Taming the Prince

“Meaning all life is equally cheap to you,” Sara said flatly.

In reply, the man only turned his gaze back to her and smiled that grim smile again.

And somehow Shane knew that none of it was true. Not that the Black Knights were activists. Not that all people were created equal in their world. Not that their cause was a noble one. Not that he and Sara were safe.

And not that Sara was a mere student, either. He just wished he knew for sure who—and what—she really was.

Sara wasn’t surprised when she exited the jet approximately two hours later—with her hands bound behind her back and her cheek throbbing from where the ferocious Fawn had struck her—to find that they had landed on a deserted, poorly lit tarmac out in the middle of nowhere. Of course, she couldn’t be positive that two hours had passed, but she was reasonably sure that was how long they had remained in flight after the hijacking. She’d been forced to guesstimate the passage of time, as the Black Knights had taken her watch. And her pearls. And her textbooks. And her purse and luggage. And her shoes.

Strangely, it was the textbooks about which she was most concerned. She did hope the Black Knights didn’t examine them too closely. And she hoped she got them back eventually. They’d been frightfully expensive.

She had only been able to guess at what their final destination might be, as well, though she had done her best to gauge the jet’s direction at one point by opening the screen over the window beside her seat and noting the position of the moon and stars. Unfortunately, one of the terrorists had seen what she was doing—hence her tied hands—and had slammed the screen back down again. Before he’d managed to do so, however, Sara had been able to discern with some confidence that they had been heading southeast. Which would have put them in Spain, or perhaps Portugal.

Nevertheless, with it being night, she had been unable to determine anything in the landscape that might have proven to be a landmark—no mountains, no shorelines, no lakes, nothing. The air was cooler and crisper than what she was accustomed to, not to mention surprisingly windy, leading her to believe they were at a higher elevation than one might find in Penwyck. But with so many variables in place, she honestly couldn’t say with any real certainty where they were.

Of one thing, however, she was completely certain: she and Shane could be dead by dawn if they didn’t behave exactly as they were told.

The Black Knights were a nasty group, completely without morals or scruples. They wouldn’t balk at killing a young student or a man who might be king. They wouldn’t balk at killing anyone. Over the last decade, they’d been responsible for a number of assassination attempts on King Morgan, and numerous episodes of political sabotage. Oh, they’d started off as a small faction of seemingly ineffective upstarts, but it hadn’t been long before they’d organized into a formidable enemy of the crown. They were even suspected of kidnapping Prince Owen of Penwyck, and Sara couldn’t help wondering now just how deeply their involvement had run in a number of other intrigues that had plagued the royal family over the years. Certainly they were capable of just about anything.

Her right cheek throbbed again, reminding her that she probably had a very impressive black eye by now. Honestly, she wouldn’t have thought the tittering Fawn would have even known how to make a fist, let alone use one. Just the first of many mistakes that Sara now realized she had been making since leaving L.A. The first had been in trusting that the crew who boarded Her Majesty’s jet in L.A. were the same ones who regularly flew with the royal family—clearly, they were not. The second had been in assuming that their flight would be a boring, uneventful one—clearly, it had not been.

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