way beneath all those layers she wore. So deliciously sharp up close when she seemed so soft from a distance. “What a pleasure it was to break off your engagement for you, since you were apparently unable to do it yourself.”
But Zeus could not be shamed. Many had attempted it. All had fallen short. He merely lifted a shoulder. “If I had broken it myself, there would have been too many unpleasant consequences. Monies to be paid. Kings to placate. Wars to avert. Far better all round to make Isabeau break it herself.” He inclined his head in her direction. “You, apparently, were the bridge too far.”
