“What a shock.”
“I am next in line to the throne. Any legitimate child of mine would ascend that throne after me. In the absence of children, a line of succession would move on. Either to any children my father’s second wife produces, or to my cousin. If any children I have are illegitimate, they would precede my father’s second round of children only if my father had girls.”
“That is a fascinating history lesson. Thank you.” She smiled at him still, though it felt more...fixed, somehow. “An alternative would be for you to go away. And never tell anyone. I will do the same. And we will never again talk about issue.”
Or anything else, she thought stoutly. And waited to feel relief rush in.
But instead, she felt something far more bittersweet flood her, though she couldn’t quite name it.
“I’m afraid it is much too late for that, Pia,” Ares said, with that quiet power of his that shook through her no matter how solid she told herself she was. “Because speculation already exists. Reporters clamor outside even now. What they cannot learn for certain, they will make up to suit themselves.”
“You must know the folly of living your life by what the tabloids say,” she chided him. Gently.
“I never have.”
“Wonderful.” She smiled. “Then no need to start now.”
“You said yourself that you have never appeared in the tabloids before. There is no reason to throw yourself in the midst of a nasty little scrum of them, like a bone to pick.”
If Pia didn’t know better, she might have been tempted to think he was trying to protect her.
“More than that, there were reporters who heard you make your claim,” Ares said. He shook his head. “Do you know nothing of the history of this planet? Wars have been fought for much less than a claim to a throne.”
“You talk about war a lot,” she said, and felt herself flush when his gaze turned considering. “In case you were unaware.”
“I am a prince. One of my main roles in this life is preventing wars from ever taking place. One way to do that is to conduct my private affairs in private.” He inclined his head, though Pia was aware it was a command and not a sign of obedience or surrender. “My car awaits.”
“And if I refuse to get into it with you?”
“I have a security detail who will put you in the vehicle, no matter your protests. But you know this.” Again, that dark, considering look that seemed to peel her open. “Is that what you want? Plausible deniability?”
For a moment, Pia didn’t know what she wanted. She felt the way she had when her doctor had come into the exam room and told her the news. Pia had been fairly certain she was dying of something. All those strange cramps. The fact that she kept getting sick. She was certain something was eating her away from the inside out.
It had never occurred to her that she could be pregnant. The word itself hadn’t made sense.
She’d made the doctor repeat herself three times.
Looking at Ares, here in the library of Combe Manor where she had spent so much of her childhood, was much the same.
That train kept jumping the tracks and hurtling away into the messy night, no matter how still she stood or how gracefully she tried to hold herself together.
But she could hear her brother’s clipped tone from the other side of the door, issuing his own orders. She’d seen that scrum of ravenous reporters out in front of the house, clamoring for a comment and ready to pounce.
“Let me tell you what sort of life you will lead,” her mother had said in the days following her graduation from finishing school, right here in this very same manor house, stuffed full of pictures of all the battle-hardened Combes who had charged out of their circumstances and had made something of themselves, no matter what.
Pia knew she was meant to feel deeply proud of them all. When instead, all that desperate clawing for purchase made her feel...tired. And unequal to the task.
“Am I supposed to know what to do with my life?” Pia had asked. “I can’t seem to make up my mind.”
“It’s not for you to decide, dear girl,” said her mother, who only called Pia dear when she was in one of her less affectionate moods. Pia had sat straighter, waiting for the inevitable other shoe to fall. “Your father has gone to a tremendous amount of trouble to make you into the perfect heiress. Biddable and sweet enough. Reasonably accomplished in the classic sense of the term. And very, very wealthy, of course.”
It had seemed wiser not to say anything. Pia had sat there at the breakfast table off the kitchen where her mother drank her hot water and lemon, murmured about how refreshed she felt with each sip, and raised her brows at Pia’s slice of toast with a bit of creamery butter.
Which was to say, it was a normal breakfast at Combe Manor. Pia could have drunk the hot lemon water herself, but she’d long ago learned that it was better to disappoint her mother as early in the day as possible, so there could be no grand expectations over the course of the day she would then fail to meet.
Alexandrina had let her gaze sweep over her daughter as if she was sizing her up for market. “You will work in some or other worthy charity that we will vet, of course. You will dedicate yourself to your good works for a year, perhaps two. Then I imagine your father will suggest a suitor. He might even allow you to pick one. From a preselected group, of course.”
“You make it sound as if he plans to marry me off.”
Pia had spent much of her life despairing over the fact that while she had the same dark hair and gray eyes as her mother, Alexandrina’s all...came together. She was simply beautiful, always, no matter what. It was a fact, not a to-do list. Pia had the raw material, but she was put together wrong. No matter how hard she tried to glide about, exuding effortless beauty.
“Dear girl, your brother will run the business,” Alexandrina had replied, as if Pia had said something amusing. “He is already in line to do so. You are here to be decorative, or if not precisely decorative—” the look she’d slid at her daughter had been a knife, true, but Pia had been so used to the cut of it she hadn’t reacted at all “—you can be useful. How will you accomplish this, do you think?”
Pia hadn’t had an answer for her. Her accomplishments, such as they were, had always been a serene collection of tidy, unobjectionable nouns. She’d no idea how one launched off into a verb.
“What did you do?” she asked her mother instead.
She already knew the story, of course. Her father liked to belt it out at cocktail parties. Alexandrina had been set to marry some stuffy old title of her father’s choosing, but then she’d met Eddie. First they’d made headlines. Then they’d made history, uniting the brash, upstart Combe fortune with the traditional gentility of the San Giacomos.
Pia rather doubted that an epic love story was in the cards for her. Epic love was the sort of thing that just happened to women like her mother, and led to decades of true love. Which in the San Giacomo/Combe family had always meant operatic battles, intense reunions, and a revolving door of scandals and sins. Pia had always thought that, really, she’d be quite happy to find herself reasonably content.
“You and I are not the same,” Alexandrina had said softly that day, something making her gray eyes glitter. “And I can see that you think I’m being cruel to you. I am not.”
“Of course not,” Pia had agreed, staring at her plate and wishing she could truly rebel and order a stack of toast instead of her one, lonely slice. But she only dared antagonize her mother—who despaired over Pia’s sturdy figure, inherited from the Combe side of the family and suitable for factory work, not fashion—so far. “I don’t think that at all.”
“We have wrapped you up in cotton wool as a gift, Pia,” Alexandrina had intoned. “Always remember that.”
Pia remembered it, all right. She’d decided she wanted no part of any cotton wool, so she’d charged right out and shed i
t in New York. Enough with nouns, she’d thought. She wanted to be about verbs, for a change.
And look what that had got her.
“You look as if you’re mulling over a very important decision,” Ares said, still watching her from the door. “But you must realize that you have no choice here.”
“It’s out of the frying pan, into the fire.”
Pia hadn’t meant to say that out loud. But there it was, dancing between them.
Ares didn’t reply with words. He only inclined his head in that way of his, that she already knew was him at his most royal. Too royal to live, really.
And Pia thought of her father, blustering and brash Eddie Combe, who had called her names and then died. She would never see him smile at her again. She would never stand there while he blustered and bullied, then softened. He would never pat her on the head the way he had when she was small and tell her things like, Buck up, girl. Combes don’t cry.
But another thing her father had said, so famously that the vicar had quoted him in the service today, was that if the worst was coming, you might as well walk into it like a man rather than waiting for it to come at you as it pleased.
Control the conversation, Eddie liked to say. And had said, often.
And then did.
Pia told herself that was why she moved then, walking across library floor as if she was doing the bidding of her unexpected prince. That was why she followed after him, ignoring her brother and their guests as his staff led them through the manor house, down and around to the servants’ entrance, far away from the mess of reporters out front. That was why she got into the car that waited for them there, meekly and obediently, and sat next to Prince Ares as he drove her away.
It wasn’t capitulation, she assured herself. She was controlling the conversation.
And it certainly had nothing at all to do with the way looking at those green eyes of his made her heart thump wildly in her chest.
Or that melting feeling everywhere else.
CHAPTER FIVE
PIA REGRETTED HER impulsiveness the moment the car started moving.
She regretted it as they left Combe Manor behind, taking the little-used back road off the hill and leaving the paparazzi—and her brother, and her entire life—behind them.
Pia told herself she was only getting a few tests. That she wasn’t leaving anything, not for long. That this would all be perfectly fine once she and Ares were on the same page and plans were made for the future.
But she couldn’t shake the sense of foreboding that squatted on her, there on the smooth leather seats of the royal town car.
The car swept them off to a private airfield, and Pia dutifully trooped up the stairs into the jet that waited there, assuming that the prince would take them off to London. Where there were doctors aplenty who could administer the necessary tests, and give him the answers she already had, but he needed to see on official letterhead of some sort or another.
She told herself that she didn’t mind that he needed proof. After all, wasn’t that at the crux of all this? He didn’t know her. She didn’t know him. That would perhaps suggest that they shouldn’t have slept together, but they had, and it was only to be expected that he would require proof. Even if he really had been just some guy named Eric.
But the sound of the jet engines lulled her to sleep, and when Pia woke again because the air pressure was making her ears pop, she felt as if she’d been sleeping for a very long time.
“Where are we?” she asked sleepily, because a glance out the window into the dark didn’t show the mess of lights she would expect above a city like London.
Ares sat across from her on one of the royal jet’s low, gold-embossed leather couches.
“We will be landing shortly,” he said, without looking up from his tablet.
Pia always forgot that her body had changed, and kept changing. She went to sit upright and struggled a bit, certain that she looked as ungainly and inelegant as she felt.
“Yes, but where?” she asked, hoping her businesslike tone would divert attention away from what her mother would have called her persistent ungainliness. “That can’t be London, can it?”
Down below the plane, there were great expanses of darkness, and a few lights. They were headed toward the light, but it was far too contained to be a city.
“It is not London,” Ares said, something in his voice making her turn her head around to look at him directly. “It is the kingdom of Atilia. My home, after a fashion. I’m taking you to the Southern Palace.”
“But... Why on earth would you take me...?”
“Where did you imagine I would take you?”
He considered her, and she became aware—in a hot rush that made her cheeks flare into red—that they were, for all intents and purposes, alone in this compartment of his plane. His security detail had stayed in the main bit, while Ares had escorted her here and closed the door. She had no idea how she had possibly slept so deeply when Ares was right here, taking up all the oxygen.
And that was all before she started thinking about the ways this man could take her.
Not to mention the ways he already had.
“I assumed, reasonably enough, that we would pop down to London.”
“London is far too exposed. Here in the islands I can control who sees you and me together, what conclusions they might draw, and so on. And I can have my own doctors administer any tests.”
“I didn’t bring anything,” Pia protested. And when that aristocratic brow of his rose, as if she wasn’t making any sense, she felt her face get hotter. She cleared her throat. “Like a passport.”
“I am the Crown Prince,” Ares said dryly. “I do not suffer bureaucracy.”
“Because you are the bureaucracy?”
She regretted that. Especially when all he did was fix that overtly calm green gaze on her, making her want to squirm about in her seat. She refrained. Barely.
“And after I take all the tests you need me to take?” She blinked a few times, trying to clear her head. And the sleep from her eyes. “My life is in England.”
“If by some chance you are truly carrying my child and the unexpected heir to the kingdom of Atilia,” he said, with something far too complicated to be simple temper in his voice, “then you can be certain that life as you know it has changed irrevocably.”
“Well, of course it has,” Pia said. Crossly, she could admit. “But it has nothing to do with you. Impending motherhood generally changes a girl, I think you’ll find. It’s fairly universal.”
The jet was dropping closer to those lights below, and Pia felt something like panic clawing at her. Maybe that was why she didn’t wait for him to answer her.
“You can’t spirit me away to an island and keep me there, Ares,” she said instead. But if she was looking for some kind of softness on his face, there was none to be found. He could as easily have been carved from marble. “You know that, don’t you? That’s all well and good in the average fairy tale, but this is real life.”
“I keep trying to explain to you who I am,” Ares said quietly. Almost apologetically, which made every hair on her body feel as if it stood on its end. Because he was the least apologetic creature she had ever met. “I have never been a good prince, it is true, but I’m a prince nonetheless. And we have entered my kingdom, where my word is law. I am afraid that you will discover that I can do as I like.”
“But—”
“Call it a fairy tale if you like, cara mia,” he murmured. “If it helps.”
It did not help.
That panic continued to claw at her as the jet landed. As Pia was marched off—escorted, she supposed, and politely, but it all felt rather more kidnap-ish than it had before—and bundled into yet another gleaming car. This time they were driven along a precipitous coastal road that hugged the looming hills on one side and dropped off
toward the sea on the other. They skirted around the side of the island, until they came upon what looked to Pia like a perfect fairy-tale castle.
Just in case she didn’t already feel as if she’d stumbled into the pages of a storybook already.
It rose as if from a pop-up children’s book, blazing with light as it sat up over the sea on a jutting bit of hillside. It even had turrets.
“What is this place?” she managed to ask, half-convinced she was still dreaming.
“It is the Southern Palace, as I said,” Ares said from beside her in the car’s wide backseat. “If, as I suspect, you are merely pregnant yet not with any child of mine, you will stay here only as long as it takes you to sign the appropriate legal documentation that asserts you have no claim to the throne of my kingdom. And never will.”
“I don’t want your throne. Or your kingdom.”
“Then it will all go very quickly.” He turned then, the light from the palace as they approached the first wall beaming into the car and making him gleam. Making him even more beautiful, which was unhelpful. “But if, by some miracle, what you say is true? Then allow me to be the first to welcome you to your new home, Pia. You can expect to be here for some time.”
“Once again,” she said, working hard to keep her voice calm when she felt nothing but that panic inside her, shredding her, “you might be a prince and this might be your kingdom—”
“There is no might, Pia. I am who I say I am.”
“Well, Eric,” she replied, glaring at him, “you cannot actually kidnap women and hold them captive in your palace, no matter who you say you are. I think you’ll find it’s generally frowned upon.”
Ares settled back in his seat as the car slipped into some kind of courtyard, then continued under a grand archway that led deeper beneath the palace. And if he was bothered by the name she’d used—the name he’d given her in New York—he didn’t show it.
“You are welcome to register a complaint,” he said after a moment, as if he’d taken some time to consider the matter. “In this case, your only recourse would be the king.”
His Two Royal Secrets (One Night With Consequences) Page 5