Wedding Party Collection: Marrying The Prince: The Prince She Never Knew / His Bride for the Taking / A Queen for the Taking?
A convenient relationship?Prince Leo di Medina is marrying Alyse Barras and the whole world believes the sham is a fairy tale. While ruthless prince’s addictive kisses give Alyse the hint of something more beneath the lie, scandalous headlines threaten to ruin everything!When Prince Rafael Marconi is tasked with escorting his brother’s future wife home, he’s surprised by the spirited, seductive woman that is Alexia. The royal playboy can feel an immediate connection, but the American heiress is strictly off-limits!Spare to the throne Alessandro Diomedi must return home and take not only the crown but a new wife! Liana Aterno has been trained from birth to be the perfect queen, something the King knows well – she is his wife in name only! Until one electrifying kiss changes everything…
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Kate Hewitt
KATE HEWITT discovered her first Mills & Boon romance novel on a trip to England when she was thirteen, and she’s continued to read them ever since. She wrote her first story at the age of five, simply because her older brother had written one and she thought she could do it, too. That story was one sentence long – fortunately, they’ve become a bit more detailed as she’s grown older.
She studied drama in college and shortly after graduation moved to New York City to pursue a career in theatre. This was derailed by something far better – meeting the man of her dreams, who happened also to be her older brother’s childhood friend. Ten days after their wedding they moved to England, where Kate worked in a variety of different jobs – drama teacher, editorial assistant, youth worker, secretary and, finally, mother.
When her oldest daughter was one year old, Kate sold her first short story to a British magazine. Since then she has sold many stories and serials, but writing romance remains her first love – of course!
Besides writing, she enjoys reading, travelling and learning to knit – it’s an on-going process and she’s made a lot of scarves. After living in England for six years, she now resides in Connecticut with her husband, her three young children and, possibly one day, a dog.
Kate loves to hear from readers. You can contact her through her website, www.kate-hewitt.com.
To Maisey, Caitlin and Jennie, who first inspired me with the idea for this story! Love, K.
TODAY WAS HER wedding day. Alyse Barras gazed at her pale, pinched face in the mirror and decided that not all brides were radiant. As it happened, she looked as if she were on the way to the gallows.
No, she amended, not the gallows; a quick and brutal end was not to be hers, but rather a long, drawn-out life sentence: a loveless marriage to a man whom she barely knew, despite their six-year engagement. Yet even so a small kernel of hope was determined to take root in her heart, to unfurl and grow in the shallowest and poorest of soils.
Maybe he’ll learn to love me...
Prince Leo Diomedi of Maldinia seemed unlikely to learn anything of the sort, yet still she hoped. She had to.
‘Miss Barras? Are you ready?’
Alyse turned from her reflection to face one of the wedding coordinator’s assistants who stood in the doorway of the room she’d been given in the vast royal palace in Averne, Maldinia’s capital city, nestled in the foothills of the Alps.
‘As ready as I’ll ever be,’ she replied, trying to smile, but everything in her felt fragile, breakable, and the curve of her lips seemed as if it could crack her face. Split her apart.
The assistant Marina came forward, looking her over in the assessing and proprietary way Alyse had got used to in the three days since she’d arrived in Maldinia—or, really, the six years since she’d agreed to this engagement. She was a commodity to be bought, shaped, presented. An object of great value, to be sure, but still an object.
She’d learned to live with it, although on today of all days—her wedding day, the day most little girls dreamed about—she felt the falseness of her own role more, the sense that her life was simply something to be staged.
Marina twitched Alyse’s veil this way and that, until she gave a nod of satisfaction. It billowed gauzily over her shoulders, a gossamer web edged with three-hundred-year-old lace.
‘And now the dress,’ Marina said, and flicked her fingers to indicate that Alyse should turn around.
Alyse moved slowly in a circle as Marina examined the yards of white satin that billowed out behind her, the lace bodice that hugged her breasts and hips and had taken eight top-secret fittings over the last six months. The dress had been the source of intense media speculation, the subject of hundreds of articles in tabloids, gossip magazines, even respected newspapers, television and radio interviews, celebrity and gossip blogs and websites.
What kind of dress would the world’s real-life Cinderella—not a very creative way of typecasting her, but it had stuck—wear to marry her very own prince, her one true love?
Well, this. And Alyse had had no say in it at all. It was a beautiful dress, she allowed as she caught a glance of the billowing white satin in the full-length mirror. She could hardly complain. She might have chosen something just like it—if she’d been given a choice.
Marina’s walkie-talkie crackled and she spoke into it in rapid Italian, too fast for Alyse to understand, even though she’d been learning Italian ever since she’d become engaged to Leo. It was the native language of his country, and Maldinia’s queen-in-waiting should be able to speak it. Unfortunately no one spoke slowly enough for her to be able to understand.
