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      To Tara Gavin and Melissa Jeglinski, with deep appreciation for your professional expertise and your warm friendship!

       Chapter One

       Six months earlier …

      “I’m going to kill him! Let me in there!”

      Whit Howell had been hired as the king’s bodyguard to protect him from political threats and criminals—not from his own daughter. But as furious as Princess Gabriella St. Pierre was at the moment, she posed the greatest threat Whit had encountered yet during the ten weeks he’d been on the job.

      “Your royal highness,” he addressed her as protocol required even though they were alone in the hallway outside the door to the king’s wing of the palace. “Your father has retired for the night and will not be disturbed.”

      “You damn well better believe he’s going to be disturbed,” she said, her usually soft, sweet voice rising to a nearly hysterical shout. “He’ll be lucky to be alive when I’m done with him!” She rushed toward the double mahogany doors, but Whit stepped in front of them.

      She slammed into him, her breasts flattening against his chest. With her stiletto heels on, her forehead came to his chin. Her hair—a thick golden brown, was falling over the tiara on her head and into her face and rubbing against his throat.

      With her face flushed and caramel-brown eyes flashing with temper, she had never been more beautiful. He doubted she would graciously accept that compliment, though, so he bit his tongue to hold it back. Of course he had noticed she was attractive before but in the kind of untouchable, one-dimensional way that a model in a magazine was attractive. She hadn’t seemed real then.

      She certainly hadn’t acted like any woman he’d ever known. Not only was she beautiful but also sweet and gracious—even to the people her father considered servants. She had seemed more fairy-tale fantasy than reality.

      She was real now. And quite touchable. She put her hands on his arms and tried to shove him aside, so she could get through the doors to her father’s rooms.

      While she was tall, she was slender—with not enough muscle to budge him. She let out a low growl of frustration and then fisted her hands and started pounding on his chest. “Get out of my way! Get out of my way!”

      Damn. If she raised her voice any louder, she was likely to disturb the king. And Whit couldn’t lose this security job. Assignments like this had been hard to come by the past three years. So he stepped closer to her, using his body to gently push her back from the door. She kept swinging even as she stumbled. So he caught her around the waist and lifted her—up high to swing her over his shoulder. Then he touched a button on the two-way radio in his ear.

      “Aaron?”

      “Put me down!” Princess Gabriella screamed, pounding on his back now.

      He crossed the wide hall, moving farther away from the tall wood doors to the king’s wing. Then he touched the button again to call his partner. Former partner. They were no longer in the security business together. They had actually been hired separately to protect the king.

      It was Aaron’s night off, which he’d had to postpone until after the ball that had been held earlier that evening. But usually Aaron would still be on the job; the man was always on the job.

      “Aaron? Timmer?”

      Maybe his partner answered but Whit couldn’t hear him over the princess’s shouts. Her yelling had drawn some of the other palace guards to the hall outside the king’s private quarters. Whit gestured at one of the men he’d personally hired, a man with whom he’d served in Afghanistan, like he had with Aaron Timmer. He could trust him to guard King St. Pierre while he deposited the princess in her private rooms.

      “Stop! Put me down!” she ordered, her tone nearly as imperious as her father’s.

      There was none of the sweetness and graciousness Whit had seen in her the past couple of months that he’d been guarding the king. While she had always talked to him as she did to all the help, with him she had seemed especially shy and nervous—nothing like the woman currently pounding on his back. The sweet woman had attracted him; the angry woman exasperated and excited him.

      As he carried her past the other guard, she implored the man, “Stop him!”

      Like he trusted the guard, the guard trusted Whit, a lot more than Aaron trusted him now. The guard let them pass.

      “You creep!” she hurled insults as she pounded harder on his back. “You son of a bitch!” She added some even more inventive insults, using words he wouldn’t have thought someone as privileged as she would even know. Then she ordered him, “Get your hands off me!”

      She wriggled in his grasp, her breasts pushing against his back while her hip rubbed against his shoulder. She had curves in all the right places—curves that he wanted to touch …

      But he shouldn’t have been able to get his hands on her in the first place. Since the day, as an infant, she had been brought home to the palace, there had been threats to her safety. People had tried to kidnap her to ransom her for money or political influence from the king. To make sure that none of those abduction attempts were successful, she had been protected her entire life but never more so than now. Usually …

      “Where the hell’s your bodyguard?” he wondered aloud. Even though he hated the woman who protected the princess, he couldn’t criticize how the former U.S. Marshal did her job.