His gaze was stern as it moved all over her, from her hair in a sloppy ponytail to the scuffed toes of her favorite boots.
Maggy stared back at him, her chin rising of its own accord, far more defiant than the moment called for. But she was seized with a desperate panic as the moment dragged out, even if she thought she’d rather die than let him see it.
Would he think better of this bizarre plan of his? In the cold light of the too-bright winter morning, would he take one look at her and realize that she could never be anything but the discarded piece of trash she’d always been? That there was nothing the least bit royal about her no matter what a blood test had said?
“Today is the last day you will walk around dressed like this in public,” he told her, his voice a very calm, very clear command. “And I can only take it as my personal mission to convince you that it is better you do not dress like this in private, either.”
“I’m American,” she told him, because she preferred to combat nerves with her mouth whenever possible. “I like jeans.”
“You are not American,” he countered in that same cool way of his that made her whole body overheat. “You have never been American, despite appearances. You are one hundred percent Santa Dominian.”
He rapped his knuckles against the window, making her flinch. But it was only his signal to his driver, she realized a moment later. He was giving his men an order, he wasn’t having her thrown back into the life she’d decided to leave behind her.
The relief that washed over her then was so intense she was afraid it might flip over the SUV.
“Santa Domini means nothing to me,” she murmured. She could only hope he hadn’t seen her reaction, or if he had, she assured herself he wouldn’t know what it meant. “It’s as much a fairy tale to me as you are.”
She shouldn’t have said that. If she could have snatched the words back, she would have. Maggy glared down at her ratty old orange backpack and tried to pretend she couldn’t feel his assessing gaze light up the side of her face, like an open flame.
But the truth was, she felt it everywhere. She felt him everywhere.
“I have no objection to jeans, per se,” he said as the SUV started down the road, surprising her. “There is a time and place for them, of course. These are not the eighteen hundreds. What I object to is cheap fabric and unflattering, mass-produced cuts that do not flatter your form in any way.”
She forgot she was trying to avoid looking at him and shifted to frown at him then. “But—”
Reza only held up a hand, in that way of his, as if he was holding an invisible scepter. “When I have outfitted you in a manner consistent with your actual station in life, if you truly wish to spend your time in the clothes you’ve brought with you, then we will revisit this conversation.”
He didn’t wait for her response. He returned to his papers without sparing Maggy another glance. And it took her longer than it should have to really notice that he’d ended the conversation entirely on his terms, not on hers.
I think you can probably get used to that, she told herself as Deanville slid past her window. That seems very king-like behavior.
But the truth was, she couldn’t bring herself to care about that as much as she should have. She was too focused on all the things she wasn’t feeling about leaving the only home she’d ever known. Maggy knew every street, every hill, every tree on the way out of town. She’d been found on Route 132 in Strafford, which was how she’d gotten her surname, and she’d spent the longest stretch of time in a foster home in Deanville. These things—these places—should have left their marks on her. They must have. Yet she felt far more marked, and indelibly, by the man who sat beside her.
And when the convoy delivered them straight out onto the tarmac of a private airfield, not far from a sleek jet embossed with a very intricate and glossy coat of arms, Maggy stopped worrying about the separation anxiety she definitely wasn’t feeling about leaving her old existence. Instead, she started panicking slightly about the fact she’d never been on a plane in her life.
“Are you well?” Reza asked as they stood on the tarmac, the sun making the cold bite of the winter air seem less harsh than it was. “You’ve gone unusually quiet.”
“You don’t know me well enough to know what’s usual or unusual,” Maggy pointed out.
His hard mouth almost quirked. “Answer the question, please.”
She took her time looking at him. At his ruthless, forbidding face that seemed to fill a thirst in her she hadn’t known she had. Maggy had no idea what that meant. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know. But she wasn’t used to anyone paying such close attention to her.
Something she really didn’t want to share with him.
“I’m terrific,” she told him. “Never been better, in fact.”
She expected him to throw something back at her, or glare in his kingly way. Reza did neither. His expression was too fierce and his mouth was that stern, unsmiling line. But then her breath caught in her throat, because he reached out and smoothed his hand over the length of her ponytail, not quite tugging it, and for a moment it was as if they were the only two people in all the world.
It made her heart flip over.
She was very much afraid that he could hear it.
One mad beat of her heart. Then another. And then Reza dropped his hand and touched her gently at the small of her back, indicating she should walk ahead of him toward the jet while his aides converged around him.
And it took her the whole way up the metal stairs and into the plane, waved in by smiling flight attendants, to catch her breath and get the wild drumming of her pulse under control.
Once on board, she had other things to think about, like the fact there was gold everywhere. Dark, gleaming wood. Thick, soft rugs at her feet. Especially when she was shown past what looked like a luxurious hotel living room into a fully outfitted bedroom suite. On a plane.
“Please don’t hesitate to ring if you need anything, Your Highness,” the flight attendant who’d escorted her said with a smile. “Anything at all.”
And it wasn’t until the uniformed man walked away that Maggy realized what had happened. That when the man had said Your Highness, he’d meant Maggy.
She had to close the door of her suite and sit on the wide, soft bed for a little while then. Until she found her breath again and got her head to stop spinning.
This is what you wanted, she told herself, trying to breathe in and out without hyperventilating. She ran her palms up and down her thighs, the feel of her same old jeans somehow even more disturbing. As if they could somehow snap her back to Deanville if she wasn’t careful. Maggy promised herself she’d burn them at the first opportunity.
This is who you are now, she chanted to herself. You need to figure out how to deal with it.
But it took her a long while to pull herself together.
The flight was long and smooth. It was also one of the most pleasant experiences of Maggy’s life. Every time she stepped outside her suite, there was a different selection of tempting foods laid out in the living room area. Sometimes Reza was out there on one of the sofas, but other times he was off in one of the other rooms in the jet. There was a guarded office, a conference room, bedrooms. An area featuring armchairs and tables where more guards sat, mixed in with a set of always busy-looking people that Maggy assumed were the king’s top aides. Maybe his cabinet. None of them looked up when she walked past, stretching her legs, and yet she was sure she could feel their eyes on her back.
And when they finally landed, it was dark.
“Is this your kingdom?” she asked Reza when he escorted her off the plane. There was a strange, heavy salt scent to the air as they crossed another, smaller tarmac and climbed into one more waiting SUV. All the lights had halos around them and her head seemed to spin. She felt hollow straight through.
“Not quite,” he replied, and she told herself it was her odd exhaustion that was making him sound like that. As deep and as dark as
the night around them. “This island has been in my family for a very long time. It was a gift from an ancient Venetian doge for services rendered, or so the story goes. It will serve as a decent way station, I think.”
Maggy felt muddled and thick from the long flight. She wanted to ask him what he meant by calling this a way station. She wanted to ask him if he’d take her to see the sea for the first time. It took her another beat to realize that the ocean itself was that scent in the air, like a rough magic threaded through the night. But she couldn’t seem to make her body respond to any of the half-cooked thoughts whirling around and around in her head. She slumped against yet another soft leather seat back and didn’t know where the SUV ended and the strange feelings inside of her began. And meanwhile, the world outside the window was nothing but dark in all directions. No towns, no cities. No lights. As if he’d carried her off the side of the world.
She didn’t realize she’d fallen asleep until there were suddenly too many lights and a new sort of commotion woke her.
Maggy pushed herself to sitting position and it took her much too long to recognize that she’d fallen asleep with her head on Reza’s wide shoulder. The scent in her nose now wasn’t the sea. It was him. Faintly spiced, warm male. A far deeper and more treacherous magic and this one seemed to pool deep inside of her, making her core tighten, then ache. Her breath left her in a rush and her eyes flew to his—
To find him watching her in that way of his, his gray eyes dark. And that all too knowing silvery gleam in his gaze. As if he could tell that just then—one hand at his lean, hard side and the other on his muscled arm, the impression of his shoulder against her cheek—she wasn’t thinking of him as a king at all.
Something rolled over her, intense and searing. She was suddenly aware of how terribly, inescapably hot she was. So hot she was surprised she wasn’t glowing like those lights, with her own bright halo marking her as out of her depth and overheated as she felt.
“We have arrived at the villa,” he told her quietly. It occurred to her to wonder how long he’d sat there, letting her sleep on him, before waking her. The idea that it might have been more than the moment or two it took to park wound tight inside of her, lit white-hot and bright. “Can you walk or shall I carry you?”
She couldn’t tell if he was kidding. Not that he struck her as much of a kidder. The air between them seemed...taut. Charged. Maggy let go of him entirely and threw herself back across the seats, then told herself she didn’t care if he could see her panic. As long as there was space between them. As long as she stopped touching him.
It made that unsmiling mouth of his soften slightly.
“I can walk,” she said. Too quickly.
Her voice gave away too much. She could hear it. And more, she could see the way his eyes went dark, the gleam in them very silver and very, very male. It connected hard to something she hadn’t known was there inside of her, making her core shiver, then melt.
Over and over again.
“As you wish, Princess,” Reza murmured, laughter in his voice that she could see nowhere on his harsh face. “Welcome to the island.”
And then he climbed out of the SUV, leaving her to sit there with only her too-loud breath for company. Wondering what might have happened if she’d said something else. If she hadn’t let go.
If she’d moved toward him rather than away.
* * *
Reza stood out on the wide stone balcony that surrounded the master suite in the villa, paying no attention whatsoever to the frigid winter temperature as he let the crisp sea air wash all over him.
He needed to wash himself clean of this affliction.
Of this abominable need that was eating him alive from the inside out.
He didn’t understand what was happening to him. Why the slightest, most innocuous touch from Maggy all but wrecked him. How was she managing it? How had she located the chinks in his armor when he’d had no idea it was armor in the first place? He’d thought this was simply who he was—unassailable in all ways—until now.
Was he more his father’s son than he had ever imagined? Was it possible?
The cold night beat at him, but he didn’t move inside.
This island had always been his family’s retreat. Back when Reza was a boy, this was where his parents took him at least once a year so that the royal family could have some time away from the pressures of court and the endless scrutiny of the public. When he was older, he’d realized it was where his parents came to hash out their differences—meaning, his father’s betrayals—in a place his father couldn’t retreat. The one place his father’s mistress wasn’t available at a moment’s notice, allowing his mother the chance to pretend the other woman didn’t exist. Fittingly, this was where they’d taught him that he was never, ever to behave as if he was flesh and blood and a mortal like all the rest. Like them.
This was where he’d learned that there was no room in the king for any hint of the man.
It does not matter what you say, Reza, but what you do, his mother had told him again and again, that harsh look in her gaze not for him, he understood in retrospect, but aimed at him all the same. Your subjects want to follow a king they can admire and support, not a flawed, weak little man whose clay feet trip him up whenever he tries to stand.
His mother had been a remote parent and a distant queen. She’d believed her place was behind the king, silent and beautiful and ever supportive, and no matter the whispers about her husband’s long-term dalliance or where his obsession with that woman had led him as the leader of a country. As far as Reza knew, she had never indicated in any kind of public setting that she even knew the other woman existed. The people are interested in the king, never his consort, she would tell her aides reprovingly when they’d broach the possibility of an interview or an article, perhaps talking about both of her husband’s women. And then she’d proved that her devotion outstripped her rival’s beyond a shadow of a doubt when she’d followed the king into the hereafter within three years of the death she’d known full well was no random heart attack. She had been a beacon of correctness unto the grave, and all the better if she’d been able to use it as a weapon. That was his mother. Ferocious in her pain unto the end.
Reza had not brought Maggy, his feral princess, here by accident.
But even now, even as he stood out in the cold and tried to lecture himself back into the closed-off, hermetically sealed state he had long preferred, Reza couldn’t quite manage it. He couldn’t stop thinking about Maggy.
The fact he was thinking of her as Maggy at all, instead of the more sophisticated, regal, and thus far more appropriate Magdalena, was part of the problem.
She’d shuffled out of her house dressed like a Halloween costume version of a young American woman, all attitude and that stubborn chin. But then, her wide caramel eyes had told him she was far more anxious than she appeared. She’d looked more vulnerable in that harsh morning light. Less hardened by the life she’d led than she had the night before.
He hadn’t known how to identify the feeling that had worked in him then. He hadn’t the slightest idea what it was. It had taken him the entire ride to the airport, reading and rereading the same three sentences on the same damned document, to understand what it was.
Helpless.
He was Reza Argos. He was the king of the Constantines. He was not and never had been and never would be anything like helpless. The very idea was laughable.
But then he’d proved that wasn’t true at all when he’d touched her again, running his hand over that brash, blond hair that was nonetheless silky and smooth against his palm. He’d stood too close to her out on that tarmac. She’d smelled vaguely of vanilla and coconut, and even that had slammed through him like a caress against the hardest part of him. And that same feeling had washed through him again.
He couldn’t help himself. He couldn’t stop.
He had no idea what the hell he was doing or when he’d become a slave to his feelings like his father
. He only knew he couldn’t allow it.
Reza was no untouched, untried boy. Yet here he stood on the other side of the planet, the cold wind from the Adriatic Sea pummeling him, and all he could think about was the way she’d looked at him back on a tarmac in the middle of nowhere in Vermont. What was happening to him?
Why was he letting this happen to him, and with the most unlikely creature imaginable? Did he care so little for his own pride—the promises he’d made himself that he would never, ever succumb to weakness like his father?
And that was before she’d fallen asleep on his shoulder.
It was a ten-minute drive from the airfield on the southern tip of the island to the magnificent villa that stood at its highest point, commanding views over the sea in all directions. And Reza had sat there perfectly still, unwilling to dislodge the soft weight of her.
Unwilling or unable. He couldn’t decide which. He’d been lost somewhere in the heat of her body against his. The faint press of her against him. The way her head seemed crafted especially to fit right there on his shoulder—
“Sire.”
His aide’s voice came from behind him, snapping him out of the memory of her body next to his, and Reza didn’t turn. He worried at what might be on his face. What he might reveal without realizing it. What might very well be shining off of him like a beacon, betraying every last thing he’d become. Showing that he’d turned into the very thing he hated.
“Is our guest settled?” he asked. He didn’t like the effort it took to sound as calm as he usually did.
“Yes, sire. In the queen’s suite, as you wished.” His aide cleared his throat. “And everything is arranged for the morning, in accordance with your orders.”
Reza turned then, nodding his acknowledgment and then following his aide back into the villa. He closed the doors against the winter chill, then stood in the great expanse of the bedroom that he’d once believed was the size of the world. He’d been allowed in here so rarely as a child. It had been his father’s private retreat. He’d hidden away in here from the family he’d supposedly come to the island to spend time with in the first place.
Bride by Royal Decree Page 8
