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Suddenly, the evening had potential, not that Leandro hated events such as tonight. Sometimes he actually enjoyed them. But occasionally, like this evening, the boredom factor kicked in. And even though his attendance helped to maintain the public persona he had worked hard to present, the impulse to escape the tedium had become irresistible.

Not as irresistible as her legs, he decided, as his gaze made a return journey up the delicious long length…and didn’t she deserve some sort of reward for her ingenuity, obvious though it was?

Not obvious to someone with the intellect of an ant—a persona he had carefully cultivated. It was amazing how people let their guard down around someone with a reputation for being dim, and he had nailed the role.

No applause needed. It wasn’t as if it could be classed hard work to flirt and bed beautiful women, to appear on red carpets and premieres, to never appear to excel, to be no threat to the cabal of families who ran the kingdom he would one day rule, unless, of course, he proved an obstacle to the people who actually ran things.

Palace politics were brutal in a superficially civilised way. Civilised in that nobody ever stabbed you in the front. Not that anyone in the Palace would employ anything as crude as a knife. A well-fed rumour could do harm equivalent to a thousand knives in skilled hands.

That was just one option. What they would employ remained a question mark. There were rumours, of course, there always were, but nothing concrete. Of course, people did fall out of windows and the brakes on cars did fail… Accidents happened, but they appeared to happen more frequently when someone crossed the powerful group of courtiers that ran his country.

Coincidence?

Leandro did not believe in coincidences.

His father was a puppet, an indulged figurehead, and Leandro had decided, once he was old enough to appreciate this, that he was not going to be anyone’s puppet.

Luckily for him, he was not alone. There were others in the Palace who protected him, people who had been loyal to his mother but had been unable to protect her. People who had nurtured Leandro’s love for his country and taught their preciously talented child the importance of never being seen as a threat. People who had encouraged the idea of him being packed off to school at seven and spending his school holidays with his maternal grandmother, a scheme that his father had not had any objection to.

The King thought his son soft, an opinion he frequently shared, and had never forgiven him for growing taller than him before his eleventh birthday.

Leandro had made mistakes, of course. The waiting game did not come easily to him, and getting the first class honours degree when he should have still been in high school had been a potentially bad one. The suggestion that he was too smart for his own good had lasted one news cycle before his grandmother—a woman conveniently known for being litigious—had strongly denied the, at the time, non-existent rumours that the degree had been bought and paid for with a new science wing.

Leandro had then embarked on a series of headline-grabbing escapades that established him as a hedonistic airhead without a moral compass.

It was a role that actually came easily to him, which suggested he had more of his father in him than he would have liked. Unlike his father, he had some self-awareness and though, obviously, marriage was in his future, Leandro was not going to repeat history and marry a woman foolish enough to fall in love with him and then make her life a misery by bedding anything with a pulse.

Was monogamy even a real thing, outside poetry and romantic fiction?

He would never promise fidelity, he was a realist, but he would respect his wife and be discreet and expect the same courtesy in return. His bride would know upfront what she was signing up to.

He was confident the deal would appeal to many women; that didn’t make him arrogant, it made him a realist. The same way he was realistic about women who threw themselves at him; it wasn’t him they were aiming at, it was his name, his reputation, his profile, and the publicity that being seen with him would bring.

Marriage was still a long way off and before then there were a lot of distractions, some pleasant.

Very pleasant.

One such distraction was standing right there. Her face blank, her eyes wide, making him think of a deer caught in flight-or-fight mode.

She really was spectacular, he decided, eating up every sleek sexy inch of her with his eyes. The trickle of wariness—he could not recall having such a strong physical reaction to a woman before—was quickly burned away by the blast of testosterone-fuelled heat that had settled heavily in his groin.

He placed the sparkling tiara on the tiles and levered himself from the pool, aware as he planted his feet and pulled himself upright of her gasp.

He took her admiration in his stride as he stood there exuding the arrogance of an alpha male at the very top of the food chain and the inborn grace of a natural athlete.

* * *

Of course Elsie knew who he was. The world knew who he was—he was the no-show Playboy Prince whose absence from the ballroom had women weeping into their champagne cocktails. Leandro Soares, who was no stranger to decadence and excess in all its forms, had decided to go for a swim.

She had seen topless photos so she knew about the lean muscularity, the sculpted abs and broad shoulders, she knew he was as beautiful as a man could be, and he was all that and so much more in the flesh.

He was all sleek male power, broad shoulders, long powerful legs, not an ounce of excess flesh to blur the flawless delineation of every perfect muscle. His shoulders were broad, his belly flat and corrugated and flecked with the same light sprinkling of dark body hair that dusted his chest.

He was a prime example of raw virility, and no photo or clip could come close to conveying the sheer maleness of him. The earthy masculinity he projected was one hundred percent sexual with no filter.

And, to her shock and shame, there wasn’t a cell in her body that was immune. The sensation that thrummed through her body was like an electric shock. Her heart fluttered in her throat as he grinned wickedly and took a step towards her, shaking his head and sending out a shower of water drops.

Elsie recognised the irony of her reaction. She had been privately scornful of women who were attracted by biceps and a pretty face, even if the man they belonged to didn’t have a personality to match. Attraction couldn’t just be physical; there was an intellectual element too—it had seemed so screamingly obvious.