Stranded with the Prince

Chapter One

Sagro Prison island, Italy

Boots slapped on the concrete floor, keeping a regular rhythm. The night security lights were on, enough to see the guard who was texting on his phone as he strode out of sight, a sly grin on his pockmarked face. A minute went by, then another. The steel door opened then closed at the end of the cell block.

The 2:00 a.m. check was complete. Nobody would be by again until morning.

Roberto, fully dressed, slid out of bed, making no more noise than his shadow as it moved across the floor. He laid his pillow lengthwise on the bare mattress then draped the bed with his blanket, creating a bulky form.

His sheets had been ripped, twisted into rope and wrapped around his waist before he’d gone to bed. Now he bent and squatted one more time to make sure the cumbersome arrangement wouldn’t limit his movement. He adjusted a tight strip under his left armpit before he stole to the door and pressed the top part of the lock hard.

Click. The sound was so soft even he barely heard it.

José had fixed the locks. The oldest of the team, José had been a locksmith before a drive-by took out his family in the godforsaken backstreets of Bogotá. With nothing to live for, he’d signed up for the rival gang. José understood revenge.

So did Roberto. It pushed him forward as he stole down the hallway, moving fast in a crouch. He listened to the snoring of the other inmates. A bed creaked now and then as someone turned over in his sleep. He listened for any indication that someone noticed him, not trusting—despite substantial bribes and dire threats—that they wouldn’t betray him and sound the alarm.

José was waiting for him at the water block, along with Marco, the third member of the team.

“Any trouble?” Roberto kept his voice to a low whisper.

Marco shook his head. He was young and sullen, still not over the fact that they’d been imprisoned. That here, on the other side of the ocean, the boss couldn’t protect them. He was ready to go, but didn’t think it fair that they had to orchestrate the escape themselves. He’d griped and whined through the preparations. Which better stop right now, right here. Roberto flashed him a sharp look that warned him to be on his best behavior.

The young thugs coming out of the slums these days were too hotheaded, only after the glory, and rarely willing to put enough effort into a job to get it done right. They wanted the fastest car and the biggest gun, wanted to build reputations overnight, which led to too much senseless killing.

“All’s according to plan,” José was saying.

Exactly what Roberto wanted to hear. His sticker, a spoon handle sharpened into a knife, waited stashed inside a showerhead. He retrieved the makeshift tool then went to work on removing a wall panel.

A hundred years ago, Sagro Prison had been the hunting castle of some Italian king. When they’d rebuilt it into a prison in the fifties, they changed just about everything. Security had been upgraded several times since, but the prison’s waste and sewer system still connected to the old castle’s cistern.

All Roberto and his men had had to do over the endless months that they’d been locked up here was dig through the wall. The cistern’s ducts, carved from stone, were plenty wide to accommodate a man.

José squeezed in first, then Marco, Roberto going last, pulling the wall panel into place behind him. By morning they’d be free men. His to-do list was simple: get food, finish the boss’s business in Trieste, then get the hell out of Italy.

But he wouldn’t go back to Bogotá, not straightaway. He had personal business in the area which he meant to see handled. He was going to Valtria, the small kingdom to the north, to gain retribution for his brother’s death.

An eye for an eye, a life for a life. He might have been too old-school to condone all the senseless killing the new gangs did these days, but revenge was part of a man’s honor. And he did believe in that. He certainly did.

Island of Morka, Nature Preserve, Valtria

SHE WAS THE SCOURGE of his life, a relentless thorn under his royal skin. Prince Lazlo of Valtria watched Milda Milas bear down on him and knew what it felt like to be hunted.

A professional matchmaker from New York. He loved his mother as much as all his brothers did, but the Queen had gone too far this time. One of her ladies-in-waiting had a cousin in New York who’d been Milda’s client. Apparently, a recommendation had been made. He didn’t like the idea of his mother discussing his personal life with her ladies-in-waiting. Shouldn’t they have been talking about the royal gardens or copying antique tapestries and the like when they retired to the Queen’s private quarters?

Despite the calming, balmy breeze that streamed from the endless azure water, Lazlo’s sense of peace was fast disappearing. He’d been looking forward to spending the day away from the palace, away from Milda’s harping. He should have known she wouldn’t let a perfectly good day go by without doing her best to ruin it. A dull throb started up in the knee he’d once injured in a crash. Maybe his subconscious was beginning to associate her with pain.

“And there I was, thinking I could hide from you here,” he said when she reached him.

He liked the island of Morka, fifty miles off the Italian coast, an inhabited chunk of land in the Mediterranean Sea, owned by the Valtrian royal family and set up as a nature preserve. With its wild olive and orange groves, the place was a veritable paradise—but for Milda Milas’s unfortunate presence.

“Your Highness.” She stopped in front of him with that ra-ra-hurra look that hardly left her face whenever she dealt with him. She seemed to think that if she smiled wide enough and pretended that what she was doing to him was normal—wonderful, even—somehow he could be tricked into agreeing with her.

“I don’t know how you got here. Never mind that.” He reconsidered and cut to the point. “You should leave,” he told her firmly. “I’m not playing your games today. I’ve made other plans.”

Since the top of her head only came up to his shoulders, she usually rose to the tips of her toes when she wanted to browbeat him into yet another one of her crazy plans. She was stretching up so hard at the moment that she looked like a ballet dancer. The wind whipped her long, reddish-brown hair around her slim face. Her eyes, the exact dusky blue of his first race car, narrowed as she dropped the smile, recognizing smartly that it wasn’t going to work today.

“You should face your responsibilities, Your Highness. Don’t you think all this endless evasion is childish?”

She had his gander up in thirty seconds flat. A new record. She knew she was annoying him, but she didn’t care. She had the Queen’s protection. She’d been given free reign, God help him.

“I’m childish?” He drew up an eyebrow slowly, regally, and regarded her with a chilly expression he’d learned early on in life from his mother. “You torture me for money. What does that make you?”

She dropped back on her heels and stuck her chin out, her eyes and lips narrowing. “To be honest, I’d torture you for free. If that makes you feel better.”

He was taken aback for a moment. He was used to more respect as a prince. Although not from her, admittedly.

“You know what I think?” she asked with a smirk, losing the last of her polite veneer.

He allowed a subtle sneer. “A better question is, mademoiselle, do I care?”

“I think you’re afraid that you couldn’t hold an intelligent woman’s attention over the long term. That’s why you engage only in nightlong, scandalous affairs with those twits.” Her tone turned to lecturing. “Your conduct is embarrassing the monarchy and the Queen. You were caught on tape in a compromising situation, for love’s sake.” She rolled her dusky blue eyes in a way that told him exactly what she thought of that.

Not that until now he’d been forced to guess. She had expressed her opinion a number of times since the unfortunate incident.

He tried to put this latest scandal out of his mind. No chance of that with her around. She was going to lecture him on his duties as a prince? His blood pressure inched up. He drew a long, slow breath.

“You know what I think?” he asked, and kept going, without giving her a chance to pipe up. “I think American kamikaze nuptial consultants should stay in their own country.”

He was pleased with himself for resisting the urge to raise his voice. He was not going to lose control because of her. He was a prince. He was certainly up to the challenge of ignoring a troublesome matchmaker. “Where are my brothers?”

He was supposed to be on the island with them, and only them, on a day hike. Miklos’s idea. Since the failed rebel attacks of the past two years, the six royal brothers hardly got to spend time together anymore. If he didn’t like Miklos’s and Benedek’s wives so much, he would have blamed it on them, but Princess Judi and Princess Rayne were too lovely to fault for anything. He couldn’t truly blame his brothers for not wanting to leave home, even if he never understood what had possessed them to rush into marriage.

Single life suited him just fine. Being a prince, he already had more expectations and regulations, more rules governing his every move than he cared to think about. Marriage would have been just another prison.

Which Milda refused to understand.

“Your brothers aren’t coming.” Her slim fingers worried the colorful bead bracelet on her left wrist.

Why couldn’t they just call, instead of sending a message with her, of all people, when—Lazlo froze, a terrible premonition holding him speechless for a moment before he could ask, “This is another one of your traps, isn’t it?”

So help him God—

“You’ll be going hiking with the Lady Lidia, the Lady Szilvia and the Lady Adel.” Her “this will be fun, you’ll see” smile returned.

He swore in a way that should have been beneath him as a prince. “My brothers helped you set me up?” A new low. Incomprehensible, really. The sense of betrayal was overwhelming.

And her guilty look confirmed everything.

His brothers probably thought it was a grand joke. “I’m going to murder them,” he muttered.

History was full of princes who killed their own brothers to get closer to the throne. He didn’t care about the throne. But he might be driven to murder by Milda Milas yet. Except, then centuries from now historians would speculate that maybe he’d been secretly in love with her, and the act had been motivated by jealousy or some such nonsense. That would be intolerable. She was already messing up his life; he wasn’t going to let her sully his legacy.

“How dare you?” He stepped toward her, ready to take her to task, but caught sight of a sizable pile of duffel bags farther up the beach. He’d thought them a pile of rocks earlier, with the sun in his eyes, but now that a small cloud blocked some of the brilliant rays, he could see that he’d been mistaken. “What is that?”

They couldn’t have needed all that equipment for one day. His own guards were in the process of unloading his speedboat, removing the two boxes that contained the food and drink he and his brothers would have needed until they returned to the palace this evening.

“A two-week hike?” she squeaked, cleared her throat, went back up on her tiptoes then said again, in a deeper tone of self-confidence she must have practiced in the mirror, “A two-week hike with the ladies.” Her damned smile was in full bloom.

He glanced around but didn’t see any desperate women ready to drag him to the altar. Excellent. He had plenty of time to run for the boat. “Have you lost your mind?”

She drew her slim shoulders up, looking like some sort of exotic bird taking up defensive position. Or getting ready to attack. He had the uncomfortable feeling that he was about to be pecked to death.

“The ladies went to see the Painted Rocks. They should be back shortly. You need to spend time with intelligent, self-sufficient women, and stay away from your empty-headed beauties for a few days,” she stated.

So she admitted that the three ladies in question weren’t beauties. Not that he could bring that up without proving himself to be shallow—of which she accused him endlessly.

The impatient growl that escaped him didn’t seem to alarm her in the least. “Once you calm down, Your Highness, you’ll see this was a good idea.” She didn’t back away. She never backed down from him, one of her many annoying qualities. “By tonight, I promise you’ll feel a lot better about all this.”

The only thing that would have made him feel better would have been tossing her into the sea. Sadly, being a prince, he’d been raised better than to threaten bodily harm to a woman. Not even a woman who was dead set on ruining his life.

She wasn’t going to quit until she saw him married. She was the type to see that the job got done. No matter what. In anyone else, he could have appreciated the drive. He could appreciate little in her. They’d been doing battle for months now.

A wave of weariness hit him. “Why are you doing this to me?”

Her gaze never wavered. “For one, as you pointed out, I get paid for it.”

“I could pay you more to go away.”

“I would never break my contract. You should be grateful. I’m here to help you. The Queen gave you six months to announce that you’ve chosen a bride. She wants to see you settled down. You must end the scandals.”

“I still have another month.” In fact, he’d been counting on that last month of freedom rather desperately.

“Exactly.”

“Two weeks on this blasted island would waste half. Absolutely not. When that boat leaves in a few minutes, I’m leaving with it.”

“And the ladies? Common courtesy—”

“If you want to stay with the ladies, be my guest.

Have a pajama party.” He ignored the intriguing picture that flashed into his mind and focused on her clenched jaw instead.

But the next moment she was forcing a smile again. He hated how cheerful she always was while she tortured him.

“Two weeks in this beautiful place is exactly what you need.” She sounded like she actually believed it. “By the time we come back for you, you will have made your choice. The Queen and the country will be happy.”

“Dare I ask, what about me?”

“Try to give these women a chance. Maybe you’ll fall in love with one of them.” Her eyes brightened at the mention of the L word.

“In two weeks?” Was she for real? Sadly, she was. She had an unshakable, deep-seated belief in romance that annoyed the hell out of him. He gave her his most discouraging expression, the one he normally reserved for ambushing paparazzi.

But her eyebrows stayed up, the corners of her lips tugged into that fake encouraging smile, her gaze steady on him. “Stranger things have happened.”

A lot of strange things had happened to him lately, his mother hiring the pushiest woman in the world to force him to wed being one of them. But the chances of him falling in love were slim to none. For that to happen, he would have to believe in love to begin with.

There was no point in further bickering with her. They were too different. They’d never understand each other. He glanced at the boat, ready to go, and realized that the two guards had disappeared, leaving the boxes of food on the bluff above the tide line. “Where did Ben and Vince go? ”

She worried her bead bracelet again for a brief, unguarded moment before she responded. “They’ll guard the island’s perimeter. They’ll be in radio contact with each other, but not with you. I can’t risk you bullying them with some fake emergency into coming to pick you up.”

The woman boggled his mind. She was beyond all belief. “Good plan.” He couldn’t help a sneer. “And what would have happened if there’d been an emergency?”

“I’m not at liberty to say,” she said, apparently still thinking that she could make him stay.

He glanced toward his jacket, draped over the side of the boat, his cell phone in the pocket. He needed to pay closer attention to her. She wasn’t to be underestimated. With some luck, she could have stranded him. The thought was disturbing.

He needed to make her see reason and quit this sordid business. “You really expected me to spend two weeks in the bush with a bunch of wilting lilies? I’m a racer, not a camper. And I bet your ladies haven’t seen more nature than what can be found at the palace gardens. What, exactly, did you think we would be doing out here? ”

She put that pert nose of hers into the air and flashed him a smug look. “Lady Lidia is an herbalist, Lady Szilvia is a survival specialist and Lady Adel is a doctor at your favorite ski resort.”

He sure didn’t remember her. Which must have meant she wasn’t a looker. Then again, he preferred to sustain his injuries at the racetrack, so maybe he hadn’t been visited by the resort’s doctor in the past.

“I’m to attend a race tomorrow evening.” It was to be the first time one of his cars was running with a modified engine, a major invention he needed to see in action. He needed to make manufacturing decisions based on tomorrow’s race. She was interfering with his business.

“Prince Lazlo—”

“Enough.” He was out of patience with her and her meddling. She’d been relentlessly after him for the past five months, since the Queen and Chancellor Egon had sicced her on him. “So you decided to parade the country cows.” He practically growled the words. “You need to understand, Milda, that I’m not some prize bull you can lead into the pasture for breeding.”

“Prince Laz—”

“No.” He raised a hand, palm out. “I don’t care what these women want from me—title, money or their children in the line of succession. They need to find another way of getting it. So you collected a homely bunch of ambitious—” he swallowed the word that a prince wouldn’t utter “—ladies. Read my lips. I don’t want any of them.” He pushed by her to stride toward the boat.

“Prince Lazlo!”

“Goodbye, Milda.”

But something in her voice as she called his name again stopped him. He turned to give her a piece of his mind, in case she still harbored some doubts regarding how he felt about the evil job she’d been hired to do.

And he saw the three ladies.

They had come out of the wild olive grove. From the look on their faces, they’d been standing within hearing range when he’d made that country cow comment. Blast it, he thought.

By God, he was tired of this. He liked the chase between the sexes, another sport to him. But, call him old-fashioned, he liked to be the one to do the chasing. He inclined his head, his jaw so tight he could barely push out the single word. “Ladies.”

They looked vaguely familiar—and were pretty, to be fair—but he couldn’t place them. No big surprise there. He’d run into a lot of women over the years.

“Your Highness.” They curtsied, but if looks could kill …

Which was surprising. The women he regularly saw at court were more of the simpering kind—lots of eyelash batting and that sort of thing. He hated simpering. But maybe these three were different. Maybe Milda had done her homework.

He still didn’t care. He wasn’t going to be forced into marriage.

What a crazy, absolutely insane idea this has been—him on a deserted island with three proper young ladies. Ridiculous, really. For two weeks!

He gave them an apologetic smile he had to force. They’d been inconvenienced as much as he had. “I’m sorry you’ve been misled. Why don’t you wait in the boat? I’ll take you back to the mainland in a minute.”

The boat could only seat four. Which meant Milda and the two bodyguards would have to wait until someone returned for them. Now there was a happy thought. With some luck, the pickup would take a long time. For a moment, he even toyed with the thought of not sending his boat back. Two weeks of freedom without her hounding him …The idea held considerable merit.

“See what you’ve done?” he asked, once the ladies were out of earshot, as they marched toward the boat. Obedient they were, he couldn’t help noticing. After dealing with Milda for the past five challenging months, he was beginning to appreciate obedience more and more in a woman. “You managed to further damage my reputation. You should quit and go home to New York. You’re a PR liability.”

No evidence of her infamous smile now. Her face was turning red. Her delicate nostrils flared. He wouldn’t have been surprised to see smoke coming out of her dainty ears.

“I damaged your reputation?” She put her hands on her slim hips. The movement stretched her shirt over her breasts. They were one of her very best features, made the endless hours she spent lecturing him bearable. “I damaged your reputation?” She was sputtering.

“You can think of ways to make it up to me while you wait for someone to come for you.” He smirked as he stepped away from her, ready to saunter across the beach.

“I’m fighting for my business,” she warned him. “My livelihood and my heritage. I will not give up. I will not give in.”