Reclaimed for His Royal Bed

By Maya Blake

The world is watching as this royal couple collides in this dramatic second-chance romance by Maya Blake!

They’re fooling the world
But their attraction doesn’t lie!

For over a year, King Lucca has been haunted by the disappearance of Delphine Alexander from his life and bed. Having tracked her down, he can finally lay his family’s scandalous past to rest…if she agrees to his plan.

Delphie needs Lucca’s help to save her car-racing team, but the cost is high. A month playing the golden couple for the cameras will see them hurtling toward an inevitable fiery clash—as she’s set alight by his touch and comes closer to revealing the explosive reason why she left…

From Harlequin Presents: Escape to exotic locations where passion knows no bounds.   

• Language: English
• Publisher: Harlequin Presents
• Release date: Nov 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9780369707369

Maya Blake

Maya Blake's writing dream started at 13. She eventually realised her dream when she received The Call in 2012. Maya lives in England with her husband, kids and an endless supply of books. Contact Maya: www.mayabauthor.blogspot.com www.twitter.com/mayablake www.facebook.com/maya.blake.94

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

GHOSTED.

His Majesty King Lucca of San Calliano couldn’t abide that word. He couldn’t hear it without his jaw turning to granite. Without his fist clenching in volcanic fury. Without his temperature ramping up until he could see nothing but red.

Eighteen months ago, the media had delighted in labelling him The Ghosted Prince. After his breathlessly anticipated, spectacular, globally televised ascension to the throne of the kingdom of San Calliano, the daring few who believed themselves immune to his wrath had gleefully changed the moniker to The Ghosted King.

Apparently, it was immaterial that he was deemed one of the most forward-thinking heads of state of his time. That within a few short years he’d catapulted San Calliano back into economic success with a series of trade deals financial journalists still rhapsodised about. Hell, it didn’t even matter that, as the world’s most eligible bachelor, he’d dated stunningly beautiful women both before and after his one flawed encounter with the woman he’d thought trustworthy and above reproach.

She’d turned out to be merely beautiful on the outside.

His lips curled.

She would always remain The One That Got Away. The one who had turned her back on unimaginable wealth, immeasurable power and unfettered influence. The one romantics liked to believe had ripped his heart out, severely denting his playboy image in the process.

Except he didn’t have a heart—certainly not the kind of heart that weakened men like his father, leading them into making shocking errors of judgement that reaped huge repercussions for the things they purportedly loved. That stained their family with disgrace that took painstaking effort to crawl out from under.

No, the strain of observing such a repeated barrage of flawed behaviour in his father had inured him against emotional entanglements long before he’d met her.

And yet...didn’t you pave the way for that eventual near downfall yourself?

Sì. He grimly accepted that. He’d let untrammelled lust cloud his judgement. Allowed beauty and brains to blind him to the fact that those brains were being used against him, that behind her mesmerising smile lay a calculating soul. That smile had made him forget every last thing he’d learnt about discretion. Decorum. Circumspection.

He’d trampled over the hard lessons taught by palace tutors. Harsher lessons taught by his father’s bitter and unforgiving hand.

For those spellbinding four months, Lucca almost believed he would’ve strained to remember his own name if asked.

He’d been bewitched. Entirely enthralled.

And then...

Ghosted.

No. He hadn’t been discreet about his interest. He’d been even less so when she’d disappeared without a trace. When his every call had gone unanswered and her line had been disconnected soon after. He’d put himself through hell, imagining the worst, instructed his trusted investigators to spare no expense in finding her. Their failure had only incensed him more, driving him to take measures unbecoming of the Prince of a kingdom like San Calliano.

He’d dispensed favours like confetti to friends and enemies alike in a frantic bid to find her—leaving himself open to ridicule and exploitation.

Mio Dio, he’d even come within a whisker of begging.

She’d nearly stripped him of his dignity.

Ironic that her final act had restored it. Returning the most precious gift he’d given her, along with a handwritten note, shortly before his coronation, had finally driven him to reclaim his backbone.

He’d remembered the steel that had forged his kingdom’s path through wars and strife, turning it into an empire that now commanded the world’s attention and respect. He’d remembered that the royal blood coursing through his veins came with duty and responsibility, both of which he’d shirked with barely a thought from the moment he’d laid eyes on her—just as his father had with sickening frequency during his reign.

That reminder, and the fact that he was now King, had stopped him jumping on his plane the moment she’d been located three months ago. He had chosen instead to bide his time. To plot and strategise.

But those two handwritten words were seared in his memory for all eternity.

It’s over.

Fury, quiet, stealthy and ruthlessly suppressed—because he’d never let himself forget again who he was—moved through him. With effort, he unfurled his fist, forced his vision to clear and took a deep breath.

Far below him the turquoise waters of the Mediterranean sparkled beneath a cloudless cerulean blue sky.

If Monaco was deemed the playground of the rich, San Calliano easily surpassed it as an arena of power and influence. A priceless crown jewel in a sea of ordinary gems that countless pretenders had sought to usurp in its six-hundred-year history.

However, for almost three decades his father had whittled away at its legacy—first with his precarious economic practices, and then by his wife’s reckless actions.

Lucca himself had also, for a brief spell, nearly lost sight of what the San Calliano legacy meant.

Never again.

Another deep breath centred him.

Behind him, his tourism minister and her committee waited.

He hadn’t spoken since that brief but unfortunate loss of control when he had surged away from the conference table after seeing her picture. Since they’d offered her up as a participant in the most exclusive event of his first year as King.

Lucca was ashamed of that flash of aberrant behaviour. But not as much as he was ashamed of knowing that even after all this time she affected him this much.

‘Sire?’

He stiffened, even though he far preferred that title to Your Majesty.

Your Majesty seduced him back to a time when a connoisseur of lust, who had never obsessed over a lover, had lost his mind over a woman.

Against his will, he recalled their first meeting...the faintly mocking look in her liquid brown eyes as she’d dipped into a curtsy and huskily murmured, ‘Your Majesty...’ knowing full well that he was a prince, not a king.

She’d teased him about it with increasingly sexual subtext—until she’d gasped it the first time he had penetrated her, embedding the sound of that title into his memory for ever.

Lucca despised her for that too.

It was one of the many sins he was very content to heap on her head.

Allowing that memory to increase his fury, he turned around to look at the enlarged pictures laid out on the polished antique conference table in his palace office.

Some people, like his tourism minister, mistakenly believed that despite the unsavoury headlines he’d got over her, hence her being offered up as a candidate now. And he had in the conventional sense. He’d dated several women since her, each more stunning than the last. But that sharp sting of betrayal, the memory of what she’d put him through in those frantic weeks, had never left him.

As a royal, he’d learned diplomacy long before his formative years; he knew when to hold a grudge and when to take the high road. When to bide his time, and when to show the full force of his power.

In this instance, he definitively was not going to be the better man and let it go. Not until he’d exacted retribution. To do anything else would be to risk being deemed weak, like his father. To remain the subject of lingering ridicule and whispers.

While San Calliano’s reputation was fittingly restored in the halls of economic power, questions remained over his personal life because of her. And that he couldn’t let stand.

So he stepped forward and stared down at the image of Delphine Alexander.

His ex-lover.

His traitorous ex-lover.

The woman who’d made a mockery of him, bringing ridicule to his kingdom years after his own mother had courted scandal and drowned them in disgrace, turning his father into a bitter, mean husk.

His mother’s actions had been out of his control.

Delphine was another matter entirely. She’d pulled the wool over his eyes in a way that had seared his dignity and continued to stain his reputation.

He reached for the dossier accompanying her photo. Almost everything written in there he knew from his time with her. What he didn’t know made his senses spark to life, his path to restoring the wrongs done to him seeming almost too easy once the plan had formed in his mind.

Still, he raised his gaze to the group seated before him. While the ultimate decision lay with him, he’d learned the efficacy of listening to diverse views.

‘She’s your first choice?’ he asked his minister, dropping the photo when he noted that his fingers were caressing the glossy outline of her cheekbones, her sensual full lips.

His minister nodded. ‘Yes, sire. If we can convince her to come out of retirement, that is.’

Lucca was confident she would by the time he was done with her.

‘Why her?’ he pressed.

‘Well, the other two are beautiful, of course, but Miss Alexander possesses a certain...mystique that we believe will truly capture the essence of the royal collection.’

Against his will, Lucca concurred. Her flawless dark caramel-coloured skin alone would illuminate the allure of the fabled San Calliano diamonds a thousandfold. He stopped himself from tabulating just how many extra ways she might elevate the occasion to mark the once celebrated but until recently defunct San Calliano Arts, Culture and Film Festival.

‘You haven’t approached her yet, have you?’ he asked sharply, knowing how eagerly his whole kingdom was anticipating the week-long event.

Arabian thoroughbreds, a world-exclusive diamond show and a supercar exhibit, along with renowned works of Renaissance painters, were but a few of the gems his committee had come up with. Tickets had sold out in minutes and VIP invitations were like gold dust.

‘No, sire. Since the show includes the San Calliano diamonds and you have a history with Miss Alexander we wanted to seek your input first.’

He dragged his gaze from Delphine’s photo, but could only manage cursory glances at the other candidates before his attention was compelled back to her.

Lucca quietly despised his inability to look away. Despised the pull that had started across a clichéd crowded room in New York and still seemed to have power over him.

That link would be severed once and for all soon enough, he silently vowed.

‘You’re right. She’s the right choice. But no one is to make contact with her. I will be the one to offer her the position.’

One month later

Delphie Alexander stared in shock at the sandy-haired man stretched out on the lounger beside her. He looked mildly hungover, but then that was a state of being he’d perfected over the years.

‘Are you serious? You sold your share of the team?’

Hunter Buckman shrugged indolently, completely relaxed in the Qatari sun. That ingrained nonchalance had endeared him to her when they’d met several years ago, at the after-party of a runway show. But now that same nonchalance often left her gritting her teeth in frustration.

He never took anything seriously.

As sole heir to a multimillion-dollar Texas oil empire, he’d never needed to lift a finger to do an honest day’s work. The problem was, nothing was what he did 90 per cent of the time. His attention span was flighty at best, and his hedonistic lifestyle exclusively dictated his interests.

But she’d hoped...prayed...his interest would be long-lasting when he’d let her buy into his latest venture.

‘I’m sorry, Delly. The offer was too good to refuse.’

She bunched her fists in her lap, resisting the urge to scream. ‘But you didn’t even give me a chance to make you an offer.’

He grimaced, scratching his unkempt stubble. ‘I knew you’d try to talk me out of selling. Or...’ He paused, glancing away guiltily.

Her hackles rose. ‘Or...?’

‘Or bend over backwards to buy the shares from me.’

‘And what would have been wrong with that?’ She wasn’t a stranger to hard work. She’d striven to succeed from the age of sixteen, when it had become clear that she only had herself to rely on, and hadn’t looked back since.

Hunter avoided her gaze, glancing around before snapping his fingers at a passing maid. The staff were well-versed in their boss’s predilections and thirty seconds later a chilled bottle of his favourite beer arrived. Delphie stopped herself from pointing out that it was barely 9:00 a.m.

He took a healthy slug before meeting her gaze. ‘I knew you’d kill yourself trying to come up with the cash to buy me out. I couldn’t let you do that. You’ve already been through so much.’

‘So you were trying to spare my feelings?’

She couldn’t stop the mild horror in her voice, or the shaming reminder that Hunter had seen her at her lowest point. He’d stood outside her bedroom door on endless nights and listened to her sob her heart out, first over her broken heart, and then over the deep despair of losing her precious baby.

When she’d finally stumbled out, wrecked and raw, he hadn’t probed her with questions. He’d simply put her back together in his own unique Hunter Buckman way.

‘How many times do I need to tell you that I’m fine?’ she said now. ‘All that...business is in the past.’

‘Damn it, I knew you’d react this way. Delly...’ He stopped and sighed. ‘I was offered one hundred and twenty million dollars for it. That’s a serious chunk of change.’

She winced, her insides churning as she swallowed the hard knot of reality. It would’ve taken her several months, perhaps even years, to come up with a financial package to counter that offer. And with multiple investors would’ve come multiple, and inevitably frustrating, demands.

She’d been thrilled with having Hunter as her sole partner, regardless of the fact that he owned 90 per cent of Hunter Racing and her a meagre 10 per cent. She’d poured her heart and soul, not to mention her entire savings, into the racing team for the last year—mostly from behind the scenes, since she hadn’t been quite ready to face the world until recently, once she’d dragged herself out of her months-long desolation.

Fixing a distraught child’s broken bike on the side of the road here in Qatar on one of her evening walks had been the defining moment that had sparked a flame and lit through her cold desolation, and it had set her on a new direction. A direction that not only gave her purpose and a means to dwell on something other than the child she’d lost, but also revived her father’s memory through doing the thing he’d loved the most.

Her modelling days were behind her. Managing a racing team had become her new passion. A passion now at risk, thanks to Hunter’s actions.

She swallowed the ball of frustration knotted in her throat. ‘I only joined the team in the second quarter of last year. This was meant to be my first full year. You couldn’t wait for me to find my feet before landing me with a different partner?’

‘Come on...don’t give me that,’ he drawled in his lazy Texan twang. ‘You found your feet in your first week as team boss. You pulled Hunter Racing up to fifth in the championship by the end of last season, after languishing in the bottom half four years in a row. Six races in this year, we’re already third.’

Delphie massaged her temples as tension built. ‘Yet you’re walking away from the team?’

He shrugged again, his tanned torso gleaming under the sun. ‘It doesn’t spark joy in me any more, Delly. Not like it does for you.’

Joy.

A distant concept.

She’d arrived in Qatar firmly believing she’d never again experience that emotion. Nineteen months on, she knew it to be the truth. But she’d discovered she could still draw breath, despite her soul-shrivelling loss. Just as she could nurture the pebble-sized corner of her heart that still cherished the time she’d been given with her father before his death. In that place she’d found contentment. Enough to make facing the day bearable.

She swallowed, looking past the sparkling infinity pool to the gleaming waters of the Persian Gulf. Hunter had bought this house because it was infamously rumoured to have once belonged to a sultan’s favourite mistress. But it had been Delphie’s sanctuary when her life had fallen apart over a year and a half ago—

No. She wasn’t going to think about that.

These days she could go for several blessed hours before King Lucca of San Calliano, his