TITLE: WITH A PRINCE
AUTHOR: Jeffe Kennedy
FORMAT:
PUB DATE: May 30, 2017
Copy:
The guy on the train is just
Marcia’s type. A face like an angel, a scent like raw honey, treats her like he
has a white horse and suit of armor stowed in his messenger bag. Perfect.
Too perfect. No guy like that
would be interested in prim, awkward Marcia, notorious goody-goody and a
twentysomething still clutching her v-card. She’s been following rules her
whole life—but somewhere, the game changed. And left her behind.
So when she meets Damien,
with his rumbling motorbike, gleaming piercings, and wicked imagination, she
doesn’t care that he’s the exact opposite of “her type.” Her type would never
dare her into such shocking, fiendishly inventive adventures—and she can’t wait
to say yes.
Yes to whiskey in the middle
of a workday. Yes to letting her hands roam over his body from the back of his
bike. Yes to a fling full of wild abandon and absolutely no long-term
potential. Except Damien’s not just the straightforward bad boy she imagined.
And as they burn through Chicago’s nights, Marcia can’t shake the fear that
this happiness is just another fairy tale…
I plowed headlong into someone,
packages flying, the scent of leather and too much Bay Rum aftershave, my
vision going black for a second as my ankle twisted and I fell. Ow.
“Shit! Aw, fuck it all. I’m
sorry, lady. Here, let me help you.”
Hands scrabbled at my elbow, and
I beat them off. “Just… stop!” Stupidly I was crying again. Shit. Could this
day get any worse?
“Aw, motherfucker—you’re crying.
You’re hurt. Where are you hurt, lady? Should I call an ambulance? I’ll call
911 and—”
“No!” I got a hold of myself and
said it more calmly. “No, I’m fine. That is, I was crying already and… I’m just
having a really shitty day.”
Something about the guy’s potty
mouth had clearly infected me, that I’d say that to a stranger.
“Topped off with me knocking you
over.” He cocked a thin dark eyebrow at me. One pierced with a thick bar. Head
shorn on one side, showing a curling tattoo, and a fall of black hair fringed
down his pale cheek on the other. Six—no, seven—rings in the ear on the shorn
side, and two more coiled through one side of his lower lip that gave the odd
impression of vampire fangs. His eyes, though, amid all that black and white,
his eyes were a startling bright aqua—like those photos of the
Caribbean—emphasized by a ring of deep gray-blue. They narrowed quizzically.
“Help you up then?”
I frowned, mostly for me being a
dazed idiot. “Did you call me lady?”
He popped an easy grin, perfect
teeth gleaming. “Sorry—thought you were older at first. Dunno why. No offense
or anything.”
“Great,” I muttered, scrambling
to my knees and then my feet, ignoring his helping hand. I skidded a little on
the slick tile and he caught me by the elbow. “Stupid boots.” I would never
wear them again.
“They’re fucking hot though,” the
guy said.
I was spared an answer by a woman
handing him one of his dropped packages that had spun away. Though…hot, huh? No
one ever called me hot. Maybe I would
wear them again. I checked my shoulder bag, making sure my phone and tablet
were present and not shattered. He finished collecting a rather impressive
array of packages, stacking them again.
“They do offer bags,” I pointed
out.
“Yeah, but bad for the
environment. I always feel guilty, and ’sides, I can carry them fine. Except
when hot women in blue leather boots knock me over.”
“Hey—you knocked me over. And you
thought I was an old lady.”
He grinned easily, holding the
stack in one hand. “Not old, just matronly, maybe. And you weren’t watching where you were going. I tried to dodge you.”
Great. I’d become matronly. Went
well with spinster, at least. “I apologize then.” I sounded stiff enough to be
all those things.
“Nah, it was my fault. I saw you
coming—head down and charging ahead like a little French horse. I should have
dodged quicker. Buy you lunch to make it up?”
A little French horse? Lunch? I
glanced at my phone. “I just ate, and I have to get back to work.”
“Do you?” He dipped his chin,
giving me a look I couldn’t interpret. “Do you really?”
“Um. Yes.” I spoke slowly.
“That’s what grownup people with jobs do.”
He held up his one-handed pile of
packages, balancing them like a juggler. “I’m a grownup with a job. Well,
several. Enough to keep me from being homeless. Doesn’t mean I can’t pop off
and buy a whiskey for a pretty girl to make up for knocking her on her arse.”
“Are you a Brit?”
He winked. “Can’t get anything
past you, luv. What do you say?”
“About what?”
“A. Whis. Key,” he repeated
slowly, just like I had. “You already ate, so let’s go grab a drinky. Take the
sting out.”
“I have to go back to work.”
“So go later. It won’t take that
long.”
“I can’t go to work drunk.”
He snickered. “One whiskey will
hardly make you drunk.”
Well, it might, since I never
drank. And I nearly told him so, but the words sounded insufferably prim and
stuffy before I even spoke them. He’d thought I was some matronly woman at the
food court. One who’d been sniffling over her salad and the fact that her mommy
had a boyfriend. I was sick of myself.
And the idea of going back to my
desk filled me with a sudden, deep loathing.
“Hey, it’s the holidays.” He
waved a free hand at the decorations. “We’re supposed to live it up a little.”
“It’s not even Thanksgiving,” I
replied automatically, then winced at myself.
“Looks like a party to me.” His
grin widened the spacing of the hoops in his lip and added a bit of a wrinkle
to his nose, a mischievous gleam in his eye. “Desks are boring.”
Just like me. Fine. Enough
already.
“Okay,” I said. “Where?”
“Pub on the corner?”
I had no idea there was one.
“Lead the way.”
“All right-y-oh.” He crooked an
elbow for me, raised a brow when I stared at it. “Gotta keep you on your feet.”
“I’m not that bad.” But I took
his arm, feeling more than a little wild. The music had switched to “Santa,
Baby,” and it made me feel kind of sexy, even. I could work late to make up for
the long lunch break. Again. Since I missed out on all the conversations at
home anyway. It felt pretty nice to glide down the escalator holding onto a
guy’s arm. A woman riding up the other way gave him the side eye, and then me,
and that perversely pleased me, too. Not your usual Marcia.
About Jeffe Kennedy
Jeffe Kennedy is an award-winning author
whose works include novels, non-fiction, poetry, and short fiction. She has
been a Ucross Foundation Fellow, received the Wyoming Arts Council Fellowship
for Poetry, and was awarded a Frank Nelson Doubleday Memorial Award.
Her award-winning fantasy romance trilogy
The Twelve
Kingdoms hit
the shelves starting in May 2014. Book 1, The Mark of
the Tala,
received a starred Library Journal review and was nominated for the RT Book of the
Year while the
sequel, The Tears of
the Rose
received a Top Pick Gold and was nominated for the RT
Reviewers’ Choice Best Fantasy Romance of 2014. The third book, The Talon of the Hawk, won the RT
Reviewers’ Choice Best Fantasy Romance of 2015. Two more books followed in this world,
beginning the spin-off series The Uncharted Realms. Book one in that series, The
Pages of the Mind,
has also been nominated for the RT Reviewer’s Choice Best Fantasy Romance of
2016 and is a finalist for RWA’s RITA Award. The second book, The Edge of the Blade, released December 27, 2016.
She also introduced a new fantasy romance
series, Sorcerous
Moons, which
includes Lonen’s War,
Oria’s
Gambit, The Tides of Bàra,
and The
Forests of Dru. With Last
Dance, Jeffe is
introducing a new contemporary erotic romance series, Missed Connections.
Her other works include a number of
fiction series: the fantasy romance novels of A Covenant of
Thorns; the
contemporary BDSM novellas of the Facets of
Passion; an
erotic contemporary serial novel, Master of the
Opera; and
the erotic romance trilogy, Falling Under, which includes Going Under, Under His Touch and Under Contract.
She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with
two Maine coon cats, plentiful free-range lizards and a very handsome Doctor of
Oriental Medicine.
Jeffe can be found online at her website: JeffeKennedy.com, every Sunday at the popular SFF Seven blog, on Facebook, on Goodreads and pretty much constantly on Twitter @jeffekennedy. She is represented by Sarah Younger of Nancy
Yost Literary Agency.
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