About this book
Julian Aldric has been Crown Prince his entire life and regent for eleven months. He has the authority, the responsibility, and the particular exhaustion of a man running a country while his father's name remains on the letterhead. He notices the British diplomat the way he notices everything he wishes he hadn't — precisely, reluctantly, and without being able to stop.
Imogen Hartley has spent her diplomatic career in the space between arrival and departure — useful, charming, and gone before anyone looks too closely. A Grand Prix summit to Sorvaine — a sovereign principality on the Mediterranean coast — is exactly the kind of bounded assignment she does best: six days, defined scope, and a flight home already booked. She stays for reasons she files under professional development and does not reopen.
The warmth between them is not the obstacle.
The obstacle is real: an expected marriage to Isabelle Vauclaire, whose dissolution would destabilize the pharmaceutical alliances that underpin the crown. A regency whose legitimacy depends on appearing unassailable. A father whose illness is publicly acknowledged and privately catastrophic — and whose secret Imogen will come to share.
The crown has always known what it requires of him. The question — the one neither of them can stop circling — is whether he has ever known what he requires for himself.
Duty is easy. Want is the hard part.
A royal romance. Book 1 in the Sorvaine Series.