Twisted Games

I read Twisted Games because the first book in the series left me curious, and because everyone in romance circles has opinions about Rhys Larsen. Ana Huang self-published it on July 29, 2021, then Bloom Books reissued it in September 2022 in a 448 page paperback that became the edition most readers know. It is the second book in the Twisted series, following Twisted Love, and it follows a new couple, Princess Bridget von Ascheberg of the small European kingdom of Eldorra and her bodyguard, Rhys Larsen. The premise is pure fantasy fulfillment, royalty, forced proximity, forbidden attraction, and Huang commits to it without apology across four hundred plus pages.

Here is my honest starting position. This is not literary fiction and does not want to be. It is spicy new adult romance with a plot built to delay gratification and then deliver it thoroughly. If that is your thing, this is among the better executed versions. If it is not, nothing here will convert you. I enjoyed it more than book one, rolled my eyes a fair amount, and finished rooting for both leads, which is the job.

Bridget is twenty one when the book opens, second in line to the Eldorran throne behind her older brother, studying abroad in America and chafing at every rule her position requires. She is stubborn, warm, quick with languages, and tired of being ornamental. An incident on campus, a stalkerish ex and a paparazzi mess, convinces her grandfather the king that she needs professional protection. Enter Rhys Larsen, ex-military, now elite private security, six foot something of scowl and discipline, a man with two rules. Protect the client at all costs. Never get emotionally involved. He has kept both rules for years. Bridget breaks them in weeks.

The bodyguard and the princess

Rhys is the book's main attraction, so let me describe him fairly. He is stoic, competent, and rude in the way romance heroes are rude when they are fighting attraction. He grew up hard, foster care and worse, and built himself into a weapon and a professional. He does not talk about his past. He trains before dawn, checks exits in every room, and treats Bridget's safety as religion. Bridget, for her part, treats his rules as a personal challenge. She is used to being managed by palace staff and has no intention of being managed by one more handsome wall of muscle. Their early chapters are a sparring match of snuck-out windows, ruined schedules, and arguments conducted at close range.

Huang writes dual first person, alternating Bridget and Rhys chapters, and the structure does exactly what it should. We get Bridget's frustration and loneliness, the weight of duty, the grandfather whose love arrives as control, the brother she adores who keeps dodging his own future. And we get Rhys's hunger and self-disgust, his certainty that a man like him has no business touching a woman like her. The tension builds through forced proximity beats that fans will recognize. Guarding her door. Sharing transport. The trip where only one arrangement is available. A closet, a party, a winter cabin sequence that the fandom quotes constantly. Each scene ends with both of them pretending it meant nothing.

What lifts the book above book one is that Bridget has a real external life. Her studies matter to her. Her friendships with Jules, Stella, and Ava, the heroines of the other Twisted books, give her scenes where she is not only a princess or a love interest. And Rhys's competence is shown, not just claimed. The security details feel researched enough to carry the fantasy, routes, rotations, threat assessments, the boring work that keeps a client alive. When the danger is low, these details slow the pace. When it spikes, they pay off.

The romance progresses the way these books do. Denial, banter, a first kiss that breaks the rules, a secret affair conducted in hotel rooms and borrowed hours, promises that it will stay casual. It never stays casual. Rhys falls first and hardest while insisting he is not falling. Bridget falls while telling herself she can separate duty from heart. Both are lying, and Huang lets the reader enjoy the lying.

Abdication and the weight of a crown

About a third of the way in, the plot shifts from campus to kingdom. Bridget's brother abdicates. I will keep the details light to avoid spoiling the family drama, but the effect is simple. Overnight Bridget goes from spare to heir, from a princess with some freedom to the future queen of Eldorra. The palace recalls her. Her grandfather, old, ill, and immovable, begins her training in earnest. Parliament starts discussing her marriage as a matter of state. And Rhys, suddenly the bodyguard of the heir in a country with opinions about everything, becomes a liability she cannot afford and cannot give up.

This is the strongest section of the book. Huang understands that royalty romance works when duty has teeth, and here it does. Bridget is not playing at princess. She attends councils, learns trade figures, visits factories and farms, and discovers that she is good at the work and that the work costs. Her grandfather's bargain is explicit. Marry well, behave flawlessly, secure the succession, and Eldorra survives. Love a commoner bodyguard in secret, get caught, and the monarchy wobbles. Bridget's growing political education, guided by advisors with their own agendas, gives her chapters weight the campus half lacked.

Rhys's half of this section is darker. Back in Eldorra, his past catches up in the form of people who know what he was and what he did to survive it. He takes a bullet, in a sense and then in fact, absorbing damage meant for Bridget's world. His belief that he is unworthy hardens into a decision. He will leave, for her good, before he ruins her. Readers who dislike the noble-sacrifice breakup should brace themselves. It arrives on schedule, nobly and stupidly, and costs both of them years.

There is also a genuinely frightening sequence late in this stretch, an attack that moves the threat from tabloids to blood. Huang stages it well, using Rhys's training details from earlier chapters so the action reads as competence under pressure rather than chaos. Bridget, for once the protected rather than the decider, hates every second of it, and her fury afterward, at the attacker, at the palace, at Rhys for treating her as fragile, is one of her best moments. She is not a prize to be guarded. She is the future queen, and she insists on acting like it.

Years apart and the long way back

The final act jumps forward, and I am glad Huang allowed the gap. After the breakup, Bridget does her duty. She reigns or prepares to reign, accepts a courtship with a suitable man that the whole country approves of, and performs happiness while hollowing out. Rhys builds a security empire, gets rich, stays alone, and watches her from the distance he chose. Their reunion, when it comes at a royal event thick with protocol and press, crackles precisely because both have lived. They are not the same people who kissed in hiding. She has authority now. He has standing. The power gap that made the early affair queasy has narrowed, though not vanished.

The love triangle resolves the way these books resolve, with Bridget choosing openly and paying for it in public. I will not detail the final confrontations except to say they involve the grandfather's ultimatum, a press scandal, and Rhys refusing, this time, to be the secret. The ending is a happily ever after with a crown on it, an epilogue with warmth, and cameos from the other couples that set up the next books. Readers who need realism about constitutional monarchies will have checked out long before. Readers who want the fantasy, the queen choosing the guard in front of everyone, will get exactly the scene they queued for.

The spice deserves a frank paragraph since it occupies real estate. There are many explicit scenes, written enthusiastically and with clear consent, and they escalate with the relationship. Fans will be pleased. Others may find the frequency slows the middle, one more hotel room when the plot wants the palace. I skimmed once or twice without losing the thread, which tells you the scenes are more reward than engine. The book's content warnings, noted on the author's site, include gun violence and mentions of abuse and overdose, and those elements are present but not graphic beyond the romance genre's norms.

What works and what drags

What works is the couple and the duty plot. Bridget is likable without being soft, and her growth from rebellious spare to deliberate heir is the book's real arc. Rhys, for all his alpha possessiveness, gets a coherent wound and a job he is good at, which keeps him readable. The Eldorra politics, while simplified, give the forbidden love actual stakes. And Huang's pacing within scenes, banter, tension, release, is professional grade. She knows when to end a chapter.

What drags is length and repetition. At 448 pages the book circles its central dynamic, want each other, pull away for duty, collide again, more than the plot needs. Rhys's internal monologue about unworthiness repeats until it becomes furniture. The side characters, especially the grandfather and the suitable suitor, lean toward function over personhood. And the class politics deserve a raised eyebrow. The fantasy asks us to thrill at a guard loving a princess while barely glancing at the staff, drivers, and maids who enable both. That is the genre's bargain, but this book's palace chapters make the bargain visible.

Read Twisted Love first, not because the mysteries require it but because the friend group lands better in order. Then read this one for Bridget and Rhys if bodyguard royalty slow burns are your pleasure. Skip it if power imbalances bother you even when consensual, if you want politics with bite, or if 400 pages of pining sounds like a chore. ## The friend group and the series machine

One pleasure of reading the Twisted books in order is watching Huang operate her ensemble. Jules, Stella, and Ava circle Bridget with distinct energies, the bold one, the sweet one, the quiet one, and their banter chapters give this long book air. Readers of Twisted Love will recognize Alex and Ava's story humming in the background, and the seeds of Twisted Hate and Twisted Lies are planted in throwaway lines that fans catalogue eagerly. This is romance as shared universe, and Huang is good at it. Each couple gets a book, each book gives the others cameos, and the group chat energy keeps 448 pages from sagging. If you read out of order, you will still follow everything. The books explain themselves. But the emotional payoffs, weddings, reconciliations, inside jokes, compound with familiarity.

The series also has a signature move worth naming. Each hero is a powerful, damaged man who believes himself unworthy, and each heroine is a woman underestimated by her world who proves stronger than anyone guessed. Alex the billionaire with a past, Rhys the guard with blood on his hands, and later Josh and Christian in the same mold. The formula is visible once you see it, and your tolerance for it determines how many of these you will read. I found Rhys the most readable of the set because his damage is tied to his job rather than just his childhood. His fear has a professional shape. Protecting Bridget is what he is for, and loving her breaks the tool. That tension is sharper than generic unworthiness, and Huang works it well.

Why the royalty fantasy works

It is worth asking why princess books still pull millions of readers, and Twisted Games is a useful case. Part of it is the old Cinderella machinery, gowns and balls and tiaras, which Huang supplies with enthusiasm. Part of it is the constraint fantasy. Bridget's life is governed by protocol, and every stolen hour with Rhys feels hotter because the rules are explicit. But I think the deeper pull is competence. Readers love watching a woman learn to rule, to chair meetings, to read budgets, to face down parliament, and Bridget's political education gives the fantasy substance. She is not waiting to be chosen. She is learning to choose, and her final choice of Rhys reads as policy, not just passion. A queen announcing her own marriage is a power move dressed as a love scene.

There is a flip side the book mostly ignores. Real monarchies run on inequality, and Eldorra's charm depends on not asking who cleans the palace. Huang gestures at charity visits and factory tours, but the system itself is never questioned, only the personnel. That is standard for the subgenre, and complaining too loudly misses the point of escapism. Still, I noticed it more here than in billionaire romances, perhaps because thrones are harder to modernize than companies. Your mileage will vary. If you can shelve the politics, the fantasy delivers.

For its audience, Twisted Games is a confident, generous serving of exactly what was ordered. I closed it fond of a fictional queen and her guard, which is more than many worthier books have managed.