Prince's Son of Scandal

by Dani Collins

  The residual depression of an attack hovered like a cloud, though, along with profound loss as she accepted she and Xavier would never be. It had been a serious trip to hell and back, but she was back. That was something, she reassured herself. She had proved to herself she could not only grit her way through an episode, but that it wouldn’t actually kill her.

  Where was Tyrol? She checked her phone and saw Gerta had replied.

  The Prince is with the Prince.

  Xavier had had more meetings today. Was Tyrol sick?

  She tugged a robe over her nightgown and yanked open her door—to find Xavier slouched in an armchair, clothes rumpled, eyelids heavy. Tyrol was fast asleep on his shoulder. It was such a tender scene, it pushed tears into the backs of her eyes.

  “Is he okay?” She gently gathered the sleeping baby into her arms.

  “Missing you, but otherwise fine. He just ate. That’s purely for show,” he added as Tyrol began to stir and fuss at the sound of her voice.

  She sat to feed him, but Xavier was right. Tyrol nodded off before he’d taken more than a few gulps and she cuddled him instead. Oh, he smelled good and his skin was so soft. His hair was fine against her lips and his grip on her finger, endearing.

  I’ll always come back to you, my sweet, sweet boy. She had thought about him a lot last night. She had thought about Xavier and how delusional she had been, ever thinking she could be his queen when she had this awful shortcoming.

  Fresh agony washed over her.

  When she couldn’t avoid it any longer, she looked at where Xavier hadn’t moved.

  “Was it a rough night?” she asked.

  “For him? Not particularly. For me? Yes.”

  With a lurch in her heart, she noticed the glass on the table beside him. “Are you hungover?”

  “No. I poured it, then thought I’d prefer to be sober if you decided you needed me.”

  “Were you worried? I’m sorry.”

  He snorted and reached for the glass. “Now, she’s sorry.” He made a face at his first sip and clunked the glass back onto the table. “Mostly water now. How was your night?”

  “Awful.”

  He nodded in grim agreement.

  “Why are you angry? Xavier—”

  “I’m not angry.” He shot to his feet, though, and paced a few steps only to turn back abruptly. “I am angry. I respected your wishes because fine, I accept that you had to feel you could get through an attack alone. But I have issues, too. Because of you. You ignored my texts for months before you admitted you were pregnant. Then you locked me out of a delivery room while you flatlined. We’ve been apart more than we’ve been together. You damned well need to stay accessible to me. I need to know you’re alive, even if you’re not at your best.”

  That was the problem. Sometimes she was at her absolute worst.

  And she really wasn’t up for a scolding over it. Or facing how she was supposed to be accessible from across the city. Much as she had given his grandmother a show of bravado, that’s all it had been. She couldn’t be his wife. She knew that now and it hurt so badly; she had to escape to hide how anguished she was.

  “I want to shower. Can you take him and order breakfast?”

  He said nothing as she handed him Tyrol again.

  Swallowing, heavy with a melancholy that would never lift, she went back to her room and started the shower, blinking hot eyes as she did. She wasn’t ready. If she hadn’t had that stupid attack, if they hadn’t had that big fight yesterday, they could still play alternate universe a few more days. Why had she shortchanged them like that?

  She stepped under the spray and turned to see Xavier had come in behind her.

  “Where’s Tyrol?”

  “Nursery.” He peeled off his clothes, dropping them to the floor as the glass walls gathered steam.

  “What are you doing?”

  “What does it look like?” He opened the door and came in, crowding beneath the head that rained from the ceiling.

  They’d showered together before, daily, but that was before.

  “Xavier, I can’t.” Her heart was too tender, still pulling at all its old fractured lines and itching from fresh stitches.

  “What did I just say about locking me out?” He cupped her wet head and planted a single kiss on her mouth, hot and possessive. Oddly tender.

  She moaned and ducked her face as soon as he let her, tucking her forehead into his collarbone. Her vision filled with the golden skin she loved, taut and smooth over hard muscles. He was growing aroused, which always excited her.

  “You know we’re just putting off the inevitable. You were right all along,” she muttered.

  “You’re staying here. We’re staying married.”

  For a couple of heartbeats, she thought she’d imagined it, then she jerked back her head and looked at his implacable expression. The wetness in her clenched eyes wasn’t from the water raining on her face.

  “The future king decrees it? We both know I’m not a suitable queen.”

  “You are.”

  “You saw me last night!”

  “And I see you this morning, having survived it. That’s who and what you are, bella. You survive. You push through hardship to come out the other side, bruised maybe, but you make it. You don’t give up on yourself, you would never give up on Tyrol and I won’t let you give up on us.”

  Her mouth trembled. “If you loved me—”

  He made a noise of imprecation. “If? If?” His hands cupped her face again. “You put a spell on me the first time we met. You gave me a son and helped me kick-start my heart so I could give him the love he deserves. Of course I love you, you infernal woman. How the hell else are we here?”

  “You don’t have to yell about it. What about Patrizia?”

  “Are you seriously worried about a woman you have never met? You’ve ruined her life, bella. Just as you have ruined mine. But you won’t feel bad about it because you’ve saved us both from a terrible mistake.”

  “Tyrol did. Lay the blame where it belongs.”

  “I thought I just did. God, I love you.” He kissed her and this time he meant it, fusing his mouth to hers and letting her taste his desperation.

  She grasped his wrists and pulled away, gasping, trying to speak from soul to soul. “Do you mean it? Because I don’t think you understand how much it means to me that you can accept me, with all my breaks and imperfections. Don’t say it unless it’s true.”

  “You are flawed. You’re unpredictable and defiant and shameless. You’re also brave and creative and you love with everything in you. If you can rise out of your past and risk your heart, what kind of coward would I be if I refused to do the same? I’m privileged to be one of the people you love, Trella. I know what an exclusive club it is.”

  They kissed again and this time they didn’t stop. The water rained down, washing away any ghosts that lingered, leaving only the love they had for each other.

  Her body melted against his and she found herself pressed into the wall by his flexing muscles.

  “Mine,” he growled, kissing and licking at her neck and shoulders, across her breasts then between them. “There is no more locking yourself away. Understand? Not from me.” The kisses continued, down her arms, across her hips.

  She needed this doting attention. This all-consuming passion from him. It soothed and healed and made her feel cherished. By the time he knelt and hitched her thigh onto his shoulder, she was nearly weeping at the sweetness of him pouring such love all over her.

  Her stomach jumped in reaction at the way he claimed her. He pleasured her until she was delirious, crying out with abandon. Then he stood and took her where she was, against the hard tiles, naked and slick as he drove into her, hard and deep. It was lust and bonding and naked unabashed love. When th
e climax came, they were in it together, trying to meld their slippery bodies into one being so they could never be separated again.

  Then they leaned there, panting and wrung out, the water cooling, barely able to find the strength to get to the bed. They fell asleep in each other’s arms, waking to make love again without the frantic pace driving them.

  “We have time, bella. All our lives,” he murmured, rocking lazily within her.

  She released a shaken sigh, combing her fingers through his hair and was astonished at the lightness in her. The breadth of view. Years and years to come of this.

  “I love you. You’re the only man who could have given me this.”

  “You’re the only woman I want or need. The only woman I could love so much.”

  Later that evening, he placed his rings on her finger as they dressed for dinner. The Queen wasn’t one for making apologies, either, but she invited them to dine with her and suggested Xavier take his son and wife to Spain the day after Christmas if it was something Trella wanted.

  It was, he did and it was wonderful.

  EPILOGUE

  Press release five years later...

  Inconceivable Twins!

  The Deunoro Palace surprised the world today by announcing that King Xavier and Queen Trella are celebrating the arrival of their daughter, Vivien.

  Queen Trella’s sister, Queen Angelique of Zhamair, also celebrates with her husband King Kasim the arrival of their third child, and first daughter, Genevieve.

  While it was widely reported that Queen Angelique was carrying twins, it has now been revealed that, with the help of the world-renowned fertility clinic in Lirona, Queen Angelique was implanted with one egg from each set of parents.

  Mother and babies are in excellent health.

  The Queens’ brothers, Henri and Ramon Sauveterre, were on hand with their own growing families to welcome this latest and most unusual pair of Sauveterre twins.

  * * * * *

  If you enjoyed PRINCE’S SON OF SCANDAL

  why not explore the first three parts of Dani Collins’s THE SAUVETERRE SIBLINGS quartet?

  PURSUED BY THE DESERT PRINCE

  HIS MISTRESS WITH TWO SECRETS

  BOUND BY THE MILLIONAIRE’S RING

  Available now!

  Keep reading for an excerpt from A BABY TO BIND HIS BRIDE by Caitlin Crews.

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  A Baby to Bind His Bride

  by Caitlin Crews

  CHAPTER ONE

  “THEY CALL HIM the Count,” the gruff man told her as he led her deeper and deeper into the wild, wearing more flannel and plaid than Susannah Betancur had ever seen on a single person. “Never a name, always the Count. But they treat him like a god.”

  “An actual god or a pretend god?” Susannah asked, as if that would make any difference. If the Count was the man she sought, it certainly wouldn’t.

  Her guide shot her a look. “Not sure it really matters this far up the side of a hill, ma’am.”

  The hill they were trudging up was more properly a mountain, to Susannah’s way of thinking, but then, everything in the American Rockies appeared to be built on a grand scale. Her impression of the Wild, Wild West was that it was an endless sprawl of jaw-dropping mountains bedecked with evergreens and quaint place names, as if the towering splendor in every direction could be contained by calling the highest peak around something like Little Summit.

  “How droll,” Susannah muttered beneath her breath as she dug in and tried her best not to topple down the way she’d come. Or give in to what she thought was the high elevation, making her feel a little bit light-headed.

  That she was also breathless went without saying.

  Her friend in flannel had driven as far as he could on what passed for a road out in the remote Idaho wilderness. It was more properly a rutted, muddy dirt track that had wound deeper and deeper into the thick woods even as the sharp incline clearly indicated that they were going higher and higher at the same time. Then he’d stopped, long after Susannah had resigned herself to that lurching and bouncing lasting forever, or at least until it jostled her into a thousand tiny little jet-lagged pieces. Her driver had then indicated they needed to walk the rest of the way to what he called the compound, and little as Susannah had wanted to do anything of the kind after flying all the way here from the far more settled and civilized hills of her home on the other side of the world in Rome, she’d followed along.

  Because Susannah might not be a particularly avid hiker. But she was the Widow Betancur, whether she liked it or not. She had no choice but to see this through.

  She concentrated on putting one booted foot in front of the other now, well aware that her clothes were not exactly suited to an adventure in the great outdoors. It hadn’t occurred to her that she’d actually be in the wilderness instead of merely adjacent to it. Unlike every person she’d seen since the Betancur private jet had landed on an airfield in the middle of nowhere, Susannah wore head-to-toe black to announce her state of permanent mourning at a glance. It was her custom. Today it was a sleek cashmere coat over a winter dress in merino wool and deceptively sturdy knee-high boots, because she’d expected the cold, just not the forced march to go along with it.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to change?” her guide had asked her. They’d stared each other down in his ramshackle little cabin standing at lopsided attention in an overgrown field strewn with various auto parts. It had made her security detail twitchy. It had been his office, presumably. “Something less...?”

  “Less?” Susannah had echoed as if she failed to catch his meaning, lifting a brow in an approximation of the ruthless husband she’d lost.

  “There’s no real road in,” her guide had replied, eyeing her as if he expected her to wilt before him at that news. As if a mountain man or even the Rocky Mountains themselves, however challenging, could compare to the intrigues of her own complicated life and the multinational Betancur Corporation that had been in her control, at least nominally, these last few years, because she’d refused to let the rest of them win—her family and her late husband’s family and the entire board that had been so sure they could steamroll right over her. “It’s off the grid in the sense it’s, you know. Rough. You might want to dress for the elements.”

  Susannah had politely demurred. She wore only black in public and had done so ever since the funeral, because she held the dubious distinction of bein
g the very young widow of one of the richest men in the world. She found that relentless black broadcast the right message about her intention to remain in mourning indefinitely, no matter what designs her conspiring parents and in-laws, or anyone else, had on her at any given time.

  She intended to remain the Widow Betancur for a very long while. No new husbands to take the reins and take control, no matter how hard she was pushed from all sides to remarry.

  If it was up to her she’d wear black forever, because her widowhood kept her free.

  Unless, that was, Leonidas Cristiano Betancur hadn’t actually died four years ago in that plane crash, which was exactly what Susannah had hauled herself across the planet to find out.

  Leonidas had been headed out to a remote ranch in this same wilderness for a meeting with some potential investors into one of his pet projects when his small plane had gone down in these acres and acres of near-impenetrable national forest. No bodies had ever been found, but the authorities had been convinced that the explosion had burned so hot that all evidence had been incinerated.

  Susannah was less convinced. Or maybe it was more accurate to say that she’d been increasingly more convinced over time that what had happened to her husband—on their wedding night, no less—had not been any accident.

  That had led to years of deploying private investigators and poring over grainy photographs of dark, grim men who were never Leonidas. Years of playing Penelope games with her conniving parents and her equally scheming in-laws like she was something straight out of The Odyssey, pretending to be so distraught by Leonidas’s death that she couldn’t possibly bear so much as a conversation about whom she might marry next.

  When the truth was she was not distraught. She’d hardly known the older son of old family friends whom her parents had groomed her to marry so young. She’d harbored girlish fantasies, as anyone would have at that age, but Leonidas had dashed all of those when he’d patted her on the head at their wedding like she was a puppy and had then disappeared in the middle of their reception because business called.