out what to do next. But that wouldn’t happen tonight. His brain had shut off about six boring monologues ago. With the last-minute covering for his father, he hadn’t been able to hit the gym.
He also hadn’t been able to steal time with Mallory, which was his new favorite pastime.
Indulgence.
Addiction.
Now it was too late to do anything but draw a curtain over this day and start to plan when to squeeze in Mallory tomorrow. As his bodyguard opened the door to his suite, Christian said, “’Night, Gregor.”
“Good night, Your Highness.”
Christian gave the door an unnecessary but satisfying hard kick to shut it behind him. The kick was in reaction to the night—and to Gregor’s polite response. Gregor was perfectly competent and mostly invisible. But he wasn’t Elias. Which was yet another change he hadn’t asked for, and wasn’t ready for.
Yes, it’d been unorthodox when his best friend became his protection officer. But they’d been together in school, and shared a cabin and all their duties in the navy. As soon as Elias qualified for Royal Protection duty, putting him on Christian had seemed obvious. It worked great.
Damn it, he missed him, he thought, yanking loose his tie in the dark room.
He didn’t have that automatic pseudo-partnership of Elias shadowing him all day anymore. Eli’s nights were taken up with Kelsey. Great for them and all that. Of course he wanted his best friend and his sister to be happy…as weird as it was to see his best friend and his sister together.
Which brought his thoughts back around to Mallory.
Thinking about her made him smile. It also banished his lame pity party. Christian shrugged out of his dinner jacket and tossed it in the general direction of a chair as he turned down the hallway to the bathroom.
There was a sliver of light under the door. Odd. The maids were never that careless. He opened the door to a room filled with steam—and a bathtub full of a naked woman.
“Oh good, you’re finally here.” The woman extended one leg. Yep, definitely naked. “Want to get wet? I already am…”
Christ. He did not need this.
A total stranger in his tub, of all things.
How was it even possible? How many damn layers of security had she evaded? Christian knew the protocol to follow. Knew Gregor would expect him to push the panic button in his pants pocket, to bring all manner of guards to defuse the situation.
But there weren’t any bubbles in the bath. It was easy to see that the woman wasn’t armed. Of course, that didn’t mean she wasn’t batshit crazy. Or trained in eight kinds of ways to kill him with her bare hands. So Christian stayed put in the doorway. But he didn’t press the panic button.
He wanted to know things. Not an official version printed up and presented in a portfolio on his desk in a week. He wanted to know right the fuck now what was going on.
“What’s your name?”
“Annaliese.” She stroked her long blonde hair into a rope and pulled it down her chest.
In the calmest voice he could muster, he said, “Annaliese. I’m Christian. Want to tell me why you’re in my bathroom?”
“I heard you’ve officially begun the search for a bride.”
“Not in my bathtub.”
She stuck out her lower lip in a pout at the immediate shutdown and then tossed her head. “Well, I also heard that you’re a very good time. So even if I don’t pass the audition, we’ll have a fun night.”
“In jail. You must know that’s where you’ll finish the night.” Or in the hospital, having her mental status evaluated. It took a special kind of idiocy to pull a stunt like this. Christian almost hoped she had the excuse of illness to explain it.
Sure, he had a reputation in the media as the Playboy Prince. He’d had no compunction about no-pressure, no-promises sex with perhaps more than his fair share of women.
But now, the only woman he wanted was Mallory.
So he sure as hell didn’t want to settle for a random stranger to warm his bed. Nor did he like the implication of an unhinged person creeping about the palace unchecked.
“Why?” She stretched a glistening, dripping arm overhead. The move lifted her breasts above the water. Christian wanted to shift his gaze to the opposite side of the room. On the other hand, he still hadn’t entirely ruled her out as a threat, so he had to keep a close watch on her. “Why can’t you join me in here