The Wild Heir(25)

I hesitate a moment before I do, still so unsure of what’s going on. “What’s ridiculous?”

“What isn’t?” he asks, and I notice he’s not sitting. He stands in front of me, and from here he looks even more massive and powerful than before. He’s intimidating, that’s for sure. “This is what constitutes my mother’s garden. It’s the only place she has in private to enjoy her flowers.” He gestures to the park behind the palace. “In the summer, the park and main gardens are open to the public. Hell, a lot of the palace inside is too. I don’t know why they choose to live like they’re fish in a bowl.”

“Our palace back home is completely blocked off,” I tell him. “No one can even get near, though of course it’s pretty useless since no one really cares about us. No one even knows where Liechtenstein is.”

“They have some great places to go abseiling,” he says. “Some great women too.”

I shouldn’t roll my eyes at the Crown Prince of Norway, but I do.

“Hey, you could be one of them,” he says.

“I’ll pass,” I tell him with a scoff, folding my hands in my lap. “So, may I ask what we’re doing out here? What was all of that inside?”

He gnaws on his lip for a moment, that damn full bottom lip. He’s almost wincing.

This isn’t going to be good, is it?





Six





Ella





“You honestly don’t know why you’re here?” he asks as he stares down at me.

My heart starts to thump harder in my chest and I shift uncomfortably on the bench. “No,” I say quietly, wishing now I had the courage to not agree to any of this until I had talked to my father. I have no idea what I’ve gotten myself into by coming here, but I have a feeling I’m about to find out.

He presses his lips together, raising his brows as if to say, oh boy, here we go.

“Right, well. I’m going to be straight with you. More so than I think my family would like, but since we’re both involved in this, I think honesty is the only thing we’ve got right now.”

“Okay…” Jesus, what is it?

“I’ll start by telling you what my father told your father.” He runs his hand through his hair and starts to shift his weight from one foot to the other.

“Why don’t you sit down?” I tell him.

He shakes his head and I know I shouldn’t take any offense to the fact that he won’t sit next to me, but I kind of do. Do I smell? I fight the urge to take a whiff.

“The reason you are here, Princess Isabella of Liechtenstein,” he goes on, “is that my father told your father that I was very interested in meeting you.”

Huh? Come again?

“You were interested in meeting me?”

He shrugs with one shoulder.

“But that’s not true, is it?” I continue, still confused.

His jaw tenses as he thinks that over and for once he looks away. “It’s not about…it doesn’t matter. That’s what he told him. And so, you were invited here for dinner like this was a set-up, a blind date of sorts.”

I can only stare at him. The Prince of Norway is telling me that the reason I’m here is because of him, that he wanted to take me on a date?

“My father’s butler never mentioned that,” I manage to say after a beat.

“Which surprises me,” he says, “or maybe it’s that he wanted you to come, and if you’d known the truth, you would have said no.” He pauses, giving me a furtive glance. “Would you have?”

Hell. I don’t have an answer to that. I suppose if my father had told me the truth and expressed any importance to it, I still would have come here, to please him and make him happy.

I shrug. “Sure. I mean, this is just a dinner, that’s all. It would have been a…new experience.”

“You don’t have to worry about sparing my feelings,” he tells me. “I don’t have that many to begin with.”

“I wouldn’t be proud of that.”

“I’m not proud. Just honest.”

“Okay, fine. Are you asking if I would have wanted to go on a dinner date with you? Well, no. You’re not really my type.”

“And you’re not my type either,” he says quickly, like he’s throwing what I said back in my face.

I frown, not understanding. “If I’m not your type, then why did you invite me here for dinner?”

“Because I had to. I picked you.”

I blink slowly. “Picked me for what?”

“Marriage.”

Am I hearing this right?

My lips move to make words but no sounds come out. Finally, I manage a breathless, “What?”

“I know,” he says with a deep sigh, sticking his hands in his pockets and rocking back on his feet. “It’s going to take you a lot of time to come to grips with it. Fuck knows I still am. I mean, this is absolutely surreal to say the least, not to mention ridiculous, unfair and, well, cruel, but it is what it is.”

None of what he’s saying is making any sense at all. Am I being filmed? Is this a joke? I start looking around for cameras and of course there are a million of them on the palace walls and lampposts for security reasons.