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CHAPTER ONE

AVA GLANCED OUT of the carat the sparkling su off the exquisite French countryside and wished herself a thousand miles away Maybe a million That would land her on another planet where no one knew her name Where no one knew the man her father had expected her to marry was about to marry another woman, and felt sorry for her in the process

‘It’s tiirl, and came home to Anders’

That particularly supportive co her blood boil His condescending words filled her head, drowning out the singer on the car radio arbling about wanting to go hoo

Not that her father’s anger was entirely unexpected Of course he was disappointed that the ed to marry since she was a child had fallen in love with soe doesn’t have ti thirty in a year meant that she was over the hill—made it seem as if it was her fault

But Ava wanted to fall in love! She wanted to get married! She just hadn’t wanted to marry Gilles—a childhood friend as more like a brother to her than her own—and he hadn’t wanted towith their fathers’ archaic pledge for a little too long, so each other for a fill-in date when the need arose

Oh, how her father would love to hear that Soo, her relationship with hirated to the point where they barely spoke, let alone saw each other Of course if she had been born a boy things would have been different

Very different

She would have had different choices She would have been Crown Prince, for one—and, while she had no wish at all to rule their small European nation, she would at least have had her father’s respect His affection So

Ava gripped the steering wheel of her hatchback htly as she turned onto the narrow country lane that ran alongside Château Verne, Gilles’s fifteenth-century estate

For eight years she had lived a happy, relatively low-key existence in Paris; finishing university and building her business, stepping in at royal functions when her brother Frédéric had been absent Now that Gilles, Marquis de Bassonne, was set tothat was all about to change