Title Page

Dedication

To Walter Mittermeyer, a true prince,

and his lady, Helen

Chapter 1

She’d been to the palace before. The first time, nearly seven years earlier, she’d thought it was a fairy tale sprung into three dimensions. She was older now, though she wasn’t sure about wiser. Cordina was a country. The palace was a building, a beautiful one. Fairy tales were for the very young, the very naive or the very fortunate.

Despite the fact that she knew the palace that housed the royal family of Cordina was stone and mortar rather than wishes and dreams, she had to admire it. It glistened white, almost pristine, atop a jagged jut of land that overlooked both sea and town. Almost pristine, yes, but not detached—and not altogether placid.

Towers speared to the sky, piercing the blue with white. Turrets and buttresses attested to its age-old defensive function. The moat had been filled in, but one could imagine it. In its place were high-tech security systems and surveillance. Windows, some clear, some tinted, gleamed. Like any palace, there had been triumph and tragedy there, intrigue and glamour. It still stunned her that she’d had some part in it.

On her first visit she had walked on a terrace with a prince and, as fate had dictated, had had some part in saving his life. Fate, Eve decided as her limo passed through the high iron gates and beyond the red-uniformed guards, was always sticking its fingers into ordinary lives.

Circumstances had led her to the tiny principality of Cordina all those years before, accompanying her sister, Chris, an old friend and schoolmate of the Princess Gabriella. If the circumstances had been different, Prince Bennett might have been with another woman on the terrace that night. She might never have met him or become a part of the closing chapters of the political intrigue that had haunted his sister and the rest of the royal family.

She might never have developed a fondness for the lovely palace in the storybook country. She might never have found herself being drawn back to it time and again. Yet this time she hadn’t been drawn back exactly. She’d been called back. Command performance. She wrinkled her nose at the thought. Wasn’t it too bad the command had to come from the one member of the royal family who annoyed her.

Prince Alexander, eldest son of the reigning monarch and heir to the throne. She watched trees heavy with pink blossoms bend in the breeze as the car cruised by. His Royal Highness Alexander Robert Armand de Cordina. She couldn’t say where she’d learned his full name or why she remembered it. To Eve, it was simply as rigid and humorless a title as the man it pertained to.