The Reluctant Princess
Автор
Christine Rimmer
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Chapter One
A Viking was the last thing Elli Thorson expected to find in her living room on that sunny afternoon in early May.
At a few minutes after five that day, Elli parked her little silver BMW in her space behind her building and got her two bags of groceries out of the trunk. She’d had the checker bag her purchases in paper because she was short on paper bags. Possibly, if she’d gone ahead and taken plastic, everything would have turned out differently.
With plastic, she would have been carrying the bags low, by the handles. There’d have been nothing in the way of her vision. She’d have seen the Viking before she shut the door to the landing with both of them on the same side of it. Maybe, with the door standing open, there would have been at least a chance of escaping him.
When she got up the stairs to her apartment, she was carrying the bags high in her arms, with her purse looped over her left elbow and her key ready in her right hand. Maybe if she hadn’t been ready with the key—if she’d set the bags down, dug around in her purse, and opened the door before picking the bags up again…
But she didn’t set the bags down. She had her key ready. And on such small choices, the course of a life can depend.
Elli braced the right-hand bag against the door. That freed her hand just enough to work the top lock. Then, by bending her knees and twisting sideways a fraction, she was able to slip the key into the bottom lock and get it open, too. She pushed the door inward, juggling the bags back to where she had a firm grip on them from underneath.
Her apartment had a small entry area—a square of floor, really—between the living room and the kitchen. Elli spun over the threshold. A quick nudge of her heel as she turned to the right and the door swung shut and latched. Her cute little butcher-block kitchen table was right there. She slid the bags onto it.
“Ta-da!” With a flourish, she dropped her keys and purse beside the bags and spun back toward the living area.
That was when she saw him.
He stood in her living room. A man dressed all in black—black slacks, black boots, muscle-hugging black T-shirt. He was blond and scarred and stone-faced—and big. Very, very big.
Elli was no midget herself. She stood five-eleven in bare feet. But this man topped her by several inches. And all of him was broad and hard and thick with muscle. The sheer size of him was scary, even if he hadn’t been standing right there in the middle of her living room, uninvited, unexpected and unwelcome in the extreme.
The sight of him so shocked her that she jumped back and let out a shriek.
The man, gazing so calmly at her through piercing gray-blue eyes, fisted a hand and laid it on his chest, right over his heart. “Princess Elli, I bring greetings from your father, King Osrik of Gullandria.” His voice was deep and sonorous, his tone grave.
It was then, when he called her Princess Elli, that she realized he was, in reality, a Viking and not some buff burglar she’d just caught in the act. He was a Viking because that was what they were, essentially—the people of Gullandria.
Gullandria. Though Elli had been born there, the place had always seemed to her like something from a fairy tale, a barely remembered bedtime story told to her by her mother.
But Gullandria was real enough. It was an island shaped roughly like a heart that could be found between the Shetlands and Norway, in the Norwegian Sea—a tiny pocket of the world where the ways of the legendary Norsemen still held sway.
Elli’s mother, Ingrid Freyasdahl, had been eighteen when she married Osrik Thorson, who shortly there-after became king of that land. Five years later, Ingrid left the king forever, taking her tiny triplet daughters and returning to California where she’d been born and raised. It had been a big scandal at the time—and now and then the old story still cropped up in tabloid magazines. In those magazines, her mother was always referred to as the Runaway Gullandrian Queen.
Elli’s heart was beating way too fast. So what if her father had sent this man? She had no memory of her father. She knew only what her mother had told her and what she’d read in those occasional absurd scandal-sheet exposés. Osrik Thorson seemed no more real to her than the mythical-sounding country where he ruled.
She demanded, “How did you get in here?”
The intruder opened his fist and extended his massive hand, palm out, in a salute. Tattooed in the heart of that hand was a gold-and-blue lightning bolt. “Hauk FitzWyborn, the king’s warrior, bloodsworn to your father, His Majesty, King Osrik of the House of Thor. I am at your service, Princess.”
She resisted the urge to shrink back from that giant hand and boldly taunted, “Was that my question? I don’t think that was my question.”
The huge man looked somewhat pained. “It seemed wiser, Your Highness, to be waiting for you inside.”
“Wiser than knocking on my door like any normal, civilized human being?”
In answer to that, she got a fractional nod of his big blond head.
“Here in America, what you did is called breaking and entering. What’s wise about that?”
This time the fractional move was a shrug.
Elli’s mind raced. She felt threatened, boxed in—and at the same time determined that this oversize interloper would not see her fear.
She looked at him sideways. “You said you were at my service.”
“I am bloodsworn to your father. That means I serve you, as well.”
“Great. To serve me best, you can get out of my apartment.”
He had those bulging, tendon-ridged arms crossed over that enormous chest and he didn’t look as if he was going anywhere. He said, “Your father wishes your presence at court. He wishes to see you, to speak with you. He has…important matters to discuss with you.”
This was all so insulting. Elli felt her cheeks burning. “My father has made zero effort over the years to get in touch with me. What is so important that I have to drop everything and rush to see him now?”
“Allow me to take you to him. His Majesty will explain all.”
“Listen. Listen very carefully.” Elli employed the same patient, firm tone she often used on stubborn five-year-olds in her class of kindergartners. “I want you to return to Gullandria. When you get there, you can tell my father that if he suddenly just has to speak with me, he can pick up the phone and call me. Once he’s told me what’s going on, I’ll decide whether I’m willing to go see him or not.”
The Viking’s frown deepened. Evidently, he found the disparity between her wishes and his orders vaguely troubling. But not troubling enough to get him to give up and go. “You will pack now, Princess,” he intoned. “Necessities only. All your needs will be provided for at Isenhalla.”
Isenhalla. Ice hall. The silver-slate palace of Gullandrian kings….
Truly, truly weird. A Viking in her living room. A Viking who thought he was taking her to her father’s palace. “I guess you haven’t been listening. I said, I am going nowhere with you and you are trespassing. I want you to leave.”
“You will pack now, please.” Those flinty eyes seemed to see right through her and that amazingly square jaw looked set in granite.
Elli repeated, more strongly than the first time, “I said, I want you to leave.”
“And once you are packed, I will do as you say. We will leave together.”
There was a silence—a loaded one. She glared at him and he stared, unblinking, back at her. From outside, she heard ordinary, everyday sounds: birds singing, the honk of a horn, a leaf blower starting up, a siren somewhere far off in the distance.
Those sounds had the strangest effect on her. They made her want to burst into tears. Though they were right outside her door, those sounds, all at once, seemed lost to her.
Lost…
The word made her think of the brothers she had never known. There had been two of them, Kylan and Valbrand. Kylan had died as a young child. But Valbrand had grown up in Gullandria with their father, the king. Over the years, she and her sisters had talked about what it might be like to meet their surviving brother someday, to get to know him.
But that would never happen now.
Valbrand was dead, too. Like Kylan.
And were her brothers the key to what was happening here? Her father had no sons anymore. And without a son, maybe his thrown-away daughters had value to him now—whether they wanted anything to do with him, or not.
Yes. She supposed that made sense—or it would make sense if she could even be certain that this Viking had been sent by her father in the first place.
Maybe this was a trick. Maybe this man had been sent by an enemy of her father’s. Or maybe he was simply a criminal, as she’d assumed at first. But instead of robbing her apartment, he was here to take her hostage. He’d haul her out of here and hold her prisoner and her mother would be getting a ransom note….
Oh, she didn’t know. How could she know? This was all so confusing.
And whatever the reasons for the Viking in her living room, there could be no more denials. Elli could see it, shining there, in those unwavering pale eyes. Hauk FitzWyborn—who called himself the king’s warrior, who said he was blood-something-or-other to her father—might be at her service, but only if her desires didn’t conflict with whatever orders he’d been given. He intended to take her…somewhere. And wherever that somewhere actually was, he meant to take her today—whether she agreed to go or not.
The bottom line: this was a kidnapping and Elli was the kidnappee.
Oh, what was she thinking—to have stood here and argued with him? She should have hit the door running at the sight of him.
Maybe she could still escape—if she moved fast enough.
She spun for the door.
And she made it. She had the doorknob in her hand.
But she never got a chance to turn it.
With stunning speed for such a big man, he was upon her, wrapping those bulging, scarred arms around her. It was like being engulfed by a warm boulder. She cried out—once. And then a massive hand covered her mouth and nose.
That hand held a soft cloth, a cloth that smelled sharp and bitter.
Drugged. He had drugged her….
“Forgive me, Your Highness,” she heard him whisper.
And the world went black.
