Free His Royal Prize by Katherine Garbera

duckling.”
    “There’s no way I could believe that,” he said.
    She lifted one of her delicate shoulders. “Well, I was. I had braces and glasses. I was just about as awkward as a young girl can get, much to my father’s great disappointment.”
    She was rambling a little and he realized she did that when she was nervous. “I’m sure you were lovely.”
    She shook her head. “You say that now but if you had met me back then, you wouldn’t have even noticed me.”
    “That’s where you’re wrong,” he said. “I have two sisters. If you were half as awkward as they were, I would have gone over to talk to you just to let you know you weren’t alone.”
    She looked up at him, those wide weary eyes of hers trying to see if he was telling the truth. He hoped she could read the sincerity in his eyes. “So you became a sexy young woman and the paparazzi just swarmed around you?”
    She laughed, a very sweet sound that made him want to hug her closer.
    “Not exactly. I wore a very sexy dress that my mother had designed for me to my then-boyfriend’s film premiere. And when they took photos of Andy and me, people started asking who I was. And Andy told them. We went to a few more functions together and then we broke up. But the paparazzi were still following me and at the time, I liked it. And so did my parents—it kept the family name in the public eye.”
    Andy was Andrew Hollings, one of the hottest directors in Hollywood. She lived in the world of celebrity and for a second, he wondered how a British peer measured up. But based on the way she’d responded to him, he didn’t think he’d been found wanting.
    He and Amelia were electric together. He had thought maybe there was fiery passion between them because of that addictive thing he felt for her. But he supposed it was just the newness of lust that made him feel that way.
    He finished washing her, feeling himself harden as he touched her. He wanted her again. And he knew he’d take her another time tonight.
    But not now. He wanted to know more about Amelia than how her body reacted to his touch. He wanted to know the secrets behind her eyes. He needed to find out every detail of her past and present.
    Damn, he was obsessed.
    How had that happened? It was sometime between the restaurant and here. Probably when she’d taken him out on her rooftop garden and shown him her own private hideaway—and let him into her luscious body. He struggled to focus.
    “Is that when you decided to use the paparazzi?” he asked.
    “This is going to make me sound like a spoiled brat, but please keep in mind that I was young and not very mature,” she said.
    “I will.”
    “Every time I had a photo in the papers or showed up on TV, my father would call me. I was speaking to him more than I had in my entire life. And though the conversations weren’t meaningful, I finally had his attention.”
    “And you weren’t about to give it up,” Geoff concluded.
    “That’s right. I don’t know what your relationship is with your parents, but I was largely forgotten. Auggie and Dad were close because they play polo together. But Mom was always in Milan and I was not very…fashionable, so I didn’t fit in.”
    He suspected that having been left alone so much of the time was one of the reasons she was able to project such a strong sense of self—one of the many qualities that made her attractive to the public.
    “Were you lonely?”
    “A little, but not too much. I was at boarding school and then camps for most of the year. And my friend Bebe always invited me home with her for holidays.”
    “My childhood was similar,” he said. “Except I was usually the one inviting mates home for the holidays.”
    “I don’t know a lot about your upbringing. Caroline and Gemma are your half sisters?”
    “Yes. My mother is Princess Louisa and my father is Malcolm Devonshire. They never married.”
    “I did know that. I heard that you and your half brothers were summoned to