by Dani Collins
“What?” Fernanda had had the gall to cast it as a good thing. “She’ll be happy. Mummy sold it all to the prince. We’ll all be out of your hair by next weekend. You should be happy, Sopi.”
Sopi had been utterly speechless, standing there in shock as the prince arrived and everyone stared. She had moved on autopilot, only feeling reality hit her as they reached the table. Instead of holding a chair for their guest the way she would as a hostess, the prince’s assistant, Gerard, had moved behind her and held her chair.
It had been so unexpected, it had knocked her out of her stasis and into a plummeting realization that everything had changed. The one dream she had clung to was gone. The only home she had ever known would never be hers.
The nascent fantasy she had had that a prince—a damned royal prince—might see something in her beyond a penniless chambermaid had burst like a bubble, leaving her coated in a residue of disillusion and humiliation.
Slamming into her cabin, she kicked off her shoes. Hard. So that one dented a cardboard box and the other went flying toward the bathroom door.
She wrenched at the dress she’d bought with him in mind. It was meant to be pulled on gently to retain the shape and prevent snags in the delicate knit. She dragged roughly at it. Tried to tear it because she hated it. She yanked it off and dropped it where she stood and wiped her feet on it. She was panting and shaking, still trying to catch her breath after her sprint through the snow-laden trees, filled with an endless supply of hate.
With a final twist of her foot, she flicked it to the side and shoved at a stack of boxes, freshly delivered this afternoon and left for her to move to a more convenient location. Everything was always left to her to do, and she was sick of it. She shoved the stack even harder, so it fell with a tumble.
The crash wasn’t nearly as satisfying as she had hoped, especially when it was followed by a loud stomp of a heavy foot leaping onto her stoop. The door flung open to let in a burst of cold air that swirled like a demon around her nearly naked body.
Him. The instrument of her ruin.
“Bastard,” she muttered and turned away to take her narrow stairs two at a time.
Below her, she heard the door click closed. She glanced down from the loft and gripped the rail with humiliated rage as she watched him take in the clutter and the mess of boxes. He picked up her dress and gave it a light shake.
“Come right in,” she said scathingly. “Act like you own the place.”
He lifted his gaze, and she instantly felt naked. Not just physically, which she mostly was, but as though she was utterly transparent. As if he could see through her sarcasm to those puerile fantasies she’d spun in her head. It was so agonizing to be seen this way, she had to hold back a sob and turn away. She yanked out a drawer in her dresser, digging for jeans and a pullover. The stairs creaked as she stuck her legs into her jeans.
He appeared in the loft and flicked his gaze in harsh judgment of her used furniture and what she had always thought of as a cozy living space. As her turtleneck nearly choked her, and she yanked at her hair enough that it had some slack outside her collar, she saw the loft through his eyes and was mortified to realize it wasn’t humble. It was shabby.
Angry that he was seeing it and forcing her to see it, she said, “I was being facetious. What I really meant was get lost.”
What she really meant were two words she had never said to anyone, no matter how badly Nanette had ever baited her, but she was feeling them this evening. She really was.
He draped her dress over the footboard of her bed. “We’ll continue this discussion in my room.”
“Gosh, I would love to accommodate you, Your Highness, but I have to pack and find a place to live. Because if you think I’m going to work for you, you need to see a psychiatrist about your loose grasp on reality.”
“My people will pack for you. Socks,” he said, nodding at her bare feet.
“I’m not going anywhere with you.”
“Süsse, I will carry you out of here kicking and screaming if I have to. We are not talking here.”
“There is nothing wrong with the way I live.” Everything was wrong with it, but she would die on the hill of defending what was left of her home after the way he had treated her. “This is what a person has to do when they’re kicked around by people who have more power than they do.”
“I know that!” he shouted, then seemed to pull himself together with a flex of his shoulders and a clench of his jaw. “It reminds me of the way my brother and I lived when we were in exile. I hate it. I won’t stay here, but you and I will talk. Am I carrying you?”
Shaken by that completely unexpected admission, she only hesitated long enough for one brow to go up in a warning that he was dead serious.
She swallowed and told herself she was only cooperating because this was too small a space for the explosive emotions still detonating inside her and radiating off him. She found a balled-up pair of socks and sat on the top stair to put them on with her boots, aware of him looming over her the whole time.
“I don’t know what we could possibly have to say to one another,” she muttered.
“You will be surprised,” he promised in a dark vow. He followed her down the stairs and out the door.
His bodyguard flanked them as they crossed to the hotel and blocked anyone from joining their elevator.
Sopi refused to make eye contact with the wide stares that came at them from every level of the foyer.
“I forgot my phone,” she murmured as she realized her hands and pockets were empty.
“It will be retrieved.” He let her into his suite himself, waiting while the bodyguard moved through in a swift check of all the rooms. Rhys stationed the man outside his door with, “Only Gerard, and only if the place is burning to the ground.”
“Yes, sir.”
Rhys let out the sort of breath that expelled hours of tested patience.
Sopi hugged herself and moved to the window where she noted he had quite the view of naked women frolicking in the pool below.
“I was in here last week,” Sopi murmured. “Packing Nanette’s and Fernanda’s things to move them down the hall so you could have this suite. Except that’s not what I was doing, was I? You’ve all been cooking this for ages, and I just did the heavy lifting so they could be on their way faster.”
“If they’re still here in three hours, I’ll set them on the stoop myself.”
Taken aback, she realized that whatever fury she was nursing, he had plenty of his own. “If you’re so angry with them, why—”
He held up a hand to stop her, pausing in removing his suit jacket before finishing his shrug. He threw his jacket over the back of a chair and loosened his tie on the way to retrieving stapled documents from a stack on the desk.
He dropped one set onto the coffee table. “That’s a copy of the offer Maude accepted today.” Slap. “That’s the transfer of Cassiopeia’s into your name.”
CHAPTER FIVE
“WHAT?” STUNNED, SOPI stepped forward in shocked excitement, unable to believe it. She pulled up as she realized such a thing would have to come with conditions. Her excitement drained away. “Why?” she asked with dread, fearing she already knew.
His beard darkened where he bit the inside of his cheek. His irises glowed extra blue and laser sharp as he branded patterns on her skin with his gaze. “Last night, you asked me where this was going.”
“It’s not going anywhere. You made that perfectly clear when you didn’t come back to the pool afterward.” Her heart hammered in her chest.
“Nanette was loitering in the spa. I was protecting you by sending my bodyguard.”
“Sure you were,” she choked. “That’s also what you’re doing here, I guess?” She waved at the paperwork.
“I am,” he said in a voice so gritty it left her feeling abraded all over. “Nanette
knew I was with someone last night. I could have revealed you, but I wasn’t ready to. I wanted time to consider exactly how I would answer your question.”
“And this is your answer?” She was growing more appalled by the second. How did he manage to hurt her so easily? So deeply? Despite last night’s intimacy, they were still virtual strangers. He shouldn’t be able to impact her like this. “You went behind my back to cut a deal to buy my home?”
“I wanted to talk to you about it.” Her temper didn’t faze him. He stood as an indifferent presence, unrepentant and untouched. “You weren’t here. From now on, you’re not allowed to be angry with me for actions I take if you don’t show up to hear my side of it before I take them.”
“Wow. Sure,” she agreed, laying on the sarcasm with a trowel. “I will be sure to never be angry with you in future when I never see you again.”
“Dial back the histrionics. We have a lot to cover, and you don’t want to peak too early.”
Her blood boiled. She shot her arms down straight at her sides, hands in tight, impotent fists.
“I have a right to be angry, Rhys! You bought property stolen from me.” She jabbed at her chest. “Now you want to gift it to me like you’re doing me a favor—” Her voice caught, but she forced out the rest, each word like powdered glass in the back of her throat. “But I expect you want favors in return, don’t you? Virginity is quite the precious commodity these days, isn’t it? You make me sick!”
She turned to wrench at the door latch, but he was on top of her, surrounding her and catching her hand in a firm but strangely gentle grip as he caged her. His deep, velvety voice growled into her hair, causing tickles against her ear that made goose bumps rise on her nape.
“It’s a wedding gift.”
“To who!” She tried to shove her elbow into his gut.
“You.” He spun her and pinned her to the door. “Now settle down before my bodyguard bursts in here and I have to kill him for trying to touch you again.”
“You really have lost half the cards from your deck. I’m not marrying you.” She pressed her forearms against his chest, forcing space between them, so astounded she didn’t have the sense to be intimidated. “We’ve known each other two days. Why would you even suggest such a thing?”
“Because the gradual approach is not open to me.” His jaw clenched as he studied her flushed, angry expression.
She didn’t want to be aware of his heat and weight pressing into her, but she was. She really didn’t want to like it. She turned her face to the side, resisting and rejecting.
“You were going to come to my room last night. Weren’t you?” His voice was smoke and mirrors, casting a spell she had to work to resist.
“If you had come back to the pool and asked me yourself, I probably would have, yes.” She lifted her chin but winced internally as she admitted it, hating herself for that, too. “Were you planning to propose if I had?” she scoffed.
He backed off a fraction. “I wasn’t thinking much beyond how badly I wanted you in my bed.”
“That’s a no, then.” She gave him a firm nudge, but he was immovable.
“Everything changed while you were playing hide-and-seek this morning.”
“I was doing my job.” Her voice faded into a discouraged sob that rang in her chest as she realized she no longer had one of those.
He sighed and gave a comforting brush of his thumb against her jaw. “Maude was determined to sell the spa, Sopi. Someone else would have bought this property if I hadn’t. Be happy it was me.”
“You people need to quit telling me how to feel about this.” A burning ache of blame stayed hot in her throat.
“Don’t lump me in with your stepfamily,” he warned, not even flinching. He only grazed her cheekbone with his fingertips as he tucked a wisp of hair behind her ear. His voice changed. Gentled. “And hear what I’m saying. Your life would have toppled regardless. Whether you’re happy about it or not, I’m offering you a cushion. A velvet one. With gold tassels.”
His words, edged in irony, held a quiet finality that shook her to the core. Her world was shattered. All she had known had been upended and was sliding beyond her reach.
Her heart began to tremble and she pushed harder on his chest, freshly angry, but scared now, too. “Let me go.”
He waited a beat, then stepped back and dropped his hands to his sides, watchful.
She hugged herself, moving into the room to put space between them so she could think, but she remained too anxious and confused to make sense of any of this. Marriage? Really?
“I’ve always thought that if I were to marry, it would be to someone I love. Someone I trust. I’m not going to marry to get a thing. Especially not to get something that should already be mine.”
“I wanted you to be here while I negotiated with Maude.” He sounded brisk but tired as he moved to the bar and poured two glasses from a bottle of whiskey that was already open. “If it were up to me, I would have hired the lawyers you needed to fight Maude, taken a partnership in the business in exchange, but there was no time. Plus, all of my business dealings are scrutinized. I can’t foot the bill on a stranger’s legal fight—or gift a hotel to a woman with whom I am having an affair—without causing a lot of questions to be asked. Buying this property as a present for my future wife, however...”
She shook her head, unable to take in that he really meant that.
Nevertheless, a distant part of her was processing that she would finally be the boss here. All her friends would have secure jobs. That was as important for the village as for the spa. She grew dizzy with excitement at the prospect.
But why her?
“Is this like a green-card thing or something?” she managed to ask. “Would it be a fake marriage?”
He snorted as he came across with the glasses. “Not at all.”
“You’re genuinely asking me to marry you. And if I do, you’ll give me this hotel and spa, all the property and rights to the aquifer. Everything,” she clarified.
“If you’ll live in Verina with me and do what must be done to have my children, yes,” he said with a dark smile.
She was still shaking her head at the outrageous proposition but found herself pressing her free hand to her middle, trying to still the flutters of wicked anticipation that teased her with imaginings of how those babies would get made.
She veered her mind from such thoughts.
“Why? I mean, why me?” She lifted her gaze to his, catching a flash of sensual memories reflected in the hot blue of his irises.
“I’ve already told you. I want you in my bed.”
“And that’s it? Your fly has spoken? That’s the sum total of your motivation?”
His eyes narrowed, becoming flinty and enigmatic. “There are other reasons. I’ll share them with you, but they can’t leave this room.”
That took her aback. “What if I don’t want to carry your secrets?”
“You’re going to carry my name and my children. Of course you’ll keep my secrets. Would you like to tell me yours?” He regarded her over the rim of his glass as he sipped, as though waiting for her to tip her hand in some way.
She shrugged her confusion. “I’m not exactly mysterious,” she dismissed. “The most interesting thing that’s ever happened to me is happening right now. You realize how eccentric this sounds?”
“Eccentric or not, it’s a good offer. You should accept it before I change my mind.”
She snorted. “You’re quite ruthless, aren’t you?” She spoke conversationally but knew it as truth in her bones.
“I do what has to be done to get the results I want. You understand that sort of pragmatism, even if you’ve pointed your own efforts in dead-end directions. I look forward to seeing what you accomplish when you go after genuinely important goals.”
“This is my home. It’s impor
tant to me.”
“Then claim it.”
A choke of laughter came out of her. “Just like that? Accept your proposal and—” She glanced at the paperwork. “I’m not going to agree to anything before I’ve actually reviewed that offer.”
“Due diligence is always a sensible action,” he said with an ironic curl of his lip. He waved his glass toward the table, inviting her to sit and read.
Gingerly, she lowered onto the sofa and set aside her whiskey.
Rhys kept his back to her, gaze fixed across the valley as he continued to sip his drink, saying nothing as she flipped pages.
His behavior was the sort of thing a dominant wolf would do to indicate how little the antics of the lesser pack affected him, but she was glad not to have his unsettling attention aimed directly at her as she compared the two contracts. Aside from the exchange of money on Maude’s—and the fact that hers finalized on her wedding day—they were essentially the same.
“I want possession on our engagement. If I decide to accept your proposal,” she bluffed, fully expecting him to tell her to go to hell.
“Done. On condition we begin the making of our children on the day our engagement is announced.” He turned, and his eyes were lit with the knowledge his agreement had taken her aback. “We’ll keep the conception part as a handshake agreement. No need to write that down in black-and-white.”
He brought her a pen. His hand was steady as he offered it. Hers trembled as she hesitantly took it.
“Are you completely serious?” she asked.
“Make the change. Sign it. I’ll explain why I want you to marry me. You’ll accept my proposal, and Cassiopeia’s will be yours.”
Inexplicable tears came into her eyes. This was too much. Too fast.
“What if we get engaged and I back out?”
“I expect you to go into this with good faith, Sopi. I will.”