His Two Royal Secrets

by Caitlin Crews

  And when he finally set her down again, she had to bite her own tongue to keep from protesting.

  She wiped at her face, then looked around, and it took her longer than it should have to recognize that she was in a bathroom. A huge, suitably palatial bathroom, that was. If she wasn’t mistaken, he had taken her back to her own rooms.

  And she sat there, feeling limp and fragile with the force of her own feelings—none of which she could name—as the Crown Prince of Atilia filled her bath. She sat where he’d put her, there on the wide lip of the oversize tub. And she watched him, vaguely astonished that His Royal Highness knew how to go about such a mundane task.

  The beauty of her convent education was that she and the rest of the girls from wealthy families who could afford to go there had been taught how to function like regular people. It was one of the convent’s primary missions, in fact.

  “You do realize I have servants to do this, don’t you?” one of the girls in Pia’s year had thrown at Mother Superior one morning as they’d all been scrubbing the floors of their dormitory.

  “My dear child,” Mother Superior had replied, in that mild voice that made them all wince, “you are being taught basic chores not for you, though you can certainly benefit from learning them, but for those servants. In the perhaps vain notion that a dose of empathy might allow you to inhabit your place in this world with more consideration for others.”

  That had stuck with Pia, along with the punishment Mother Superior had levied against their entire class for the rest of the semester—that was, scrubbing the whole of the great hall. On their hands and knees.

  Now she sat in a palace with a man she barely knew but would have sworn didn’t lift a single finger if someone else could do it for him. A prince who’d given her twins and spirited her away from her life—twice, now. And she wondered who’d taught him the same lesson.

  And then wondered what was wrong with her that she wanted, so desperately, to believe that he was capable of something like empathy. Because that might make him into the father she knew he didn’t want to become.

  Why do you want him to be a father? she asked herself, harshly enough that she could have been one of her own parents. You can raise these babies perfectly well on your own. You don’t need him.

  That was true. She knew that was true. And still, Pia watched Ares sprinkle bath salts over the hot water as if this was church. Then she didn’t know what to feel when he came back to her, there on the edge of the tub set in an alcove with the sea outside.

  “I think it is time you took off this shroud you are wearing, cara mia,” he said in a low voice.

  Pia looked down. She knew she hadn’t changed her clothes, but she hadn’t really processed the fact that she was still wearing that same black dress, severe and solemn and not remotely comfortable, that she’d worn to her father’s funeral. And then to his grave.

  She raised her gaze to Ares. “I don’t think I want to.”

  Something moved over his face. He crouched down before her so he was on eye level with her. His arms were on either side of her legs, caging her there against the tub, and she thought that on some level, she should hate her heart for the way it beat so hard when he was close. She really should.

  Ares shifted, moving back on his heels, but he did not rise. And his eyes were green and gold and that, too, felt like betrayal.

  “I understand,” he said, astonishing her anew.

  Pia wanted to believe that, too. With a fervor that boded ill for her.

  A faint smile moved over his mouth as he saw her expression. “When my mother died she lay in state, as is the custom here. And then my father and I walked through the streets as we transported her to her final resting place. I wore the typical regalia of my station, a uniform I have never found comfortable in the least. And yet, when it was over, when I was out of the public eye and back in my private rooms, I found I couldn’t bear to move. I couldn’t bear to change out of that uniform.” His gaze seemed particularly green then. “Because I knew that doing so would indicate that I was moving on in some way.”

  “You loved your mother very much.”

  “I did. Did you not love your father? Or your own mother?”

  He moved a hand to rest it on her thigh, and Pia was...astounded. She could feel the heat of him, all that power and strength, and be aware of him as a man. But she could also find that grip of his comforting, apparently.

  She felt too many things to choose one, much less name it.

  “There is no right answer,” Ares said. “I had an excellent relationship with my mother. I have no relationship with my father. Parents are complicated.”

  And Pia was sure she wasn’t the only one of them who was painfully aware that they were soon to be parents themselves. That they could inflict God knew what on their own children.

  It was an unbearable intimacy to share with a man who was as good as a stranger.

  “My parents had children only as an afterthought,” she heard herself blurt out.

  Anything to stop thinking about herself and Ares as terrible parents. Or any kind of parents.

  What she’d said was true, of course. She’d read articles that had said as much, and less nicely. But she had never said it out loud herself before. And in a way, it felt like grief to hear her own voice, speaking that truth.

  But somehow, she wanted to keep going. “Or at least, I was an afterthought. I suppose they always planned to have my brother. The heir of my father’s dynastic dreams, et cetera.”

  She stared down at Ares’s hand, and wanted to slide her own on top of his more than she wanted to breathe. She would never know how she kept her hands to herself. Or how she pushed on when she wasn’t sure how or why she was speaking in the first place.

  “When they focused on me at all, I think they saw me as a project,” she told Ares as the scent of the lavender bath salts filled the room. “I don’t honestly know that they were capable of loving anything but one another. I don’t mean that in a bad way. I loved them both, I think. But it was always bound up in the ways I disappointed them.”

  His green eyes were grave. “How could you possibly be a disappointment?”

  Pia didn’t know how to answer him. And she knew that the reason for that was ego, nothing more. Pride. She didn’t want to tell this man what he should have been able to see with his own two eyes.

  And would, now. Now that he knew who she was. And therefore knew who her mother was. It was one thing to be herself, Pia knew. She could do that. It was when she was compared to Alexandrina that people felt the most let down.

  Her parents most of all.

  But she couldn’t bring herself to point that out to Ares. She didn’t have it in her.

  “I’m glad I’m having boys,” she said instead. “I think that must be easier.”

  Whatever light she’d seen in his gaze shuttered then. He moved his hand, which struck Pia as yet another tragedy she was unprepared to face, and reached into the water behind her.

  He tested the temperature, then moved back, rising to his feet in a lithe rush that was nothing short of dazzling, with all that muscle and grace.

  “You should get in,” he told her, sounding distant and royal again. “Then I suggest you get some sleep. I cannot promise you that grief goes anywhere, but the sooner you start the process of moving on, the sooner you’ll get to the part that’s easier. Eventually, you’ll find it hurts a lot less than it did.”

  “I think that must feel like losing them all over again,” Pia said, without thinking.

  Ares’s gaze was too hot, too arrested as it snapped to hers.

  “It does,” he bit out.

  And he left her there, sitting in her funeral dress on the side of a hot bath, wondering how and why he’d made drawing her bath feel like a gift. And why she wanted nothing more than to sink into it, fully clothed, and lie there
until she stopped feeling.

  When she stood, she felt unsteady on her feet. She found herself crying all over again as she pulled the dress off, then folded it neatly, placing it much too carefully on one of the nearby counters.

  As if it was precious to her when really, she wanted to burn it. She had worn it twice in six weeks’ time. She would never wear it again.

  And when she sank down in the bath, and lost herself in the silken embrace of hot water, lavender, and steam, she let the tears fall until they stopped of their own volition. Pia didn’t know who she cried for. The mother who had never loved her the way Pia had wished so desperately she would. The father who had viewed her as something to barter, or an amusement, but never a real person.

  Or this new life she’d stumbled into, whether she wanted it or not. The babies she carried, the prince who had fathered them, and the terrifying, unknown future that loomed ahead of them all.

  She cried herself dry, and only then did she rise up from the tub, towel herself off, and take herself into the vast, airy confection of a four-poster bed that waited in the bedroom. She crawled into the center of the bed, turned over onto her side to find the only position where she could be remotely comfortable, and wrapped one arm around her belly.

  “I promise you this,” she murmured out loud to the twin lives inside of her. “I will never barter you away. I will tell you I love you every single day of your lives. And you will never, ever find yourself wondering on the day of my death if you grieve because you miss me—or because you don’t.”

  And still murmuring vows to the sons she would bear within a few short months, but treat better if it killed her, Pia finally fell asleep.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  ARES HAD NO idea what was happening to him as each day bled into the next, then a week slipped by. Then another.

  And he and Pia stayed suspended in the same waiting game.

  It was easy enough to make the Southern Palace his base of operations. So easy, in fact, that he couldn’t quite remember why it had been so important to him to live apart from Atilia in the first place.

  He flew in and out, from one royal engagement to another. And despite the barrage of scandalmongering headlines about him and Matteo Combe—and the expectant state of the Combe heiress the world had ignored until the funeral—his actual life was the same as it had been before. Did it matter what he called his base when he flew everywhere anyway?

  Ares assured himself that nothing had changed. Nothing but his location.

  Except he noticed that he found himself almost eager to return to the palace at the end of each engagement.

  Almost as if he couldn’t truly be easy until he’d seen Pia again.

  If she had cried again after that first night, she never showed it. Nor did she make further attempts to break out of the castle, which was a relief if only because it prevented Ares from sharing parts of himself when he never, ever did such things.

  The reports Ares received about her in his absence were always glowing. She was unfailingly polite and kind to all members of the staff. She went on walks, around and around the many courtyards, and at low tide, down to the beach, where she was known to spend time on the rocks, staring out toward the horizon. She never tried to lose her security detail. She seemed perfectly happy to have regular checkups with the doctor.

  Her only request had been a laptop computer, which Ares had been more than happy to provide, particularly as it gave him leave to monitor what she did.

  After all, he had never promised her privacy.

  And that was how he discovered that what Pia did with her time was write an online column for one of those internet magazines that Ares had always personally believed were the scourge of the earth. He found this discovery so astounding that he sat with it for nearly a full week before it occurred to him to do anything about it.

  One night, after he’d flown back from some or other formal charity event in mainland Europe, he found her curled up in what the staff had informed him was her favorite room of the palace. It was known as the Queen’s Sitting Room, in the ancient wing, and had been built to accommodate a queen who had loved the ocean, her books and needlework, and liked to sit where she could look out all day while the business of the court carried on elsewhere. During the day the light cascaded in through the arched windows. At night, light made to look like candles blazed from every surface while the waves surged against the rocks outside.

  Ares moved soundlessly into the room, not sure what to do with the wall of sensation and something perilously close to longing that slammed into him the moment he saw her.

  Every moment he saw her, if he was honest.

  Pia sat cross-legged on the chaise pointed toward the windows, a pillow over her lap—or what lap she had, with her huge, pregnant belly in the way. She was frowning down as she typed, worrying her bottom lip between her teeth, and Ares was only a man.

  And it had been a long time indeed since he had taken a woman, now that he thought about it. Too long. Months.

  Ares found he didn’t actually want to scour his memory, because he was terribly afraid that Pia really had haunted him. That he might not have touched another woman since that night in New York.

  He didn’t want to consider that possibility, so he considered her instead.

  His gaze traced the elegant line of Pia’s neck, and the little wisps of dark hair that had tumbled down from the knot at the top of her head. He leaned against the doorjamb, letting his gaze drift lower. Her breasts swelled against the loose top she wore and he remembered covering them with his hands in New York. Now he wondered if they would spill over from his palms, so generous had they become. His mouth watered.

  And there was something about her lush, swollen belly that got to him, no matter how he tried to pretend otherwise.

  There was something about the fact that she carried his babies, that she was big and round by his doing, that made something dark and primitive wind around and around inside him until he was tight like a coil.

  He didn’t know how he felt about becoming a father, but that had nothing to do with his appreciation of what he had done to her body. Or how she seemed to take to it so easily, so naturally, like one of the ancient goddesses that the locals claimed had first lived here on the site where the palace stood.

  He shook himself, bemused at the direction of his own thoughts.

  “When did you become an advice columnist?” he asked her, unaware until he spoke that his voice had gone all...gravelly.

  But he couldn’t worry about that when he had the distinct pleasure of watching Pia jolt in surprise. She whipped her head around, and then Ares’s pleasure turned to a deeper joy as her cheeks reddened.

  The way they always did when she saw him.

  As if she couldn’t keep herself from flushing pink and deeper red, which made him wonder if she was pink and red all over.

  The possibilities made him ache.

  “How do you...?” she began.

  But her voice trailed off. She looked down at the laptop before her, and Ares braced himself for her temper. For the outburst that was almost surely coming.

  He had to wonder if he’d asked the question specifically to provoke her.

  If he’d lowered himself to such games.

  But when Pia looked at Ares again, her gray gaze was resigned. “You’re monitoring this laptop. Of course you are. I don’t know why I didn’t assume you were from the start.”

  Ares inclined his head slightly. “For security purposes, naturally. This is a royal palace.”

  “And because you’re nosy.” Her gaze stayed steady. “You want to know things about me without having to ask.”

  He could see that moment shimmer between them, Pia in her funeral dress on the side of that tub and him too close and much too open, and he was sure she could, too. But she didn’t say anything.

  “
You could be in league with the tabloid reporters who swarmed us in Yorkshire,” Ares said mildly instead. “You could have been planted by my enemies.”

  “Do you actually have enemies?” Pia asked, her voice even more mild than his. It scraped at him. “Or is this a part of those many wars you appear to be waging, though no one is waging them back at you?”

  Ares leaned one shoulder against the doorjamb, crossed his arms, and regarded her sternly. “I suppose you could say I am my own war.”

  He certainly hadn’t meant to say that. He didn’t even know where the words had come from. Only that once they were out there, he couldn’t deny the stark truth of them.

  Or the acrid taste they left behind in his mouth.

  It was like the first night she’d been here and that bizarre urge he’d had to tend to her. Ares wasn’t certain he had tended to another person in the whole of his life, save his own mother in her final days. He hardly knew her. He knew the urge even less. It felt as if he’d been hit on the head and had only come to—and back into himself—when she’d reminded him of the fact that she was having sons.

  His sons.

  Every time he thought less of the sweet ripeness of her body and more about what that ripeness would result in, it hit him in the same way. Hard. Debilitating.

  A full-on body blow.

  “If you are your own war, you are lucky, Ares. That means you can call it off at any time.” She closed the laptop and set it aside, her gray gaze on him. “You can have an armistice whenever you like.”

  “It is not quite that easy.”

  But he sounded more uncertain of that than he should have.

  “Why are you spying on me?” she asked him, direct and to the point, that gaze still firm on his.

  And if her voice had been sharp, or accusing, Ares would have known what to do. He could have handled it with a dose of royal arrogance, or that edgy thing in him that was always too close to the surface when he was in Atilia. Or near her.

  Instead, he felt something like...outgunned.