A Prince At Last!. Cathie Linz

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      Chapter Two

      Juliet stared down at the envelope on her desk as if it were a snake that might lunge out and bite her. Her fingers trembled as she traced the elegant handwriting—Luc.

      What had his mother been thinking when she’d written his name? Had she hoped that he’d never find out he was heir to the throne of St. Michel? Would she even have known? From what Luc had told her of the investigation, Katie had been told that her marriage to Philippe was illegal.

      Which meant Katie would have believed her son to be illegitimate. And she’d have done everything she could to hide that fact from him.

      Juliet knew how much legitimacy mattered. The royal princesses had had to weather that storm of controversy themselves when Lise’s rotten first husband Wilhelm had sold the story to a tabloid. Once the word was out that King Philippe had had a secret first wife, whom he’d never divorced, the paparazzi had swarmed the de Bergeron Palace like a bunch of locusts, feeding off the scandal.

      The princesses had all left the palace now—Marie-Claire had married Sebastian, Ariane had gone to Rhineland and married Prince Etienne, Lise had finally found true happiness with her former brother-in-law, the honorable Charles Rodin. Juliet’s own half sister Jacqueline was visiting cousins in Switzerland and protected from most of the scandal while their brother Georges had headed off to the Andes in Peru for a few weeks of summer skiing.

      At least things had worked out well in the end for the three older princesses, who had all found the men of their dreams.

      Juliet thought she’d found the man of her dreams as well—Luc. Her chances of having him see her in a romantic way had always been slim at best, but now they were impossible.

      Juliet turned and caught her reflection in the small mirror propped on top of the bookcase along the opposite wall. She’d placed it there to reflect the view of the garden rather than out of any vanity on her part.

      She had nothing to be vain about. Her green eyes were all right, she supposed, but her long dark hair had never behaved properly, and was at this moment falling out of the topknot she’d secured it in with a pencil to hold it in place. Her eyebrows were bushy, or so her roommate in boarding school had once told her, and her mouth was too large to be elegant. She even had freckles, something no princess would ever have.

      Of course, she wasn’t a princess. She was the ugly stepsister. The smart one, the bookworm, more interested in the past than in her future.

      On those occasions lately when she had dreamt about her future, she’d placed Luc at her side. Her gaze traveled from her reflection to the letter on her desk.

      The fact that Luc was the missing heir changed everything.

      She certainly didn’t have what it took to make a king happy. She didn’t even have what it took to keep a rich St. Michel businessman’s son like Armand Killey happy. Three years ago, Armand had swept her off her feet, telling her he loved her quiet beauty. And she’d bought every word, had, in fact, hungered for someone to love her after her mother had died.

      But Armand hadn’t really loved her at all. He’d simply been using her in order to get close to the king. Juliet had heard him and his father discussing the plan. She’d been devastated and humiliated, as well as angry with herself for being so stupid as to fall for Armand’s slick ways in the first place.

      “Did you read the letter yet?” Luc asked, disrupting her thoughts and once again catching her unprepared. He must have gotten the fresh air he’d said he needed by taking a brief walk in the garden, out of her line of vision.

      “No.” She paused to remove the pencil from her hair and let the dark strands tumble where they may. She’d learned long ago there was no fighting her hair, it always won. If it didn’t want to stay up, it wouldn’t. Turning to face Luc, she said, “I did not read it. And I’m not going to until you do.”

      “Then you’ll be waiting a very long time,” he retorted, “since СКАЧАТЬ