It's Getting Hot in Heir: It's Reigning Men, #7

By Jenny Gardiner

Sometimes falling in love can be a royal pain…

Gabriella Puccini, Contessa of Castiglione Girasole, is tired of having to sacrifice everything for the men in her life. So when she finally realizes that her fiancé would rather be married to his career than to her, she decides to go back to where it all began to figure out why she keeps settling for the wrong men, only to encounter her childhood crush, who couldn’t be more wrong for her…

Edouardo Squires-Thornton has been decidedly down on his luck. Unceremoniously sidestepped for the family inheritance upon his beloved father’s death, Edouardo has spent months adrift, feeling lost and confused, barely mustering the energy to do much but watch bad reality TV in his boxers. But when he’s tricked into an unexpected meeting with childhood sweetheart Gabriella, will Edouardo decide it’s time to pull on his big boy pants and figure out his life?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jenny Gardiner Books
• Release date: May 24, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524289041

Jenny Gardiner

Thank you so much for reading my books! I hope you'll find some that keep you from doing the dishes, or vacuuming, or maybe even cause you to stay up later than you'd planned to (although I covet my sleep, so I'd feel guilty if I was to blame for that too often!). I'm the author of SLEEPING WITH WARD CLEAVER, winner of Romantic Times/Dorchester Publishing's American Title III contest, bestseller SLIM TO NONE, the IT'S REIGNING MEN contemporary romance series, including SOMETHING IN THE HEIR, HEIR TODAY GONE TOMORROW, BAD TO THE THRONE, LOVE IS IN THE HEIR and SHAME OF THRONES (book 6, THRONE FOR A LOOP, comes out in March); ANYWHERE BUT HERE; WHERE THE HEART IS; the memoir BITE ME: A PARROT, A FAMILY AND A WHOLE LOT OF FLESH WOUNDS; the essay collection NAKED MAN ON MAIN STREET;  two contemporary romances as Erin Delany: ACCIDENTALLY ON PURPOSE, & COMPROMISING POSITIONS. I have a funny dog story in I'M NOT THE BIGGEST BITCH IN THIS RELATIONSHIP. And I've got many more novels in the works! I've had pieces appear in Ladies Home Journal, the Washington Post, Marie-Claire.com, and on NPR's Day to Day. I honed my fiction writing skills while working as a publicist for a US Senator. Other jobs I've held have included: an orthodontic assistant (learning quite readily that I wasn't cut out for a career in polyester), a waitress (probably my highest-paying job), a TV reporter, a pre-obituary writer, and a photographer (once being Prince Charles' photographer in Washington!). Oh I'm also the volunteer coordinator for the Virginia Film Festival, which is a great one!  I live in Virginia with my husband and a small menagerie; we have three grown children, one of whom lives in Australia and I dream of visiting her there. I love all things Italian, regularly fantasize about traveling to exotic locales, and feel a little bit guilty for rarely attempting to clean the house.  I hope you'll sign up for my newsletter so you can hear about upcoming releases and get special offers here: http://eepurl.com/baaewn Visit me at my website below and my facebook page http://www.facebook.com/jennygardinerbooks , or twitter http://twitter.com/jennygardiner Thanks again for your support! Jenny

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What people are saying about Jenny Gardiner's books:

A fun, sassy read! A cross between Erma Bombeck and Candace Bushnell, reading Jenny Gardiner is like sinking your teeth into a chocolate cupcake...you just want more.

—Meg Cabot, NY Times bestselling author of Princess Diaries, Queen of Babble and more, on Sleeping with Ward Cleaver

With a strong yet delightfully vulnerable voice, food critic Abbie Jennings embarks on a soulful journey where her love for banana cream pie and disdain for ill-fitting Spanx clash in hilarious and heartbreaking ways. As her body balloons and her personal life crumbles, Abbie must face the pain and secret fears she's held inside for far too long. I cheered for her the entire way.

—Beth Hoffman, NY Times bestselling author of Saving CeeCee Honeycutt on Slim to None

Jenny Gardiner has done it again—this fun, fast-paced book is a great summer read.

—Sarah Pekkanen, NY Times bestselling author of The Opposite of Me, on Slim to None

"As Sweet as a song and sharp as a beak, Bite Me really soars as a memoir about family—children and husbands, feathers and fur—and our capacity to keep loving though life may occasionally bite."

—Wade Rouse, bestselling author of At Least in the City Someone Would Hear Me Scream

It’s Getting Hot in Heir

(book seven of the Royals of Monaforte series)

by Jenny Gardiner

Copyright © 2016 by Jenny Gardiner

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

All characters in this book are fiction and figments of the author’s imagination. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. Thank you for respecting the author's work.

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Chapter One

It seemed Gabriella Puccini, Contessa of Castiglione di Girasole, couldn’t unwrap the sleeve of her Girl Scout Thin Mints cookies fast enough. Which sucked, cause when a girl wants a quick pick-me-up after a devastating breakup, the last thing she needs getting between her and her heartache-therapy cookies is stubborn cellophane. After trying to pull apart the seal to reach her binge food du jour the logical way, she decided to cut to the chase and open the whole damned stack with her teeth.

No one else is even going to have a chance to get near my saliva-contaminated cookies, she said with a grimace as she placed the sleeve edge in her mouth and bit down. Besides, no doubt the whole damned box of them will be floating in my stomach long before someone else might happen upon them.

But still, the wrapper wouldn’t give despite Gab’s repeated valiant attempts to tear it with her incisors.

All right. Looks like this calls for the big guns, she said, grumbling, as she pulled out a serrated knife from her silverware drawer. With a hard stab—maybe administered with a slight sense of revenge?—she gouged the blade into the package right between two cookies to ensure she’d get to the source with no more false starts this time. The plastic wrapper finally yielded without a fight, and Gabriella managed to make a healthy dent in that measly little mound of cookies in about four minutes flat. Within the hour, she’d ingested the entire stack and was well on her way into the second.

Milk, she said under her breath, rifling around the sink for a quasi-clean cup in the pile of dirty dishes that had accrued since she’d learned her fiancé was no longer interested in being her fiancé two days earlier. Need. Milk. Now. She unearthed a cup that didn’t look too dirty, gave it a quick rinse, poured a slug of milk into it, and dropped a cookie in to soak.

But it didn’t take long for her to realize that milk and cookies weren’t gonna do it alone this time.

Wine, she finally said, fumbling for an opener. She verbalized this as if it hadn’t already dawned on her that she’d officially bypassed the bury-your-emotions-in-food stage and was now moving on to the drown-them-in-alcohol phase of her freshly-anointed Miserable Rat-Bastard Fiancé Detox Program.

Gabriella found a bottle of her favorite Sangiovese on the wine rack and mercifully opened it with greater ease than she did the cookies. Pulling a glass from the cabinet, she slopped the liquid nearly to the rim. What’s one little glass of wine between friends? she said, wrinkling her nose as she looked down at Butterball, her yellow Labrador, who stared up at her with ever-adoring eyes.

Salute, Gabriella said to the dog, tipping her glass as wine sloshed over the brim onto the kitchen floor. She took a big gulp, shook her head against the wince that inevitably came with guzzling a drink meant to be savored in small sips, and helped herself to some more. Butterball whined in solidarity. With a sigh, the dog plopped down on the floor to lay her head on her paws and close her eyes. Even Butterball wasn’t interested in commiserating with her.

Ah well, Gab said, bracing for a full-on bender. Bottoms up.

~*~

Gabriella woke hours later, curled up on the dog bed, her chestnut hair crumpled in a bird’s nest on her head, her face creased by the acrylic pile fabric. Butterball’s paws were pressed up against Gab’s stomach, dog breath hanging in the air a little too close to Gab’s nose for comfort.

Gabriella let out a moan loud enough to scare Butterball out of her deep sleep.

She scruffed the dog’s head. Back to sleep, girl, she said, rubbing her own throbbing head as she lifted herself off the floor and took a good, hard look at the mess in her apartment. It seemed all the more symbolic of the shambles her life had become in such a short time. A trail of discarded dirty clothes was scattered throughout the place. A telltale path of food wrappers and crumbs dotted the countertops, a little Hansel and Gretel trail of her misery. Days’ worth of dishes were piled all over the sink and counter. It hadn’t helped that two days earlier, she’d cooked a veritable feast for her and Matthew’s six-month engagement anniversary, making use of just about every pan, mixing bowl, utensil, and measuring spoon she owned. Unfortunately those dishes now only served as a painful reminder of how quickly you can go from what you thought was the pinnacle of joy to the dregs of heartbreak.

She closed her eyes as the whole scene replayed itself in her head yet again. She’d spent the better part of that day fixing the meal, a pappardelle with duck ragù like her mother used to make when she was a child. The whole time she prepared the duck—seasoning the legs, browning them, chopping the onions and carrots and celery and garlic, even searing the crap out of her fingertips as she pulled the meat off the bone once it had all cooked down on the stove—she’d thought about how much she wanted what her parents had in a marriage and how thrilled she was that she was finally going to get that with Matthew.

Matthew... They’d fallen in love on the metro, of all things. Somewhere on the Red Line between the Woodley Park-Zoo stop and Union Station. She remembered the first time she noticed him. She was engrossed reading the online version of the Italian newspaper La Republicca on her iPad, catching up on the news from home, but had glanced up to catch him staring at her. She was on her way to her job with a nonprofit that helped resettle war refugees. She’d started working with the organization years earlier through her cousin Zander’s charity, the Prince’s Trust. Before then, she’d managed a large soup kitchen facility in Rome with her friend Giulia, but eventually wended her way to the States after trying unsuccessfully to shake off the lingering gloomy clouds following a breakup with her boyfriend Giovanni from university days. Unfortunately for her, Giovanni joined the Royal Guard in Monaforte after graduation, with plans to travel nonstop for the indefinite future, leaving no time for a life with Gabriella.

Gab should’ve realized then that she wasn’t great at choosing the right guy for a long-term relationship. After all, Giovanni had picked his career over a future with her, which smarted, badly. The only thing that finally helped her get over that soured relationship was fleeing to America for a while and starting a new life in a new place.

So there she was, living in Washington, on her way to work and minding her business while catching up on the news from back home, when her curiosity was piqued by the man who kept staring at her. This went on for several days during her morning commute, and each day the cute, dark-haired stranger seemed to move a little closer to where she sat. Finally, after at least a week, he sat down next to her and started up a conversation. Told her he thought her hazel eyes were mesmerizing. What a line. That night, they went out for dinner and a movie, and before she knew it, they were dating exclusively.

Matthew had worked as an assistant legislative director for a senator, and his work hours were burdensome. Which ultimately helped to land Gabriella where she found herself only moments earlier: zonked out on the dog bed with an encroaching Girl Scout cookie- and alcohol-induced hangover looming like an approaching hurricane. While Matt’s commitment to his job was admirable on one level, it also meant pretty much every time she was counting on him to be home on time, he wasn’t. It was like living with an obstetrician who was constantly called out to deliver babies at inconvenient hours.

If Congress was in session and she and Matthew planned something special like a weekend getaway, they were guaranteed that at the last minute, some stupid crisis at work would crop up, killing their plans. In theory, the hours he worked when Congress was in session meant he was able to slack off when they weren’t, but it seemed more and more lately, Matt had erred on the side of all work and no play just to keep his boss happy. And that made Gab unhappy. Especially after she’d gone to all the trouble to cook an amazing feast, something that resurrected in her so many memories of her childhood spent both in Monaforte and in the tiny Tuscan town of La Quercia Castiglione di Girasole.

By the time Matt had finally made it home that fateful night, Gab had not only eaten her share of dinner and powered through three generous glasses of a Super Tuscan she’d been saving for the occasion, she’d also fed her fiancé’s portion of duck ragù to Butterball, who clearly enjoyed homemade pappardelle more than Matthew apparently did. At least someone—or thing—would enjoy her culinary skills.

Matt tried to give Gab a hug when he finally showed up three hours late, but she turned a cold shoulder to him.

What? he said to her, an air of annoyance in his voice.

I think you know what, she said, frowning. She started to turn off the lights in the living room, having zero interest in discussing anything with him, but she knew it was inevitable.

Look, Gab, we should talk, he said.

Yeah, maybe we should, she said, rethinking the no discussion thing. It was time to lay it all out on the table because she had no intention of becoming a political widow for the next forty years. I think it’s time for us to go back home. You said you’d be willing to move to Monaforte or Italy with me, and I think this proves the time is now. Unless we go back there, you’ll just worm your way further and further into this black hole of work and the next thing you know we’ll be complete strangers.

Matthew’s brows furrowed. Move to Monaforte? Or Italy?

She nodded. Remember? We talked about this early on when we started dating, she said. We’d stay here for a few years then go back home. I think that time has officially arrived. It’s time to go home.

Monaforte or Italy might be your home, Gabriella, but they’re not mine. He shook his head. I have an important career here. I just found out our legislative director is leaving to go head up a committee, which means I’ll take over his job. And with the senator about to move into an election cycle, well, I’m not going anywhere but to work.

Gab’s eyes grew wide. You mean even more work than you already do? She threw up her hands in exasperation and shook her head, completely dismayed. Americans and their notion of working until they die, no pleasure, no relaxation, just work, work, and more work—it drove her up a wall. There are hardly any more hours in a day in which to work! Unless you’re planning to go home and sleep in the senator’s bed and make him breakfast every morning.

So funny, he said, frowning. No need to get cynical about it.

She shook her head. Cynical? Are you crazy? Here you are, this man who woos me on the subway and promises me this wonderful future with him and asks me to marry him and six months later, instead, with you constantly postponing wedding plans, you’re telling me now that basically you’re planning to be married to your career and not your fiancée?

Matthew pursed his lips and furled his brow,