by Holly Rayner
Giancarlo kept a protective arm around her as they walked inside, but as they crossed the threshold he relaxed visibly. This was home, she knew before he even told her. The palace might be the place where he had grown up, but this was where he lived now.
They got in the elevator and took it straight up to the top floor, Giancarlo having to put hold up a keycard to get the elevator to take them there. When the doors opened, Juliette saw why: the elevator opened directly into his living room.
It was luxurious, but not gaudy. Everything seemed planned and thoughtful in its layout. The sofas were rich Italian leather, and somehow managed to look comfortable without looking formless.
Giancarlo deposited her on one of them, and Juliette sighed in relief. Her exhaustion was beginning to get the better of her, and now she was safe from the frothing jaws of the media, the adrenaline was starting to wear off.
“Do you want something to drink? Tea, maybe?”
No servants here, she noticed. Not the way his father would have done it. But then, Giancarlo was very much not his father, and for that, she was glad.
“Some water would be nice.”
He brought it to her, and she downed the whole glassful, only realizing then how thirsty she’d been. Giancarlo sat down next to her on the sofa, and she lay in his lap without thinking about it. It felt like the most natural thing in the world—like they had been together for years and this was how they always sat.
“I’m so, so sorry,” Giancarlo said, after they’d had a moment to settle in.
Juliette shook her head. “It’s me who should be sorry; I didn’t know your mic was on.”
“No, don’t worry about that. I mean my father.”
Juliette saw it all again in her mind: the King and his henchmen; the uncomfortable chairs and the prop bottle of wine; the check and the clipboard. She shuddered. It all felt so sinister in retrospect.
“It’s not your fault,” she said softly. “He’s your father. You can’t predict what he’s going to do.”
“No,” he stroked her hair back from her face. “Maybe not exactly. But I know what he’s like. I should have seen it coming.”
She sighed. Part of her wanted to just forget all of that, but the rest of her knew that she couldn’t. They were going to have to face his father eventually, and Giancarlo needed to know what he’d done.
“He said that I was just the latest in a long line of women. He acted like you make a habit out of seducing girls like me.”
Giancarlo almost seemed amused by this. “If I made a habit out of getting attached to women who leave me, the way I’ve gotten attached to you, I wouldn’t be long for this world. No, there haven’t…there haven’t been other women like you. There are rumors. There are always rumors. But mostly, the press just likes a story.”
“So, no secret children of secret mothers who your father has paid off?”
He shook his head, slowly. “The relationships I’ve had have all ended on good terms—well, as much as they ever do. If I already had children, I’d definitely know about it.”
Juliette stared at the rich detailing on the painted ceiling. A relic from the original building, no doubt. She wondered how old it was.
“So, he just lied completely? But he knew…he knew details…”
“What you have to understand about my father,” Giancarlo said, “is that he will do absolutely anything in the world as long as he thinks he has a good reason for doing it. If he knew things about me, about how I— it’s because he found people to pay to tell him. He’s old-fashioned in the worst way and he’d do anything in his power to stop me having children with someone he considers to be “beneath” me. If he couldn’t do that, well, he’d stop at nothing to prevent the news getting out. The old fool cares more about bloodlines than people.”
She could hear the contempt in his voice as he spoke. It was justified, and in many ways Juliette felt the same. But still, she didn’t want to see Giancarlo consumed by his anger towards his own father.
“But you don’t feel that way, right?” she said hesitantly, reaching up and laying her palm on his cheek.
He smiled. “No, of course not, and I don’t care that the entire press of Italy found out at the same time as I did. I’ve never been happier in my life, Juliette. I thought that nothing could be better than you coming back to me and telling me you’d changed your mind. I was wrong.”
She saw him, now, for the man he was—the man she’d always thought he was. And his warmth, and kindness pulled her towards him, almost as though there was a string attached to her lips, pulling her up.
When their lips met, she felt the same excitement spreading through her body as she had felt that night when she thought his name was Nico and they were both simply adventurous trespassers. Only, this time, it was all the stronger for the fact that she knew who he was, and she knew that their life together was the only life she could have wanted.
She felt herself melting further into him with ever subtle movement of his lips on hers. She was losing herself, and all the things that she had thought worth of worrying about, in the quiet depths of his soul.
But then a loud sound cut through the air, and Juliette felt Giancarlo’s pocket vibrating against her chest.
“I don’t have to get it,” he mumbled, as he reached for the phone to silence it. But, when he saw the screen, his face dropped.
“What is it?” Juliette asked, fearing she already knew the answer.
“It’s him.”
“You have to answer it.”
Juliette said the words with sadness in her voice, but she knew they were true. As much as she resented the King, he was the father of the man she loved, and she knew they could only ignore him for so long. She could tell, from the way that Giancarlo was looking at the phone, that he knew it too.
But then, something changed.
“No,” Giancarlo said. “I don’t.”
Resolutely, he pressed the button to ignore the call, and tossed the phone on the sofa next to him.
Juliette felt Giancarlo take her chin with his hand, and gently direct her face back to his. He’d drawn close to her again, and she was struck by the little flecks of gold in his eyes. She hadn’t noticed those before. Would it always be this way, she wondered. Would there always be more precious surprises to discover about him? Would their child, when it came, have the same gold flecks in its eyes?
“Now,” Giancarlo said. “Where were we?”
Then he kissed her again, and she drank in the sweetness of his mouth. She could hear the buzz of the ignored phone on the sofa beside them. She drew back, just an inch, but it was too far for Giancarlo.
“Ignore it,” he said. “He has no place here. You and the baby, you are all that matters to me.”
Juliette sighed. She hadn’t realized how much she’d been longing to hear those words since she first discovered she was pregnant. Now that she’d heard them, she felt as though a mountain of stress and worry and pain had been lifted off her shoulders. Her lips curled upwards, and she leaned back forward to continue the kiss.
But the movement was interrupted by a loud, familiar voice calling out from the doorway.
“All that matters?”
As one, Giancarlo and Juliette snapped their eyes to the man standing by the elevator. Juliette hadn’t even heard the doors open, so distracted had she been by the sweetness of the Prince’s kiss. The old man’s phone was clenched in his hands, and he was staring daggers at Juliette.
Giancarlo stood, positioning himself in front of Juliette as though to protect her, but that couldn’t stop the words from coming through. The King spoke in quick, brusque Italian, and Juliette was amazed at how ugly he made a beautiful language sound.
“Are you stupid, boy? I thought you’d grown up. I thought you’d gotten this stupid habit of walking around, pretending to be a commoner, out of your system. I thought I was finally going to get the son I deserved—the son I was supposed to have. But no. You have to go and make a fool
of yourself in front of everyone. You have to be careless, and make a mockery of our family.”
Juliette saw Giancarlo’s fist clench at this, and she reached her hand out to take his, to try to soothe him.
“This is just like you. You forget how the world works. You wander around, pretending to be something you’re not, and think that means that you know how the common people are. But you don’t. You don’t know what their lives are like. You don’t know how they worry about things you’ve never had to worry about. You don’t know the choices they face.
“So how can you possibly know how far apart you are? How can you know that any love she has for you is any more than a love of your money? She can’t relate to you. She can’t share anything of her life with you. She sees you as a solution to a problem, and the problem is her life. You’re a checkbook to her, Giancarlo. That’s all.”
Juliette’s anger bloomed in her chest. She rose, wanting to answer the charges the King had just laid on her, but still Giancarlo stood between them as the King continued his tirade.
“And the worst part of all of it is that you don’t see it! Everyone else sees this little American student, desperately doing anything she can to get back into our country. Everyone else sees her generic clothes and her mediocre life and they all know that you’re just a way out of it. They know that the child is just a tool she’s using to climb out of her miserable existence.
“And everyone sees you falling for it! They all see you falling right into her little trap. How would they ever trust you to be king when you can’t see a con right in front of your face?”
The King was breathing heavily. Juliette could hear it, even from her position behind Giancarlo.
After a moment, she heard Giancarlo’s deep, steady voice ring out over the sound of his father’s haggard breath.
“Are you finished, Father?”
A long pause. Maybe he nodded. Juliette didn’t know or care. She was too focused on the man she had just discovered she loved, and what he was about to say. He spoke in English, she noticed. But the Italian rhythms she’d noticed in his English before were notably missing. He spoke like his words were holding back an ocean of anger, and the slightest disturbance might cause the levies to break.
“You’ve said a lot of things to me over my life, Father, and I always tried to listen. When I was a child, I thought you knew everything there was to know about being a king, and being a prince. I thought I would learn from you. I thought that if I could just be like you, then everything would take care of itself and the people would love me. But as I grew older, I grew to know that that wasn’t true. Do you know how I knew?”
He let the question hang in the air. When the King didn’t answer, he continued.
“I knew because they didn’t love you. They didn’t want you. They didn’t care about you. This isn’t the Middle Ages anymore. We don’t get any power from armies, or from divine right. We exist to please them, and remind them of traditions and bring a sense of continuity to their lives. We are for them. They aren’t for us.
“And that’s why I’ve gone out to try and get to know them. That’s why I show that I care about their children. Because I do. Because that is the part of being a prince that’s actually worth doing.
“But you don’t understand that, Father. You don’t understand any of it. And I’ve watched you get more and more jealous as you watched the people grow to love me. I’ve watched you spread rumors. I’ve watched you sit at my own table and insult me. And I’ve let you do it. Because you’re my father, and I thought it was my duty somehow. I thought you deserved respect. I even stayed in Italy, when I wanted to go see the world, because you demanded it, and I thought that if I just gave you want you wanted, eventually things would get better between us. But this…”
For a moment, his voice quivered, overcome with emotion. But he steadied it, and continued.
“This is too much. You go after the woman I love, and you tell her lies about me. The single greatest thing that has ever happened to me in my life, and you do all you can to try and ruin it. You tried to take my child from me.”
There was a long silence as the two men stared each other down. It was the King who broke it, finally, with a hollow bluster to his voice.
“I see you haven’t been listening to—”
“Enough!” the Prince broke in. “You are a trespasser here. This apartment belongs to me, and you are no longer welcome. I am here with the woman I love, celebrating the fact that we are going to become parents together. If you are not going to join in that celebration, it is time for you to go.”
The King looked as though his face had frozen in anger. The only movement Juliette could see was his jaw clenching and unclenching. And then, as though something had snapped, the man turned his back on the two of them. He pressed the button for the elevator, and the sound of the doors opening was the only thing breaking the tense silence of the room.
The King stepped into it and pressed the button. As the doors closed on him, his gaze caught Juliette’s, and a shiver ran down her spine at the look her gave her.
But then the doors closed, and he was gone. They were alone, again, at last.
SIXTEEN
Juliette’s arms flew around Giancarlo.
“I’m sorry you had to see that,” he said, but Juliette only laughed.
“I’m not sorry. I’m not sorry at all. That man is awful. I don’t care that he’s your father, and I don’t care that he’s the King. You see him for who he is. And, even though he’s all those things to you, you stood up to him.”
She could see the strain that standing up to his father had had on him. In the moment, he had been commanding, and had seemed like a man made of stone. But now, he looked exhausted by the effort.
“I’ve wanted to say those things to him for a long time,” he said. “But I’ve never had the courage to, before.”
Juliette looked up at him. “Why not?”
Now it was Giancarlo’s turn to laugh a little. “Because I didn’t have you to fight for.”
They sat back down on the sofa together, arms around one another. The tension of the moment was gone, and they were left in the aftermath, curled up in each other’s warmth.
“He’s taken a lot from me, over the years,” Giancarlo said, after a while. “He took my freedom. He took my options. But I couldn’t let him take away the right to be a father to my child. I wouldn’t let anyone take that.”
Juliette thought back to earlier that day. She’d compared two versions of Giancarlo, unsure which the real one was. But now, she saw that neither was the true him. The truth was that he was deeper than that—much more complicated than she could have seen during just one night together. She was going to enjoy finding out who he really was.
“No one will take it from you,” she said softly. “I shouldn’t have doubted you. I shouldn’t have thought there was a chance that anything he said was true. I—”
She would have continued, but at that moment she was distracted by a flash of light through the window.
“What is it?” Giancarlo asked, turning his head to see what she was looking at.
“It’s just the press,” he said, turning back to her. “They’re an unfortunate part of being with me, I’m afraid.”
He seemed regretful as he said it, and after the crush of people and the unwanted attention they’d received at the awards ceremony, Juliette understood why. She wanted to reassure him, but wasn’t sure how. She took a shot.
“If that’s the worst thing about being with you,” she said. “I think I can handle it.”
Giancarlo lifted up his hands, metaphorically weighing the options. “Being with a prince… having to deal with the press. Being with a prince… having to deal with the press.”
Juliette shook her head. “No, not a prince. You. A prince isn’t all you are, Giancarlo. Not to me.” She nodded her head towards the flashes of the cameras that were beginning to come more often, now. “Maybe to them.”
&nbs
p; Giancarlo turned, sliding his hand down Juliette’s arm until his hand clasped hers. Standing, he slowly led her forward, towards the apartment balcony.
“No, I’m even less than that to them. I’m just a story. And, if there’s an interesting story to be had, they’ll ignore that I’m human as well.”
When he stopped, a few feet from the door to the balcony, Juliette stepped forward so that she was close up behind him.
“I’ve heard people talk about it that way, but I’ve never really understood it. I think most think it’s something people sign up for when they get famous; just part of the package.”
Giancarlo looked at her from the side of his eyes, smirking. “What, when we choose to be born into royalty?”
She hung her head, and then leaned it into his shoulder. “Well, I guess we don’t factor in royalty.”