Bride by Royal Decree

by Caitlin Crews

  Reza drew himself up to his full height. He looked down at her with all the authority and consequence that had been pounded into every inch of him, all his life, even when his own father had failed to live up to the crown he now wore himself.

  “I am Leopoldo Maximillian Otto, King of the Constantines,” he informed her. “But you may call me by my private family nickname, Reza.”

  She let out a sharp, hard sound that was not quite a laugh and thrust his mobile back at him. “I don’t want to call you anything.”

  “That will be awkward, then.”

  Reza took possession of his mobile, studying the way she deliberately kept her fingers from so much as brushing his, as if he was poisonous. When he was a king, not a snake. How this creature dared to treat him—him—with such disrespect baffled him, but did nothing to assuage that damnable need that still worked inside him. She confounded him, and he didn’t like it.

  But that didn’t change the facts. Much less what would be gained by presenting his people with the lost Santa Domini princess as his bride.

  He met her gaze then. And held it. “Because one way or another, you are to be my wife.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  “I GET IT,” Maggy said after a moment. The word wife seemed to pound through her like an instant hangover, making her head feel too big and her belly a bit iffy, and if there were other, stranger reactions to him moving around inside her...she pretended she didn’t notice. “Someone must have put you up to this. Is this some new reality show? The Cinderella Games?”

  Reza—as the other six hundred names he’d rattled off, to say nothing of the title he’d claimed, were apparently not fit for daily use—blinked in obvious affront.

  “Allow me to assure you that I have not, nor will I ever, participate in a show of any kind.” He managed to bite out his words as if they offended him. As if the very taste of them in his mouth was an assault. Then he adjusted the cuffs of his coat in short jerks of indignant punctuation. “I am a king, not a circus animal.”

  Maggy found that despite never having seen a king in all her life, and having entertained about as many thoughts about the behavior of monarchs as she did about that of unicorns and/or dragons, she had no trouble whatsoever believing this man of stone and consequence was one.

  “I’ll make a note that you’re not a sad, dancing elephant.” Somehow, she kept from rolling her eyes in the back of her head. “Good to know.”

  “I suggest you look it up,” he said, very much as if she hadn’t spoken. Maybe for him, she really hadn’t. It was entirely possible that a king simply wasn’t aware that anyone else spoke at all. He nodded toward her hip, and the phone she’d stashed in her back pocket. “Pull up an image of the king of the Constantines on your mobile. See what appears. I think you’ll find that he resembles me rather closely.”

  And Maggy opted not to explore why the certainty in his voice shivered through her, kicking up a commotion in its wake.

  “It doesn’t matter what comes up,” she told him, careful to keep that shivering thing out of her voice. “I don’t care if you’re the king of the world. I still need to clean this floor and lock up the shop, and that means you and all your muscly clowns need to go.” When he only stared at her in cool outrage, she might have smirked a little. Just a little. “You’re the one who mentioned a circus. I’m only adding to the visual.”

  “What an extraordinary reaction.” His gray eyes were fathomless, yet still kicked up entirely too many tornadoes inside of her. And his voice did strange things to her, too. It seemed to echo around inside of her. As if he was inside of her—something she was better off not imagining, thank you. “I have told you that it is highly probable you are a member of one of Europe’s grand, historic royal families. That you are very likely a princess and will one day become a queen. My queen, no less. And your concern is the floor of a coffee shop?”

  “My concern is the lunatic in the coffee shop with me, actually,” she managed to say, fighting to keep her voice even. Because she knew, somehow, that if she allowed herself to feel the reaction swelling inside of her, it might take her right back down to her knees. And not by choice this time. “I want you to go.”

  He studied her for what seemed like a very long time. So long she had to rail at herself to keep from fidgeting. From showing him any weakness whatsoever—or any hint that she was taking him seriously when she wasn’t. She couldn’t. Princesses? Queens? That was nothing but little girl dreams and wishful thinking.

  If there was one thing Maggy knew entirely too much about, it was reality. Cold, hard, grim, and often heartbreaking reality. There was no point whining about it, as she knew very well. It was what it was.

  “Very well,” he said after what seemed like a thousand years, and was that...disappointment that washed through her? Had she wanted him to keep pushing? She couldn’t have. Of course she couldn’t have. “If you feel you must continue with these unpleasant tasks of yours, then by all means.” This time he waved a hand, and it was even more peremptory and obnoxious than his previous partially raised finger. It made her blood feel so hot and so bright in her veins that she flushed with it. With temper. And she was certain he saw it. “Don’t for one moment allow your bright future to interfere with your menial present circumstances.”

  Maggy had wanted to hit quite a few people in her time. That was what happened when a girl found herself on her own and entirely alone in the world at eighteen, when the foster care system had spit her out. She’d found herself surrounded by bad people and worse situations in places where violence was the only reasonable response to pretty much anything. Still, she’d scraped by and she’d survived—because what was the alternative?

  But she wanted to hit this man more. She even did the math as she eyed him there in front of her. His four goons would likely object to any manhandling of their charge, but she was closer to him than they were. She was sure she could land a satisfying punch before they flattened her. She was equally sure it would be worth the tackle.

  She didn’t know how she kept her hands to herself.

  “I appreciate your permission to do my job.” Maggy was not, in fact, anything remotely like appreciative. “Here’s a newsflash. Even if you are a king, you aren’t my king.”

  She watched, fascinated despite herself, as a muscle worked in his granite-hewn jaw, indicating the impossible. That this man of stone and regal airs was having his own set of reactions to her.

  To her.

  There was absolutely no reason she should feel that as some kind of victory when she didn’t want to win this. Whatever this was.

  “You will dine with me tonight,” he told her, in the manner of one who was used to issuing proclamations and, more, having them instantly obeyed.

  Maggy let out a short, hard laugh. “Um, no. I won’t be doing that. Tonight or ever.”

  Reza only gazed back at her, and she told herself she was imagining that little suggestion of heat in his stern gaze. That she was a crazy woman for imagining it. That he was a king, for God’s sake. That she shouldn’t care either way, because it was her own, personal law that she didn’t do complications of any kind.

  And there was no pretending a man who pranced around calling himself a king in a coffee shop wasn’t one giant complication, no matter how harshly compelling that fierce face of his was.

  “Then I am happy to remain where I am,” he told her after another long, tense moment.

  “Until what?” She shook her head, then shoved a chunk of her hair back behind her ear. “You convince me that this insane story is true? I already know it isn’t. Princesses don’t go missing and end up in foster care no matter how many little girls wish they did. You’re wasting your time.”

  “You cannot possibly know that until you take a blood test.”

  “Oh, a blood test? Is that all?” Maggy bared her teeth at him. “You can expect that to happen over my dead body.”

  He smiled then. And it was devastating. It...did things to his face. Ma
de it something far closer to beautiful than any man so hard and uncompromising should ever look. It should have been impossible. It was certainly unfair. Maggy’s mouth went dry. Parts of her body she’d stopped paying any attention to outside of their sheer biological functions prickled to uncomfortable awareness.

  Oh, no, she thought.

  “Let me tell you how this will go,” Reza said softly, as if he knew exactly what was happening to her. As if he was pleased it was. “You will give me a blood sample. You will sit and eat a decent dinner with me tonight not only because I wish to get to know you, but because you look as if you haven’t eaten well in some time. If ever. The blood test will confirm what I already know, which is that you are Her Royal Highness Magdalena of Santa Domini. At which point, you will leave this menial existence that is beneath you in more ways than it is possible to number and is an insult to the blood in your veins. And then, among other things, you will assume your rightful position in your brother’s court and in the line of ascension to his throne.”

  She’d opened her mouth to protest his snide reference to her menial life, not to mention his idea that she was some wayward waif who’d never eaten a meal, but got caught on that last bit.

  Maggy’s heart seemed to twist in her chest. “My brother?”

  And she knew she gave herself away with that. There was no chance this overwhelming man didn’t hear the breathiness in her voice. The longing for that life so many people took for granted. A life with family. With people who were as much hers as she was theirs, whatever that looked like. The kind of life she’d never had—and had taught herself a long time ago to stop wishing for.

  “Yes,” Reza said. His harshly regal head canted to one side, though he kept his gaze on hers. “Your brother. He is the king of Santa Domini. Previous to his coronation, he was rather well-known as one of the world’s greatest and most scandalous playboys. If you have been in the vicinity of a tabloid newspaper over the past twenty years, you will have seen a great deal of him, I’d imagine. Too much of him, I would wager.”

  Her hands felt numb. With some distant part of her brain, it occurred to her to think that was a strange reaction. That pins and needles should stab at her fingers as if her arms had fallen asleep when they hadn’t. When, despite what was happening here, she was very much awake.

  “Cairo,” Maggy whispered. Because even she knew that name. Everybody knew that name. She’d seen his pictures all over every magazine in existence for as long as she could remember, because there was nothing else to do while standing in line in sad discount supermarkets stocking up on cheap staples but look at pretty people doing marvelous things in exotic places. “Cairo Santa Domini.”

  Reza inclined his head. “The one and only. He is your brother. As someone who saw him in person not long ago and is now looking at you, I must tell you that there is absolutely no doubt that you are his blood relative.”

  Maggy shook her head. She took a step back and only stopped because she had nowhere to go, with his henchmen looming back near the counter. “No.”

  She didn’t know what she was denying. Which part of this madness. Only that it was crucial to her sanity—to everything that had kept her upright and grimly moving forward all her life no matter what got thrown at her—that she keep doing so.

  But his dark gaze was much too knowing on hers. She was sure he could see far too much. And the fact he could—that he seemed to have no problem whatsoever seeing straight through her when no one else had ever come close—shook through her like a winter storm, treacherous and dark.

  “This will not go away, Princess,” he told her, very matter-of-factly. And he didn’t shift that gaze of his from hers. “Nor will I. And you can be certain that if I recognized you, so, too, will someone else.”

  “I think you’re overestimating the amount of time people in your world spend looking closely at people in mine.”

  Again, a curve of those stern lips, and she wasn’t equipped to deal with that. She couldn’t process it. She could only feel the way it flushed over her, like another kick of temper when she knew full well it wasn’t that. She might not have felt anything like it in recent memory, but she knew it wasn’t anything close to temper.

  “You’re decades too late,” she threw at him. She didn’t know where it came from. Or, worse, she knew exactly where it came from. That dark little hollow place she carried around inside of her that nothing ever filled. And she couldn’t seem to stop herself once she’d started. “Everyone dreams they’re secretly a princess when they’re ten. Especially in foster care. But I’m over that now. This is my life. I made it, I’m happy with it, and I’m staying in it.”

  “Come to dinner with me anyway,” he ordered her, and there was something about the way he said things as if they were laws instead of requests that, oddly, made her want to obey him. She had to lock her knees to keep from moving toward him. She, who was famous for her attitude problems and inability to follow the orders of people who were paying her to listen to them. What was that? “You can consider it a date.”

  Maggy assumed he was joking. Because he had to be joking, of course. No one asked her for dates, even roundabout ones like this one. She had stay the hell away from me stamped all over her face, she was pretty sure.

  And the few times anyone had actually mustered up all their courage and asked that scrappy Strafford girl on a date, it had not been a king.

  Not that she’d independently verified this man was who he said he was.

  “I would rather die than go on a date with you,” she told him, which was melodramatic and also, in that moment, the absolute truth.

  Again that slow, coolly astonished blink of his, as if he required extra time to process what she’d said to him—and not, she was quite sure, because he didn’t understand her.

  “How much money can you possibly make in this place?” he asked.

  “That’s rude. And it’s none of your business. Just like everything else about me is none of your business. You don’t get to know everything about another person simply because you demand it or send your little minions to dig it up.”

  “By minions, am I to assume you mean my staff?”

  “If you want to know things about someone, you ask. You wait to see if they answer. If they don’t, it could be because they don’t want to answer you because your question is obnoxious. Or because they think you’re a random creepy guy who showed up with his personal collection of armed men after closing time to say a whole lot of crazy things, suggesting you might be delusional. Or that you won’t go away no matter what you are. Or in my case, all of the above.”

  That muscle in his jaw clenched tight. “Consider dinner with me an employment opportunity.” When she only stared back at him, that muscle clenched tighter. “An interview for a position, if you will.”

  “A position as what? Your next little piece on the side? While I’m sure competition for that downward spiral is intense, I’ll pass. I prefer my lovers, you know, sane.”

  She knew she’d gone too far then. Reza went very, very still. His gray eyes seemed to burn through her. Her pulse took off at a gallop and she had to order herself to keep breathing.

  “Be very careful, Magdalena,” he advised her, his voice low and stern and still, it wound its way through her like a wicked heat. “I have so far tolerated your impudence because it is clear you cannot help yourself, given your circumstances. But you begin to stray too far into the sort of insults that cannot and will not be tolerated. Do you understand me?”

  Maggy understood that he was far more intimidating than he should have been, and she was fairly hard to cow. She told herself it didn’t matter. That she was as numb as she wished she really was, head to toe, except for that wildness deep in her core that she wanted to deny was there.

  She rolled her eyes. “You don’t have to worry about tolerating me. And I really don’t care if you do or don’t. What you do have to do is go.”

  He let out a breath, but she knew, somehow, he wasn�
��t any less furious.

  “I have already told you the only way that will happen and I am not in the habit of repeating myself. Nor am I renowned for going back on my word. Two things you would do well to keep in mind.”

  And Maggy thought, to her horror, that she might explode. And worse, do it right in front of him. Something was rolling inside of her, heavy and gathering steam, and she was terrified that she might break down in front of this granite wall of a man and humiliate herself. Ruin herself.

  She didn’t know him. She didn’t want to know him. But she knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that she couldn’t show any weakness in front of him or it would kill her.

  “Fine,” she gritted out at him, because when there were no more defensive plays to make, offense was the only way to go. She’d learned that the hard way, too, like everything else. “I’ll have dinner with you. But only if you leave right now.”

  And then she wished she could snatch the words back the moment she’d said them.

  Reza didn’t smile or gloat. He didn’t let that stark, hard mouth of his soften at all. And yet there was that silver gleam in his gaze that kicked at her anyway and was worse, somehow, than the gloating of a lesser man. Or it hit her harder, anyway.

  He merely inclined his head. Then he named the fanciest resort within a hundred-mile radius, waiting until she nodded.

  “Yes,” she bit out, letting her sharpness take over her tone because it was much, much better than what she was afraid hid beneath it. “I know where it is.”

  “I will expect you in one hour,” he told her.

  Expect away, idiot, she thought darkly.

  But she made herself smile. “Sure thing.”

  “And if you do not appear,” Reza said quietly, because apparently he really could read her like a very simple book, “I will come and find you. I know where you live. I know where you work. I know the car you drive, if, indeed, that deathtrap can rightly be called a car at all. I have an entire security force at my beck and call, and as the sovereign of another nation, even one who is flying under the radar as I am here, I am granted vast diplomatic immunity to do as I please. I would suggest you consider these things carefully before you imagine you can plot your way out of this.”