Dear Readers:

During an unprecedented cold wave causing death, injury, and extensive damage to property throughout most of Northern Europe, Major Kat Wallace volunteers to fly a humanitarian Christmas drop to assist those affected by record-breaking snow.  Stranded in bad weather, she soon finds herself battling off hostiles.

Kat’s reason for taking a mission so close to Christmas is quite sentimental.  While serving as a young pilot training instructor, she met Prince Alek, crown prince to one of the oldest, unbroken lines of royalty, second only to the Danes, who is attending pilot training at her base.  Despite her attraction to the impossibly cocky prince, when put in the position to pass or fail him on a check ride for which he’d obviously not prepared despite his undeniable, natural flying skills, she busts him, causing him to meet a review board to determine whether he stays or goes.  Recognizing his potential that he doesn’t seem to see or accept in himself, she recommends that he get a second chance.  But it’s too late.  He’s called back home to face revolution, never to be heard from again.  In the years since, she’s often wondered what happened to him. 

Alek is anything but dead.  For years he’s been fighting as a rebel leader, determined to restore the monarchy in his homeland as well as his people’s freedom and honor.  He’s made many mistakes, not the least of which was refusing to accept that there are consequences for bad behavior.  From the bastard son he fathered when he was a teen to his not educating himself on the problems of his kingdom, he has made many mistakes.  Now he’s set out to right those wrongs, even if it means losing his life in the process.  He owes part of his epiphany to the gorgeous, fast-talking, and (to his confusion and dismay) totally unaffected by his charms USAF pilot Kat Wallace, who (rightfully so) bounced his ass out of pilot training.  She changed his life, even if he didn’t yet recognize it.  Somehow she saw in him what he didn’t, or couldn’t, but what he hoped to God he could call on now in the battle for his homeland, his people, and the chance to reverse his failing them.

Kat is more than wary of the wannabe prodigal prince’s intentions.  She’s not entirely convinced he’s done playing with life as if it were a silly game.  But with communications cut off, weather moving in and her own crew to protect, Kat forms a way-outside-the box (not to mention protocol) alliance with Alek.  With forces joined, and their fiery attraction melting the wintry ice, Kat and Alek wonder if trust alone will be enough to survive the dangers looming ahead.

Be sure to visit Lindsay’s website for more on her novella and other books: www.lindsaymckenna.com

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Snowbound with a Prince
(from the Mission: Christmas anthology)

Prologue

Prince Aleksas aimed a bleary-eyed glare outside the VIP terminal at Virsland International Airport at the parking spot that should have held one of his Porsches, or the new Ferrari.  “Where the hell is my car?”  Where was his entourage, for that matter?  Alek had spent most of his life as the king of Virsland’s sole heir shaking off assistants and bodyguards and countless other meddling staffers.  Now when he needed them, they were nowhere to be found. 

His Ferragamo boots clapped against the polished birch floors as he stalked back and forth in front of the exit doors, expecting that at any moment, someone would pull up in a sleek sedan, full of apologies, and offer him a ride home to the palace.  The VIP terminal was utterly deserted.  Granted, it wasn’t used much, but there should have been a few people around.  Even the nervous man who’d escorted him here from the main passenger terminal had vanished as well.  Odd...and annoying as hell.  Only midday, it was already twilight.  In the dead of winter in Virsland the day was as bright as it was going to get.  He should be sitting by a warm fire, a heavy crystal glass of excellent brandy in his hand, not prowling an empty airport terminal like any average person off the street. 

He pulled out his cell phone.  The battery was dead.  Swearing, he shoved it back in his pocket.  How could he be expected to keep up with such mundane details like charging phones?  He was the crown prince.  He had people to do that for him.  People who weren’t here.  Damn them.  “Damn everyone!” 

His shout reverberated off the marble and glass walls.  The empty terminal was marvel of Scandinavian architecture.  Right now it just seemed cold.  Unwelcoming.  Father should have allowed him a vacation before summoning him home, presumably to be scolded once again for not performing up to expectations.  Alek refused to be held accountable.  He’d never asked to be a military pilot, but Father insisted he take training at the Americans’ base in Texas.  Well, they’d kicked his ass out the door and sent him home.  What did his father think would happen? 

And so instead of passing a lazy day in a blissful daze on a remote tropical island where no one would demand anything of him or expect anything of him and where pleasure of every sort was a finger-snap away, he was here--bored, exasperated, and alone.

“I need a drink!”  Turning slowly, he searched for another human being to do his bidding.  Anyone would do.  “A shot of vodka for His Majesty the Crown Prince!” 

All the bars were closed at this early hour. 

He scrubbed a hand over his face.  It was too damn early to be awake.  To be conscious.  It reminded him too much of the past six months he’d spent in pilot training: every morning up at dawn, dressed in his flightsuit and ready for the daily briefing, five days a week.  He’d played the game as father wanted him to--a favor, for the man was fighting cancer and no one knew if he’d win the battle--and it still wasn’t good enough.  Alek was never going to be the man his father needed him to be.  When would the old man accept it?  Maybe this time.

Alek dug in his pocket for a cigarette then remembered he’d given up the habit during his months in Texas.  His foul mood darkened.  He wanted out of here--now.  Almost a full day trapped in the first class cabin of a commercial airliner from Dallas to Washington to London to Virshagen had left him feeling like a caged animal, even if the whiskey was top-notch, and even if the London flight attendant had pressed her phone number into his hand while he’d slept off the effect of the expensive alcohol.  She on the other hand wouldn’t have been expensive.  The Fionas and Tatianas of the world never were.  They came easy like everything else in his life.  “Playboy,” his critics called him.  “The Heartbreak Prince.”  Alek shrugged.  Could he help it if sweets fell so easily into his hands by their own volition?  Besides, he liked easy.  Anything more required too much damn effort.

You’d have made the effort for Kathryn. 

He came to a complete stop.  His breath caught with a vision of the gorgeous, curly-haired, freckled little Texan with the big spirit and the even bigger heart, big enough for everyone, even him.  He’d fallen for USAF pilot Kathryn Wallace the moment he saw her, the same moment that she more or less told him to go to hell.  More, Alek, not less. 

“Hell-Kat,” her squadron-mates called her, and for good reason, although there was a sensitive spirit hidden beneath that armor, one he wished fate had allowed him time to properly discover.  Even so, Kathryn Wallace was one of only two people in the entire world he’d call a friend.  Vincent Soren was the other, and Alek hadn’t seen him in God knew when.  The man was a Raptor, a member of the elite, thousand-year-old Virsland palace guards.  He’d served several years as one of Alek’s personal guards and often a confidante.  Jah, Kathryn and Vincent knew him, the real him, because he let them in.  To everyone else, he was a stranger.  He’d learned early that most people wanted something for him.  They wanted to befriend his money or status, or the power he perceived he held.  Not Vincent.  And not Kathryn. 

Kathryn...  He wished she was here now.  If she were in his arms, nothing much would matter.  A shudder of yearning went through him as he thought of her mouth and how for so long he’d wanted a taste of those sweet, soft lips...and more.  So much more.  Even now, in the throes of his frustration and his defeat, he felt his body reacting to the mere thought of holding her.  Just holding her.  The attraction had been mutual--her eyes didn’t lie--but to Kathryn his character mattered more than his appearance.  Character that was obviously lacking.  Now he’d never see her again, and he doubted she was sorry.

 Fool, she was too good for you.  You damn well proved it, too.  Into his mind flashed the scene of the military officials at the review board convened to get rid of him.  All of the American officers wore their stiff, you-left-us-no-choice faces except for Kathryn.  She’d appeared so sad and disappointed in him.  He’d disappointed people all his life, but it never mattered until that moment. 

“You’re a born leader, Alek,” she told him a few days earlier after his last training ride, observing him with those wide-open, utterly honest blue eyes that won his heart the instant he’d first looked into them.  “People believe in you even when you give them no damn reason.  It’s a gift, Alek, a God-given gift.  Instead of lifting yourself into something worthy of their respect and loyalty, you act like you don’t care.  I think you do care.  I think you care very much.  But you’re afraid.  Am I right?  You’re not sure you’re good enough.  You’re not sure you can be the man they want you to be so you work hard at making sure you’re not.  Then you don’t have to worry about destroying anyone’s expectations.  Or failing them.  Or disappointing them...” 

Good God, he’d thought, sitting there across the table from her in the briefing room.  That was exactly what he’d been doing all his life, running from having to find out if he measured up.  It was as if a light had been shined in his soul, revealing the reason behind so many of his actions--or lack of action, which was often much worse.  Instead of acknowledging she was right, he automatically sought refuge behind his “whatever” face.  A model he used to date coined the term to describe the look of bored indifference he’d taken a lifetime to perfect.  Whatever.  Jah, it fit.

It didn’t work on Kathryn, though.  Never one to take his bullshit, she walked out on him, slamming the briefing room door in his face.  Even now, days later, the sound wouldn’t leave his mind, that door banging closed over and over in the aching recesses of his brain with each beat of his pulse.

He swore bitterly as remorse tightened his gut.  Frantically, he rooted in his pocket for a smoke.  Again, he remembered he’d given up the habit.  No cigarettes to distract him, no booze to blunt the ache of self-disgust.  You let Kathryn down. 

She could go to hell for all he cared.  What right did she have to believe in him?  Was it his fault she mistakenly assumed he was capable of more than what he was?  Alek threw his arms out to the sides.  “This is all there is, Kathryn, darling!” he called out.  “This is it.”

He fell into a leather chair, his long legs sprawled as he glowered outside at a panorama of snow-covered, forested hills.  This is my country...  The familiar beauty soothed his dreadful temper.  He might do his level best to shrug off the demands of being home, but the forest was in his blood and in his soul.  No matter where in the world he tried to hide, the scents and sights of his homeland curled through his consciousness, subtly, seductively, calling him back. 

Damn genes.  He couldn’t rid himself of his DNA anymore than he could his royal title courtesy of one of the oldest, unbroken lines of royalty in the world, second only to Denmark’s, originating in the time of Beowulf with a man called Haldor the Fierce.  An ancient painting of the king, the oil paint cracked and darkened with age, hung in the Hall of Ancestors at the palace.  It terrified Alek as a child when he’d peer out at Haldor from the shadows.  Yet, he was inexplicably drawn to the painting.  Some said it was because he resembled the raider king.  Alek spent many a long moment trying to see it for himself.  Dressed in furs and armor, King Haldor sat on his throne with his hounds at his boots, glaring back at Alek, daring him, challenging him to live up to his destiny. 

Alek snorted.  He’d bet old Haldor never had to answer to people telling him what to do and when to do it.  He’d never had to worry about public image, or responsibilities.  Or tabloids.  And paparazzi.

“I think you do care.  I think you care very much.  But you’re afraid.”

Alek winced at the memory of her words.  Perhaps that was why he never told Kathryn of his feelings for her before he left.  He was afraid.  He was so sure she’d find him inadequate that he’d let the opportunity slip away.

Afraid...  Haldor chimed in, his imagined voice rumbling and deep and slightly mocking.  Don’t come back to me, boy, until you know the difference between a life wasted and a life spent.

“To hell with you all!”  Alek threw his cell phone across the waiting area.  It shattered into pieces.  His life was in the same state, and he hadn’t a clue or even the motivation to cobble it back together.  He was too far behind the eight ball, as the Americans would say.

A shadow moved across his vision.  Oh, joy.  Finally.  His ride home was here--

Sudden pain seared his neck, cinching down and cutting off his air supply.  He was lifted by whatever was wrapped around his neck and dragged him backward off the chair.  The chair fell over.  His boots scraped over the floor as he tried kicking back onto his feet.  Can’t breathe.  Sputtering, he clawed at his neck, felt leather-clad knuckles and a wire. 

Blood pounded behind his eyes and in his head.  A wild few glances told him there was more than one attacker.  The others seemed to be milling around watching the spectacle.  All of them were in plain clothes, black clothes, like special agents in the Virs army wore.  But his vision quickly dimmed, going from red to gray to black. 

“Don’t kill him,” he heard someone warn.

The pressure around his neck eased.  His vision returned.  He rolled onto his hands and knees, grasping at his neck.  His head felt half-severed.  Blood, warm and slick dribbled over his hand and to the floor.  The wire had cut deep.

“Vanhanen doesn’t care if he stays pretty, does he?”

General Vanhanen?  The commander of the Virsland military?

Was this an f-ing coup?  The men gave him no time to think about it.  The boot that drove into his face ended all higher thought.   

He’d always been athletic, agile, but his traveling clothes, jetlag, hangover, and shock were no match for this out-of-the-blue viscous attack.  Instinctively, he tried to protect his head and face and gut, in that order.  Someone grabbed his hair, yanking him into a more vulnerable position.  “Worthless piece of shit,” someone muttered and hit him again.  “You won’t be so pretty to the girls any longer, not that there’ll be any where you’re going.”  Laughter.  Another powerful kick, this time in the balls. 

Why the hell didn’t he pass out?  It seemed a cruel twist that he’d stayed conscious through the beating.  Was it a strength of his ancestors passed down to him without his consent like everything else they gave him that he didn’t want, like his royal blood?  If ever he wanted to be a weakling and die, this was it.  He’d hit rock bottom anyway.  Why keep living?  There was nowhere to go but lower.  Might as well end it this way.  It’d be good fodder for gossip if nothing else:  Crown Prince found in a bloody pulp in airport.  Cleanup took hours.

After a while, the blows blended together.  His agony-fueled daze made it impossible to tell how much time had passed between the first blows and now.  His nasal passages were swollen nearly shut.  Blood ran down the back of his throat.  One eye was so puffed-up he couldn’t see out of it.  The other eye was too blurred to make much sense of what he was looking at anyway.  “Don’t kill him,” he was certain he heard a second time.  The men rolled his worthlessly limp body in what felt like a Turkish rug.  He was lifted and carried outside, judging by the faintest change in temperature, then dropped into a car.  He sensed the pressure change when the trunk closed. 

He wanted to die, but something in him fought to stay alive, kept him sucking in breath after breath when he felt as if he were suffocating, and damn well wanted to.

                           # 

A blast of cold water woke him from a stupor.  He’d been unrolled from the carpet.  Men held his arms to keep him upright and on his feet.  His head hung low.  Blinking, he noted that blood had had made interesting splash patterns on the white marble floor.  His blood.

His floor.

They’d brought him to the throne room of the thousand-year-old winter palace in Virshagen.  It was the main location of the government under one of the few monarchies in the world that still ran the country.  To his left was a view of the Baltic Sea.  In the midnight hour it glittered with hundreds of vessels.  Every king since Haldor’s time had enjoyed that view.  Alek could barely see it though his swollen eyes.  The lights of the city and the ships blurred and spun, doubling, tripling... 

Another bucket-full of ice water hit him in the face. 

“You damn near killed him,” a familiar voice scolded. 

Sputtering, Alek choked on water and blood.  “I’m awake, damn you!” 

It was a struggle to lift his head.  It felt as if it weighed a hundred pounds.  “Welcome home,” the voice said.

Alek swung his gaze in that direction.  “Vanhanen,” he growled.  The general was resplendent in his Virsland Royal Army dress greens.  His epaulets and war medals sparkled.  This was his father’s trusted general for the last forty years.  “What the fuck are you doing on my father’s throne?”

“Keeping you off of it.  The time for the people has come.  Listen to them, Aleksas.”

The balcony doors were flung open, allowing in tangy sea air and a rumble other than the roar of the sea.  People were chanting, yelling, a large crowd, Alek judged.  What were they saying?  Half deafened by blows to his head, he couldn’t make out the words. 

“Do you hear them?  They’re cheering,” Vanhanen said.  “I have declared a new government, beginning today.”

“A military takeover?  Are you fucking kidding me?  The people will never accept this.”

“The uniform comes off once I am sworn in as president.”

Vanhanen surely would not get away with this.  The Barons family was loved by all.  Weren’t they?  Alek knew there were ongoing problems with the economy since his father’s illness.  He remembered hearing some such thing, but he hadn’t paid much attention.  Maybe he should have. 

“I promised the people a new future, Aleksas.”

“Prince Aleksas.”

“No more.  The Barons represent the past, and it is time to cut ties with the past.”  Vanhanen addressed him gently, condescendingly, as if he were still a child. 

Could he blame the man?  After all, he’d acted like a child--irresponsible, living for pleasure.  Letting down those he loved.  Now, thrust into the middle of a military coup, he didn’t know what to say, or how to act, or what to do to change its course.  Surely whatever he’d come up with wouldn’t be good enough.  So he stood there, held by the guards, hiding behind his mask of indifference. 

“You’re a born leader, Alek.”

No, Kathryn.  I am not.

His head hung low.  He almost passed out again.  Pain and shock made him drift in and out of the nightmare that was reality, and the one that was his own rotting conscience. 

“Aleksas...” 

He head jerked up at the sound of his name being called in a very weak voice.  Father’s voice.  He spun his gaze around in time to see his father being pushed down to his knees in front of Vanhanen and his army officers.  No raptors, he thought.  No palace guards.  It gave him hope that the ancient royal guard had not defected, had not betrayed their king.  He did recognize a few parliament members standing in the gathering, and hot rage began to boil.  Traitors.  How many others were in on this conspiracy?  How long had they plotted, while his father fought his cancer and endured chemotherapy...while you played?

Alek’s throat hurt too much to allow him a gulp of shame.  He couldn’t recall ever seeing his father kneel outside of church, and since Alek had avoided going to mass for years, the memory was fuzzy at best.  Now his sire was crouched in front of the throne on which he should have been sitting.  They hadn’t beaten him like they had Alek, thank God.  Alas, they didn’t need to subdue him; the cancer had done it for them.  The once-vibrant man’s skin was chalky.  He’d lost his hair.  He was a ghost.  An ousted king who’d tried to make a man out of his only heir, his one living blood relative.  There should have been more heirs, jah, more siblings after Alek, boys and also girls, but King Christoffer never touched another woman after his wife, Alek’s mother, was killed in an auto accident.  Despite all the urgings of advisors and all the willing beauties, the king spurned making any more heirs, pinning all his hopes and dreams on Alek. 

And Alek panicked.  He couldn’t bear the pressure.  What if he was inadequate?  He pretended to be weak.  Stupid.  His father knew better, and pushed him harder, waiting patiently for him to wake up.  Putting his entire kingdom at risk, waiting for Alek to grow up and assume responsibility.  God, it was all so clear now.  Why had it taken him so long to see it?  For fifteen years it had been just the two of them.  All Alek had done was run from him, rebelling against everything, for he hadn’t wanted to risk disappointing him.  Yet, in the not wanting to, he had.

“You named your boat--‘No Consequences’.  Well, you were wrong.  There are consequences, Your Highness.”

With Kat’s accusation ringing in his ears, Alek forced himself to meet his father’s eyes.  “I’ve failed you,” he whispered.  His father simply shook his head and glanced away--in disgust?  In defeat?  Alek tried to jerk his arms out of the guards’ grip.  “Father, I am--” Sorry, he meant to say, but a gunshot interrupted his apology.  His father sagged to his side, blood pooling on the white marble like blood on virgin snow. 

Alek bellowed in pain, then at Vanhanen.  “You shot the king.  You shot the king!”  None of the men in the room spoke.  Some seemed as shocked by the execution as Alek was. 

His father’s eyes were still open, the life not drained out of them yet as he seemed to stare at Alek in surprise.  His sire’s last moments of life would be spent watching his good-for-nothing son sniffling in the grip of guards.    

“What will you do, son?  What will you do now?”  The question came in Haldor’s voice, his father’s voice--or his own; Alek wasn’t sure.  He saw the same question in Vanhanen’s smirking eyes. 

I will fight!  Growling, Alek wrenched from the men’s grip, kicking their legs out from under them.  He may have acted spineless and stupid in the past, but he remembered the countless hours spent training him in martial arts, the only part of his education he’d paid any attention to.  He wasn’t any less afraid, no; but he’d fight for his father’s honor and their kingdom despite the fear.  Perhaps that was what courage meant, not the absence of fear but the triumph over it.  A realization too late?  Likely so, jah, but if he was going down, he’d go down fighting.  These traitors had underestimated him just as he’d underestimated himself all these years.

In full sight of his dying father, in full view of the paintings of Haldor and the other kings and queens hanging in the Hall of Ancestors, Alek roared as he lunged forward, charging toward Vanhanen.  The scene played out in slow motion.  With a glare as cold as the Baltic sea in January, Vanhanen swung the pistol around and aimed it at Alek’s head.  Behind the general was the sea, sparkling with ships in the night.  Timeless.  Eternal.  “The future is now,” the general said, and fired.

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