Claiming His Princess: Duty at What Cost? / A Throne for the Taking / Princess in the Iron Mask
Duty at What Cost?To protect Princess Ava de Veers, James Wolfe must keep his mind on the job. Having shared one passionate night, Wolfe knows exactly how wilful, independent – and sexy – she is. But he will separate his feelings for Ava from the task at hand.Wolfe is the most daring man Ava has ever met and he drives her crazy! Yet as the threat to her life escalates, he’s the only man she can trust and the only place she feels safe is in his arms. But, as royalty, Ava knows that duty always comes at a cost…A Throne for the TakingA kingdom’s safetyBetrayed by those she loves, Honoria Escalona must now face the only man capable of bringing stability to the Mediterranean kingdom of Mecjoria. A cold, hard man who once called her his friend…Alexia Sarova – the true King of Mecjoria.In exchange for her happinessBut Alexei’s tortuous past has changed him into someone she hardly knows. He blames Ria's family for his bitterness and his help, when he offers it, comesPrincess in the Iron MaskA Princess in hidingDispatched by the King to retrieve his head-strong errant daughter, Lucas Garcia thought this was just another day at the office. That’s before he meets Princess Claudine Verbault, who’s adamant that returning to the kingdom that banished her as a child is never going to happen.A barely concealed attraction!Hidden from the spotlight, the now independent Claudine has learnt the art of being the anti-perfect princess. But Lucas does not look like the kind of man to accept insubordination! If only she could bargain with this frustratingly immovable man…and give him something to distract him from his duty!
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Claiming His Princess
Duty at What Cost?
Michelle Conder
A Throne for the Taking
Kate Walker
Princess in the Iron Mask
Victoria Parker
Table of Contents
From as far back as she can remember MICHELLE CONDER dreamed of being a writer. She penned the first chapter of a romance novel just out of high school, but it took much study, many (varied) jobs, one ultra-understanding husband and three very patient children before she finally sat down to turn that dream into a reality.
Michelle lives in Australia and, when she isn’t busy plotting, loves to read, ride horses, travel and practise yoga.
To Paul, with love.
And “a big kiss” to Anne-Emmanuelle for her wonderful friendship and even more wonderful French translations. Thank you.
AVA GLANCED OUT of the car window at the sparkling summer sunshine bouncing off the exquisite French countryside and wished herself a thousand miles away. Maybe a million. That would land her on another planet where no one knew her name. Where no one knew the man her father had expected her to marry was about to marry another woman, and felt sorry for her in the process.
‘It’s time you stopped messing around in Paris, my girl, and came home to Anders.’
That particularly supportive comment had come only this morning, making her blood boil. His condescending words filled her head, drowning out the singer on the car radio who was warbling about wanting to go home. Home was the last place Ava wanted to go.
Not that her father’s anger was entirely unexpected. Of course he was disappointed that the man she had been pledged to marry since she was a child had fallen in love with someone else. the way he’d spoken to her—‘A woman your age doesn’t have time to waste!’—as if turning thirty in a year meant that she was over the hill—made it seem as if it was her fault.
But Ava wanted to fall in love! She wanted to get married! She just hadn’t wanted to marry Gilles—a childhood friend who was more like a brother to her than her own—and he hadn’t wanted to marry her. The problem was they had played along with their fathers’ archaic pledge for a little too long, sometimes using each other for a fill-in date when the need arose.
Oh, how her father would love to hear that… Somehow, after her mother’s death fifteen years ago, her relationship with him had disintegrated to the point where they barely spoke, let alone saw each other. Of course if she had been born a boy things would have been different.
Very different.
She would have had different choices. She would have been Crown Prince, for one—and, while she had no wish at all to rule their small European nation, she would at least have had her father’s respect. His affection. Something.
Ava gripped the steering wheel of her hatchback more tightly as she turned onto the narrow country lane that ran alongside Château Verne, Gilles’s fifteenth-century estate.
For eight years she had lived a happy, relatively low-key existence in Paris; finishing university and building her business, stepping in at royal functions when her brother Frédéric had been absent. Now that Gilles, Marquis de Bassonne, was set to marry a friend of hers, she had a bad feeling that was all about to change.
Ava crinkled her nose at her uncharacteristically gloomy mood. Gilles and Anne had fallen in love at first sight two months ago and were happier than she’d ever seen either one of them before. They completed each other in a way that would inspire songwriters and she wasn’t jealous.
Not at all.
Her life was rolling along just fine. Her art gallery, Gallery Nouveau, had just been reviewed in a prestigious art magazine and she was busier than ever. It was true that her love-life was a little on the nonexistent side, but her break-up three years ago with Colyn—the man she had believed she would eventually marry—had left her emotionally drained and a little wary.
At nearly twenty years her senior he had seemed to her to be the epitome of bourgeois intellectualism: a man who didn’t care about her heritage and loved her for herself. It had taken a couple of years to figure out that his subtle criticisms of her status and his desire to ‘teach’ her all that he knew made him as egotistical and controlling as her father.
And she really wished he hadn’t popped into her mind, because now she felt truly terrible.
