Little Red (Not Quite the Fairy Tale #5) by May Sage Page B

sigh. It wasn’t that he wasn’t affected – every woman in the room was gorgeous, obviously, and he knew he needed to think about giving the kingdom an heir at some point.
    The issue was that he knew them all and they bored him to death. Not their fault: he was just rather hard to entertain.
    He’d grown up with parents who had loved each other with passion until the day their ship sank. They’d debated everything – from politics to music, travels and sport teams; his mother had been a brilliant horsewoman, and nothing would have ever enticed her to stay indoors on a sunny day – so she’d married the owner of a small horse farm. Call it mommy issues, but that’s what he was after: a partner who shared at least some of his interests.
    His grandmother attempted to pair him up with socialites who had perfectly manicured hands and half polite smiles. They excelled at the art of mundane conversation and knew how to behave in society, but he was after much more than that. 
    Chase forced his smile and tried not to poke his eyeballs with the blunt end of his spoon while Mimi did her thing.
    “Dear,” she said, demanding his attention, “Lovely Janice here has been volunteering some of her time to entertain the servant’s children,” she told him fondly, gesturing to the blonde who was, for all intents and purposes, topless: her neckline ended below her belly button. He sincerely hoped she didn’t dress like that in front of the kids.
     
    Seeing an issue with the ways things were run when a frantic cook had begged to be excused because he needed to pick up his sickly toddler, a sixteen-year-old Chase had brought it up to Mimi and highlighted a well-constructed plan to open a free daycare facility right in the palace.
    “It will save our employees time, money and energy,” he’d said. “They’ll also be able to spend their breaks around their children. I understand there will be some expenses, but I believe we will benefit as much as them, in the long run. It should lead to a lower staff turnover, saving us a considerably amount of money on interviewing and training new personnel.”
    They had the place running within a month and his servants had yet to stop thanking him for it every time they cornered him.
    That day, Mimi had looked at him, startled, before announcing it was time for him to start shadowing her. Four years later, she’d stopped ruling, leaving it all to him. Her name was still on the letterhead, but Chase was the actual leader of Enom.
    He wouldn’t be so bold as to say that he was the best sovereign out there – a handful of his childhood friends were just as efficient – but he was good at identifying and preventing problems before they arose.
    He’d be an adequate King; just as soon as he found a woman he wished to tie himself to.
    Immediately, his mind conjured the image of one particular woman. It was silly and presumptuous, as he’s seen her exactly twice, and had never exchanged so much as a word with her, but he couldn’t help it.
    She was so alluring Chase might have believed she’d been sent by Mimi, if she had paid any attention to him, but she hadn’t. Hell, she hadn’t even seemed to see him.
    She was pointblank the prettiest creature he’d ever seen: small, with pouty lips and dimples that might have made her cute, if she hadn’t been perched on three inch high heeled boots, and wearing a long red coat over a black cat suit. She’d long left the realm of cute and landed in the freaking hot territory.
    What intrigued him wasn’t her appearance – not only that, in any case. It was the fact that the first time, she’d come out of a bookstore, and the second, of an outdoor sport outlet.
    He wanted to know a lot about her – the titles of the books in her brown bag, what kind of sport she practiced, the taste of her red lips – but what he really needed was her name.
    Next time, he swore. Next time he saw her, he’d ask.

 
    Chapter Two
    An Ultimatum
     
    The