PROLOGUE
THEBASTARDWASDEAD.
Ripping free the report, Akeem crushed it and threw it across the room. And there, on a rug made from silk, lay a discarded account of Damien Hegarty’s life and death, all summed up in a few paragraphs on expensive paper.
He almost chuckled. The man who’d called him a monster—worse—was dead,and this would be the closest Damien would ever get to opulence.
Relief should be the feeling easing the tension from Akeem’s shoulders. But it wasn’t.
She would lose everything.
Akeem Abd al-Uzza, Crown Prince of Taliedaa, looked down again at the document he’d thought destroyed and his heart boomed in his ribcage.
There she was. A single photograph.
Charlotte.
He traced his finger along the outline of the woman in the picture. He remembered everything. Every minor detail of her softness against his rough. Oh, how he’d been obsessed by every blemish, every minor mark shadowing the golden tones of her flesh.
She had besotted him with her kindness.
‘Kindness!’ he sneered, and the word stung his lips.
Akeem raked unsteady fingers through his hair. Lust stormed through him, dredging up long-forgotten memories and stirring him in ways unexpected. Undesired.
The freckles above her right breast, and how he’d joined them together with his tongue before taking her nipple into his mouth. How she’d cried out his name—his name—as his hand explored her body for the first time the night before she’d rejected him. Thrown him away as if he was nothing.
He pushed back out of his chair to stalk to the window that revealed views of the ancient city below and the rolling deserts beyond.
It never lessened. The lurch in his gut as he looked down over the city. It would be his. It was his. He closed his eyes. He, the forgotten orphan heir, was the ruler, up on high in the palace in the mountains.
Why, for the love of all he had overcome, could he not leave the past alone?
Leave her alone?
Charlotte Hegarty had hurt him. She’d crushed all that was innocent within him. And yet, after almost a decade, he still wanted her.
Wildly.
Two weeks and he’d be officially named King. He had a limited amount of freedom left before the weight of the crown kept him firmly away from the past. Away from her. Away from his need to rub in her face all she’d thrown away to live a life of drudgery.
For one last time before he was King he would claim his revenge. It was the very personal act of a man, not a king, but it wasn’t an opportunity he was going to miss.
Holding the past by the hand, he’d show it—and her—that there was no place in his world for either of them.