Chapter Seven
The bike accelerated away from the checkpoint as they were waved through by the single guard—who appeared to be mesmerised by Theo Caras’ authority and hadn’t even asked who was riding with him.
Freya’s heart soared when she sneaked a look over her shoulder to see the palace’s turrets disappear into the snowy night while Theo manoeuvred the bike down the steep cobblestoned hill heading towards the coastal road and the port.
She clung to his back as tears scalded her eyes.
She was free! At last. Of her father’s impossible demands, his constant judgment, and his casual cruelty.
She made a silent promise to her brothers to get them away from him too, as soon as she had got herself set up in Switzerland.
But the truth was, he had never treated them as badly as he had treated her.
Maybe her father had been a good man once—she vaguely remembered a man who had been distant but not cruel, not unkind.
A man she had looked up to and wanted to please…
But her relationship with the prince had changed the day her mother had chosen to leave him, to leave them all, even if it had taken her years to understand that…
‘Thank you,’ she whispered against Theo’s neck, closing her eyes to absorb the rumble of the bike, and the feel of him so strong and dominant and wild.
Maybe it didn’t have to be a bad thing he’d found her.
She still had no clear idea why he’d chosen to help her.
Perhaps it had been to best her father, for refusing to sell Caras the land he wanted.
But right now, she didn’t care what Theo’s motives were.
She could relax, until she got to the port.
She tightened her arms, inhaling his scent, as the lights of the town flickered on her closed lids, and she catalogued the next stages of the plan she’d worked on for three solid months.
Once she disembarked the ferry tomorrow in Amalfi, keeping to the cabin she’d paid for during the overnight sailing, she had a bus ticket through the Alps and into Switzerland.
She had contacted an old school friend in Zurich whose father had a condo he used for business that would be empty until February.
She should be safe once she got to Sorrento, because no one would be expecting a princess to be travelling on a coach.
And one thing she knew her father would not do was inform the police or the press of her disappearance.
His fear of scandal was so huge he would never want anyone to know she had run away from him, like her mother.
The irony of that didn’t escape her. That while her mother had run for purely selfish reasons, she had run simply to live free of his cruel demands.
Once she was safe in Switzerland, she would contact him and tell him she had no intention of coming back.
Her engagement would have to be ‘unannounced’.
She knew he would cut her off without a cent, but she’d prepared for that.
She had enough money from the sale of her grandmother’s jewellery to survive for at least a year, if she was frugal, until she could find a job.
That was the next hurdle, because she had no work experience of any note—and no proper qualifications because her father had not let her graduate.
And she was fairly sure opening schools and hospitals and giving worthy speeches about what her father considered to be ‘women’s issues’ wasn’t exactly considered work in the real world.
But she could speak four languages fluently, and she knew a lot about diplomacy—because she’d spent most of her life managing her father’s increasingly erratic moods.
Hope blossomed under her breastbone.
Anything felt possible now. She was on her own at last. And while it wouldn’t be easy, she welcomed the challenges, the hurdles, the freedom to fail, the chance to learn, the opportunity to be someone not bound by royal duty and forced into the increasingly narrow box her father had constructed for her.
The cold wind whipped at her cheeks, and she buried her face against Theo Caras’ broad back. His butt flexed—her thighs clamped tight around it—as the bike accelerated.
The giddy excitement took a hot sweet turn, into arousal, and awareness…
But instead of being confused by her livewire attraction to him, she let herself enjoy it.
Why wouldn’t she respond to Caras? He was gorgeous and she was a girl who had been refused contact with any eligible boys from the point she’d reached puberty.
The rush of desire didn’t have to be about Caras per se.
Her fanciful heart swelled against her aching ribs.
Perhaps she would take a boyfriend, someone kind and cute and not dangerous like Theo Caras.
Someone who could introduce her slowly to the joys of sex.
Who could give her another taste of what Theo Caras had given her a tantalising, intoxicating glimpse of three months ago.
But preferably without that scary loss of control.
She shivered, the thrilling thought delicious beyond belief. Then the bike tilted, accelerating as it shifted position…
Why were they moving so fast? Shouldn’t they be near the port by now?
She eased her eyes open and blinked at the huge eighteen-wheeler they were overtaking at speed. The blur of light and colour that raced past slowly became recognisable as a four-lane freeway.
What the hell?
The romantic dreams were blasted away on a wave of harsh reality.
What were they doing on the coastal highway? Which headed out of Galicos towards France, and away from Port Gabriel.
Where on earth was Theo Caras taking her? Because it was not to the ferry terminal, which was no more than a mile from the palace through the streets of Port Gabriel.
‘Theo, you’re going in the wrong direction!’ she shouted at his back, but the words were whipped away on the wind, drowned out by the powerful rumble of the superbike’s engine and her thundering heartbeat.
She squeezed his ribs and shouted at his nape, which was pressed against her nose, demanding to know what they were doing on the highway.
He shouted something over his shoulder that sounded like: ‘Relax, Your Highness!’ The cynical, arrogant tone, though, was crystal clear.
Her temper—which had dissolved in a fog of excitement and gratitude—roared back to life. Theo Caras was kidnapping her!
‘Merde!’ she shouted into the darkness, hurtling to who knew where—while forced to cling to the most infuriating man on the planet.
Theo slowed the bike to turn into the airplane hangar, aware of his pilot heading down the steps of the jet. And the woman behind him bristling with tension as she released her hold on his waist.
She scrambled off the bike as soon as it came to a stop, then tore off the helmet.
‘You bastard! What are we doing here?’ Her voice rose to a shout. ‘I can’t miss that ferry.’
She punctuated the exclamation by flinging the helmet at his head. He caught it one-handed, before it could give him brain damage. He smiled, impressed with her throwing arm, and the vivid flush on her cheeks that made her magnificent in her fury.
‘Stop grinning. You have to take me back. There’s no other way for me to get out of the country without being noticed.’
‘Calm down, Freya,’ he said, able to see the fear in her eyes now, under the fury.
His heart squeezed with something he didn’t recognise. Because he rarely changed his opinion of people, especially rich, entitled people like her. But then he’d never felt the surge of protectiveness either, as when he’d watched her smack against that wall, while refusing to let go of the rope.
That she had decided to run away from her privilege, to escape her father—in the middle of the night, on her own—had surprised him, but not as much as the spurt of joy when she’d told him she’d never had any intention of marrying Faron.
Even so, he wasn’t about to rethink his spur-of-the-moment decision to get her out of Galicos on his jet.
Her father’s deal with Faron was dead—even without the marriage.
Because Theo planned to kill it. But why not use this situation to his advantage?
If he had the princess, her father couldn’t use her to attract another rival investor.
Especially not if he kept her with him until January sixth when Andreas’ loan payment was due.
Plus, they had unfinished business from that night in September, because however much he might have tried to persuade himself he didn’t want her in the months since… He did.
But first, he had to stop her shouting at him, and get her on the damn plane.
‘It’s too late to make the ferry,’ he said, cutting through her diatribe. ‘But it was a dumb idea anyway. Your face is one of the most famous in the principality.’
‘No one would expect to see me there… And I’m wearing a disguise!’ she hurled back.
He choked out a laugh, which didn’t go down well. Her wide eyes narrowed, and the mossy green turned into a vivid emerald… Which spiked the heat in his gut that had been having a field day already while she’d been stuck to him on the bike.
‘How dare you laugh at…?’ she began, going off on another rant.
‘Princess, your disguise isn’t worth shit,’ he cut her off in mid-rant.
‘I spotted it was you—just by the way you moved—from fifty yards away, and I sure as hell wasn’t expecting to see you acting like a cat burglar in the palace grounds either.
’ His gaze coasted over her furious features.
‘And then there’s that face. Believe me when I tell you it’s unforgettable, because I’ve put a lot of effort into forgetting it for three solid months and it hasn’t worked. ’
She stiffened, the blush going radioactive. Okay, maybe that was too much information. But time was running out. Galicos closed its airspace at eleven-thirty, which gave them less than twenty minutes to board the plane and get out of here.