Page 2 of Awakened On Her Royal Wedding Night
Francois.
His mind always leaped to his twin when something unpredictable and less than desirable happened. Cold hatred threatened to engulf him, but Felipe habitually banked those grim, unhelpful emotions. He focused on exactly what was happening in the moment.
“How many?” He took the tablet.
“Just the one, sir.” The guard tapped to show the security footage in both night vision and infrared. A swimmer was approaching the western side of the island.
Situated furthest from the rest of the islands in the Nazarine archipelago, Sentinella had been named hundreds of years ago for the protective armies that had been stationed here. Its lofty cliffs allowed unimpeded surveillance of the surrounding waters and its lack of low, sandy beaches made it difficult to infiltrate.
In fact, any craft attempting to enter that particular lagoon took a beating through a toilet bowl of currents that punched every which way. Once inside, the shallow cove was littered with sharp rocks that lurked below the surface. They shipwrecked vessels and were guaranteed to shred a knee if you didn’t know where they were. There was no reward once you reached the beach at the base of the cliffs. It was mostly rocks and coarse sand.
Like its occupant, Sentinella was formidable and inhospitable to strangers.
Felipe tried to expand the image, but it was too grainy to provide many clues as to the swimmer’s identity.
“How did they get here? Is there a vessel nearby?”
“TheQueen’s Favoriteheld a sunset dinner for the pageant contestants this evening. Tenders were buzzing around it, bringing people back and forth from Stella Vista and taking side trips to the smaller islands. That’s normal for these things. There was a seven-meter speedboat stalled about a mile out an hour ago. That’s the closest any came to us.”
The guard’s lips were tight. He knew the hostility that existed between the Princes and hated to even mention Francois.
Felipe wasn’t ambushed by the news that his brother was nearby. Francois spent most of his life chasing skirt and parties around the globe, but he always came home at this time of year, bringing his sordid little beauty contest to their island kingdom.
He didn’t usually send trespassers boldly up to Felipe’s front door, though. Not when he had his image and his own personal interests to protect. What was he up to this time?
“Let’s greet our visitor.” Felipe rose without having tasted the braised duck before him.
“Sir, he might be armed.”
He? Felipe looked again at the screen. The swimmer had found a rock to clasp. As their arm came out of the water, the strap of a bikini top was revealed.
“Unless she intends to spit a cyanide capsule at me, I don’t think she’s carrying a weapon.” He strode out the door to the inner grounds of the castle fortress, then across to the gate in the wall.
Two guards followed him, radioing low communications to the rest of the team. Another two fell into place next to Felipe as he stepped beyond the wall of the castle and made for the second gate, the one that blocked access to the stairs down the cliff face.
The narrow steps had been chipped from the stone wall by long-ago soldiers. A weathered rope was mounted through eyelets pounded into the rock, providing a tenuous handhold if a foot happened to slip.
Felipe hadn’t been down these steps in years, never at night, but he waved away the guard who tried to illuminate the path with a handheld spotlight. He wanted to approach more stealthily.
The quarter moon made it a treacherous descent. When they came to the bottom of the stairs, cypress trees briefly blocked his view of the water. He could hear the waves fighting one another outside the lagoon, but also heard a feminine cough and some ragged breathing near the shore.
He brushed past the guard who held out an arm, trying to hold Felipe back from advancing the short distance to the water’s edge.
In the pale moonlight, a woman—a mermaid? a siren?—was crawling from the glittering, black water. She paused, rearing up so she knelt in the shallows. Water lapped around the tops of her thighs. Her hair was pewter in the moonlight and stuck in vine-like curls against her shoulders and chest. Silver droplets fell off her chin and sat like diamonds against the swells of her breasts before slithering down her abdomen. Her chest heaved and every breath held a sob of effort.
That wasn’t a bikini. It was a bra and underwear, a lacy set in an indeterminate color that sat as a charcoal streak against skin that might have been tanned golden or naturally tawny, but in the cool light of the moon, turned her into a timeless black-and-white photo of a castaway survivor. Of Venus, rising from the deep.
She was the most fiercely beautiful thing Felipe had ever seen. She made his guts twist in a mix of awe and lust, the desire to possess and an instant certainty that she could not be captured or contained.
In a surge of uncharacteristic jealousy, he wanted to physically knock his guards’ gazes away from her. She washis.
With a fresh moan of effort, she crawled further out of the water and collapsed onto her side, chest heaving, legs still in the lapping surf.
As Felipe strode toward her, he dragged his gaze from her long thighs and trembling abdomen, past the quiver of her breasts to the way her eyes popped open beneath the anguished knot of her brows.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded in the Nazarinian dialect of Italian, crouching beside her.
The noise she made was one of pure suffering. Her arm moved in a sudden arc. A fistful of gravel peppered his face.
