Even as her stomach lurched and her face flamed, Liv had to stop herself from reaching out. Her fingers itched to touch that silky hair, to trace the vulnerable bumps of his spine. He really was one gorgeous hunk of man. And last night—at least what she could remember of it—had been absolutely splendid.
She let her head drop to the grass again, shut her eyes and stifled another moan. Oh, how could she?
Liv wasn’t married. She wasn’t even engaged. But she and Simon Graves, a fellow student from back home in California, were more or less a steady couple. And even if she’d been completely free, well, Prince Finn was a player, for heaven’s sake. The man was incredibly charming. All the available—and some of the not so available—women in her father’s court adored him. They vied for his attention. He had his pick of them and he did his best to satisfy them all.
Never—ever—would she have imagined she’d wake up one morning and discover she’d become a notch just like all the other notches in some player’s bedpost. She was seriously disappointed in herself.
She was also outta here.
Now.
With bleak determination, Liv braced her hands against the grass and pushed. That brought her to all fours. It also caused her stomach to do something distinctly unpleasant—a lurch, followed immediately by a long, awful roll. She found the sensation not the least reassuring. And she didn’t even want to think about what might happen once she was fully on her feet.
But it couldn’t be helped. She was standing up and she was doing it now.
With a muffled groan, she lunged upright. For a minute, she swayed there, certain she was going to spew the contents of her stomach all over the dewy grass and the gorgeous naked man at her feet.
Somehow, she held it in.
Her clothes—and his—were strewn around the clearing. She had to swallow more than once to keep from hurling, but somehow she managed to lurch around from garment to garment, disentangling her soggy things from his.
She located everything—well, except for her shoes and her panties. The shoes, she remembered now, had been left behind long before Finn led her to the clearing—back there while she was dancing around the burning ship. As for the panties, well, she just didn’t care to consider what might have happened to them.
She made herself get dressed, more or less. Everything was limp and damp and hard to manage, and wooziness left over from all that ale she’d drunk didn’t help matters any. Right away, she gave up on her bra and the clingy calf-length half-slip that went under the skirt. She just put on the two damp halves of the dress, smoothed them as best she could and carried the rest in a wad in one fist. She did not look back as she headed for the trees.
Her father’s palace—unlike her panties—was easy to find. Isenhalla loomed several stories tall, a marvel of gleaming gray slate, with a fairy tale’s worth of turrets and ramparts, towers and widow’s walks. It rose majestically over the parkland where the revels of the night before had taken place, the red-and-black Gullandrian flag flying proudly from the tallest spire.
Liv walked fast, through the thick copse of trees that ringed the clearing, out into a broad, sloping meadow where the ashes of the burned-out ship still smoldered. She kept her head down and her feet moving and managed to avoid contact, verbal or otherwise, with the few leftover revelers sprawled here and there on the grass.
Beyond the grass were high topiary hedges, broken at intervals for access to the gardens. Head hammering and stomach churning, Liv pushed on through the gardens, ignoring the way the pebbled paths abused her poor feet.
By blind luck, she ended up at the same narrow back palace entrance the bridal party had come down the night before. Miraculously, the door had not been locked. She slipped through, padded down a short, dim hallway and then began climbing the narrow flights of stairs.
At the third floor, she pushed open the landing door. She went down a narrow hallway to another door. Through it was a main hallway—a wide one with an arched, intricately carved ceiling and a beautiful marble floor. A thick Turkish runner led off in both directions.
Liv went left. It wasn’t far—maybe a hundred feet—to the tall, carved double doors of the suite she shared with her ‘‘baby’’ sister, Brit—they were fraternal triplets, Liv, Elli and Brit. Liv was the oldest, Brit the youngest.
The doors, as per usual, were guarded.
Liv had hoped against hope that the pair of Gullandrian soldiers, beautifully rigged out in the dress uniforms of the palace guard, would for once have taken the morning off. But there they were, resplendent and impassive, as always. Liv tried her best to look dignified as she approached them, an effort severely hindered by her soggy dress, her battered, dirty bare feet and the wad of limp underwear she clutched in her fist.
Not that they said anything. The guards never said anything. They stared straight ahead, their handsome, square-jawed Nordic faces about as readable to her as runes. In unison, white-gloved fists hit proud, broad chests. As one, they each took an equal sideways step toward each other. Each grabbed a handle of one of the doors. Smoothly they pulled the doors wide.
Liv walked through with her shoulders back and her head high. Not until she heard the doors click shut behind her did she allow herself to droop a little.
The suite was huge. The marble-floored antechamber opened into a massive drawing room done in rich damask and heavy silk, with lots of gilded intricately carved tables and an ornate fireplace rigged, by way of a beautiful wrought-iron insert, to burn gas.
Liv kept walking. She walked through the entry hall and the drawing room, down a hallway, right past her own bedroom to Brit’s room. The door was shut. She grasped the gilded door handle. Not locked, it turned.
Just as she was about to push the door inward, Liv became aware of movement to her right. It was the chambermaid. For their stay in Gullandria, Liv and Brit shared a maid to take care of their rooms and their clothes and a cook who inhabited the small galley off the private living area to one side of the drawing room. The maid was young—eighteen or nineteen, max—and way too thin, with big, slightly protruding eyes in a wan, pointy face. She wore soft-soled shoes, so you couldn’t hear her coming. It seemed to Liv she was forever popping up out of nowhere, startling her and Brit when they thought themselves alone. Right now, the girl hovered in the open doorway to Liv’s own room.
‘‘What?’’ Liv demanded in a distinctly crabby tone.
The pale, pointy face seemed to get paler and pointier still. ‘‘Highness, forgive me. Just tidying up—are you all right, Highness?’’
‘‘Never better,’’ Liv lied with a sneer.
The maid dipped a quick curtsy and escaped toward the drawing room. Liv watched her scurry off. Once she was sure the girl was gone, Liv swayed toward the door frame. For a moment she just sagged there, disgusted with everything, herself most of all.
She needed to lie down. To lie down and go to sleep and not wake up until her head had stopped hurting and her stomach quit churning.
But instead of turning for her own room, she pushed open Brit’s door and tiptoed in. After the trouble she’d gotten herself into, she wanted to be sure that Brit was all right.
The room was dim, all the heavy curtains drawn. The centuries-old rug—wine-red, with a golden wheellike pattern spinning out from the center of it—was wonderfully soft beneath her sore feet. The fine old mahogany bed, its four posters broad as tree trunks and intricately carved with dragons and vines and fairylike women with long, twining hair, loomed in the center of the room, the soft, old linens in disarray. Liv could see a slim tanned hand and arm hanging over one side.
Quietly Liv moved closer. At first, she smiled at the sight that greeted her when she got close enough to see that her sister was, indeed, in bed sound asleep.
Brit