The Stolen Princess (Fated Royals Book 1) Read online

  Stolen Princess

  Nikolai Andrew

  Dani Wyatt

  Copyright © 2020

  by Dani Wyatt & Nikolai Andrew

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof

  may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever

  without the express written permission of the publisher

  except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places,

  events and incidents are either the products

  of the author’s imagination

  or used in a fictitious manner.

  Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,

  is purely coincidental.

  Cover Credit Cormar Covers

  Editing Nicci Haydon

  Created with Vellum

  Foreword

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  Contents

  Stalkers welcome

  1. Sara

  2. Bors

  3. Sara

  4. Bors

  5. Sara

  6. Sara

  7. Bors

  8. Sara

  9. Bors

  10. Sara

  11. Bors

  12. Bors

  13. Sara

  14. Bors

  15. Sara

  16. Bors

  17. Sara

  18. Sara

  Coming Next From the Fated Royals

  Like what Nikolai brings to the feast?

  Other Titles By Dani Wyatt

  Let’s Stay Connected!

  About Dani

  About Nikolai

  Thank You to Every Reader

  Dedicated to

  Everyone who has ever thought…

  I just want to be happy.

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  Sordid fun and other dirty shenanigans

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  Now, let’s get on with the show…

  Sara

  The clucking and scratching of the hens outside my window woke me long before dawn. I breathed in the cool air, staring into the darkness, riding out the last of a dream that both puzzled me and left me aroused in a way I’d not known before.

  The image of the dreamy, handsome, dark-haired man drifted still in my half sleepy state, and I fought the urge to run my hand down my body, the way he had done to me in my dream, to tuck my fingers between my thighs and rub away the clutching ache my dream lover had left behind.

  I could almost still feel his warmth. The shiver as he touched me. The filthy words he had whispered in my ear that left me aching and my cheeks hot. I slipped my hand down my nightdress to where the tension tightened in my belly and battled this urge.

  I stopped just above where the pulsing still lingered knowing my own hand could not give me the same tawdry feelings the mysterious man in my dreams had delivered.

  Instead, I forced myself off the threadbare mattress that served as my bed, crossed the chilly darkness of my room in a single stride and lit the stubby remnants of last night’s tallow candle. The oily wick crackled, then settled to a dull glow. The bare slate stones were icy on my feet, and I shivered as I pulled my woolen shawl around my shoulders. It was a patchwork of colors after years of mending, but simple and worn as it was, I cherished it. It was a tapestry of my life, stitched together from what I could find to make something that was beautiful and almost whole.

  Wrapping my arms around my body for warmth, I shuffled quickly out into the kitchen and awakened the smoldering embers in the fireplace with the poker. I added two heavy bricks of peat to the grate, and rubbed my hands in front of the low flames, then swept the errant ash around the hearth back into the glow of the coals.

  Glancing at the neatly stacked pyramid of apple-wood logs to my left, I longed to put just one or two on as well. But I cast that foolish thought from my head. Roaring fires were expensive and were only to be lit when my mother, father, and sister were awake. No matter, my chores would be more than enough to warm me up even as I headed outside into the damp morning.

  From a chipped crock that I kept in the woodshed, with a stone on top to keep out the mice, I took a few handfuls of feed and scattered it around the chicken run. The hens dove for the food, while the cock strutted back and forth along the fence line, waiting for dawn.

  Mornings were my favorite time. The quiet, the calm, the orderly pace of the chores of the day. The way the dew gathered on the papery purple leaves of the thistle. I didn’t have much to myself, but I had my mornings under the wide sky and that was more than a girl like me had any right to ask for.

  Sometimes, I wondered why I was so lowly. So much a cast-off in my family and this world. But, in the end, I knew wondering only turned to sorrow—and there was enough of that in my life already.

  Instead, I raced happily and busily against myself to finish all that needed to be done before my family awoke.

  Using the frigid well water, I scrubbed my sister’s frock, my father’s undershirts, and my mother’s nightclothes against the washboard until I couldn’t feel my fingers anymore. These I hung out on the drying line before warming my hands on the fresh eggs, nestled in each nesting box. I placed each egg carefully in a basket and set them aside to take to market.

  Back in the kitchen, the fire had come back to life, driving away much of the night’s chill. I set about preparing a stew for later. I chopped the onions and carrots as quietly as I could, so as not to wake the house. To the stew I added a single lamb chop that I had gotten from the butcher the day before—an extravagant treat that he gave me in exchange for only a few eggs.

  The rheumy old butcher always squinted and told me I had the prettiest eyes in the land; that one glance at them, even with his failing sight, was enough to keep him satisfied to the end of his days.

  “Aye, like the first queen’s eyes, they are,” he would say, somehow the wrinkles around his mouth both sad and happy at once. “I knew her, you know. Butcher to the royal household for many a year before the new queen insisted on choosing her own staff. But emerald eyes like that, lass…they could bring down kingdoms.”

  When I heard my family stirring, I quickly tidied the kitchen to erase all the evidence that I’d been up and about for so many hours. My family was never happy with me it seemed, but they in their own way didn’t want evidence of how hard I worked while they slept. I placed the lid on the pot of their breakfast porridge slightly off center, so they could smell the cinnamon and cloves that steamed up from the oats. Then I put one thick log on the fire before hurrying to my room and shutting the door behind me, careful not to let the latch click too loudly.

  Though they never said out-right that they preferred to wake up without my face being the first one they saw, I could tell as much from a look or a sigh. Although over the last year or so, my father had started being nicer to me than he ever had before. Well, not exactly nice.

  Different. More attentive.

  I’m sure most girls would have enjoyed the change in their fortunes, but I tried to avoid him even more. He had always looked after himself, first and foremost. And it made me wonder what it was that he wanted.

  In my room, I brushed my hair as best I could, staring in the gloom into a small bowl of water from the well, as I always did, in an attempt to see myself. My mother and father refused to spend money on such frivolities as mirrors and looking glasses, not for me. Nobody would care to see me anyway; I had long since grown accust
omed to acting and feeling like an invisible girl. The rest of my family had brown hair, but mine was jet black—my mother said it made me less pleasing to the eye than my sisters, and kept me out of sight whenever there was company.

  My sisters, two now married off and one still at home, all had birthday suppers and I remembered them all, since I was the one that had made their special pastries and always cleaned up after the celebrations from an age far too young to handle such duties.

  But as for me, I wasn’t even totally sure of my age. I thought I must be close to being nearly eighteen, though when I asked my parents simply grunted some irritation and sent me on my way.

  I changed out of my shawl and night things into my plain homespun shift dress, a hand-me-down from my eldest sister. While Bridget, my one sister who still remained at home, was given occasional gifts of new fabric with which to make herself attractive dresses, I could never hope for such things.

  Beautiful clothing was not for me, my mother assured me. And, looking down at my hips and curves beneath the shift dress, so boxy and homely and plain, I knew she was right. Even so, the dress wasn’t entirely without its charms. I’d added embroidered flowers down the side of the skirt, and a little lace at the collar, along with nipping in the waist, just a little, to make the most of the unshapely figure God had given me. Doing so had drawn poisoned glances from my mother and Bridget, but so long as I kept mostly to myself, so far they hadn’t insisted that I undo my changes.

  Once I knew my family was out of the kitchen, I quietly left my room and tied my apron around my waist. I grabbed the basket of eggs to trade at market, and dropped a few coins I had saved from making corn husk dolls and selling them on my trips to market without my father or mother being the wiser into my pockets, then made for the front door. There stood my father waiting for me, smiling and a knot in my stomach formed.

  “Good morning, father,” I said, lowering my eyes.

  My father smiled even wider. “Thank you for breakfast, Sara. Delicious.”

  “It was no trouble.” I slipped past him, angling myself as to prevent any contact and out the front door.

  I didn’t turn back to look at him as I ran through the front garden, unlocked the front gate, and then began on the road to town. With each step farther from the house, I felt freer and happier, and looked forward to what the day might bring.

  The village was raucous and joyful, full of the sights and smells of market day. I knew most everyone, and before I’d even gotten to the center square, my cheeks ached from smiling and joking and laughing. The dressmaker offered a bolt of blue calico, the color of cornflowers. She looked me up and down, and said, with a dramatic raise of her ample bosom, “I’ll even offer you a bargain, since a frame like yours, my dear, will need a somewhat generous cut.”

  Her comment stung a bit, but I took it in stride, flattered even, because she was curvy and soft like me, and she looked so regal and luxurious in her voluptuous folds of damask and brocade. I knew I could never have such an extravagant fabric but it still brought me a smile to dream that someday I might wear something other than the plain, scratchy cloth of my shift dresses.

  Next was the greengrocer, who bought most of my eggs and sold me turnips for tomorrow’s stew. He asked how I was, then after my father to which I simply answered all was well.

  He screwed up his face adding, “such a useless good-for-nothing.” Not wanting to speak out of turn or be unkind about my father, I simply lowered my eyes and thanked him as I retreated out, scurried down the alleyway and emerged into the sunshine by the well at the town center.

  The washer women were gathered there, gossiping as they worked. I sought out an old seamstress named Matilda who had grown into something more than a mere familiar face, to ask her about a particularly difficult embroidery stitch called the bullion knot that I was having trouble mastering. But before I could get the words out, the cobblestones trembled under my feet with the rumble of hoofbeats.

  I looked up the road and saw a brawny, dark man on a chestnut stallion, riding with the reckless speed of either a gifted horseman or a careless fool, the reins held loosely in one gloved hand.

  The muscles of his other arm rippled with each gallop as he smoothed the horse’s mane. His face was marked here and there with old wounds, and there was an irregular, thick scar running from the bridge of his nose and beneath one eye, so close that it could only have been a miracle that saved his sight. He brought the stallion to a whinnying stop just short of the well and didn’t even glance our way as he dismounted, patting his horse’s flank.

  His frame was burly, his thighs so muscular and ample that his pants seemed to strain with his movements. He stripped off his mud-splattered jacket and shirt, right down to his snug britches. With his skin bare, I saw more scars, of all shapes and sizes. The scars of a warrior; of a man who had fought to live.

  I shuddered as the tightness in my center I’d had upon awakening returned, and the image of that dark man from my dream felt suddenly like déjà vu.

  I swallowed hard and found myself drawn to him, to his body, despite the way the other women around me fell silent and seemed to shrink back into themselves. Deep down in my core, I ached to touch him. I wanted to run my fingers over each scar and muscle, to know each story.

  To know him.

  Still holding the reins in one hand, he grabbed the well bucket with the other and poured it over his face and body, ignoring the stares. His skin glistened in the sun as rivulets of muddy water trickled down between his pectoral muscles.

  “Who is that?” I whispered to the woman beside me.

  Her voice was barely a squeak. “Bors MacDonald. He comes and goes, every few years. Pay him no mind and he’ll be gone before you know it...”

  He glanced our way, his dark, unsettling eyes pinning me in place, and whatever the washerwoman’s next words were, they were lost to me, because all I heard was my own heartbeat. The intensity in his gaze caused a quiver to replace the tension down low, and I felt a trickle of fluid leak between my legs.

  He dropped the bucket and the reins, and took a few long strides in my direction, never once unlocking his eyes from mine. His jawline hardened into a severe angle as the muscle there flexed under the days of unshaven beard.

  I nearly cowered before him, half expecting to be bawled out for staring, but he stopped just a few inches from where I stood, appearing to battle with himself… Against what? I didn’t know. But in my mind’s eye I saw him stride over, pin me down and force himself upon me right there and then, and I felt my nipples tighten to peaks at the idea.

  “This time I’m here to stay, Annie,” he muttered.

  His eyes stayed up on me, as if he was trying to make some important decision. His brow tightened and I thought he might speak to me.

  Instead, on a pained huff, he turned, scooped up his clothes without dressing, mounted his horse and rode on through the town center leaving me standing unable to draw my next breath.

  Nobody spoke for a long moment after he was gone. The washerwomen went back to their tasks muttering and mumbling, and when I was finally able, I took a few deep breaths to settle the violent longing that had come over me.

  “Who is he?” I asked Annie when I gathered my senses, then clarified, “What is he?”

  She narrowed her eyes, as if reluctant to talk about him, then said, “A warrior of the clan. A dangerous man. You keep away from him.”

  One of the other women laughed. “Though I hear he’s a devil under the sheets.”

  “Aye, and what would you know about it, Maggie Fitzroy?”

  My face turned red, though not from embarrassment. The thought of anyone else having him made my blood burn in my veins. I’d never known jealousy before but I now understood why it could drive a person mad.

  “You keep away from him,” Annie said. “I mean it, you’re far too young and sweet to go near a brute like that.”

  I thanked her, and sought out Matilda, barely able to pay attention as she
gave me her advice, before making my way out of the town center and onto the path home.

  And that should have been the end of it, but when I came to a crossroads, and saw muddy hoofprints heading in the opposite direction, it gave me pause. I considered the road ahead, then cast my mind back to my dream.

  A feeling in the pit of my stomach told me something had changed. Something within me. And try as I might to shrug it off, I could not.

  My mother and father had always forbidden any mention of men as it related to me. Marriage and love and all it entailed, all the mysteries of the bed that I so longed to know, did not seem to be my destiny. My sisters could marry but I could not, and I was unsure why but without prospect I dared not challenge my parents on the subject.

  But a man like that, I thought to myself, swallowing hard and feeling my cheeks flush. A man with such strength, such passion, such intensity. My family would be powerless to stop a man like that from taking me as his own.

  Wouldn’t they?

  And I liked the thought of that very, very much.

  Being taken.

  There would be a beating in it for me, I was sure, but instead of taking the path toward home, I turned in the direction of the hoofprints.

  Bors

  I rode hard up the King’s Highway that led out of town. Any other time, a good hard ride would have cleared my mind of all other thoughts. But this time was fucking different. She was fucking different. All my thoughts were for her. Those eyes, that face, that body. She was perfection itself.