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was ten years ago, what bearing does it have on her health now?”

      “Fallopian tubes.”

      Demyan stopped and stared at Maks in confusion. “What?”

      In no mood to give his cousin a break, Maks took advantage of the other man’s inattention and knocked him on his ass with a well-timed kick.

      Demyan jumped to his feet, but he didn’t come back for more like Maks expected. “Knock it off and explain what the hell appendicitis as a teenager has to do with an adult woman’s fallopian tubes.”

      Demyan was no idiot. He knew Maks’s interest in Gillian’s reproductive system was of paramount importance to the House of Yurkovich, the royal family of Volyarus.

      “She has a poorly functioning reproductive system.” Maks adjusted his thin sparring gloves. “There is less than a thirty percent chance of pregnancy.”

      A lot less by some estimations, slightly more by others, according the specialist Maks had consulted.

      Demyan shoved hair the same dark color as Maks’s own off his forehead. “With fertility treatment?”

      “I have no intention of becoming the next father of sextuplets.”

      “Don’t be an ass.”

      “I’m not. You know I cannot marry a woman who won’t be able to produce the next heir plus a spare.”

      Demyan didn’t reply immediately. They were both too personally aware of the costs associated with those issues.

      “You aren’t your father. You don’t have to marry a woman you don’t love in order to provide an heir.”

      “I have no intention of doing so. Neither will I marry a woman I like whose only hope of providing that child would be via often painful and not always successful fertility treatments.”

      “You could adopt.”

      “Like my parents adopted you?”

      “They didn’t formally adopt me. I am still a Zaretsky. It was never your father’s intention that I inherit the throne.”

      “You were just his spare,” Maks muttered with some bitterness.

      Demyan shrugged. “Duty is duty.”

      “And my duty precludes asking Gillian Harris to marry me.” His personal sense of honor also dictated he break things off with her as soon as possible.

      “You don’t love her?” Demyan asked with only mild curiosity.

      “You know better.”

      “Love only leads to pain,” Demyan quoted one of Maks’s mother’s favorite refrains.

      Maks added the rest. “And a compromise on duty.”

      Both men had reason to believe it, too.

      “What are you going to do?” Demyan asked, dropping back into a sparring stance.

      Maks executed a simple forward jab-left hook combo. “What do you think?”

      “I’ll miss her.”

      Maks didn’t doubt it. One of the reasons he’d decided to ask Gillian to marry him was that despite her mostly small-town upbringing, she got along surprisingly well with his family and successfully navigated social situations many would find overwhelming.

      The daughter of a renowned world news correspondent, Gillian had been attending events with the world’s richest and most powerful since a young age.

      Demyan blocked Maks’s kick and returned one of his own. “Are you going to tell her tonight?”

      “I may not need to.” The lovely blue-eyed blonde would have gotten a copy of the results of her latest physical.

      Gillian would know about the reasons behind her irregular menses now as well. She already knew the responsibilities associated with his position. She should be expecting the dissolution of their relationship.

      A more practical woman than most, he had hopes there would be no awkward “breakup” scene.

      “Yes, Nana, I think tonight’s the night,” Gillian said into the phone mashed to her ear with her shoulder as she hopped around the room trying to get her shoes on.

      “Has he told you he loved you yet?” Evelyn Harris, Gillian’s nana and the woman who had raised her, asked.

      “No.”

      “Your grandfather has told me every night before we go to sleep for the last forty-eight years that he loves me.”

      “I know, Nana.” But Maks was different.

      He held his emotions in check like it was a royal imperative, and ever the dutiful prince, he obeyed. They came out when he was making love, though. After a fashion.

      Maks made love with the single-minded intensity of a man who was thinking of nothing else but pleasing and getting lost in the woman who shared his bed.

      For the past seven months, that woman had been Gillian.

      They’d dated a month before he took her to bed the first time. She’d found that odd at the time, considering his reputation, but later she’d realized that, as unbelievable as it might seem, Maks was looking for more from her than a casual bed partner.

      And while she’d been more thrilled than shocked, she’d been stunned all the same.

      She didn’t belong in his circle. She was not rich, famous, or powerful, but Gillian’s father still liked to see her when he was in town. That inevitably meant going to some function or other on his arm. He couldn’t dedicate time simply to visiting her, so he included Gillian in his schedule.

      As the famous news correspondent’s unremarkable daughter, Gillian had attended more than her fair share of diplomatic and high society events.

      No one had been more shocked than she when it turned out that Crown Prince Maksim Yurkovich of Volyarus seemed to like unremarkable. Several comments made by him, and a couple by his mother on the few occasions Gillian had met the queen, had made it clear that royalty did not look for notoriety when choosing a mate.

      Though regardless, she would have thought Maks would be looking for someone with more personal cache than Gillian to bring into the royal family. Apparently Volyarussians did not have the same requirements for pedigree in a mate than other royal families of the world.

      And there couldn’t be anyone less notorious than the small-town girl from Alaska who made her living as what her father termed a “chocolate-box” photographer.

      There was nothing objectionable, or even questionable in Gillian’s past. Her parents hadn’t stayed together and neither had been interested in raising her, but they’d entered into a short businesslike marriage prior to her birth and hadn’t filed for divorce until a year after.

      “I may as well hang up now, your mind is clearly in the clouds again, child,” Nana said over the phone line.

      Gillian shoved her blond hair behind her ear and adjusted the phone. “I’m sorry, Nana. I didn’t mean to—”

      “I know. You get to thinking about Maks and the rest of your brain shuts off, especially the part attached to your ears.”

      “It’s not that bad.”

      Her grandmother’s snort said the older woman did not agree. “You make that boy tell you that he loves you before you agree to be his wife.”

      “He’s hardly a boy, Nana.” Gillian had made the same protest before, but to little effect.

      “I’m seventy-five years old, Gillian. He’s a boy to me.”

      “Some people never say those words,” Gillian pointed out, returning to the subject she knew her grandmother considered most important.

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