Page 48 of Modern Romance Collection February 2025, 5-8

She was looking at him.

Aston turned away from her. Tonight was about business, not pleasure, and business was something he did well. Yet, as he stalked back into the throng of people, he couldn’t shake the intense sensation he had misplaced something vital.

Something that one day he’d crave to recover.

CHAPTER ONE

Six months later

ANASATATher dressing table, hardly able to look in the mirror. Today was supposed to be an important day, one she could barely draw up enough emotion to dread. Her mother had said she must make an effort. When had there been a time in her life when she hadn’t; hadn’t done everything that was demanded of her? She gritted her teeth, adjusting her fringe and the rest of her hair to hide the angry pink scar that marred her temple, threading into her hairline.

Her doctors promised that there was revision surgery for it, and the other scars that were more easily hidden by her clothes. They said that they’d fade in time. If only the memories would, and that all her scars could be so easily dismissed. She shut her eyes against the jolting vision of crushing steel and shattering glass, then the ominous silence, hands pulling her from a crushed vehicle, the pain, a voice in her ear...

Ana sucked in a sharp breath, supressing the memory. Her heart pounded a panicked rhythm, a sick acid sensation climbing to her throat. She swallowed it down, opened her eyes and trulylookedat herself, staring at the woman who looked back at her. Still Anastacia Montroy, but in all other ways changed. It felt as if she’d aged a hundred years in the space of a mere six months.

The door of her room cracked open, and her mother swept inside in a perfumed glide. If Ana had once been called ‘perfect’ she’d only been a pretender to the title, because her mother was inallways a picture of perfection. Never once had Ana seen her with a hair out of place, her clothing anything other than immaculate. Today, the Queen was dressed in a pale-blue suit that accentuated her eyes of a similar hue and made her blonde hair gleam like spun gold. Pearls clasped at her throat, she looked as cold and forbidding as the snow-topped mountains for which Halrovia was famed.

‘Incomparable’, her father had once said of her mother; he hadn’t necessarily meant it as praise. Her mother wielded that perfection like a blade. Her sister, Priscilla, had once been the recipient of most of her mother’s cutting comments. No longer. Prince Caspar had proposed to Cilla soon after the Spring Ball and she’d moved to Isolobello, becoming assistant to Halrovia’s ambassador there till she and Caspar eventually married—a clever request of the Crown Prince to get his beloved closer to him, one that her parents hadn’t been able to refuse.

Now the Queen’s laser focus was turned on her. The once ‘perfect princess’ who had been dubbed...imperfect, a disappointment, when she’d spent herwholelife trying to live up to the impossible standards set for her by her family, the public, the press. She’d never failed.

Till that dreadful night six months ago. In the aftermath of the Spring Ball, the press had constantly questioned how Prince Caspar could have passed up a famed beauty like her, wondering why he’d chosen Cilla, unfairly dubbed the ‘plain princess’, instead of the supposedly perfect one. The shock ofthatannouncement had caused a stir, ripples in the press that lasted to this day, where she was concerned at least. What everyone had failed to realise was that Ana couldn’t capture a man whose heart had already been taken from the moment he’d set eyes her sister.

She’d been angry for Cilla, who few people had ever seen the true worth of because she didn’t fit the Montroy family mould. And for herself, because no one could look past her appearance to the very heart of her. That fateful night, everything had reached breaking point. She’d been so tired of being good all the time, the press asking what was wrong with the perfect princess. Why hadn’t she been able to snag a prince? All she’d wanted was to live a little. To go out, like any young woman in her circle might, to take to the casinos and clubs of Monaco. To flirt and have fun. To wear a scandalously short red dress. To pretend for a moment she wasn’t perfect, that she simply...was.

But it had ended in a terrible car accident that had changed her life. She considered herself lucky—at least her body hadn’t been completely shattered, unlike that of the friend she’d been in the vehicle with. Carla was still in hospital undergoing rehabilitation. She might have been able to walk today, had she not been in the company of a princess.

You’ll scar, and no one but me will love you now...

That voice...a man’s voice...whispered as she’d lain bleeding, trapped in the wreckage of the car. No one had believed that the accident had been something more sinister, that it had had something to do with who she was rather than a series of random events culminating in one, catastrophic moment... Some days, even she’d convinced herself it was a product of her shocked brain. Yet she’dheardit.

No one but me will love you now...

Ana almost laughed. How true that portent had become in the voice of the man she’d been trying to escape on the night of the accident. The man no one believed had been sending her anonymous letters ever since he’d glimpsed her on the night of the Spring Ball.

She’d always received fan mail—but then some had begun to come in via her private secretary that made her senses scream on high alert. It was the way they’d been phrased. They’d sounded just like the man she was sure wrote them, somehow...oily. She hadn’t been able to put her finger on it, other than the sentiments had made her deeply uncomfortable, made her skin crawl. Still, everyone had dismissed her concerns. Her parents had said she was just being dramatic.

That night had changed the way her country and her family saw her. Had left its terrible scars, physical and emotional. Yet no one seemed to care.

Ana greeted the woman who was more monarch than mother.

‘Mama.’ She gave a small curtsey.

Her mother’s eyes narrowed, looking her up and down, no doubt searching for flaws in the conservative navy dress she wore with its high neck, long sleeves, skimming just below the knee. Impeccably tailored, it hid a multitude of sins...or the evidence of her failings.

The Queen’s lips thinned. ‘You’re wearing that? You look more like a nun than a woman about to become engaged.’

The problem was, she didn’t feel like a woman about to become engaged, particularly since she didn’t yet know who her mythical fiancé was supposed to be. A fire of anger lit in her belly. At least with Caspar they’d been given a choice—thrust together on an expectation, yet never forced.

This? It had been presented to her as afait accompli. Ana felt as if all her choices had been stolen from her. She suspected it was because her parents believed she’d made such a hash of capturing Caspar’s attentions that they wouldn’t give her a chance to ruin an arrangement with another person they’d chosen for her. She took a slow breath, through the hurt and the ache.

‘The dress has pockets,’ she said, hating that her voice somehow sounded small.

Her mother sniffed, looking down her nose at Ana from her towering heels.

‘Why does a princess require pockets?’

To hold her phone, which gave her constant updates and alerts about the man she believed had followed her to Monaco that terrible night. He was from one of Halrovia’s oldest families. Rich, titled...entitled. Count Hakkinen, the son of one of her father’s former advisors. A man who had caused the skin on the back of her neck to prickle unpleasantly the moment she’d been introduced to him.

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