Page 189 of Modern Romance Collection March 2025 (1-4)

“I prefer the witchy rock star. I suspect my mother meant it in the slightly more tomboyish fashion.”

“My condolences.”

“Well, I’m pretty resilient.”

“Clearly.”

“Tell me about where you live,” she said. She had let his name go easily enough. It wasn’t that he was opposed to telling her. But Adonis was a particular sort of name. And if somebody recognized it, then they would know exactly who he was.

Again, not that it mattered. His being a prince hadn’t stopped the plane from going down. And perhaps therein lay a real look at his arrogance.

He had functionally believed himself to be bulletproof because he was… Important.

He didn’t even have a spare. His father needed him.

Was he truly so ridiculous?

Was he so hollow that he had never truly considered these things? He had thought he would gallivant around the world and prove to his mother that she’d made a mistake in leaving him all those years ago, after which he’d ascend the throne.

What it seemed like now was perhaps a mix of his father’s rigidity and his mother’s selfishness and he did not care for that at all.

Any more than he liked having those arrogant plans derailed.

He thought instead of the warmth of home. The air, the water. The food.

“We have some of the best food in the world. Fresh ingredients. Fish, lemon. Olive oil.”

“I’m hungry,” she said.

“You have any food in here?”

“I might,” she said brightly, suddenly scampering from the wreckage and going out into the snow. She examined some of her crates, a couple of which were intact.

Then she pushed one of them back into the ship, her eyes alight with determination.

“I’m going to look in here. This was for a specialty shop…”

She opened it up, and the contents were revealed as cured meats and cheeses.

“Oh,” she said, her expression rapturous. “We’re going to be okay. What we need to do is try to get the back part of the plane sealed up.”

“We?” he asked, gesturing toward his leg.

“Well. I will. And then we have food. It would be great if I could start a fire, and melt the snow. You don’t want to just eat it, because then… Well, hypothermia.”

“Where did you learn all of this?”

“A lot of it is just knowing. From living in Montana all my life. You had to know how to be safe in the wilderness. What we don’t want is to attract the attention of animals, though. This food is a boon, but it’s going to smell incredible to a bear.”

“We don’t want that,” he said.

“We don’t.”

“What we really want is to be rescued.”

“Agreed.”

She sighed. “I have flares and a flare gun. But I’m going to have to time it. It depends on if anyone’s out looking for us. I’ve got to take inventory and see what we have.”

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