“As much as I want to beg her to come back, I can’t. I can’t stir shit up for her…it’s not right. I’m not right for her. I’m just another complication, and she’s got enough guilt over her dad’s heart attack.” Fuck. His brain was too wired to think clearly. “The reality is that she has to be in St. Christophe. She has to be the hereditary princess, marry some guy, and pop out kids. It’s just how their laws work. It’s fucking over, and I need to find a way to let it go. Let her go.” Pushing her would only create more stress. Stress she didn’t need.

Right?

“In snowboarding, we make changes all the time to make the sport better, safer,” Fin said.

“They’ve tried changing the laws,” Brodie said. “It hasn’t worked.”

“Jesus, Brodie,” Gray said. “You want her or not?”

“Of course I do.” He’d chosen this plot of land for its location, so Rosie could smell her flowers every June.

“Then quit fucking around and go get her,” Fin said.

“This isn’t the kind of thing you can work out alone,” Will said. “It’s something the two of you have to figure out together.”

“Besides, it doesn’t have to be Marcel she marries, does it?” Fin asked.

“No.” Energy roared through him.

“Then, what’re you still doing here?” Will said.

The fact that neither Rosie nor her bodyguard had responded to his text messages only became problematic when he’d arrived in Villeneuve and had no idea how to get to her.

At a stoplight, he texted Harrison again. Just got into Villeneuve. You think I could see Rosalina?

He’d storm the castle if he had to. His brother was right—this was a problem they could only solve together.

And Rosie wouldn’t just blindly go along with anything. That was one of the reasons he loved her.

Cruising down the main street of the capital city, he found himself still trying to get a handle on driving on the left side of road. The businesses all looked like fairytale cottages, with flower beds hanging off the windows and dark brown wooden shutters. Wrought iron streetlamps lined the pretty, clean street.

His phone chimed, and he pulled it out of the cup holder at the next stop sign. Harrison.

“Hell, yeah.”

Yes. You can’t miss signs for the castle. Follow them up the road and park in the visitors parking lot, but then come around back. I’ll meet you in the garden.

A second one followed. Took you long enough.

Brodie smiled. It hadn’t even been a week. He’d seen signs for the castle everywhere, so he pulled a U-turn at the intersection and headed up the long and winding road. Halfway up the mountain, he followed the signs to a driveway that took him through a copse of woods.