It was the shock, she told herself. Not the smile. Not.

It was his cousin’s smile. The de Boutaine smile.

She remembered almost every detail of Kass’s courtship. One moment she’d been part of a team excavating in the palace grounds; the next she’d looked up and Kass had been watching her. He had been on his great, black stallion.

He’d been just what a prince ought to look like-tall and dark and heart-stoppingly handsome, with a dangerous glint behind his stunning smile. And his horse…She’d spent half her childhood with thoroughbreds but the stallion had made her gasp. The combination, prince and stallion, had been enough to change her world.

‘Cinderella,’ he murmured. ‘Just who I need.’

It was a strange comment, but then he left his horse, stooped beside her in the dust and watched her brush the dust from an ancient pipeline she was uncovering. He seemed truly interested. He spent an hour watching her and then he asked her out to dinner.

‘Anywhere your heart desires,’ he told her. ‘This Principality is yours to command.’

He meant it was his to command. Kass’s ego was the size of his country, but it had taken her too long to find that out.

Stunned, she went out to dinner with him. She was mesmerized by his looks, his charm and the fact that he seemed equally fascinated by her. It was heady stuff.

The next morning he met her at the stables. He mounted her on a mare, almost as beautiful as his stallion, Blaze, and they rode together into the foothills of the mountains in the early morning mist. The magic of the morning blew her away. It left her feeling mind-numbingly, blissfully in love, transported to a parallel universe where normal rules of sense and caution no longer applied.

That night, as she finished work, he appeared again, in his dress uniform. Regal and imperious and still utterly charming, he was focusing all his attention on her. He’d just come from a ceremonial function, he told her, but she suspected now that he’d dressed that way to overwhelm her.