Twisted Games is Ana Huang's contemporary royal bodyguard romance, the second book in the Twisted series, and it is exactly the sort of book that looks at the forbidden romance trope, gives it a princess, a six-foot-something bodyguard and a constitutional crisis, then asks us to behave as though this is a perfectly sensible Tuesday. It is not. It is, however, rather fun.
Bridget von Ascheberg is a princess who suddenly finds herself much closer to the throne after her brother decides to abdicate. Rhys Larsen is her intensely serious bodyguard, a man who has made professional boundaries into something approaching a religion. Naturally, they fall for each other. The central conflict is not subtle: duty versus desire, royal obligation versus personal freedom, and the inconvenient fact that the one person Bridget wants is precisely the person she should not have.
The romance is where Huang is strongest. The slow burn between Bridget and Rhys has actual progression rather than simply announcing that two attractive people have chemistry and expecting us to clap. Their relationship develops through proximity, friction, reluctant trust and increasingly obvious attraction. Rhys's protective instincts create genuine tension because his job already requires him to be physically close to Bridget while his personal feelings make that proximity increasingly difficult to manage.
The royal worldbuilding is considerably less convincing. Eldorra functions well enough as a fictional European monarchy, but the political and constitutional machinery mostly exists to keep Bridget and Rhys apart. The succession rules, royal marriage restrictions and palace intrigue provide stakes, but they are not explored with the sort of consistency that would satisfy anyone arriving here specifically for political fantasy. (Nobody should enter this book expecting a constitutional law seminar, and frankly, thank goodness.)
Huang also leans hard into familiar romance conventions: forbidden love, forced proximity, possessive hero, royalty, bodyguard and the emotionally repressed man who apparently communicates primarily through intense staring. These tropes are not reinvented, but they are deployed with enough commitment that the story rarely feels embarrassed about what it is. That matters. Romance does not need to pretend its tropes are accidental.
Compared with the long tradition of forbidden and bodyguard romance, Twisted Games is less interested in realism than emotional escalation. The security work and royal politics can wobble, but the romantic stakes are carefully maintained.
It is glossy, melodramatic and occasionally ridiculous, but the ridiculousness is part of the appeal. Bridget and Rhys have enough chemistry to make the sillier machinery forgivable, and Huang understands that a romance can be predictable without being boring. This is trope-forward romance done with confidence, even when the crown starts wobbling under the weight of the plot.