Princess Read Online Free PDF

laughter, he fought a smile, but when she looked over to meet his gaze, laughing at he knew not what, he lost the battle and found himself laughing quietly, too.
    She lifted her hands over her head, wrists together, palms open, and twirled around once in a circle, her head thrown back to the rain, her long curls spinning out around her, raindrops on her hair like diamonds.
    “Darius!” she exclaimed. “You saved me!”
    She danced over to him with a single fairylike motion, laid one warm hand on his belly to brace herself, and, lifting up onto her toes, kissed the hard, wet line of his jaw, rain streaming in rivulets down her face.
    With that, she flitted away and ran off like a woodland nymph, trailing silvery laughter through the rain.
    Dazed, he could only stand there for a minute, staring after her. Vaguely, he pressed his hand to his stomach where she had touched him. He watched her catching raindrops on her tongue, and for a moment, he ached.
    A thunderbolt struck nearer then, like a cannon’s shot, like Zeus’s wrath.
    Darius shook his head as if to clear it, raked a hand through his rain-slick hair, and squinted against the rain, wondering who the king would get to take her into hiding and guard her.
    Luckily, he himself would be too busy catching spies.
    Serafina waited ahead for him, stamping in a grassy puddle. He caught up to her and they left the maze side by side, drenched by the rain as they ran through the octagonal parterres and down the promenade lined by tall columns of bushes sculpted into spirals.
    The rain was sizzling on the cobbled path when they arrived at the little waterworks building not far from the maze. Tucked under mounds of lilacs the exact color of her eyes, the sleepy little service building was a small square of red brick.
    Both of them soaked to the skin and breathless from running, he held the door for her. Her panting laughter echoed in its single room, empty but for some garden implements and the valves and gauges and metal contraptions which controlled the many fountains on the grounds.
    Bending gracefully to the side, Serafina wrung out her long hair with both hands while he groped his way through the pitch-dark, trying to find the small wooden door which led to the passage connecting the waterworks to the palace.
    “Wait for me. I can’t see you.”
    He stopped, holding out his hand to her. She ran into it in the dark.
    “Are you grabbing me?” she asked in playful indignation.
    “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” he muttered.
    “Exceedingly!”
    “Flirt.” He shook his head half in wonder at her swift recovery after her ordeal. Then again, she was much tougher than she normally let on. Like him, she merely played a part, but he had always known the real Serafina. “Young lady, you are definitely due for a lecture.”
    “Oh, how I miss your lectures, Darius!”
    He bumped into something and muttered an oath.
    “The blind leading the blind,” she said, giggling and clinging loosely to his arm.
    “What am I to do, take you in through the front entrance? Do you want to meet the Russian diplomats looking like a drowned rat?”
    “I never look like a drowned rat. I’m Helen of Troy, remember?”
    Taken aback by the cynicism undercutting her blithe tone, he merely said, “Trust me.”
    “Lord, are you going to find it or not? I haven’t got all night.”
    “Eureka,” he replied.
    He opened the little door. It creaked in the dark.
    She peered warily into the doorway. “It’s black as a tomb down there.”
    “Never fear, I know the way.”
    By his early twenties, he had worked his way up to the post of captain of the Royal Guard, heading palace security, but he’d known of the secret passages within the building since he was a lad. Underfoot while the palace was under construction, he’d explored every inch of it, almost as if he had known that once it was completed and filled with lords and courtiers and such, there would be no real place here for a young