Page 1 of Promised to the Alpha Prince

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aurelie

I DIDN’T KNOW why I thought he’d be here.

It was stupid of me.

I didn’t know why it stung either. I’d met him a handful of times, only a handful, and he’d never spoken very much to me.

The first time we met, we were both children. We were present at the ceremony where the marriage agreement was signed. It’s a common thing done amongst families in the peerage, especially when it would mean the combination of lands and titles and all sorts of things. His country, Valhn, and my country, Castille, bordered each other, and our lands butted up against each other.

It had been a discussion for many years to combine both lands between the two families, to form an alliance that would be financially beneficial in many ways.

So, anyway, he was eight and I was six, and I had to wear a dress which I liked because it was pretty and ruffly but disliked because it wasn’t very comfortable, and he was buttoned up in his suit. He had very white-blond ringlets back then, though his hair had darkened to a honey color in the ensuing years, and icy blue eyes. His eyes were still that blue.

He looked me over while the agreement was being signed and then he looked elsewhere. Later, when his mother prompted him, he said that I was very pretty, he guessed.

We were kids, though, and they were forcing us to do it.

And anyway, the next thing I heard, he’d presented as an alpha, and the whole contract was null and void for the next seven years.

As an alpha—the first alpha of his generation presenting amongst the titled peerage in Valhn—he was the heir to the throne. And as an alpha, he couldn’t just marry anyone, because he would need an omega.

I thought, for those seven years, that I’d gotten out of it.

And then I presented as an omega, which was a source of sheer excitement for everyone except me, I suppose.

That was when I met him for the second time. I was eighteen. He was twenty.

He arranged for me to have dinner with him at the castle in Koch, the capital city of Valhn. I was a freshman in college at the time.

He stood up when I came into the room, looking stricken. He didn’t eat any of his dinner, just picked at it. He looked at me from time to time, his gaze nervously darting over to me.

I knew why we were there, as crass as it might seem. It was to see if he got a knot when he was with me, to make sure we were compatible. For my part, I thought he smelled rather divine, like nothing in the world. I kept having these awful, embarrassing urges to crawl into his lap and curl up there, rubbing my cheek into the middle of his chest.

He left midway through the dinner, when someone came to tell him he had a phone call, and I heard him speaking in a low voice on the way out. “Thank goodness for a break in this exercise in discomfort.”

Discomfort? Seriously? He was an arrogant jerk, I decided, but he still smelled good.

He never did come back. Someone else came in and said he’d been called away for something important.

So, I went home and promptly went into the most violent heat I’d ever been through, heat suppressants be damned.

He sent word he wished to renew our marriage contract. I had a choice, sort of. My family said that I could say no, but I didn’t see any reason to say no, not at that point.

There had been this silly, silly part of my life, when I was very young and very stupid, and I’d thought that there was some way I could be with Corentin, but that was never really going to happen, regardless. And now that I was an omega, it was impossible.

So.

It didn’t matter. I had to have an alpha.

Prince Dmitri was an alpha. He had golden curls and blue eyes and he smelled good.

I said, yes, I’d marry him.

I saw him one other time, when the contract was signed again. He touched me that time, ran his fingers reverently over my cheekbone and whispered that he was pleased I’d agreed.

So, I don’t know, maybe that was why I wished he’d come.

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