The Prince's Cinderella Bride. Amalie Berlin

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       CHAPTER ONE

      IT WAS A strange sort of medical facility, but the changes made to Almsford Castle since ex-Princess Anais Corlow’s last visit made it seem almost like a new place. Or at least like an alternate version of reality that she could pretend she’d never been to, and never run away from...

      Sometimes for several seconds at a time.

      Dr. Anna Kincaid—as she was now known—checked her watch. Twenty minutes left in her lunch hour, right on schedule. She climbed onto the gym’s treadmill closest to the exit. She could run for fifteen minutes, shower like lightning, and be back in time for her first patient of the afternoon, same as yesterday.

      As soon as she got the belt moving, she increased the speed until she had to push herself to keep up. Not a sensible way to exercise but, no matter how determined she was to remain in the new job that allowed her to stay in Corrachlean with her mother and the quiet life they’d built, every minute she was at Almsford she felt the need to run. It built over the day, faster when she wasn’t busy helping patients than when she sat alone in her office with just her memories.

      Anais had more or less died the moment she’d left Prince Charming, Quinton Corlow, second son of Corrachlean. Without her husband, she’d had no title—something she’d never cared to have anyway—but she’d also lost her country, her home, for the last seven years.

      Almsford Rehabilitation Center now belonged to Corrachlean’s soldiers, people who wanted her there. People who welcomed her, maybe in even greater proportion to how unwelcome she’d been the last time around. The people made it possible for her to set foot in the grounds. The physical changes to the building made it possible for her to stay, but running in one place kept her from running away.

      Protective sheeting covered the stained-glass window running along the top half of the twenty-foot western wall in the ballroom-turned-gymnasium, adding another little barrier to her past, to keep those soul-crushing memories from overwhelming her.

      To let her—almost—put it all away.

      Laughter, warm and masculine, danced up the corridor that branched off the gymnasium to the first-floor patient rooms.

      A sparkling sensation, like the meeting of a million tiny kisses, sprung to life at the top of her head and spilled in a cascade down her back, tickling across her neck and over her shoulders, all the way СКАЧАТЬ