Page 7 of The Cinderella Prince

“Bah! What do you want from me?” She threw her hands up in exasperation. “I may have overestimated the demand by three boxes.”

A laugh erupted from me before I could stifle it. Mama Viv was on a mission, sending cupcakes to Roman, and she would have trampled me had I stood in her way. For that reason, as well as this tiny sliver of curiosity, I turned away from her and gazed over the crowd. He wasn’t on the dance floor. In fact, the guy with the bluest eyes ever had barely moved from his shadowy nook by the bar.

I closed my lips around the straw as my gaze locked on his figure. Taller than me by a few inches, he was ridiculously blond and as handsome as if he’d stepped out of afairy tale. As I sucked a sip of my cocktail, something gave me butterflies.It’s probably just sugar in my drink, I decided, but it had happened at the same moment when those blue eyes noticed me looking.

Playfully, I let my eyebrows quirk in greeting, and I received a very determined nod in return.Ah, so the game begins. But this wasn’t my first time out at a party. With a hint of a smile, I turned away from him and searched for another target, someone to keep me occupied but not someone so far away that I couldn’t see the handsome stranger when I wanted to.

In the far right corner of the bar, directly opposite the blond beauty, were a couple of my friends I hadn’t seen in a few weeks. I danced lightly to the Tina Turner tunes, even if I wasn’t that fond of them, until I reached Luke. He wore a summer tan under the locks of floppy light hair, and his smile beamed brightly when he spotted me.

“Look who’s back from the honeymoon,” I all but squealed.

Rafael, officially Luke’s husband at long last, spun with an even wider smile. His coppery skin was a shade darker before their two-week trip to the Dominican Republic. “We returned last night,” he said, hugging me shortly before letting Luke take his turn.

“And just in time for all this fun,” Luke said.

“How was the Dominican Republic?” I asked, practically having to yell over Tina’s “Simply the Best.” “If you got to see any of it.”

Rafael threw his head back and laughed. Luke wore a touch of red on his cheeks. “We saw plenty where we were allowed to explore,” he said, but Rafael’s continuedlaughter was the true answer. They hadn’t left the room, those lucky fuckers.

“We need to catch up when it’s quieter,” I said, catching the rhythm of the song despite my best attempts to stay cool. It must have been a whole minute, minute and a half even, since I’d last checked out the hot guy at the bar. “I can barely hear my own thoughts.”

Rafael shouted his agreement, but Luke’s attention drifted from me to something behind me. That was my moment, then. I could also glance back and search for that hottie without appearing suspicious. But as I did that, I found only empty shadows where he had stood before.

My vision of the rest of Neon Nights was obscured by a towering presence coming into my view. He carried his tall glass in one hand, a wristwatch strapped tightly just above his hand, and white sleeves of his formal white shirt rolled to his elbows. My gaze followed his torso. All the buttons of his shirt were done to the very top.How do you breathe?I wondered.

Something shifted behind me, and I heard some snickering. Rafael, no doubt. He soon faded from my mind as my gaze went over the exquisite features of this heavenly face. Long and slender like the rest of him, his face was smooth and chiseled, and his almond-shaped eyes were so blue that they looked to me almost like sapphires or the sea on a clear day in the Gulf of Mexico. Maybe. I hadn’t been there to see for myself.

The DJ dropped the beat, and the disco ball sent shards of light over the handsome stranger’s face. In the moment of relative silence, he cracked a smile. “Hello.”

Something poked the middle of my back, like a stickherding a reluctant mule to move on. I took a step, then waved my arm behind my back. Rafael was in for a few choice words when I had a moment to spare. Still, I halted a couple of feet away from the guy I’d had my eyes on all night. “Hey.” A smile grew on my lips despite my best effort to remain cool.

As the music returned to its deafening volume, the hottie with a sparkling drink in his hand stepped closer to me, moving easily despite the cluster of shifting bodies that surrounded us. “Can I buy you a drink?”

“You’re very forward,” I replied, basically shouting.

He lifted his chin a little as if to ponder my words. Then he leaned in. “Would you like me to try to be more subtle?” There was a touch of an accent I couldn’t distinguish, but it made my heart do backflips.

I thought about it for a moment. “No,” I said. “I don’t think I’d like that.”

His smile carried relief and curiosity in equal parts. He gestured at the bar, and we waded through the sea of people. I threw one glance over my shoulder at Luke and Rafael, who were smirking and observing me as I retreated into the mass of dancing bodies. When I looked at the handsome stranger leading the way, I forgot about everything else. His shoulders were broad, the slightly rumpled shirt snugging his torso tightly, and his waist was narrow. The triangular torso was as close to my ultimate weakness as the disarming smile the stranger wore.

We reached the bar, and I watched him wave one elegant wave at Bradley, who served two girls to our left. When Bradley spotted us, he leaned over the bar.

My sexy stranger spoke with that mysterious accent. “May I have an elderflower spritz minus the peach schnapps? And my friend will have another round of your finest yellowcake uranium.” He didn’t even look in my direction when he said the words that dragged a snort-chuckle out of me.

I lifted my nearly empty mason jar of vodka lemon slushie, and Bradley nodded.

The stranger turned around enough to face me while waiting for our drinks. “I saw you delivering cupcakes today.”

“Do you always skip the cat and mouse game?” I asked.

His perfect black eyebrows arched in thought. “I don’t know. I don’t play this game often.” He admitted this with absolute confidence, as though plain truth was the fastest, surest way to seduction. His interest was unmistakable in those blue eyes, but I found a glimmer of mischief there. “Do you?”

“Now I sound like a hoe.” I laughed out loud, and the charmer joined me.

“You are Tristan, correct?” He wore that continuous smile on his full, defined lips.

I nodded. I didn’t ask how he knew. He had obviously been paying attention all day. “And who are you? I’ve never seen you in the den before.”

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