The Lost Prince Read Online Free

though Cal heard the strain behind Lelani’s calm response. Seth had a talent for testing the limits of patience.
    The backseat bickering chafed the sheath on Callum’s last nerve. They seemed to be growing on Cat, though, evident from the smile she tried to hide from her husband. She had always wanted a larger family, and now they inherited two teenagers—a seventeen-year-old centaur that acted thirty-seven, and a twenty-six-year-old porn photographer who behaved sixteen. Cal wasn’t sure if Cat’s acclimation was a good thing. His negative feelings about Seth had not subsided and were at best mixed. If it weren’t for Seth, they would not have lost their memories and spent the better part of the past decade unaware of their real identities. They would never have lost the prince, who had been put in Callum’s charge. Tristan might still be alive, as probably Ben Reyes and a score of others. The hardest point to resolve, though, the part that disturbed Callum to his core, was that he would never have married Catherine. He would never have pursued another woman if he were cognizant of his betrothal to Chryslantha. She was as much a part of him as his heart and lungs and he would have stayed true. But then his daughter, Brianna, whom he loved more than life itself, would never have existed. For all his incompetence, bellyaching, and pessimistic rhetoric, Seth was the reason Cal had his family.
    Cal once believed his love for Chryslantha was the most powerful force in the world, breakable only by death itself. Noble houses in the kingdom paired their offspring to gain land, status, and power; girls of fourteen betrothed to old men, couples with nothing in common except their parents’ desires to grow their holdings. His father was not enamored by the game despite the advantages that paired him with a wife twenty years younger, but Cal’s mother, Mina, was a different story. She was a master at the matchmaking art.
    Cal had been impressed with Chryslantha since they played as children. At seven, she looked like a princess but climbed trees like a squirrel and spit farther than a wharfie. Her father was wealthy—a duke with only an arm’s-length claim to Aandor’s seat of power. They had written to each other as children when family business took them to opposite ends of the kingdom. A union with Chryslantha would raise Callum’s status and land holdings considerably, but he was already in love with her before the first inkling of a match occurred to their parents. His friends taunted him, jealous that he valued her counsel over theirs … What kind of a man had a woman for a best friend? Chrys had more common sense than any of them; if she’d been a man, she would have been a force to be reckoned with at court, and she would still have been his closest friend.
    When Callum was sent to quell the Mourish queen’s rebellion at Gagarnoth, Chryslantha could not accept that he might die before she knew his love. The night before he embarked, she gave him her maidenhood, knowing full well the risks that it entailed. Callum had known women before Chryslantha, but it was different for men … they were expected to start young and be worldly in these matters. But had Callum changed his mind about marrying her she would have been scandalized—even if he died on the mission, her reputation would have suffered. Her father’s enemies would paint her as soiled and wanton. Because she had brothers to inherit the bulk of her father’s titles and lands, only families of lesser repute would have offered their sons for a union and they would leverage her shame to increase her dowry. Many poems had been written about the virtues of chastity—virginity was worth a woman’s weight in gold.
    Chrys gave Callum the silk garter she had worn while they made love, and knotted a small braid of her golden hair to it. I’ll try especially hard not to die, Cal had promised her, clutching the fetish as though it were worth more than all the