Her Royal Husband

He tirelessly attended functions, raised funds for charities and worked on economic development projects for his country. He felt the adoration of the people and tried to be worthy of it. When the Penberne River did its annual flood, Prince Owen was filling sandbags, shoulder to shoulder with the citizens of Sterling. When the Lad and Lassies Clubs were having a fund-raiser he could be counted on to take a turn in the dunking booth, to buy the first pie at the raffle. He cut ribbons and gave speeches, danced the first dance of each and every charity ball.

The rift between he and his brother deepened—Dylan not understanding his brother wasn’t trying to win a crown—he was trying to outrun a broken heart.

It was only his mother that he knew he had failed to convince. Sometimes he caught her watching him, unveiled sadness in her eyes. But had he not always detected a faint sadness when his mother looked at him?

A sadness that was not present in her eyes when she looked at Dylan?

Even so, he knew it to be intensified now.

And really, his campaign who was leading him down the road to being king, and away from the road of being normal, had almost worked.

Had worked until the precise moment his bedroom door had blasted open in the middle of the night, a drug-saturated cloth had been forced over his face, and he had been kidnapped.

Now, ironically, in a cell where the prince had nothing, he had everything once more.

Her memory came to him. And brought him comfort. Once again he could smell her and taste the salt on her lips, feel the silk of her hair sliding through his hands.

“If I die,” he mumbled, “I will die happy if my last thoughts are of her.”

She filled him, and he felt content.

He almost didn’t want to be drawn back from where he was by the far off sound that he could have mistaken for firecrackers, had he not been waiting for it.

Gunfire. It could only mean a rescue attempt.

And he knew he had to do his part. He struggled back from Jordan’s memory, and yet it filled him with a strength such as he had never known.

Shackled, he lurched to his feet. When his cell door flew open, and it was the enemy who arrived first, he lowered his head, like a battering ram, and charged.

And held them until he saw the familiar crest of Penwyck’s Royal Navy Seals on the dark clothed men now swarming down the hall, the enemy fleeing in front of them.

“Your Royal Highness,” a man said, stepping toward him, his smile white against the camo-darkened skin of his face.

Owen recognized the voice and took a closer look. It was his cousin, Gage Weston, a man who had made a calling of showing up where there was trouble.

Gage said, “With all due respect, you fight like a man who was born to it.”

Owen smiled wearily. “So I’ve been told.”

He looked back at his cell, and felt relief. Jordan would be safe now. All his secrets were safe.

Except for the one he had been keeping from himself. He had never, ever stopped loving her.

Chapter Two

J ordan Ashbury woke partially, her heart beating frantically within her chest.

So real was the feeling that his kiss was on her lips, that she ran her tongue along them, hoping the faint taste of salted sea air would be lingering there. When it was not, she reached across the tangle of her sheets, wanting to be reassured by the silky touch of his skin under her fingertips, wanting the ache within her to be eased by his presence in her bed.

When her fingertips touched cold emptiness, Jordan came fully awake and smelled the mingled aroma of wood smoke and fall leaves coming in her open window, not the sea. Her sheets were covered in a prim pattern of yellow teacup roses. They were sheets that had never known the skin of a man.

The ache was there, though, as real as if it had been yesterday, instead of just over five years ago, that she had awoken and he had been gone. For good. Forever. Without so much as a goodbye.

He had warned her it would be that way. The warning had not made it one bit easier to cope with when it had happened.

Jordan shook herself fully awake, angry. She sat up and fluffed her pillow with furious punches. She glanced at her bedroom clock. It was only three-thirty in the morning. She clenched her eyes tight, commanded herself back to sleep.

She had not had one of those dreams for so long. It had been at least six months. She thought that meant her heart was mending, finally.

She would not go as far as to say she was happy. Jordan Ashbury mistrusted happiness. It was the crest of an exhilarating wave you rode before it tossed you carelessly onto sharp and jagged rocks.

But she would say she was content. She had her girls—the young, unwed mothers she did volunteer work with. She had her job with her aunt. She had this little humble house she had just purchased. And of course, she had Whitney, her four-year-old daughter, who had enough exuberance for both of them.

And she had the new male in her life. There he was now. He prowled into her bedroom, leapt onto the bed in a single graceful leap, curled up by her ear and began to purr.

Jay-Jay, named in honor of Jason, whom she had dated once and hated, and Justin whom she had dated twice and liked. Both had been dismissed from her life with equal rapidity.

“No time,” she’d told her mother who had set up both disasters.

“But aren’t you lonely?” her mother wailed.

“Of course not,” she had said, strong and breezy. “It’s a brand-new world, Mom. Women don’t need men to feel they have purpose, to feel complete.”

“Working with those unwed mothers is making you cynical about men,” her mother said.

No, it wasn’t. It was reminding her, over and over, of the life lesson she most needed reminding of.

Love hurt.

Well, not Whitney love. Not Mom and Dad love. Not Jay-Jay love. Just the other kind. Man-woman love.

Only in the middle of the night, like this, did the insanity of loneliness take her, try to pull her down, make her wistful, make her ache with yearning.

“Weak ninny,” she scolded herself, opened her clenched eyes to glance at the clock then closed them again with renewed determination. Sleep.

Instead, a chill washed over Jordan, a chill not caused by the cool September air sliding through her open window. In that space between wakefulness and sleep where her mind sometimes shook free of her tight hold on the reins, she allowed herself to wonder, did it mean something that she had dreamed of Ben?

Why did she feel a knot in her stomach, a shadow in her soul? Was he in trouble? Was he dead?

She shivered, caught in the grip of something that felt weirdly like premonition.

Ben Prince did not exist, she reminded herself bitterly. How could he be dead when he had never been alive?

Except he was alive, amazingly so, in the sapphire-blue eyes of their daughter. Her daughter. The child he knew nothing about.

Jordan had tried to tell him. It seemed the only thing, the decent thing. That was when she’d found out, through the registrar’s office at the Smedley Institute where they had met during a summer program, there was no Ben Prince.

Short of yelling at them that a figment of her imagination could not have produced a pregnancy, there was nothing more she could do. He was gone.