The next time I open my eyes, I find myself not staring at a bright light at the end of a long dark tunnel like I expected, but at the ceiling. Every inch of my body hurts. It’s like pain has been layered on top of pain.

I try to shift my position, but only my hands move. I’m strapped down to something.

“Just lay still,” a disembodied voice to my left says. I roll my eyes in that direction and see a person dressed in a medical unit staring at a portable monitor.

Another person wearing an identical outfit is hooking needles and tubes to my arms. If everything didn’t hurt so badly, I’d probably be freaking out. I hate needles. But right now, I hurt too much to care.

“Alexis!” Lucas’s face appears above me and despite everything that’s happened, my heart jumps.

“Your highness. If you could just step back, just for a moment?” Lucas’s head bobbles like someone has tried to shift him, but he doesn’t move from my side.

The EMT, or whatever they’re called in Moravia, decides to ignore Lucas. “Do you think you have any internal injuries,” he asks without looking up from the screen.

“Do you know how fleas travel?” I push the words out of swollen lips.

Probably not the thing most people say right after a life-threatening event, but it’s the only thing I can think of.

Lucas’s wide-eyed gaze runs up and down my body, taking in my torn and blood-soaked clothes. He runs his hands along my arms and legs, checking for breaks and lacerations and acts like he doesn’t hear me.

The EMT does – and shoots me a dirty look. “Ma’am, this is hardly the time or place for jokes.”

“They itch-hike.”

The most amazing thing happens. Before my very eyes, Lucas’s shoulders shake. His face flexes and a moment later a blinding smile spreads across it, deep laughter, like long forgotten thunder, rolls out behind it.

I gape at him. Lucas, covered in grime and dust and desperate to save me had looked pretty damn remarkable, but his smile, stunning. It's the missing piece, the thing I’d been looking for since … probably my whole life if I’m completely honest.

The EMTs bustle me into a waiting ambulance, every movement sending fresh waves of pain shooting through my entire body. I don’t care. They could drop me right on my broken arm and it wouldn’t change anything.

Lucas laughed. That’s the only thing I care about.

From the ambulance ride to the assortment of tests at the hospital, Lucas stays by my side, using his position as crown prince to blatantly defy the doctors order for him to leave even when it's time for them to set my broken collar bone and stitch up my gunshot wound.

It takes several hours, but finally the doctors are happy with their progress and leave me alone in the room with Lucas.

Considering how close I was to being shot point blank by a mad woman, I feel pretty lucky to have escaped the situation with just a broken collar bone, a shot that passed cleanly through my side, and an assortment of sprains, scrapes, and bruises. With time, these will heal.

He sits beside my bed and runs his hand through his thick hair. “Alexis, I don’t –”

I’ve never heard him sound so hesitant, so unsure.

“I can’t believe I said those things to you.”

I reach out and take his hand in mine. “Lucas it’s okay. Eileen set me up – and she played you.”

“No.” He stands, jerking free of my grip. “It’s not okay.”

He stands, jerking free of my grip, and paces from one end of the to the other and back again. Damn, he moves nice. “She tricked me, but I made it easy for her.”

I push the button on the bed’s control panel, gritting my teeth against the residual pain I still feel despite the pain medication as it slowly elevates me into a sitting position.

“It’s something you can work on, change. Next time, instead of leaping to the worse possible conclusion, think happy thoughts. Tell yourself a bad joke. And talk to the other person before hurling accusations. Okay?”

Lucas stops beside my bed and stares down at me. I stare at my hands.

“Next time?” He says the words slowly, as if he can’t quite believe what he's hearing. “At the match, I said I wanted to talk to you, but … things happened and we never got the chance.”

“Lucas, there’s something I need to tell you first.”

I need to get off my chest first. If I don’t I’ll lose my nerve. “When Eileen … when I thought I was going to … you know. The only thing I could really think about was you. I’ve said this to you before, once, but you were asleep so I guess it doesn’t count. You probably don’t want to hear this, but I made a promise to myself that if I lived, I’d tell you that I love you, more than anything else in this world, more than I ever imagined possible.”

Lucas doesn’t say anything. The cheap clock above the door ticks away the seconds one … three ... seven. Unable to stand it any longer I sneak a peek through my lashes at Lucas.

He’s standing stock still, the biggest, happiest grin I’ve ever seen spread across his face.

He leans down and plants a feather soft kiss on my lips.

“Alexis,” he whispers, his breath fans across my face. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. I love you and I want to cancel the terms of our marriage contract and make this a real marriage. One that stands the test of time.”