Heart of the Guardians: Adoring Destiny by Adrianna Adore (best big ereader .TXT) 📗

Heart of the Guardians

Adoring Destiny

Adrianna Adore

Contents

Meeting Destiny Summary

1. Coming Home

2. Claire

3. Guile

4. Misconceptions

5. Arriving in Europe

6. Fight

7. Meeting

8. Truths

9. Knowledge

10. Preparations

11. A Night on the Town

12. Becoming

Afterword

Meeting Destiny Summary

Here is a brief synopsis of the beginning of the tale, I know it’s been a few months since the first book in the trilogy was released. In Meeting Destiny, we learn that Stephan James Von Galador was running from his troubles and hiding out, teaching history in a small college in Washington state. He was a prince who didn’t want to be king, a playboy who never felt right being one. He was also a shifter from an ancient line of Guardians whose duties were guarding the portal to keep demons and other unsavory creatures from coming through. His duties didn’t amount to much since the opening was sealed and he had a lot of free time on his hands. There is family strife, he was caught up in a scandal and to everyone’s relief, he left Galador to teach as a visiting professor. He had no intentions of doing anything other than that. A quiet life to consider his options, no pressure from the outside world, a carefully crafted new identity to hide from everything and everyone.

But then he met Claire.

A student half his age.

The animal magnetism between them was unbearable and uncontainable. For the first time, James thought he’d found true love, true happiness and she felt the same. His idyllic life was shattered when his most trusted friend and advisor arrived unannounced to retrieve him, to take him back to his country. They needed him. The king had been murdered, the other heir to the throne was missing and the portal had been breached.

James left everything behind, broke if off with Claire in a text message and hurried back to his duties. He couldn’t involve her in his troubles.

Now we pick up as he arrives in Galador some twelve hours and nearly as many time zones away.

1

Coming Home

The papers had it wrong, of course, but there had been a leak. Someone had talked and now everyone knew the king was dead. Investigators were at the palace, it was being treated as a crime scene and that didn’t happen for a natural death. The king had been murdered. The press were already asking where the successor was? Where was Stephen James von Galador? Was he off gallivanting around with another starlet or model? Why hadn’t he made an appearance? Where was his younger cousin, the second in line to the throne? Where was Stigmund Verner?

“Are you ready?” Frank asked as he straightened James’ necktie and gave him a final nod of approval. “They can be Jackals. I know you don’t like being in the spotlight but just say a few words, answer a few questions, let them know everything is going to be fine and I’ll hustle you away after a minute or two.”

James nodded, took a deep breath and opened the door of the Gulfstream. He hurried down the passenger stairs to the click and whirr of cameras and shouted questions, stepped up to the podium on the tarmac and adjusted the microphone.

“We mourn the loss of our king.” He said “My uncle Karsten was a good man, an honest statesman and a faithful servant to his people.”

He spoke a few more minutes, assured the duchy everything would be fine, the killers would be caught and justice would be served. When he finished his prepared remarks, the shouted questions came from all sides. He answered a few, yes there would be a public funeral procession, yes he would assume the duties as the monarch and be crowned, no he hadn’t spoken with Stigmund. The tarmac got quiet when a reporter asked if the rumors were true that the reason it took him so long to return to the kingdom was that he’d been in the company of a group of beautiful women on a yacht. James stared at the man who finally dropped his eyes in shame. The film they showed on the news cast that evening showed the future king with a thunderous look on his face, glaring angrily at the insipid tabloid reporter.

A piece of the lectern broke off in his white knuckled grip as Frank hurried up and rushed him away to a waiting car.

The palace was controlled chaos and the first thing he did was meet with the gathered servants and staff. Some wept openly when they saw him, they had loved the king and most had helped raise little Jamie after his parents died as he scurried the vast estate. The gendarme detective had a few questions but it was mostly perfunctory. They knew he’d been out of the country and teaching as an honorary professor for a term. Frank had left out some of the details of how that appointment came about but it was easily verified. When he was finished, the chief of the Galador police extended his condolences, dismissed the others in the room and got down to business. Captain Schmidt was past retirement age, his hair a solid silver, his mustache walrus like.

Not many people knew of the portal, most of the shifters in the world had no idea it existed. The old detective had learned of it some fifty years earlier when he’d been assigned to a grisly series of murders and the culprit had been a werewolf gone mad. He still bore the scars but a young, brash Karsten, the man who would become the king, saved him at the last moment. He was sworn to secrecy, they became friends and he kept his silence about the ancient portal. The Duchy had more than its fair share of strange occurrences over the years and Schmidt had helped turn the unexplainable mysteries into something more mundane with careful manipulation of the occasional crime scene. The world didn’t need to know