Nicholas's upcoming state wedding in London is vital for European peace, but his royal fiancée has been kidnapped by his enemies. Now Fate has provided the solution: to force Penny Lindsey to impersonate his missing bride, with one month to teach this defiant, not-so-simple country girl how to be a princess. Penny has other ideas, but she's never faced royal determination before, nor royal charm.

Penny has been captured by Prince Nicholas, Earl of Evenlode and Grand Duke of Glarien, and locked into a bedroom at his country home in England.  She wakes in the morning when the prince storms in . . .

The door crashed open. Something flickered at the edge of her awareness like a necromancer as her dream dissolved. She’d been dreaming about a place she’d never seen: Glarien, country of black forests and ancient castles, rank with wicked secrets. Wild horsemen thundering through green valleys beneath towering white peaks. Was it really like that?

Penny sat up. She was in bed, in her own nightgown, in a huge canopied bed with blue velvet hangings. But not at home in Clumper Cottage. She was in one of the grand guest bedrooms at Rascall Hall. Locked in. The major had escorted her up here last night and handed her a small bag. Her mother had packed an overnight case and sent it back with him. Nothing else could have demonstrated so absolutely the power Grand Duke Nicholas had suddenly acquired over her life. Even her mother had acquiesced in whatever story they’d told her. Why? She couldn’t be forced into agreeing to the prince’s mad scheme.

A folding screen sat close to the foot of the bed. Protection against drafts, but completely hiding the door from her view. She’d left her dress and robe hanging there last night and her small case on a chair beside it. Her mother’s case, in truth. A bag that had once gone to Glarien and back.

A man’s boots thudded across the floor. Penny clutched the covers to her chin and wriggled back against the pillows.

Nicholas strode around the screen and up to the bed. "A man named Jeb Hardacre was in my stable yard with a cart. He said he’d come for the hedgehogs. Would you be kind enough to tell me what the devil is going on?"

"Your Highness, I’m not dressed. You are in my bedroom!"

"You are as charming, Miss Lindsey, as a rumpled chick in the nest. I trust you slept well? It is morning."

He smiled.

His smile was for something delectable and rich, like cream. As if she had stared too long, too close at a fire, a hot wave ran through her blood. Her heart seemed to dive and swoop. She wanted to press both hands over it to keep it in place.

He walked to the window and wrenched aside the drapes. It was barely dawn. Powerful shoulders flexed as he flung up the sash. Cool air flowed inside, carrying a froth of birdsong: blackbirds and thrushes calling up the day.

Penny shivered. "It isn’t decent for you to come in here like this. I am most uncomfortable. Please leave!"

He turned to look at her. The dark gaze seemed fathomless, filled with secrets, but promising mischief and delight. "Good Lord! You are better covered than any lady at a ball. Nothing is visible but a plait of hair and a great deal of white linen. Why were you carrying a basket of hedgehogs at the manor last night?"

She felt flushed and awkward, at a complete disadvantage. "They are wild creatures, belonging to no one."

"Ha! And a fig for the laws against poaching! You were trespassing in a ruin that belongs to me and stealing my hedgehogs. Even in England, where you apparently wink at striking monarchs, theft is a hanging offense." His voice carried honey and silk, warmed by that charming, playful smile. A deception. For steel rang quite clearly beneath. "What the devil do you do with the creatures?"

So it was all going to come out. He was bound to be awkward about it.

"I tame them," she said. "They go to Covent Garden in London and are sold as pets. Hedgehogs eat insects. They help get rid of vermin in town."

He moved across the room, studying paintings and ornaments. "A remarkably odd hobby for a lady!"

"It is not a hobby," she said icily. "I do it for the money. Count them the payment of a debt, if you like. Don’t you think Glarien owes me that?"

"Owes you?" He seemed genuinely surprised. "Why? Your existence wasn’t entirely unknown to me, though I never expected to meet you. I knew Frederick had fathered a child with an English governess when he was a visitor in Moritzburg. I just didn’t know the details. This morning I found out."

The casual words threatened. The steel had a lethal edge. "How?"

"I have visited your mother."

A prickle of hair rose on the back of her neck. "My mother! This early? You got her out of bed, too?"

"She was up, waiting for me. Fritz told her last night I would come. How do you suppose she has survived all these years? Who do you think paid for the cottage and allowance? She lives on my charity. It seems I even own her home. Clumper Cottage, where you were born and raised, is mine. Did you know that?"

A chasm yawned, dark with frightful possibilities. The twitter and rustle outside soared. She felt ill, almost faint. "You are threatening to turn us out on the streets?"

"I don’t know. When your father died, your keep fell to the royal house of Glarien, because my mother found out about it and took up the duty. On her death, the responsibility for you both fell to me."

"Not a personal responsibility."

He walked back to the window and stood there, gazing out. Gold stained his profile, like a painting of a saint.

"I have never given you a moment’s thought before today. Secretaries took care of it, as a petty expense on the royal purse. I have a country to run."

She bunched the covers in both hands, the luxurious satin and embroidered linen. "Do you run it as well as you run Rascall Hall? Or as generously as you have provided for my mother? She has barely enough to live in any dignity at all. If I didn’t do what I can, she’d go without basic necessities."

"Nonsense. The allowance is ample." He strode back to the screen and grasped her dressing gown.

"What can you know about that?"

"Your mother has never complained."

"She’d die on the rack before she’d ask. Don’t you understand that ordinary people have dignity?"

He tossed her robe on the bed, the poor thin cotton evidence enough—if this man had any shred of sensitivity—of how hard she and her mother struggled. "It’s not my business to know minutiae. I have a staff to take care of details."

"Then tell your staff to let Jeb Hardacre have the hedgehogs."

"Too late. I sent the man about his business." He turned to walk out of the room. "Get up and get dressed. I have ordered you a bath."

Her left arm jammed as Penny struggled into her robe. She had to pull it half off to try again. The frequently darned cotton ripped. Not caring, she thrust her arm inside the torn garment and tugged the remains about her shoulders. Clambering from the bed, she stormed up behind him and grasped his sleeve.

"Wait!"

He spun about, the dark hair tumbled over his forehead, his gaze hot and unreadable as it focused on her fingers clenched on his jacket.

"You will take your hand from my arm!"

Penny jerked back as if he had burned her with a hot iron. "Oh, of course! The sacred person."

"No one—ever—touches me without my express permission."

"More royal prerogative? You didn’t hesitate to seize me. Now you sent Jeb away empty-handed? What about the hedgehogs?"

He closed the door and leaned back on the panels. A small pulse throbbed at the corner of his mouth.

"I set them free last night."

She tried to tie the sash. It had worked itself into a maddening knot. "That’s a whole week of work ruined. Why?"

His eyes were midnight in a dark wood, thick with mysteries. "I didn’t like to see them caged."

"The hedgehogs don’t come to any harm at Covent Garden. They live far longer in London than they would in the wild. They’re pampered and treated well. They’re pets."

"No longer. No more wild things will be captured here."

Wrapping both arms about her body, she turned and began to pace, that hot gaze burning into her back.

"You have no idea, have you? You don’t care in the least how ordinary people live, or that the payments sent my mother are so petty and mean. So you own our cottage! Along with palaces and castles and acres of estates. You live in luxury and waste. You have handkerchiefs that cost a month’s salary. You have a picture of your bride in a case worth a king’s ransom. You’ve never gone without anything. You snap your fingers and get whatever you want—"

"Not always," he interrupted.

She stopped and turned to face him. The floor was icy on her bare feet. Penny lifted one foot to rub the sole against the ankle of the other.

"When did you ever want something and not get it?" she demanded. "Ever?"

The dawn light smoothed over his cheeks, softening the haughty line of nose and chin, smudging the black hair to soot. He was impossibly, dangerously handsome.

"Right now," he said dryly. "I want you."

Cold air poured from the open window. Penny hopped to the other foot and rubbed her freezing toes on her shin.

"Then you’re right, Your High-and-Mightiness," she said. "I’m the one thing you can’t have!"

His own words moved and sank, only to surface with another meaning. I want you. She was disheveled and angry. Her hair hung in a long plait down her back, not neat, not glossy—a lion’s mane of disordered golden straggles, fuzzy where she’d slept on it. Her blunt nose was pink at the tip and she’d narrowed her eyes, hiding the changeable green behind two rows of stubby blond lashes.

Now she was bouncing from one foot to the other like a demented parrot, clad in a torn dressing gown and a capacious white cotton nightdress, and berating him. There was nothing seductive in her looks or manner, yet his attention concentrated on that one thought:

I want you.

The rush of arousal was so sudden and unexpected, it caught him entirely off guard. Blood sang and muscles tightened. His senses were absolutely, gloriously alert. The tousled scents of sleep and wildness and woman teased his nostrils. Her naked toes were even and straight with nails like pearls, her delectable ankles curved like a cherub’s. The nightgown billowed about her knees, swishing against her legs as she hopped back and forth. Tiny golden hairs sparkled on her wrists. The bones of her fingers clutching the robe were clear and hostile. Her throat was a column of animosity.

Yet the imagined taste of her, dog rose and woodland, flooded his mouth.

The one thing you can’t have!