Bride by Royal Decree

by Caitlin Crews

  And he turned on his heel before she could come up with a response to that. Which was good, because she didn’t have one. His men leapt to serve him, flanking him and opening the door for him, then swept him back out into the night.

  The cold air rushed in again. The door slapped shut behind him, the echo of the bell still in the air.

  Maggy was breathing too hard. Too loud. And she couldn’t seem to operate her limbs.

  So she made herself move. She sank back down to her knees and she scrubbed that damned sticky area like her life depended on it. And only when she was finished, only when she’d mopped the rest of the floor and dealt with her bucket in the utility room in the back, did she pull out her own phone again.

  She looked at it for a long moment. Maybe too long.

  Then she pretended she was doing something, anything else as she opened up her browser and typed in king of the Constantines...

  And there he was. Splashed all over the internet. On the covers of reputed newspapers and all over their inside pages. In image after image. She saw articles about his childhood. His education at Cambridge. His coronation following his father’s sudden heart attack and the war he’d wrenched his country back from in the months that followed. That same harsh face. That same arrogant brow. That same imperial hand waving here, there, everywhere as he gave orders and addresses and spoke of this law and that moral imperative and the role of the monarchy in the modern world.

  It was him. Reza was exactly who he’d said he was.

  Which meant that there was a very high probability that she was, too.

  And this time, when Maggy went back down on her knees on the floor, it wasn’t because she was in a hurry to get back to cleaning it.

  It was because for the first time in her entire life, when she’d learned how to be tougher than tough no matter what, her knees failed to hold her.

  CHAPTER THREE

  BY THE TIME Maggy walked into the gaspingly precious and markedly high-class resort and spa, set in all its grand timber and soaring glass splendor some miles outside of Deanville at the foot of the local mountains, she’d done a great deal more research.

  She’d gone home after locking up the coffee shop and she’d crouched there on her single bed in her narrow little room with her phone to her face, taking an internet crash course on the life and times of the Santa Domini royal family. And everything she’d discovered had made her...a little bit dizzy.

  Could this be real? Could she have a history after all these years of being nothing but a blank slate? Would she finally discover how and why she’d been left by the side of that road twenty years ago? Was it possible that the answer really, truly was something like one of the many silly and fanciful stories she’d made up when she was a girl to explain it away?

  She’d spent a lot of time and energy back then trying to explain to herself how and why she’d ended up the way she had. The possibility that she’d been a kidnapped princess had featured heavily in the rotation of the tales she’d told herself when she’d still had a little foolish hope left. After all, it was a much better story than the more likely one—that whatever adults had been responsible for her had abandoned her because they couldn’t care for her or didn’t want that kind of commitment any longer. For whatever depressing reasons adults would have to make such decisions. A few came to mind as more likely than finding out she was a misplaced princess. Substance abuse, for example. Mental illness. Poverty. She could take her pick and they all ended the same way: a sad eight-year-old girl on the side of a road with no memory of how she’d gotten there.

  But that wasn’t the sort of story Maggy had wanted to tell herself back then. Princesses won hands down every time.

  “Don’t get your hopes up,” she’d snapped at herself, there in her rented room in an old, converted Victorian that had likely seen its better days when Vermont was still more or less one big farm.

  She’d scrolled through pictures of the queen, the king. She’d taken great care not to think the word parents. Or the other, more personal words that indicated the kind of close relationships she’d never had with anyone. Mother. Father. And she’d sucked up her courage and taken a long, close look at the princess who had supposedly died in that car accident twenty years ago. She’d stared at that little girl’s face, not sure what she saw when she looked at it. Or what, if anything, she should see. There was no sense of recognition. There was...nothing inside of her. No spark, no reaction. There was simply the picture of a little girl lost years ago.

  And then she’d studied the many, many pictures of and corresponding articles about Cairo Santa Domini. He was once the most scandal-prone royal in all of Europe. Now he was the beloved king of the country he’d taken back from the military everyone seemed to assume had not only wrested control of his kingdom thirty years ago, but ten years after that had engineered that car accident in Montenegro to take out the exiled king. And in so doing, had killed everyone in the Santa Domini royal family save King Cairo himself, who had been in boarding school in the United States at the time.

  He was potentially her only living family member.

  It was possible, after all this time and a life lived entirely on her own in every conceivable way, that she actually had a living family member.

  Maggy had felt as if she might be sick.

  She’d thought a lot about simply getting into her junky old car and driving absolutely anywhere Reza—who it seemed really was the king he’d claimed he was no matter how little she wanted that to be true—was not.

  But in the end, she hadn’t done it. She’d thrown on the only dress she owned that was even slightly nice and she hadn’t gone to too much trouble with the rest because he’d made his feelings about her appearance pretty clear. And then she’d driven herself over to the upscale resort instead of out west toward California. And yes, she had to sit in her car in the frigid parking lot until her hands stopped shaking, but that was between her and her steering wheel and the close, hard dark all around.

  Maggy prided herself on the toughness she’d earned every day of the past twenty years, having had no one to depend on but herself. Ever. That meant that no matter how she felt—in this case, about as far from tough as it was possible to get without actually dissolving into a sea of tears, which she never allowed herself and certainly not in public places—she’d pulled herself together and climbed out of that car, her shaking hands be damned. She’d wanted answers to questions she’d stopped asking years ago. It was a little bit surprising how very much she wanted them, so long after she’d decided wondering about such things only made her weak. And how, with only the slightest provocation—if that was what she could call the appearance of an actual king in The Coffee Queen on Main Street—all those same old questions flooded her.

  Making her realize she’d never really gotten over wondering who she was or where she’d come from the way she’d assured herself she had. She’d simply stuffed her urge to ask those things way down deep inside, where none of that could leak out into her daily life any longer. The way it had when she’d been much younger and much, much angrier about her lot in life.

  When she started across the chilly, icy parking lot, well salted to make certain the wealthy people who could afford to stay here didn’t slip, break their heads open, and then fail to pay their astronomical bills, she was caught for a moment in the dark grip of the cold night. It seemed to tumble down around her and she took as deep a breath as she could stand of the sharp winter air, tipping her head back so she could see all the far-off stars gleaming there above her.

  Always watching. Always quiet, always calm. No matter what darkness was engulfing her, the stars shone through.

  By the time Maggy made it to the front door of the resort, that great, raw thing inside of her that felt like the sort of sob that she’d rather die than let free had subsided a bit. Just a bit. But it was enough to keep her hands from shaking.

  A hotel employee with a clipboard and a walkie-talkie waited for her in the sl
ick, self-consciously rustic lobby of the hotel, a serene smile on her face, as if she and Maggy had already met a thousand times before. Maggy was certain they had not.

  “If you’ll follow me, Ms. Strafford,” the woman said warmly. Maybe too warmly, Maggy thought, when greeting a complete stranger. “I’ll take you where you need to go. Mr. Argos—” and there was specific emphasis on that name “—is waiting.”

  On any other night Maggy would have asked a few follow-up questions. Demanded to know how this woman knew who she was at a glance, for a start. But something told her she didn’t want to know the answer to that question. That it would involve the word appalling again. And while Maggy felt her self-esteem was strong enough to withstand the snotty comments of an uninvited king in her coffee shop, there was no point testing that theory here, in the sort of five-star hotel broke girls like herself normally gave a wide berth.

  Instead, she let the woman lead her back outside and into a waiting hotel shuttle, clearly set aside for her use. She didn’t ask any questions then, either. She only settled into the seat she was offered in the otherwise empty vehicle and stared out the window, trying to keep her eyes on the stars as the shuttle wound its way out into the depths of the property, deep into the woods and halfway up the mountain. It stopped there. Maggy glanced out to see a guardhouse and gates, and heard many short bursts of noise on multiple walkie-talkies before the shuttle started to move again.

  “It’s only a few moments more,” the woman from the hotel told her, still smiling so happily.

  Maggy practiced smiling like a normal person. It was a skill she’d never mastered, given how little cause she’d had to go around smiling at random people. Or at all. In her experience, anyone who wanted her to act friendly and who wasn’t paying her to do so was best avoided altogether. It felt awkward and wrong, as if she was doing something to her cheeks. She was relieved when the woman looked back to the shuttle driver instead.

  Gradually, Maggy realized they were on a long driveway. It climbed farther up the steep incline in a corridor of evergreens and ghostly birch trees, then stopped beneath a towering palace of a house done in more timber and even more dramatic glass. It sprawled over the mountainside as if it had been placed there by divine intervention instead of the resort’s developers.

  She wasn’t the least bit surprised that this was where Reza was staying.

  And when she walked inside the soaring entry hall that must have commanded views over most of New England in the sunlight, she was equally unsurprised to find a battalion of servants waiting for her as if she’d strolled into Buckingham Palace.

  Not that she’d ever been anywhere near Buckingham Palace. But she’d seen as many pictures of the British palace in the supermarket tabloids over the years as she had of Cairo Santa Domini and his exploits.

  After her coat was taken and she’d been greeted approximately nine hundred times by uniformed staff members who pledged to attend to her every need, whatever those might be, Maggy was led off into the house. Each room she walked through was more impressive than the last. Here a library of floor-to-ceiling books and dark leather armchairs pulled close to a crackling fire. There what appeared to be a games room, with a pool table and a chess table and stout cupboards likely filled with every board game imaginable, if she’d had to guess. A large living area, ripe with comfortable couches and deep, thick rugs set out before the glass windows and an outside deck with views over the valley. A closer, more intimate den, with wide armchairs and enveloping sofas and the sort of wall of closed wood cupboards she figured hid television equipment.

  Only when she’d walked for what seemed like miles was she finally delivered into a final room. This one was as magnificent as the rest. It featured cozy log walls and architecturally significant windows. There was a stone fireplace and a small seating area arranged around it, and in the center of that area stood a small table set for two.

  Maggy stared at that intimate little setup for so long, her heart doing strange things in the back of her throat, she forgot to look around at the rest of the room.

  “Do not tell me you have never seen a dinner table before.”

  His voice was dark and perhaps slightly amused. She jerked her head away from the table and the fire and there he was, standing near a small, personal bar, where he’d clearly just poured himself a drink.

  Reza Argos. His Royal Majesty, the king of the Constantines.

  Her heart went wild. She felt her pulse rocket through her, making her strangely aware of her temples, her neck. Her wrists. Her sex. Her hands felt numb again, and twice as shaky, and she couldn’t tell if it was the insane circumstances or if it was just him. His gaze was gray and steady on her, and that made it worse. That made it...dangerous in ways she was afraid to consider too closely.

  It had been one thing when she’d thought he was a crazy person, there in the coffee shop. It had been easy to keep her wits about her. But now she knew who he was. And that seemed to make everything feel...precarious.

  “They buried that princess,” she blurted out.

  Because if she waited, she was afraid she wouldn’t dare ask. She was afraid of too many things, suddenly, and they all had to do with his harshly fierce face and those elegant hands. And the truth was that she wanted things—and that, more than anything else, made her chest feel tight and jittery. Maggy hadn’t made it this far by wanting things she couldn’t have. She’d learned better. And yet here she was anyway.

  “With her parents,” she continued when Reza only gazed back at her, his gray eyes glittering as if he was trying to read her. “I can’t possibly be a person whose body was recovered from an accident site, legally identified, and then very publicly laid to rest. No one can, but especially not some random foster care kid on the other side of the world.”

  “A very good evening to you, too.” His dark voice was reproving. And something else that moved in her, deep and low.

  Maggy told herself she could not possibly have cared less what moved in her. And that she shouldn’t feel it—or anything—anyway.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. Or really seethed. “Did you think I was here for my health? You told me a huge, ridiculous fairy tale of a story earlier. If it’s the lie it seems to be, I’m out of here.”

  Reza swirled the amber liquid in his crystal tumbler and eyed her over the top of it.

  “A body was found, yes,” he said, his tone cool. “It was said to be the princess’s, but then, the entire royal family was identified by members of the very military who had ousted them. There is no telling who lies in those graves. But until now, aside from a few conspiracy theorists in dark corners of the internet, no one had any reason to doubt it was exactly who General Estes’s government said it was.”

  “So in this conspiracy theory, the king and queen are alive, too?” Maggy did nothing to keep that scoffing note out of her voice. “And, what—are currently wandering around aimlessly, disguised as homeless people in Topeka?”

  His regal brow rose in affronted astonishment. Or whatever the kingly version of that was, and what pricked at Maggy was that she felt that, too. Everywhere, as if his expression was specially calibrated to work inside her like a flush of heat. She shoved that weirdness aside.

  “Topeka?” he echoed. As if she’d said chlamydia.

  “It’s a city. In Kansas.”

  Reza blinked. Very slowly. She understood that it was deliberate. It was how he indicated his displeasure. That, too, made her feel entirely too warm.

  “And Kansas is one of your states, is it not?”

  She practiced her smile. “Do you need me to give you a geography lesson?”

  He didn’t quite sigh. He seemed to grow taller and stormier at the same time, and somehow more formidable. He was wearing a dark suit that was unlike any suit she’d ever seen a man wear in her life. Calling it a suit seemed like an insult. It was molded to his tall, solid form, doing things to his broad shoulders and making it impossible to look away from all his lean, hard m
uscles and the planes of his well-cut chest.

  “I understand that I must treat you as I would any stray, wild creature I happened upon,” he said, almost musingly, his voice calm and light, though his hard gaze gleamed silver. “Your instinct is to bite first. It is no doubt how you survived this ordeal unscathed.”

  His gaze swept over her, from the top of her head where she’d clipped back her hair in what even she knew was a sad attempt at the sort of hairstyles she’d seen the queen wearing in those pictures to her shoes, which were the black stiletto heels she’d been required to wear during her brief tenure as a cocktail waitress last year. His gaze rose again, taking in every detail of her stretchy little black dress and making her feel as if she was stripped naked, before he found her gaze again.

  “Relatively unscathed, that is,” he amended.

  And that was a different kind of heat then. The scorching reaction to the way he looked at her and then the slap of the insult. Maggy hated both versions. She had to order herself not to clench her fists. Not because she didn’t want to hit him; she did. But because she didn’t want him to have the slightest idea how much he got to her.

  She had no idea how or why she knew that would be the death of her. Only that it would. And that she had to do whatever she could to avoid it.

  “Two things,” she managed to say, keeping the various rioting factions inside of her at bay and her voice as chilly as the winter night pressing against the windows. “First, I’m not a raccoon. It might surprise you to learn that I don’t really like being compared to one. And second, is an insult called something different when it comes out of the mouth of a king?”

  His mouth pressed into a hard line, and he set his glass down on the bar with a sharp click. He crossed the room in an easy step or two, which wasn’t an improvement because then he was right there. Too solid. Too tall. And much too close.