by Dani Collins
The revelation had been welcome and infuriating. He didn’t care for dishonest people, but his desire to see Trella had renewed itself. He had asked Angelique to pass along his contact details, wanting an explanation. Wanting something he refused to acknowledge, but...
Nothing.
Not one returned call, message or text.
What did it matter? He made himself get over her, focusing on more important things, primarily his duty to marry.
He had made a concerted effort to avoid all headlines containing the name Sauveterre, which wasn’t easy. First, the mysterious, reclusive Trella had come out at a friend’s wedding. That had kept the gossip industry booming through spring and summer, along with other news within the family, making it a challenge for him to change channels or flick screens fast enough to avoid catching sight of her.
Then, just as things seemed to have died down, she’d been caught climbing from her brother’s car looking less svelte than in previous photos. Pregnant, the avid Sauveterre watchers speculated.
So what if she was? It didn’t make a hill of beans difference to anyone’s life, least of all his.
Still, Xavier had looked closely at the photos that emerged, one showing her in a stunning maternity gown at her brother’s engagement party. She didn’t look very pregnant. She had said she was on the pill. If she was carrying his child, she would have returned his calls. He didn’t have anything to worry about, he assured himself.
This latest inflammatory sound bite was more of the same. Had to be. He had a walk-on part in the episodic drama that was the Sauveterre serial. He had slept with her one night. He resented being drawn into scandal for it. He was now engaged. That made besmirching his name unforgiveable. Immediately after allaying his grandmother’s concern, he would insist Trella clear him of involvement so he could reassure Patrizia their marriage plans could continue.
Damn it, he had completely forgotten about Patrizia. He paused to text.
I’ll have this cleared up shortly.
Their match was perfect in every way. Not only would it strengthen both of their countries, but they liked each other. Neither had unrealistic notions like love and passion to muddy the waters. She was nursing a bruised heart and was keen for a stable, reliable situation. A civilized relationship, she kept calling it.
He was pleased to perform his duty in a way he could stand. Patrizia was intelligent, attractive, well-bred. She would have children for the same reason he would: They were expected to. They respected one another. They were on the same page.
He wanted this marriage.
Mario paused with him and knocked, then announced him.
His grandmother didn’t rise as Xavier entered. She didn’t even look up from whatever she was writing with her antique silver pen. The crackle in the fireplace became the only sound along with the scratch of her pen.
He took the bull by the horns. “I’ll refute it and press charges against the source.”
The pen went down and she peered at him over her glasses. She was a well-preserved seventy, her eyes were the same Deunoro blue as his own, her hair more iron than silver. She was overdue to start her morning audiences, which always made her salty.
“The Queen Mother of Zhamair is the source.”
Xavier’s PA had also pointed out that the story had stemmed from Angelique’s soon-to-be mother-in-law. “I haven’t had a chance to confirm that. If she made a statement, I’m sure it’s in reaction to some online nonsense.”
“She is reacting, I am informed, to remarks made about her son and his fiancée. She wanted to set the record straight that Angelique was not the woman kissing you in the photos that emerged some months ago from Paris. Angelique has always been faithful to King Kasim. Is that true?”
“I couldn’t say whether she’s been faithful, but I’m told I was with Trella.”
“You were told?”
“They’re twins.” He shrugged, not bothering to feel awkward discussing his sex life with his grandmother. She had had “The Talk” with him herself when he was an adolescent, explaining in no uncertain terms that royalty did not produce bastards and had offered explicit tips on how to prevent such a thing.
“That particular twin is pregnant.” She used her most imperious tone. “A source intimately connected to her family has stated you were with her at an appropriate time for conception. Did you take precautions?”
“Of course.”
The condom broke. Are you on the pill?
Yes.
“She would have told me if there were consequences.” Tension gathered in the pit of his gut. He didn’t know which one of them he was trying to convince. “Any woman who sets out to trap a man does not hide it for six months. Even if it was an accident, there’s no reason to keep it from me. She might be pregnant, but it’s not mine.”
Her brows went up in regal disdain. “Perhaps you should confirm that.”
As if that hadn’t occurred to him? “Of course,” he said. Dutifully.
“Because it would be a shame if this were to cause any delay in our schedule.” She intended to step down the minute he was married. To Patrizia.
“Understood.”
* * *
It was hot in Innsbruck, despite the elevation and the calendar showing the last days of summer. But maybe the heat was caused by this extra human she was carrying.
Trella lifted her face into the gentle breeze, enjoying the sweet scent of it. She was six months along and felt it, even though she wasn’t showing much. Her mother had possessed the same tall, model-slender figure and had barely shown with twins until the very end. This was only one and with the right clothes, she barely looked pregnant.
She needed that ambiguity. Prince Xavier’s texts had devolved to the two-word kind.
Call me.
She had ignored the latest, received this morning, exactly as she’d ignored every other text and call she’d received from him, the first immediately after he’d met Angelique in Berlin, and most recently after she’d been exposed by her sister’s soon-to-be mother-in-law as the twin in his arms at the ball in Paris.
She had her reasons. That’s what she kept telling herself, even though it was pure emotion that drove her and that emotion was cowardice.
“They’re blocked by a service vehicle,” her guard, Benita, said of their car, lifting her gaze from her phone to continue her scan of the street. “Let’s wait inside.”
Benita was as tall as Trella and had a mannish demeanor when she was on the job. No nonsense, no makeup, hair scraped into a bun, communications terse.
Trella didn’t mind. She wasn’t the most cooperative principal. To her occasional chagrin, she was a high maintenance person in every way. Acknowledging that about herself didn’t stop her from saying, “I’d rather stay out here.”
The day was gorgeous and she would be on bed rest soon. She wanted to enjoy the outside world while she could.
“Killian said—”
“I know. Take extra precautions.” She scoffed at a lot of things, but not security reports. “I spoke to Sadiq. He’s the one who discovered the hack and restored all the firewalls. No one even knows I’m here.”
Except the handful of people inside the building who had just taken selfies with her. They were no doubt posting those as she spoke. She was a celebrity, whether she liked it or not. It was only a matter of minutes before lookie-loos began pulling over, wanting their own photo with a Sauveterre, especially the elusive pregnant one.
“My gut doesn’t like it.”
“Because Killian trains you to be overprotective.”
Benita had tried to cancel this trip as soon as the security bulletin had come through. Trella wasn’t sure why she had insisted on making what amounted to a house call for a joint venture she wasn’t sure she would pursue, but she had.
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Ah, she knew why she had come. For starters, her sister had been doing this kind of thing on her behalf for years. It was yet another burden she had placed on her twin and it was her turn to pay it back, now that Angelique was starting her life with Kasim.
Oh, her sister was in love. It was as majestic a sight to behold as the timeless sparkling peaks around them. Trella was deeply happy for her, but so very envious.
Her gaze tracked to the sharpest, highest peaks to the south. To Elazar.
Was he texting from inside that border, sitting in his palace office, cursing her for ignoring him?
A flutter in her midsection had her resisting the urge to press her hand across her belly. She didn’t like to draw attention to her pregnancy when she was in public. Besides, it wasn’t the baby that caused that stir in her middle. It was a complex mix of emotions.
She wanted to tell him she was grateful. She wanted to see him again, to discover if the magical connection she’d felt in Paris had been real or just a product of an exciting foray into independence. She wanted him to know they were expecting a baby.
She also wanted to hold their night in her memory as the ideal that it was. She didn’t want the harsh fallout she would have to face once she acknowledged this baby as his. Most of all, she didn’t want to be a burden on a man who had seemed too perfect to want anything to do with someone as flawed as she was.
Her expected black sedan with its darkened windows slid up to the curb.
“There. See?” Trella said, even as she noted a man approaching in her periphery.
“That’s not—” Benita’s voice cut off.
Perhaps Trella went deaf at that moment because nothing penetrated beyond the fact that the back door opened and the Prince of Elazar rose from the interior.
He was as remarkable as she remembered. Like a knight of legend, his hair shot with glints of gold, his visage sharp and stern, his air one of heroic power. He was so godlike, she couldn’t move. She was too mesmerized.
Then reality rushed in as a scuffling noise and a grunt penetrated. She swung her gaze to see Benita in a fight. A fight. With a man. He tried to twist Benita’s arm behind her back as she bent forward, trying to use leverage to flip him.
Training, the kind Trella had attended to daily until pregnancy had sent her into yoga and water aerobics, jolted her into action. As Benita’s attacker pulled back his weight, dragging Benita off her feet, Trella stepped in and nailed him with a solid, knuckle-bruising punch, right in the nose.
The man grunted and Benita twisted, nearly escaping.
“What the hell are you doing?” That accent. Strong hands grasped her upper arms and pulled her away from the struggling pair.
Trella turned into him, stomach flip-flopping in response as she felt his solid abdomen against her bump. Adrenaline coursed through her, but she only felt reassurance as he drew her protectively close. Her gaze stayed over her shoulder, fixed on the fight, which seemed to be more of a wrestle for dominance. A bloody nose wasn’t slowing down the man and Benita wasn’t giving up, biting out in Spanish, “Run.”
“Help her—Wait. What are you doing?” Trella cried as she realized she was being shoved into the back of the car.
Xavier easily overpowered her, pushing her in and following without ceremony.
She was so shocked that it took her a moment to resist. By then his big body had created a wall of shoulders and chest that were impossible to get past.
Before she could touch the door on her side, he pulled his own closed and the locks clicked. The car pulled away, leaving her guard scrapping on the sidewalk with a brute whose shirt was the same color as both men in the front of this car.
Far too late, she realized what was happening.
She was being kidnapped. Again.
CHAPTER FOUR
“STOP THIS CAR. NOW.”
Xavier respected her ability to sound so authoritative, but he ignored her and opened the privacy window long enough to accept an ice pack from his physician, Gunter, then tapped the button to close it.
“Hello, Trella. Have I got that right?” He knew he had the right one. It was impossible to explain, but the minute he had seen her, he had known.
He pushed aside the ridiculous high that rocketed through him as he finally had her alone and held out his palm. He wiggled his fingers, urging her to release the pendant she was pinching and let him examine her hand.
“What were you thinking, getting involved in that?” The mix of rage and fear he’d experienced at seeing her step into the fight was reflected in his tone. Even if she wasn’t pregnant, it would have been a foolhardy, dangerous thing to do.
But she was pregnant. There was no denying it. The narrow waist he’d held in the crook of his arm had thickened with an undeniable bump. Her breasts...
He dragged his gaze up, refusing to let fantasies sidetrack him, but her features were a distraction all on their own. Her face was rounder, her mouth lush and pouted. The urge to kiss her struck him with a fierce pull.
Damn it, what was it about her?
He met her glare with his own, thinking that he would have sworn her eyes were green, but they were steely. Bright as a cornered cat refusing to stay that way.
“I thought I was preventing myself from being kidnapped. Once again, I have trusted the wrong person.” Her unpainted lips seemed bloodless, which gave him a moment of pause, but too much of his life had been set off balance by her. He wanted answers. Today.
“It’s not a kidnapping.” He set the ice pack near her thigh. “It’s an improvised meeting to discuss mutual business, so drop your pendant. I know it’s a tracking device. Your guard won’t be harmed, only delayed. Your car can’t chase us. It’s still blocked.”
“Which sounds a lot like a kidnapping.” A harsh ringtone emanated from her purse. “That’s for you.” She pulled out her phone and used her thumbprint to accept the call then handed it to Xavier. Her hand might have trembled.
Desperate times called for desperate measures, he’d told himself when he’d concocted this intervention. As he picked up on Trella’s shaken nerves, he wondered if he was using a sledgehammer to kill a fly. It hadn’t occurred to him she might be anything but angry at having her timetable interrupted. He couldn’t be happier if he inconvenienced the hell out of her. He was beyond incensed at the way she was impacting his life without any attempt to mitigate it.
Explaining that would have to wait. He’d been warned to expect this video call. He took the phone and met the formidable expression of a man who resembled Trella. Henri, Xavier suspected, since the other brother was in Brazil.
“Your demands?” Henri asked without greeting.
“A blood sample for a DNA test.”
Trella made a strangled noise. “Like hell.”
He glanced at her. “I would accept her word as to whether she’s carrying my heir, but she’s lied to me more than once already.”
Xavier willed her to lash out with denials of his paternity. With an explanation. An apology.
She hitched her chin and turned her face to the window.
“Return her to where you took her. I’ll see what I can do about the blood test.”
“You can’t even get her to return a call. I can’t wait any longer.”
Trella’s silence was gut-knottingly damning. Whatever lingering favor he had felt toward her went ashen and bitter. A jagged lump hardened in his throat. He swallowed it, but the acrimony only moved to burn as a hot knot behind his collarbone. Each minute that she failed to deny his paternity was a tiny, incremental progression toward accepting what he had been refusing to believe. What he still didn’t want to believe.
“I have your coordinates,” Henri said, dragging Xavier back from staring at the woman who was ruining his life. “A team has been dispatched. We don’t n
eed an incident. Return her to Innsbruck.”
“If you’re tracking us, you know we’ll be in Elazar soon.” Xavier leaned toward the window to see a helicopter chasing from the distance. “I’ll close the borders if I have to, but she’s perfectly safe, especially if that’s our future monarch inside her. Stand down from trying to stop us.”
“Unless my sister gives me her safe word, this escalates.”
Xavier handed her the phone. “Your move, bella.”
She flashed him a sharp glance then looked at her brother.
“We’re coming,” Henri said.
“I know.” She nodded, pale and grave, then said, “Begonia.”
“Vous êtes certain?”
“Sí.”
“That’s tomorrow’s word,” Xavier said.
She shot him a startled frown.
He shrugged. “I do my homework.”
“Then you’ll know I’m buying you twenty-four hours.” She turned back to her phone, expression haughty. “I’m sure Killian knows by now who hacked him. Ask him to drop a virus into the Elazar palace networks, won’t you?”
“Killian has Elazar’s Minister of Foreign Affairs on the phone, along with a more aggressive team assembled.”
Xavier suspected that remark was more for his benefit.
“Gracias. Tell him I’ll handle it.”
“Will you?”
A leaden silence followed where she only gave her brother a tight-lipped look.
Xavier wondered if others were also frustrated by the avoidance game she had been playing.
“Bien,” Henri said. “If I don’t hear from you every hour, your prince may expect a gun against his temple. Je t’aime.”
“Te amo.” She ended the call and slipped her phone back into her purse, then folded her hands into her lap. “Why did you say I lied to you more than once?”
Xavier admired the way she attempted to take control of the conversation, but he was not prepared to give her any concessions until he had what he wanted.
“Why did you speak Spanish and he, French? Was it code?”
“Habit.”