LITMIR.BIZ

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ballroom and peered through her elaborate mask.

      One kiss from any man who’d look at her with warmth and desire, a man who could make her forget that a chasm of cutting loneliness was all that stretched ahead in her life.

      One kiss because it was her thirtieth birthday and she was quite sick of her stagnant life, of pretending that the sight of her sister-in-law with her swollen belly didn’t send a shaft of ache through her, or that she didn’t crave a family of her own.

      She’d lived her entire life within the rules her father, King Theos, had set, ensuring that her brothers, Andreas and Nikandros, had everything they had ever needed.

      What she hadn’t foreseen was that in the end, she would be alone. Just as she had been all these years.

      She walked aimlessly at the fringes of the vast oval-shaped ballroom, the cut-crystal chandeliers making the resplendently dressed men and women glitter. She wasn’t the only one hiding her identity behind the mask. The masquerade ball was an annual tradition of the House of Drakos and yet, with her father Theos’s dementia becoming worse, it had not been held in four years.

      But because the conservative traditionalists were balking at Andreas’s continued absence after their father’s death, and they feared that Nikandros and Gabriel Marquez’s partnership was a risk to Drakon’s economy, Eleni had suggested that they hold the ball again as a way of pacifying them.

      And then she’d put the ball together in three weeks.

      Scanning the stunningly dressed women and tuxedoed men who were dancing to a slow waltz, satisfaction filled her veins. Her fingers tingled to look through her fabled to-do list and check it off.

      The black-and-white mask she’d bought on her trip to Paris last week went particularly well with the dark red lipstick. Piled high in a chignon, wispy tendrils of her usually unruly hair kissed her jaw.

      Strapless and snug around her chest, her black-and-red silk ball gown accentuated an hourglass figure no amount of careful dieting could reduce, dipping at her waist and flaring into a full flounce.

      The four-inch stilettos she had pushed her feet into boosted her five-two height, flashing her toned leg through the thigh-high slit. She’d been stunned when she’d looked at her reflection in the gold-filigree full-length mirror.

      She’d always be plain compared to her half brothers, the Princes of Drakon; the media frequently reminded her by calling her the Plain Princess, but in that moment, she’d thought she had almost looked beautiful.

      Good enough for the House of Drakos, her father would have said.

      She continued wandering across the ballroom, marveling at the magnificence of the hotel.

      It had been a crumbling Victorian-style mansion with out-of-date plumbing and bad interiors, but in three months Marquez Holdings Inc. had renovated it into a world-class destination for the nouveau rich that were pouring into Drakon, thanks to Gabriel Marquez’s interest.

      The ruthless real estate mogul was a guest of the palace of Drakon, and had been in Drakon for three months to oversee his company’s investment in Drakon.

      Casinos, luxury resorts that rivaled the King’s Palace in style and ambience, mountain escapes, a world-class racing circuit—the map of Drakon was changing under Mr. Marquez’s and her brother Nik’s deft guidance.

      A modern-day Midas, as the media called him, Eleni wouldn’t have believed the transformation of the building Gabriel Marquez had wrought if she hadn’t visited it herself almost a year ago.

      Taking a sip of her chilled champagne, she looked down over the lush gardens. The scent of roses was thick in the air; a clock struck midnight at the old church in the city’s main square.

      She took a longer sip than was wise, felt the bubbly kiss her throat cold and sighed. It was a sound that seemed to come from the depths of her lonely soul.

      The night stretched empty in front of her again.

      “Why the long sigh, querida?”

      The deep, slumberous voice sent a shiver down Eleni’s spine that rivaled the tingles in her throat. Heart beating faster, she turned, bracing her hand on the balcony balustrade. “I didn’t mean to interrupt your—”

      “Stay.”

      With the one command, he made her spine lock. Even her father, who had been a bossy, hard-to-please man, had never ordered her around like that. “Excuse me?”

      “Stay and keep me company,” the man repeated, not even a little taken aback by her stiff tone.

      With his back to the wall, the man was huge. Like a bouncer at a nightclub, he was tall and powerfully built.

      A veneer of power clung to his frame. Unlike the other men at the ball, no mask covered his face. Only shadows.

      His blue-black hair framed his face in thick, unruly waves. The fine white dress shirt, unbuttoned at the throat, clung to lean muscle. The breadth of his frame sent tremors through Eleni.

      She couldn’t stop her gaze from traveling down his length. One foot crossed over the other and stretched the fabric of his trousers, revealing the hard musculature of his thighs.

      Eleni swallowed the strange anticipation that seemed to rise in her throat. He pushed off from the wall.

      She barely swallowed the soft gasp that rose to her lips.

      Roughly chiseled masculine planes, a wide, sensuously cruel mouth and a nose bent in the middle—it was Gabriel Marquez, the very man she’d been mooning over for months. The man who reminded her she was a woman every minute she spent in his company. The desire and need that she’d thought had disappeared with Spiros still burned bright in her.

      The ruthlessness that had made Gabriel a legend in boardrooms across Europe screamed from every inch of him.

      Her heart pumped faster as she waited for him to recognize her.

      His dark slate-gray eyes studied her. He’d never so much as rested his gaze on her in three months of long meetings and numerous requests she’d dealt with. Not once had he shown any awareness that she was a woman.

      No, then she was Princess Eleni Drakos, the facilitator for his firm, the grease between his company and the palace. But now she was a masked stranger, and something flared in those depths. Something that made her aware of how thin the silk of her dress was, of how tightly her skin seemed to be stretched.

      “Such a wealth of regret and—” he paused while his gaze seared her “—need from a beautiful woman’s lips...it feels like a challenge to any man.”

      “It wasn’t...need,” she retorted instantly, somehow negating what she had meant to say.

      “Come, querida, isn’t the idea of the masquerade to be open about our innermost desires while we hide our outward selves?” He traced the lower edge of her mask with a finger. Sensation zoomed from the spot. “You’re safe behind that mask.”

      When his finger continued its journey back down and reached the indent over her upper lip, Eleni grabbed his wrist. If he touched her mouth... “Why aren’t you wearing one?” she asked, wishing she didn’t sound so breathless.

      “Because I don’t have to hide myself to express what I want. Nor do I need to validate myself by hiding from the world who I am.”

      Arrogance dripped from his every word. But why not? There wasn’t one single woman in the palace who hadn’t lost her breath over the sight of him.

      “You sound far too sure of your appeal.”

      He shrugged. “I am Gabriel Marquez, Ms....?”

      Eleni racked her brains for a name that had no association with her or the House of Drakos. She’d taken every precaution not to betray her identity at this ball tonight, including arranging it so that she was thought to be still in Paris by her staff and even by her brother Nikandros.

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