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Privacy and cookie detailsHe was taught to speak for a country. She is the one woman who makes him listen.
A prince and an interpreter risk their public lives when she refuses to make a dangerous treaty sound safe.
Completed · 15 chapters · 2h 13m
SteamyIntense chemistry. Sensual intimacy.Heat guideYearning · Angsty · Tender
Parental illness (referenced), Invasive press attention
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Dear Maeve,
I stopped a prince in the middle of a sentence today. Forty-three dockworkers might have had to live with the verb he chose, so I put down my headset and told the room what I heard. My face appeared on the conference screen before I had time to look brave.
Interpreter Talia Novak interrupts Crown Prince Edvard Lindstrom at a trade summit when his reading of a port-safety clause turns a duty into a suggestion. She has a short contract, a professional reputation to build, and no intention of becoming the palace's convenient correction. He has a treaty to save and ministers who would rather sell it with a marriage than repair its words. Edvard returns to ask what she heard. In a map room full of flattering old borders, they begin to see each other beyond their roles. Talia wants the man who listens; she will not surrender her name or her work to be with him. Edvard wants her, but wanting her is the easy part. He must tell the truth to the woman he might have married and decide whether the treaty can stand on its own. Between public duty and private longing, Talia and Edvard have to discover what choosing each other would actually cost.
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He could have called it a nuance. Instead he took out a pencil and suspended the article. I have corrected important people before; I am less used to one asking me to show him how the mistake happened. I am also less used to noticing his mouth while he makes it. I wish those two facts had arrived on different afternoons.
We met again with Runa sitting between us. He had invited the workers’ delegate to the next review. In the map room he showed me a border an old king had drawn where he wanted a mountain to be. We made up a more honest label for it. I laughed at work, then went back to my hotel and found I could still hear him laughing too.
This morning the lamp in my booth was repaired. The maintenance slip had his name on it. I have spent years making sure my own name stays on the sentences I can defend, and I don’t know yet what to make of a man who notices the light I work by. I want to ask him. I am afraid he will answer carefully, and more afraid that he won’t.
Talia
From The Quiet Consort
Read this if you want a prince to listen to the woman everyone expects him to speak for.
Read this if you want a royal romance in which the heroine keeps her own work and her own voice.