LITMIR.BIZ

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One

      “I’m having a bad heir day,” Luc Dumont announced with a growl as he walked into Juliet Beaudreau’s office.

      “What happened?” Juliet hastily shifted a pile of papers to clear a chair for her unexpected visitor.

      But Luc ignored the empty seat and paced instead, not easy to do in the tiny room that served as Juliet’s office in the lowest level of the tower in St. Michel’s de Bergeron Palace. Luc’s very presence made the room seem even smaller. He was the kind of man who made an impression.

      He’d certainly made an impression the first time Juliet had met him three years ago. Ever since then she always lit up inside whenever she saw him. Tall and lean, with thick brown hair and rakishly carved features, he had the most vivid blue eyes she’d ever seen. Instead of his usual work attire of a perfectly fitted black suit and light-blue shirt with a burgundy tie, he was wearing a black shirt and pants, which made her think he’d literally just returned to the palace from his most recent trip.

      He was a man of many facets, deeply serious at times, wryly humorous at others. There had always been something slightly smoldering about him, deep beneath his cultured exterior.

      At the moment he simply looked gorgeous…and upset.

      “What happened?” Luc repeated. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

      “Certainly I would. Did you finally find the lost heir?” She knew that as head of the country’s Security Force, Luc had been assigned the mission of tracking down the missing heir to the throne of St. Michel.

      “It looks as if I have.” Luc kept pacing.

      “You don’t appear to be very pleased with the outcome,” Juliet noted, coming around the solid oak table she used as a desk to perch on the front corner. While doing so, she briefly wished she was wearing something a little more attractive than a black top and skirt before refocusing her attention on Luc’s news. “Who is it? We already know it’s not Sebastian LeMarc. His claim proved to be false.”

      “That was his mother’s doing, not his. Mothers can be a deceiving lot sometimes.” Luc’s voice held such bitterness.

      Concerned, Juliet placed her hand on his arm, temporarily stopping his restless pacing. “Talk to me, Luc. Tell me what’s going on. You know you can trust me.”

      It stung slightly that he didn’t acknowledge her trustworthiness, but he did begin talking. “I just returned from visiting my father.”

      Which might explain his unsettled mood. Maybe it had to do with his family and not with the missing heir. “Did the visit go badly?”

      “Depends on who you ask,” Luc replied cryptically.

      “What happened?”

      “I have to fill you in on a bit of background first. My mother died when I was six,” he said curtly, “and my father remarried after that.”

      “And your new stepmother was awful,” Juliet continued. “And you were sent away to school in England, first to Eton and then to Cambridge.”

      Luc frowned. “How did you know that?”

      Uh-oh. Juliet tried to backpedal. “Didn’t you tell me?”

      He shook his head. “No. I don’t talk about my family life with anyone.”

      “All right,” she reluctantly admitted. “I checked out your resumé, okay? Before he died, King Philippe granted me unlimited access to the royal archives and records.”

      “To do your thesis on the history of St. Michel, not to go nosing around in my personnel files. And I’m sure they didn’t list anything about my stepmother being awful.”

      “I discerned that much for myself. Are you angry with me?” She gave him her most winning smile.

      He wearily shook his head. “No. I’ll let you off easy this time. Anyway, since I was sent off to school in England, my father and I haven’t spent much time together. Maybe if we had, the lies would have come out sooner.”

      “What lies?”

      “The lies about everything. About the man I thought was my father, the woman who was my mother, about the man I am today.” His voice was rough with emotion.

      Juliet had never seen Luc so upset. She didn’t know if it was due to his English schooling or his work with Interpol before coming to St. Michel, but Luc was always a man in control, a man with hidden depths, a man who maintained his cool and kept his distance.

      Juliet suspected it was because of his upbringing, that he had felt like an outsider in his own family once he was packed off to school. She knew the feeling well. As the late king’s stepdaughter, she’d never really felt like part of the royal family. Her stepsisters, once the royal princesses, had never deliberately made her feel like an outcast. But she was different. She was the dark-haired, shy, bookish one amid all the pretty and popular blondes.

      She’d always felt as if she didn’t really belong. The one person who had befriended her was Luc. He might be thirty-two to her twenty-two, but she was older than her years. And she felt a special kind of bond with Luc, a bond she’d never dared explore for fear of ruining what they already had.

      She knew Luc saw her only as a friend and that was fine, she’d take whatever she got. And she’d be the best darn friend Luc had ever had.

      “Whatever lies might involve your father or your mother, I can tell you one thing about the man you are today,” Juliet fiercely said. “You’re an honorable man.”

      “You don’t know what it’s like, finding out your entire life is based on a lie.”

      “And I’m not likely to know what it’s like if you don’t tell me exactly what happened.” Now her voice was tinged with a bit of exasperation.

      “I’m not making much sense am I?” he noted wryly.

      “No, but that’s okay. Why don’t you start at the beginning and go from there?”

      “Ah, the beginning. Well, that would be with Prince Philippe’s marriage to Katie, the one the young prince was told was invalid because Katie was underage at seventeen.”

      “Yes, but we know now that that wasn’t true,” Juliet reminded him. “The marriage was legal and valid. That’s why you’ve been searching for their child all these months.”

      “Yes, well, the search is over.”

      “And you’re having a bad heir day. That’s what you said when you came in. And I’m assuming that you were referring to the missing heir, not to a haircut gone wrong.”

      Luc had wonderfully thick brown hair. At the moment it had an unusually rumpled look about it, due to his shoving impatient fingers through it. “You assume correctly. I was referring to the missing heir.”

      “And you still haven’t told me who he is.”

      “I know. It’s just I’m finding this entire thing a little hard to accept.”

      “What entire thing?”

      “Well, finding out that my father isn’t really my father at all for one thing.”

      Her exasperation instantly melted away. “Oh, Luc.”

      He tried to shrug it off, but she could tell he was more disturbed than he was letting on.

      “My life is turning into one of those American soap operas,” he growled in disgust.

      “Did your father tell you this news while you were visiting him?”

      “No. I went to see him to get to the bottom of this mess.”

      She was confused. “What mess?”

      “I had reason to believe that Albert Dumont might not be my real

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