Prince Albert: A Billionaire Stepbrother Romance Read online

  Or, if not the entire world, at least the Western one. Or Europe.

  Any way I think about it, it's a scandal involving several countries. It's the worst possible scenario for someone whose idea of a nightmare is being in the public eye at all.

  I've successfully avoided any public attention for the last two years. That’s not easy to do when your mother craves the public eye the way mine does, a whirlwind of charity functions and testifying before Congress and trips as a United Nations ambassador. In fact, escaping all of that meant I had to flee to another continent entirely.

  I've been so disconnected from the outside world that I had no idea who he was.

  And now, I feel like a complete and total idiot for not recognizing Prince Albert. He’s only one of the most famous princes on earth. Notorious would probably be a better word for it, known more for his antics in the bedroom than any kind of political activity.

  The door swings open and there he is, as if simply thinking about him was enough to conjure him up out of nothing, summoned here by the universe. I silently curse my luck. "Get out of here," I hiss, the words barely coming out, my breath still short.

  "Are you having a panic attack or a total mental breakdown?" he asks.

  "Neither," I lie. In fact, I might very well be having a breakdown. Maybe I’m hallucinating this entire scenario.

  "Good," he says. "I'd hate to think I over-estimated you."

  “I just needed a second," I say, my voice defensive. I don't know where this guy gets off talking about over-estimating me. "Leave me alone."

  "Not a chance," he says, still standing by the doorway. "Count to ten after I walk out this door before you follow me. When you leave here, turn right and go down the hallway. There's a Monet -- it's the third painting on the right side of the wall. Push on the panel beside it. It's a secret passageway."

  A secret passageway? Of course there's a secret passageway. It's a palace. I’ve practically walked right onto the set of a James Bond film. "You’re nuts if you think I'm about to follow you into a secret passageway," I say, my panic turning into disbelief.

  He gives me a cocky grin and shrugs. "Don't pretend you have anything better to do, luv," he says. "Unless you're planning to get on a plane and head back to Africa?"

  "How do you know I was in -- " Africa, I start to say, but he's already turned around. Damn it.

  I sit there in the bathroom, my heart no longer racing the way it was, no longer panicked and anxious. Instead, my heart pounds wildly in my chest for different reasons as I look at the closed door, where he just left. The thought of the way he looks at me, his gaze traveling the length of my body, sends warmth radiating through my body.

  We spent one night together – and not even that way. I haven’t been with him. It was one random night in Vegas, driving around in a limo.

  And getting married.

  It seems like a lifetime ago.

  I thought I would never see him again. I shouldn’t have ever seen him again. And how in the world was I supposed to know he was a prince? Or my future stepbrother?

  We spent one night together. One kiss. So what?

  It was one kiss that I’ve thought about it every day for the past two weeks, unable to shake the way his lips felt pressed against mine.

  I should be devastated by my broken engagement. When your maid of honor confesses her affair with your fiancé, it should crush you. It’s supposed to crush you, right?

  Except that I’ve been thinking of him instead.

  I'm certainly not going to chase Prince Albert – he was Albie to me then, and definitely not a prince -- down a secret passageway.

  I count in my head -- ten, then twenty, and thirty before I stand up and walk to the door and do exactly what he told me to do.

  Damn it. Prince Albert is totally trouble. I know it in my gut, with more certainty than anything. I know it with all the certainty that I knew it that night.

  Albie is going to be the worst kind of trouble.

  And this is going to be the worst kind of decision.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Albie

  The door opens, and she steps inside, looking radiant even in the dim light that shines from the overhead LED lighting in the passageway. The tunnels are an artifact of the palace, a relic from a thousand years ago, crisscrossing underneath the palace grounds and leading outside the gate. There’s a security guard posted at the exit, of course, a necessary precaution – but the tunnels were always my escape to freedom, out from under the watchful eyes of my father.

  That was when I was younger, of course. Now, I'm free to do what I want. My father has given up on my being anything but exactly what I am.

  The wayward crown prince.

  The irresponsible prince.

  The prince who lets his cock do all his thinking for him.

  And my dick is definitely doing some thinking of its own, as I'm looking at Belle right now, standing not more than a foot away form me in her simple shift dress, an aqua blue the color of the ocean in the Mediterranean that makes her eyes look even brighter than they are.

  Isabella.

  But she wasn’t Isabella when she met me, half-drunk in Las Vegas. It was Belle then.

  “Belle.” The name rolls off my tongue.

  “You a-hole,” she whispers, clearly angry. It makes me laugh.

  “Come again, darling?” I ask. “Oh, wait, no, there was no coming involved, was there? We never consummated our marriage bed. There are lots of beds in the palace, you know. I’m happy to make that happen.”

  “How kind,” she says, voice dripping with sarcasm. “Is this totally a joke to you? You didn’t tell me you were a…”

  “An asshole?” I ask.

  She glares at me. I can see it even in the flickering light. She looks at me, her dark eyes steeled, her jaw set. “A prince,” she says, her tone imperious. “I gathered that you were an asshole the night we met. That didn't exactly take a lot of detective work."

  “And yet, you saw fit to spend the entire night with me,” I say.

  “Temporary insanity,” she says. “Obviously, I was out of my mind. And there was a lot of tequila involved, if I remember correctly. Plus, I was running away. But you already know that.”

  I bend down to pick her shoe up off the ground.

  Drunken disheveled Cinderella, complete with her high heel – black, classy and simple – askew on the ground.

  When I slide it back onto her foot, my fingers graze the side of her ankle, and I look up at her. My eyes connect with hers and I can’t help what I do next. I slide my hands along her calf, watching as her eyes widen.

  “That's not my shoe you're touching,” she says. She’s objecting, yet her tongue traces the edge of her lip, like she’s inviting me to slide my hands up higher. And I want to go higher. I want to take my hands and move them up her thighs, farther and farther until I’m reaching underneath her dress. I wonder if she's wearing panties.

  “No, it’s not,” I say.

  “People are looking.”

  When I stand -- too close to her to be polite -- she inhales sharply, catching her bottom lip between her teeth. But she doesn’t move. She doesn't step back, the way she would if she didn't like how close I am.

  The look of realization that I’m waiting for, the exclamation – Oh my God, you’re him! You’re Prince Albert! – never happens.

  She doesn’t have a clue who I am.

  "Yes," I say. "Fortunately for you, you ran right into me."

  She laughs, tucking a strand of hair behind her hear. "Yeah, I’m a lucky girl," she says. "You could have mentioned the whole – oh, I don't know -- glaring fact that you're a freaking prince."

  I shrug. "You never talked about your work."

  "That's not even the same thing --" she says, her face upturned. She balls one hand into a fist, obviously frustrated, and the fact that she's at the end of her rope makes her endearing somehow. "I'm not a..."

  "Princess?" I ask. "Well, you're going to