Pia wanted no part of any of this. And not only because she was terribly afraid that she would cause a commotion simply by appearing in her...state. But because she still couldn’t believe her parents were gone. Not when she hadn’t had enough time to watch them come round. Not when she’d never know if this time, she’d disappointed them too much or if they’d soften the way they usually did. It seemed premature to mourn them.
And deeply unfair that she was expected to do it in public, as if she was part of a show for others to watch and judge.
“Do you not know who was responsible for getting you in this condition?” Matteo asked. Icily. “Or are you simply choosing not to name him?”
And maybe Pia was a little more emotionally fragile than she realized. Because that rubbed her the wrong way.
“I think you’ll find that I’m responsible for getting myself into this condition,” she replied. “I wasn’t attacked, if that’s what you mean. Nothing was done to me that I didn’t enthusiastically participate in. I’m not a damsel in distress, Matteo.”
There was a part of her that might have liked the fact she was pregnant—had it not horrified everyone who knew her. Pia had always wanted a family. Not the one she had, but a real family. The sort that she imagined everyone else had.
Matteo was studying her, and she could almost see the machinery working in his head. “That trip you took to New York. That was it, wasn’t it?”
“If you mean the graduation trip I took to celebrate finally completing college, then yes.” And oh, how she’d fought for that. It had been Matteo who had finally stepped forward and bluntly told their parents that Pia deserved as much of a chance as anyone to live her own adult life. Her cheeks burned all the brighter. Because she was imagining what he must be thinking of her now. “We had a lovely week in New York. It turns out, I happened to come back home with a little bit extra—”
“I don’t understand. You...?”
There was the sound of footsteps beyond the door, and darker clouds began to pull together over the hills in the distance. And Pia stared back at her brother, her cheeks so hot they hurt.
“You don’t understand?” she asked him. “Really? I’ve certainly seen your face and photographs with different women in the tabloids, yet you remain unmarried. How can this be?”
“Pia.”
“If you’re going to act like we’re Victorian, Matteo, I should have every right to ask about the state of your virtue. Shouldn’t I?”
“I beg your pardon. I am not in the habit of having intimate relations with women that I do not know.”
“Well. Okay, then.” She drew herself up even straighter. “I guess I’m just a whore.”
“I doubt that very much,” Matteo growled.
But the word stayed in her head, pounding like a drum, because the doors to the library were tossed open then. The staff that Matteo had kept at bay came flooding in, his erstwhile assistant was there to whisper in his ear, and it was time to do their sad duty.
And she knew their father had thought exactly that of her, at least for that moment. He’d looked at her—really looked at her, for a change, because Eddie Combe had usually preferred to keep his attention on himself—only three days before his heart attack. And called her a common tart to her face.
She kept telling herself that wasn’t cause and effect. That the heart attack hadn’t had anything to do with her condition. And that, if he’d had more time, he would have found her in the next days or weeks and gruffly offer some sort of olive branch.
Yet as she rode down in her brother’s car, tucked there in the back with him while he tended to the business of running the family company and his assistant Lauren handled calls for him, she accepted that she couldn’t know for sure. How could she?
The last thing Pia knew Eddie had thought about her was that she was a whore. He’d said so. And then in a matter of days, he was dead.
Her mother had called her fat, which wasn’t anything new. Then again, that was the worst thing Alexandrina could think to call another woman, and she hadn’t yet cycled through to the usual affection before she’d passed.
Either way, Matteo and Pia were orphans now.
And Pia was still terribly afraid it was her fault.
But she snuck her hand over her belly because whether it was or wasn’t her fault, that didn’t extend to the next generation. She wouldn’t allow it.
The funeral service was simple and surprisingly touching. It made Eddie seem far more approachable than he had in life, and Pia wondered if she would understand the man more as time went on. If her memories would mellow him into more of a father figure, lingering on his gruff affection. Or if he would always be that volcanic presence in her mind. The one that had thought his only daughter was a trollop right before he’d died.
The ride back up the hill toward the Combe estate was somber, and Pia was glad, in a fierce sort of way, that it was a moody day. The dark clouds threatened, though the rain held off, and they stood in a bit of a brisk, unpleasant wind as Eddie’s casket was lowered into the ground in the family plot.
The vicar, who Eddie had hated in life, though had requested in his will in some attempt to torture the holy man from beyond, murmured a prayer. Pia kept her eyes on the casket that was all that remained of her father—of her childhood—until she could no longer see it.
And somehow kept her tears at bay. Because there were too many cameras. And how many times had Alexandrina lectured her about red eyes and a puffy face?
It hit her again. That Alexandrina was gone. That Eddie was gone. That nothing was ever going to be the same.
Then Matteo’s hand was on her back and they moved away from the grave site to form the necessary receiving line for those who might or might not make it back to the small reception at the house. It was times like these that her years in finishing school came in handy. Pia was infinitely capable of shaking hands and making meaningful eye contact with every royal in Europe without noticing them at all.
“May I offer my condolences on the part of the Kingdom of Atilia and His Majesty King Damascus, my father?”
Something about that voice kicked at her.
Pia’s hand was already extended. And even as she focused on the man standing before her, his hand enveloped hers.
And she knew that sudden burst of flame. She knew the shiver that worked its way from the nape of her neck down to pool at the base of her spine.
Her eyes jerked up and met his.
As expected, his gaze was green, shot through with gold. And as shocked as hers.
Pia panicked. How could this be happening? The last time she’d seen this man, he had been sprawled out, asleep, in a penthouse suite high above Manhattan. She had gathered her things, feeling powerful and shaken at once by her daring and all the things he’d taught her, and had tiptoed away.
She’d never imagined she would see him again.
“You,” he said, almost wonderingly. “New York.”
And part of her was warming, in instant response to the way his mouth curved in one corner. As if Pia was a good memory, as he had been for her. At least at first.
Before the morning sickness had sent her to the doctor to discuss the flu she couldn’t kick.
But Pia couldn’t indulge in memories, good or bad, because she was standing next to her brother. And he was focusing that dark scowl of his on the man still holding Pia’s hand.
“New York?” Matteo asked. Demanded, more like. “Did you say you know my sister from New York?”
“Matteo. Stop.”
But the man, still smiling slightly, seemed unaware of the danger he was in. “I met your sister in Manhattan some months ago,” he said, amiably enough. He smiled at Pia. “Do you go there often?”
“Miss Combe, my younger sister, has been there once,” Matteo growled. “And guess what? She picked up a souvenir.�
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“I beg your pardon?”
The man frowned. But in that way very important men did, as if inviting everyone around them to apologize for opportuning them.
“My sister is six months pregnant,” Matteo bit out.
Pia had the sense that she was in some kind of slow-motion car accident. The sort she’d seen in movies a thousand times. She could almost hear the scraping of the metal, the screech of the tires. Yet everything before her seemed to move in tiny, sticky increments. She watched her brother ball up his fists and step closer to the man. The man—who had told her his name was Eric, though she doubted that was real—did not back up.
And they both turned and stared at Pia as if she was some kind of roadside curiosity.
“If your sister is or isn’t pregnant, that is no concern of mine,” the man said.
Far less amiably.
Just in case Pia had wondered if it was possible to feel worse about all of this. Look at that! It was. She rubbed at her chest as if that could make her heart stop pounding the way it was. Or at least, ache less.
“Pia,” Matteo said, dark and furious. “Is this the man?”
“Have you forgotten where we are?” she managed to ask, though she was barely able to breathe.
“It’s a simple question,” her brother bit off.
“Once again, the state of your sister’s womb has nothing to do with me,” the man said.
And he wasn’t just a man.
If Pia had been going to throw away a lifetime of doing the right thing and making the correct choice over any old man, she would have done it years ago. This man was beautiful. Those gorgeous eyes and silky dark hair, a jawline to inspire the unwary into song and poetry, and shoulders to make a girl cry. This man had walked into the party where Pia had already been feeling awkward and out of place, and it was as if a light shone upon him. It was as if his bones were like other people’s, but sat in him differently. Making him languid. Easy.
His smile had been all of that, plus heat, when he’d aimed it at her, there beneath some modern art installation that looked to Pia’s eye like an exclamation point. In bronze.
But best of all, this man hadn’t had any idea who she was.
She could always tell. It was the way they said her name. It was a certain gleam in their eyes. But he’d had none of it.
He’d liked her. Just her.
Just Pia.
She’d planned to hold on to that. She’d wanted to hold on to that. But it seemed that would be one more thing she didn’t get to have.
“Thank you so much for asking about my private life, Matteo,” she said to her brother now. In a decent impression of her mother’s iciest tone, which came more naturally than she’d expected. “But as a matter of fact, I have only ever had sex with one person.”
Then she looked at the man before her, and her memories wouldn’t do her any good, so she cast them aside. No matter how beautiful he was. “And I regret to inform you, but that one person was you.”
But that didn’t have the effect she expected it to have.
Because all the beautiful man before her did was laugh.
At her, if she wasn’t mistaken.
“Like hell,” he said.
And that was when Matteo punched him.
Right in the face.
CHAPTER THREE
ONE MOMENT ARES was standing straight up, looking one of his past indulgences in the face.
He’d laughed, of course. What could he do but laugh?
Because the truth was, Ares hadn’t forgotten her. He hadn’t forgotten the way her gray eyes had lit up when she’d looked at him. He hadn’t forgotten her smile, shy and delighted in turn. And he certainly hadn’t forgotten her taste.
He might even have toyed with the notion of what it would be like to seek her out for another taste, now and again over the past few months—
The next moment he was on the ground, and it took him a moment to understand that the Combe heir had punched him.
Hard.
Not only that, he’d chosen to do so in full view of the paparazzi, all of whom swooped in closer like the locusts they were at the sight. They took picture after picture and held up cameras to record every last detail of the Crown Prince of Atilia’s inelegant sprawl across the wet grass in the middle of a funeral.
Ares glared up at the man who had laid him out. He wanted—badly—to respond in kind, but restrained himself. Because he might not want to be king, but he was still a prince, whether he liked it or not. And princes did not swing on bereaved commoners, no matter the provocation. Moreover, he preferred to control the stories that appeared about him, especially when the press on his father was so dire these days.
He couldn’t change the fact this man had hit him. But he could opt not to react in a manner that would only make it all worse.
He climbed back to his feet far more gracefully than he’d gone down. He brushed himself off, his gaze on the man scowling at him in case he started swinging again, then put his hand to his lip. When he drew it away, he noted darkly that there was blood.
Because of course there was blood.
Because everything was about his damned blood. Hadn’t his father told him so a thousand times before Ares had turned seven?
Ares noticed movement in his periphery and held up his hand before his security detail handled the situation in a manner that would only make it worse. He glared at the Combe heir, whose name he hadn’t bothered to learn as he’d run over his notes on his way here today.
That seemed like a significant oversight, in retrospect.
“You understand that I am the Crown Prince of Atilia, do you not?” he asked coolly instead. “Attacking me is considered an act of war.”
“That doesn’t frighten me,” the other man retorted.
“What should frighten both of you is that this entire conversation is being recorded,” Pia hissed at the pair of them.
And that was the thing. He could remember her name. Pia.
Such a little name when she had hit him with a good deal more force than her brother had just now.
And the hits kept coming today.
A closer look showed Ares what he should have noticed from the start. That she’d thickened around the middle. And she was a tiny thing—easy enough, if a man had a decent imagination and the necessary strength, to pick up and move around as he liked, and Ares certainly had liked—and her bump was clearly noticeable. Huge, in fact.
It was very clearly...exactly what it was.
But what it could not be was his.
“I have never in my life had unprotected sex,” Ares said with as much regal hauteur as he could manage.
The Combe heir looked enraged. Pia only shook her head, her gaze darting around to their audience before returning to her brother.
“If you two want to roll about in the dirt, flinging your toxic masculinity about like bad cologne, I cannot stop you,” she said, half under her breath. “But I refuse to become fodder for the tabloids for the first time in my life because of your bad decisions.”
And she turned around and marched off, as if it wasn’t already too late.
When Ares looked around he could see the speculation on every face within view. Because there had been a punch, and now Pia was leaving, and it didn’t take a mathematician to put her belly and him together.
But it was impossible.
“I suggest you follow my sister up to the house,” her brother growled at him.
“Or you will do what?” Ares asked, every inch of him the product of at least a millennia of royal breeding. “Punch something again? You do not tell me where I go or do not, Mr. Combe.”
“Watch me.”
Ares laughed again, more for the benefit of their audience than because he found any of this funny. Or even tolerable.
And then, because he couldn’t see another option, he turned and made his way up the long drive that led from the family plot toward the big, hulking house that sat there at the top of the hill. But he took his time, chatting merrily with other guests, as if he was at a party instead of a funeral. As if he didn’t have what he suspected was the beginnings of a fat lip.
And as if he hadn’t been accused of impregnating a woman by her overprotective older brother, in full view of too many cameras.
He could leave, he knew. No one would keep him here, no matter what Pia’s brother imagined. His security detail would whisk him away at a moment’s notice.
But Pia’s condition was not his doing—could not be his doing—and he felt compelled to make that clear.
He walked inside the manor house, wondering, not for the first time, how it was these northern Europeans could tolerate their stuffy, dark houses. The palaces of Atilia were built to celebrate the islands they graced. The sea was all around, and invited in, so it murmured through every archway. It was there, shimmering, just around every corner.
He asked after Pia in the grand entryway and was shown into the sort of library that made him think of all the headmasters’ offices he’d found himself in during his school days. Usually en route to his latest expulsion.
She was standing at the window, staring out at the miserable British countryside, wet and cold. But what he noticed was her back was too straight.
And he didn’t know why she would claim that he was the one who’d impregnated her, but it was hard to remember that as he looked at her from behind.
His Two Royal Secrets (One Night With Consequences) Page 3