And he let out a laugh at that, which was not exactly encouraging.
Still, Pia kept glaring at him. “Is he more reasonable than you? He would have to be, I’d think. You could take me to him right now.”
Ares laughed again. “My father is not a safe space,” he assured her. “For you, or anyone else.”
The car finally came to a stop. And Pia couldn’t help the sense of doom that washed over her then. It was that same clawing panic, and something more. Something that made her heart ache.
Ares exited the vehicle with an athletic grace Pia would have preferred not to notice, nodding at the guards who waited there.
Her heart in her throat, Pia followed him, climbing out of the car to find herself in yet another courtyard. She was surrounded on all sides by thick castle walls. Far above was the night sky, riddled with stars. And it had never occurred to her before that there could only really be turrets where there were steep walls all around. That turrets belonged to fortresses, like this one.
But there were no walls steeper and more formidable than the man who stood there, watching her much too intensely as she looked around at her lovely, remote, fairy-tale prison.
Ares. Her prince.
Her jailer.
And whether he was prepared to accept it or not, the man who’d gotten her pregnant.
“I don’t want to be here,” she told him. But quietly.
“I do not want women wandering about the planet, telling people that I have left them pregnant when I have taken great care never to do such a thing,” he replied, almost too easily. “Life does not often give us what we want, Pia.”
“If you insist on keeping me here for the moment, I want an exit strategy. I want to know how and when and—”
“If I were you,” Ares said, his voice low, “I would be very careful about making any demands.”
He moved one finger, and a smartly dressed woman appeared before them as if by magic. “This is Marbella. She will be your chief aide. If you have any questions, you may address them to her.”
And he didn’t wait for her answer. He simply strode off, princely and remote, his footsteps echoing against the stone until they disappeared.
Pia watched him go, much longer than she should have, and then turned to face the woman who waited at her side.
If she expected a friendly chat, or even a smile, she was disappointed. The other woman bowed slightly, then beckoned Pia to follow her as she set off in a completely different direction into the palace. Each room they passed was more fanciful than the last. Everything was open, airy. Though it was dark, Pia could still sense the ocean all around them. The seething. The whispering. As if it was just there, around the next corner, out of reach—
Marbella led her down a very long corridor that opened up this way and that into galleries and salons, all of them lit up and done in bright, cheerful sort of colors that she imagined did nothing but encourage the sun to linger.
“Who lives here?” she asked after they’d walked a while.
“The Southern Palace has been the preferred retreat of the royal family for centuries, madam,” Marbella replied with severe formality. “His Highness is the only member of the family who uses it with any regularity these days, though even he has not been here in some time.”
“Does that mean no one else is here?” She thought about what he had said by the car. “Is the king here?”
She thought the other woman stiffened, but that seemed unlikely, given how straight she already stood. “His Majesty resides and remains in the Northern Palace, madam.”
Pia nodded sagely, as if she knew the first thing about Atilia, its geography, or its palaces.
Marbella led her on until they reached a beautiful suite of rooms that was to be Pia’s for the duration.
Pia did not ask how long that duration was expected to last.
Inside her suite, she found a selection of clothes laid out for her use, that she supposed had to have been flown in from somewhere. She flushed, trying to imagine how Ares had come by the measurements. Had he measured her while she slept? Or did he simply...remember her? And had only added a bit of pregnancy weight to his estimate?
It was amazing how red her face could get at the slightest provocation.
She was grateful when the other woman retreated, leaving her to a glorious set of rooms that she suspected overlooked the water, not that it mattered. A prison was a prison, surely, no matter the view.
Pia took out her phone, was delighted to find she had service, and quickly pulled up what she could find on the kingdom of Atilia. And better still, the Southern Palace.
The palace where she sat was on the southernmost island of the kingdom. What population there was here was spread out across the island in the small villages dotting it. The palace, on the other hand, had been carved out of the side of the mountain as a kind of folly for a long-ago queen. It looked like a fairy-tale castle, but it was, as Pia had felt when she’d looked around, a nearly inviable fortress. There was the Ionian Sea in front and a mountain in back, with only one road in and out.
If anything, she’d been underplaying what was happening here.
The man who had impregnated her was a prince. She had hardly had time to take that on board. But in case she’d had any doubt, the castle put it to rest. Everything he’d said to her was true.
Ares was a prince. The prince. And he had every intention of holding her here.
Until and unless he felt like letting her go.
She was still in her funeral garb when the doctors came, an hour or so later. They’d set up their own makeshift exam room in the palace, and Pia thought about fighting it. Because she, after all, knew what the test was going to say. Surely there had to be a way to keep this from happening. She could refuse to submit herself to the examination...
But she knew without asking, or trying, that there was little point. Ares would keep her here either way until he had his answers. No matter what those answers were.
That runaway train barreled across uneven ground, far off the track, hurtling Pia right along with it.
And the funeral garb felt fitting, really, as she sat in one of the many brightly lit sitting rooms with Ares after the doctors were done with her, awaiting the results.
He stood by one of the open, arched windows that were really doors, looking out at the dark expanse of the ocean. The air this far south was thicker. It insinuated itself against her skin like a caress—but she told herself it was only the humidity. She sat, very primly, on the sofa and tried to keep herself calm.
She tried.
The door opened after what seemed like several eternities. Possibly more. All passed in the same tense silence.
Ares turned and the doctor bowed low. “Congratulations, Your Highness,” the man said. “You are indeed the father.”
Pia couldn’t seem to look away from Ares’s face. That arrested expression. Something cold and bleak in his gaze.
It made her heart flip over, then sink.
But the doctor wasn’t finished. Because of course he wasn’t finished. Pia braced herself.
“They are both male,” the doctor said.
There was a short, electric pause.
“Both?” Ares asked, his voice a slap.
Neither the doctor nor Ares so much as glanced at Pia, and still she felt as exposed and vulnerable as if she’d been stripped naked and pinned to the wall.
“Both?” Ares asked again.
And the words Pia knew were coming sounded to her like bullets when they came, as inevitable and terrible as they’d been when she’d heard them for the first time.
“Yes, Your Highness.” The doctor bowed lower. “It is my great honor to inform you that you have been blessed with twins.”
CHAPTER SIX
THERE WAS NOTHING but white noise in Ares’s head.
A long, sort of flat-line noise that he was fairly certain signaled his own end.
For what else could it be?
Twins.
Twin boys.
He couldn’t make the words make any sense. The doctor retreated and Ares stared at Pia as if he could see through that black dress she wore. As if he could see inside of her, where there were twins. Boys.
Sons.
Ares’s head pounded like a terrible hangover, when he couldn’t recall the last time he’d drank to excess. His throat felt dry and scratchy, as if he’d caught a virus and was on the verge of tipping over into misery. He thought it was possible that he shook, too, though he couldn’t tell whether that was in him or around him—and he couldn’t seem to catch his breath long enough to truly make the determination.
What did it matter what shook? She was carrying twins.
His twins. His sons. His.
When he finally raised his gaze from her belly and the impossibility—two impossibilities—she carried even now, Pia was still sitting there on the ancient settee that had stood precisely where it was now as long as anyone could remember. Her legs were demurely crossed at the ankles. Her hands were folded neatly in her lap. She gazed back at him, her eyes big and gray and solemn, and fixed on him in a manner that made him...restless.
“Some people might be offended by your reaction,” she said quietly, into all that white noise and shake inside him. “But I’m not. My own reaction to the news was very much the same.”
“Twins,” he managed to say, though his tongue felt tied in knots. “Twins.”
She had the grace to look faintly abashed. “You claimed you couldn’t have impregnated me with one baby. You were certain. I didn’t see what throwing the reality that it was twins into the mix would accomplish.”
Ares couldn’t argue with that, which made him even more... Whatever he was. He ran a hand over his face, wincing when his palm hit his lip. He’d already forgotten that her older brother had punched him. Matteo, he’d learned on the flight, when he’d finally read the informational one-sheet his aides had prepared for him before the funeral. Matteo Combe, president and CEO of Combe Industries...though the tabloids were having a field day with the punch he’d thrown, even calling him unfit for his own office.
It seemed quaint, almost. A remnant of a former life.
A life where Ares could not possibly have been facing down the fact he’d gotten a woman pregnant. With twins.
“Well,” Pia said, a bit too brightly. “Perhaps you had better explain to me how you think this imprisonment is going to work.”
“How far along are you?” he heard himself ask.
She blinked, then tilted her head slightly to one side.
“I remember you, Pia,” Ares retorted, his voice tight. “But I failed to mark that particular night down in my diary.”
“Six months,” she replied, the lack of inflection in her voice an indictment all its own.
But he was more focused on the span of time. Six months. It made his head swim. And it meant...
“So you will... That is to say, we will...”
He couldn’t say the words out loud. Was he sweating?
“In a few months,” she said. “But babies are tricky. They do what they like. And I’m told twins tend to come sooner rather than later.”
“In the history of this kingdom, there have never been twins.”
She dared to look amused. “Ever? Really? In the course of how many thousands of years?”
He thought his growl might have been audible, then. “In the royal family, I should say. There have only ever been single births.”
“They say it skips a generation,” she offered, helpfully. She studied him for a moment. “My father’s aunts were twins.”
“Twins,” Ares said again.
As if, were he to say the word enough, it would change things, somehow.
Pia stood then, then smoothed out the front of her dress, though it required no smoothing.
“I don’t think we’re going to have a conversation with much sense in it tonight,” she said quietly. Kindly, even, which made him want to...do things. “I suppose that even if you released me on the spot, there would be no leaving here before morning. Why don’t we talk about this then. When you’ve slept on the news and let it settle a bit.”
“What do you imagine there is to talk about?” Ares scarcely sounded like himself. “You have... This has...”
“Yes,” she said, sounding faintly amused in a way he didn’t care for. At all. “You’ve caught me. I schemed to get pregnant. And to get pregnant with twins, no less. I hunted you down, cold-bloodedly used you to do my evil will, and then, as a coup de grâce, I went away and never contacted you again. Because secretly I knew that my father would drop dead and you would show up at his funeral—”
“I am trying very hard not to blame you for this,” Ares told her, and his voice, like the rest of him, was tight and taut and not him at all.
She gave the distinct impression of laughing at him without actually doing so. “That’s very kind of you. Because as I recall, we were both there. Unless you’d like to pretend that you, in fact, are a twin and Eric is the real father?”
Ares wished that Eric was a real person, so he could knock him out.
“I don’t understand how this is possible,” he said. Possibly not for the first—or fifth—time. “I am a man who enjoys sex, I grant you. But I had no intention of procreating. Ever. I have never been anything less than scrupulous about protection.”
She made a sympathetic noise, though she didn’t look the least bit sympathetic. “Did you have a vasectomy, then?”
It seemed that Pia was the one delivering knockout blows tonight.
“I did not,” Ares said. Stiffly.
“As it turns out, a vasectomy is only 99.9 percent effective. People do still get pregnant after them, though it’s rare.”
“I’ve just said I never had one.” And he had stopped explaining himself decades ago, yet he felt the strangest urge to leap to his own defense now. “I suppose I might have gotten round to it, eventually.”
The fact he’d been so adamantly opposed to procreating and yet hadn’t taken steps to ensure he couldn’t seemed, now, like the very height of foolishness. What had he been thinking? He had been so certain his blood was poisoned, given the example his father had always set of what happened when their long line of royals met the crown. He had been so clear about the fact he wouldn’t risk poisoning any children himself, to end the misery with him. And yet...
“I’ve had a few months to research protection in a panic, as I, too, failed to understand how this happened,” Pia told him in the same calmly informative way that made his teeth grind together. “And as it turns out, as they told us in the convent, the only version of protection that is one hundred percent effective is abstinence.”
She even smiled faintly as she said that. And something in Ares turned over, bright with temper.
“Do you think this is entertaining?” he demanded, his voice hardly more than a growl. “I understand that you didn’t plan this. Yet it has happened anyway, apparently. And you have had months to come to terms with it. To make your little jokes about abstinence. But my world ended tonight, Pia.”
And he watched, in that sickening mix of dismay and shame, and fury, too, as she slid her hands down over her belly as if she wanted to protect her children.
From him.
Ares shouldn’t have cared about something like that.
But it turned out, he did.
“You’re not the only person whose world ended today,” she threw at him. “In case you’ve forgotten, you didn’t discover this news at a garden party. That was my father’s funeral. And thank you for asking, but both of my parents, in fact, were less than thrilled about this. I had the distinct pleasure of telling th
em that I got pregnant from a tawdry one-night stand with a total stranger. That went over very well. My father called me a tart.”
“How can you possibly be a tart if the only man you’ve ever slept with is me?” Ares asked, and had no idea what that thing was that roared about in him. Almost as if he wanted to defend this woman against her own, dead father.
“I think it was the unmarried, pregnant, and no idea who the father was part that got to him,” Pia replied. “But then he died a few days later, so I didn’t get a chance to follow up on that.”
But Ares was still stuck on the fact that she had never touched another man.
Something kicked in him. Something that wasn’t the fact he had children coming, like it or not. Twins. Something that wasn’t all the ramifications of that he couldn’t quite face. Not quite yet.
Something that felt a good deal more primitive.
He moved toward her, watching the way her eyes widened. But better still was that little kick of awareness he could see flicker in all that solemn gray.
“No man but me,” he said.
“Yes,” she said, her voice shakier and much less calm than it had been a moment before. “That is correct.”
“You didn’t tell me that night.”
“Well. You know.” Her face was red. Even the tips of her ears were red. “It didn’t seem relevant.”
He prowled even closer.
“You went to an actual convent. Then a finishing school. And straight after that, you found me in an otherwise forgettable party in Manhattan.”
She looked as if she wanted to make a break for it, but stood fast. “That is the sum total of my life thus far, yes. Lucky me.”
“I remember you, Pia,” he said, his voice low and much too dark, and her eyes widened in response.
But he couldn’t seem to help that. Just as he couldn’t seem to help himself from reaching out and taking her chin in his hand.
As if she was his.
He expected her to jerk her face away from his hold, but she didn’t. And he watched, mesmerized—fascinated—as her pulse went wild in her neck.
His Two Royal Secrets (One Night With Consequences) Page 6
