Cinderella's Royal Secret

by Lynne Graham

  Who had time for labor when she was facing a ton of work finalizing Niko’s burial arrangements and continuing to manage his estate? Then there was Kiara’s show in Paris. She had promised to help her with her artist’s statement and had somehow deluded herself into believing she could attend.

  Really, Scarlett? Due next week, yet planning to fly to Paris in three?

  Denial was a wonderful thing—until it stopped working. It was screeching to a halt while she stood on the hand towels, waiting for Kiara and deliberately avoiding thoughts about how Javiero would react to everything he would learn today.

  To this.

  Not for the first time, she tried to will herself back in time and make a different decision. She’d been processing her employer’s refusal of further treatment and frustrated with certain decisions he had made with regard to his errant sons. Maybe those two men didn’t deserve much consideration, given their mulish refusal to see their father in his last days, but Scarlett had been compelled to prod them one last time.

  Valentino Casale had never been cooperative with her so she hadn’t expected any better than the brush-off he’d given her. Javiero, however, possessed a more solid sense of family. A heart.

  At least, that was what she wanted to believe.

  Maybe it was wishful thinking on her part.

  What Javiero had in spades was a magnetism she had barely been able to resist the handful of times she’d met with him. It had taken everything in her to keep from betraying her reaction to him.

  He must have known. He was too smoldering and sophisticated and experienced to not know when a woman was swooning over him. Maybe he’d even privately laughed at her for it. Maybe that was why he’d made a move that day. He had probably sensed she’d mentally slept with him a thousand times and was dying to make it reality.

  She hadn’t expected it to happen, though. Not really. Seeing him at all had been a rare overstep on her part, moving beyond the tight constraints of her employer’s dictates and acting of her own volition. She was still trying to explain to herself how she’d been in Madrid at all, let alone how she had wound up in Javiero’s bed.

  A quiet sense of injustice had driven her. She knew that much. Had she also been affected on a basic level by Niko’s failing health? Had she longed to assert the beginnings of life to hold off the shadows closing in on the end of one?

  Or had it been as simple as a secretive yearning on her part to have a final connection with a man she would never have an excuse to see again once Niko was gone?

  She hadn’t expected Javiero to give her the time of day after his father’s death. As it was, he only tolerated her in deference to his mother. Javiero’s attitude toward Scarlett had always been...not hostile, but disparaging. He hadn’t liked that she worked for his father. He couldn’t respect her for it.

  She’d had no idea how he might react to her pregnancy. Perhaps she’d been in a bit of denial then, too, not expecting their passionate afternoon could change her life—or create one! By the time she had suspected and had it confirmed, though, she had not only desperately wanted this baby—she had seen a poetic sort of balancing of scales in her carrying Javiero’s child.

  Not that Niko had viewed it that way. He’d been a hard man. A nightmare to work for, actually, and suddenly cynical of her motives. They’d had an extremely rare disagreement when she told him—rare because, until then, Scarlett had made a career of acting on his command.

  You went behind my back, he had accused her.

  I told them you were dying because they deserved to know.

  She had stood by that decision even though he’d been angry at her for it.

  Surprisingly, her pushback had earned his grudging respect, proving her tough enough in his eyes to take control of his holdings. He’d added her baby to his will, too, ensuring Javiero’s child would inherit the half of his fortune that Javiero had declined.

  And life altering as this pregnancy was proving to be, she didn’t regret it. She patted her swollen belly, excited to meet him or her.

  Just. Not. Today.

  Where was Kiara?

  Into her ruminations a strange sensation accosted her. A faint, dull ache in her lower back grew more insistent. Tension wrapped outward until it squeezed across her middle.

  A contraction?

  Well, duh. Of course that was what was happening, but, come on! She nearly pounded her fist against the wall in frustration.

  What had she thought, though? That she would still go into that meeting, bare as a Scotsman under her skirt while she looked her baby’s father in the eye and admitted...

  She hung her head in her hands and bit back a whimper.

  The main door opened. She lifted her head, relief washing over her. As she started to call out, however, she realized the person she could see through the crack in the door didn’t have Kiara’s voluptuous figure or curly black hair.

  Oh, dear Lord. That slender woman in a bone-colored skirt suit was Paloma Rodriguez, Javiero’s mother.

  Scarlett never swore, but she tilted her head back and mouthed a number of really filthy words at the ceiling. She texted Kiara again, suspecting Kiara had silenced her phone for the meeting.

  Javiero’s mother was smoothing her hair, checking her makeup, unconsciously betraying how important it was that she appear flawless to the rest of the people in that boardroom, most particularly her rival for a dead man’s affections.

  Scarlett had to make a split-second decision. No matter how this day played out, Javiero would finally learn she was having his baby. She wanted him to hear it from her.

  As his mother started to leave, Scarlett forced herself to speak though she could hear the quaver in her voice. “Señora Rodriguez? It’s me, Scarlett.”

  Paloma’s footsteps paused, and she said with guarded surprise, “Yes?”

  “Is Javiero waiting for you in the corridor?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’d like to speak with him. In private. In...um...here.”

  Global warming ended and the modern ice age arrived in one glacial word. “Why?”

  Shifting to open the door was awkward, given her full-term belly. Scarlett wrestled herself around it and watched Paloma’s gaze drop to her middle. Her eyes nearly fell out of her head.

  “I need to speak to him,” Scarlett said as another contraction looped around her abdomen and squeezed a fresh gasp from her lungs.

  * * *

  Javiero Rodriguez was unfit to be in public, not physically and not mentally.

  He’d showered, but he was unshaven and should have gone to his barber before leaving Madrid. He had blown off the nicety, which wasn’t like him. For most of his thirty-three years, he had passionately adhered to tradition and expectation. He’d had a family dynasty to restore, his mother’s reputation to repair and his own superiority to assert.

  He had achieved all those things and more, becoming a dominant force in global financial markets and one of the world’s most eligible bachelors. He was known to be charming and intelligent, and an excellent dancer who dressed impeccably well.

  Despite all that, a sense of satisfaction had always eluded him.

  Javiero had come to accept this vague discontent as just life. Happily-ever-after was, as anyone with a brain in his head could deduce, a fairy tale. He had experienced the bleakness of financial anxiety and the bitterness of powerlessness. He’d had a father who belittled him and abused his trust, one who didn’t so much as offer a shovel to help him dig himself out of the hole he’d been shoved into. He had tasted grief when the grandfather he’d revered had passed away. All of that had taught him ennui was the best one could hope for.

  World-weariness was a luxury he no longer enjoyed, however. Three weeks ago, he had nearly died. He had lost an eye and was left with scars that would be with him forever. He looked like and felt like a monster.

>   As he ran a frustrated hand through his hair, his fingertips reflexively lifted in repulsion from the tender line where his scalp had been sewn back on. He shouldn’t be inflicting his gruesome self on helpless receptionists and unsuspecting coffee-fetchers. It was a cruelty.

  His mother needed reinforcement, though. She had stood by him when nearly everyone else was giving him a wide berth. His uncles and cousins, people he financially supported, were taking one look and keeping their children away. His ex-fiancée, whose idiotic idea of being interesting was to keep an exotic pet menagerie, had dropped him like a hot potato once she’d seen the damage.

  Not that he was stung other than in his ego by her rejection. Their proposed marriage had been an effort to rescue his pride. He saw that now and it only made his foul, obdurate mood worse. What a pathetic fool he was.

  Grim malevolence was his companion now. It had become as entrenched in him as the deep grooves carved into his face and body. It clouded around him like a cologne gone off. It had sunk into his bones with the insidiousness of a virus or a spell, making his joints stiff and his heart a lump of concrete.

  Staring with one eye down at the streets of Athens, a city and country he had sworn never to set foot in again, he dreamed only of burning this whole place down.

  Your family stands to inherit a significant portion of the estate, his father’s lawyer had said. All parties must be present at the reading of the will for dispersal to move forward.

  Javiero didn’t want any of his father’s money. He didn’t want to be here in his father’s office tower and couldn’t stand the idea of listening to yet another version of his father’s idea of what was fair.

  For his mother’s sake, and what she stood to gain, he had relented. She had been treated horribly by Nikolai Mylonas and deserved compensation. If Javiero’s presence could help her finally gain what should have rightfully been hers, so be it. Here he was.

  He didn’t have it in him to muster pretty manners, though. His already thin patience was tested by the prospect of listening to his mother chase principles his father had never possessed. She would argue one more time that her son was Niko’s legitimate heir and Javiero was legally entitled to everything.

  Then he would have to listen to his father’s onetime and always scheming mistress, Evelina, arguing that his half brother, Val, was two days older than Javiero, and therefore all the money should go to them.

  Mine, mine, mine.

  The sickening refrain continued despite the instrument being dead.

  Javiero wished the damned jaguar had finished him off. He really did.

  As for Scarlett...? His grim mood skipped in and out of its channel, sparking and grinding at the mere thought of her.

  She had called once while Javiero was in hospital. Once. On behalf of his dying father. His mother had informed her that Javiero would survive, and that had been all Scarlett had needed to hear. Not another word, no card or flowers. Nothing.

  Why did that bother him? Until the last time he’d seen her, she had always been a very businesslike and unflappable PA. Almost pathological in her devotion to his father. She would turn up in one of her pencil skirts, blond hair gathered at her nape, delicate features flawlessly accented with natural tones, and she would irritate the hell out of him with her one-track agenda.

  Your father wants me to inform you that he’s aware you’re behind the hostile takeover in Germany. He is willing to give you control of his entire operation if you come back to Athens and run it.

  No.

  Or, Evelina has made a specific request for funds. Niko has granted it. This is your mother’s equivalent amount. If you would like to speak to him about—

  No.

  And then that final meeting. Your father has run out of treatment options. He is unlikely to survive the year. Now would be the time to come see him.

  No.

  She had finally cracked and it had been fascinating.

  She hadn’t understood how he couldn’t care one single rat’s behind about his father or his father’s money.

  You don’t want what is rightfully yours? What if it all goes to Val?

  That had caught his attention. If it was up to Javiero, Val could have every last cursed euro, but his mother would be devastated. Was Niko planning to leave it all to Val?

  No, Scarlett had assured him, but that hadn’t been the whole truth. Come and see him, she had insisted, looking ready to take him by the ear to accomplish it. He hadn’t understood what had driven her so vehemently. It wasn’t love for his father. She had never said a harsh word about Niko, but she’d never said a kind one, either.

  There had been a mystery there—Javiero had felt it—but he had refused all the same, annoyed that she was instilling a genuine temptation in him to solve it. He wanted to go with her when he had sworn nothing would ever induce him to see his father or visit that island again for any reason.

  He’d sensed a finality to her visit, though. There’d been a futility in her that told him he wouldn’t see her again after this. It had added a layer of desperation to their power struggle. The tension had become sexual and had burst into a passionate encounter that had left him reeling.

  But only him, it seemed. He had continued to think about her months later. She had left before the dinner hour, choosing to go back to work for a man Javiero hated with every fiber of his being rather than remain with her new lover.

  That had been before he looked like hell. Would she be repulsed by his injuries when she saw him? Indifferent?

  Why should he care what she thought?

  He didn’t. But he entertained a small, malicious fantasy where he pointed out his disfigurement was only physical. Scarlett had character flaws.

  “Javiero.” His mother’s voice behind him held such heightened emotion that the hair lifted on the back of his neck. Shock and urgency and something bordering on triumph?

  He swung from the window in the small sitting area and almost had to reach for the back of a sofa to catch his balance. He was still getting used to his lack of depth perception.

  His mother had insisted on rechecking her impeccable appearance. Her black hair was still rolled into its customary bun, but she was pale beneath her makeup. Agitation seemed to grip her while there was a glow of avaricious excitement in her blue-green eyes.

  “Go in there.” She nodded toward the door to the ladies’ room.

  Javiero lifted his brows and felt the pull under his eye patch against scar tissue that hadn’t fully healed.

  “Is there a problem? I’ll call maintenance.” That came from Nigel, the assistant who had met them at the south entrance. He had taken one aghast look at Javiero’s face and had kept his attention on Paloma ever since.

  “No,” his mother said firmly. She stepped aside and waved at the door, prompting. “Javiero.”

  With a snarl of impatience, he strode past his mother and shoved into the women’s toilet, halting abruptly at the sight of Scarlett turning from the sink.

  Distantly he heard the door drift closed behind him while he took in her appearance. Her blond hair was gathered at her nape, her face was rounder, her blouse untucked and her tailored jacket open to allow for—

  He cocked his head, widening his one eye, not sure he was seeing this correctly.

  He yanked his gaze back to her face. Her expression was frozen in horror as she took in his shaggy hair and eye patch and gashed face poorly hidden by an untrimmed beard.

  The word pregnant landed in a pool of comprehension deep in his brain, sending a tidal wave of shock through his entire psyche.

  * * *

  Scarlett dropped her phone with a clatter.

  She had been trying to call Kiara. Now she was taking in the livid claw marks across Javiero’s face, each pocked on either side with the pinpricks of recently removed stitches. His dark brown hair was longer than she’d
ever seen it, perhaps gelled back from the widow’s peak at some point this morning, but it was mussed and held a jagged part. He wore a black eye patch like a pirate, its narrow band cutting a thin stripe across his temple and into his hair.

  Maybe that’s why his features looked as though they had been set askew? His mouth was...not right. His upper lip was uneven and the claw marks drew lines through his unkempt stubble all the way down into his neck.

  That was dangerously close to his jugular! Dear God, he had nearly been killed.

  She grasped at the edge of the sink, trying to stay on her feet while she grew so light-headed at the thought of him dying that she feared she would faint.

  The ravages of his attack weren’t what made him look so forbidding and grim, though, she computed through her haze of panic and anguish. No. The contemptuous glare in his one eye was for her. For this.

  He flicked another outraged glance at her middle.

  “I thought we were meeting in the boardroom.” His voice sounded gravelly. Damaged as well? Or was that simply his true feelings toward her now? Deadly and completely devoid of any of the sensual admiration she’d sometimes heard in his tone.

  Not that he’d ever been particularly warm toward her. He’d been aloof, indifferent, irritated, impatient, explosively passionate. Generous in the giving of pleasure. Of compliments. Then cold as she left. Disapproving. Malevolent.

  Damningly silent.

  And now he was...what? Ignoring that she was as big as a barn?

  Her arteries were on fire with straight adrenaline, her heart pounding and her brain spinning with the way she was having to switch gears so fast. Her eyes were hot and her throat tight. Everything in her wanted to scream Help me, but she’d been in enough tight spots to know this was all on her. Everything was always on her. She fought to keep her head and get through the next few minutes before she moved on to the next challenge.

  Which was just a tiny trial called childbirth, but she would worry about that when she got to the hospital.