Bride by Royal Decree

by Caitlin Crews

  She’d never seen her own face so bright before.

  The dress looked like something out of one of those glossy magazines she’d always pretended to loathe. The gray color was soft and interesting at once, making Maggy’s pale skin seem to glow. It was a modest dress, she supposed, but it didn’t seem that way. There was something about how it fell from a sophisticated neckline all the way to her knees, with only a slight indentation just beneath her breasts, that suggested a kind of restrained and high-class sex appeal without actually showing anything. The shoes did much the same thing, somehow managing to look elegant in a way Maggy didn’t know shoes could. There was a gleaming diamond necklace around her neck and a chunky ring on her index finger featuring a collection of precious gems in a variety of colors, all of which caught the light and sparkled.

  But more than all that, she looked like someone else. Completely different from the Maggy she’d seen in her own mirror yesterday morning before she’d headed out to meet Reza’s convoy. If she hadn’t known the reflection she was looking at was hers, she’d have easily and happily believed that it was some long-lost princess. And she hardly dared think it, but she really did look like that picture of the queen he’d shown her.

  The queen. Her mother.

  But she didn’t want to think about that yet. Not yet. She took a breath and realized in the next instant that Reza was still holding her fingers in his as he stood behind her, his other hand at her waist. And suddenly she could think of nothing else. Except the tempting notion that if she leaned back the tiniest bit she could nestle herself directly against the wall of his chest.

  She would never, ever know how she managed to keep herself from doing it.

  “This is how you look after one day,” Reza told her, his voice near her ear making her shiver. He was the one who stepped away then, something she couldn’t read making his eyes silver. She fought to repress yet another shiver as she watched him in the mirror. “We will stay here several weeks. By the end of this time, I expect you will be able to acquit yourself quite well in the glare of whatever spotlight you might encounter.”

  “Yes,” she said, because she had to say something. And she couldn’t let herself say any of those things that clawed at her from that raw place, deep inside. She didn’t want to think them. She wanted this. She wanted every last part of this. “I’m sure I will.”

  But even after he turned and headed across the room, Maggy stayed where she was before that great, tipped glass, staring at herself. Because she wasn’t herself anymore.

  She was the fairy-tale princess he’d made her into, just as he’d said he would, in the course of a single day.

  And Maggy had absolutely no desire to ever wake up.

  * * *

  It was worse now she looked the part.

  And much, much worse that he’d let himself hold her like that.

  Reza told himself this mad obsession was beneath him. That he was in no position to lose himself in a woman like his father had done before him, particularly not this one. If she was to be his queen—and she was, of course, as their fathers had planned so many years ago—then the formalities needed to be observed above all else. The only thing he could think of that was worse than losing his head over an inappropriate mistress was doing the same thing over the woman who would have to bear his children. Where would it end? What destruction would he wreak? He couldn’t imagine it. Or allow it.

  He spent his days tending to matters of the crown from his office in the villa, surrounding himself with his advisers and running his country from afar. And if he insisted on an investigation into that long-ago accident and the following of twenty-year-old leads to figure out how a Santa Dominian child in a car accident in Montenegro had made it across the Atlantic Ocean to the United States, so be it. The Princess Magdalena was to be his queen. What had happened to her would be public record and, more than that, incorporated into the lore of the monarchy itself.

  He filled her days with the very serious business of turning an abandoned American foster child into one of Europe’s most celebrated royals.

  He had her fitted for an entire new wardrobe that suited her position. He had Milanese courtiers fly in with one of a kind pieces for her to try on and choose between as she pleased, with the help and advice of his personal tailors. He flew in special jewelers from Paris to outfit her appropriately, so she might have a few pieces to wear until she regained her access to the Santa Dominian crown jewels, to say nothing of the Constantinian collection she would be expected to wear after their wedding.

  And while all the outward trappings that would cement her as his betrothed in all the right ways were being attended to by the most fashionable people in the world, he brought in diction coaches to soften and shape her language. He couldn’t teach her the Italian and German every Constantinian spoke fluently in so short a time, but he could work a bit on her English. Less rural American and more European, so it would sound better to the average Constantinian ear.

  He brought in a former prima ballerina to teach his queen how to walk, how to stand, how to shake hands, and how to curtsy with varying degrees of deference. He made her sit with a selection of his aides and learn the rudiments of the kind of diplomacy she’d be expected to know inside and out at all formal functions. He had yet another aide talk her through the tangled history of Santa Domini and the Constantines, so she would be less likely to trip into any old, festering wounds that still lingered there, as such things tended to do between all ancient European nations. He had her consult with his own public affairs officers, to teach her how to handle cameras and reporters and the unsavory realities of public life in a tabloid world. He even brought in his formidable former nanny, now pushing eighty, to teach Maggy the same excruciatingly correct set of manners she’d taught him back in the day, at the table and everywhere else a royal might venture.

  “A banquet is a performance,” he heard Madame Rosso pronounce in her usual ringing tones from the formal dining room one afternoon, just as she had when he’d been a boy. “Your appetite has nothing to do with it. Indeed, you must worry about sating yourself on your own time. A banquet is an event at which you are royalty first and a hungry person never. Do you understand?”

  “I understand,” Maggy said. Sweetly enough that Reza paused outside the room, whatever errand he’d been on forgotten.

  She was so understanding when asked anything these days. She always agreed, nodded, curtsied. She modulated her tone and softened her accent. It was as if she’d been possessed by an alien, Reza thought darkly—and the fact he should have been rejoicing over how easily she was taking to what she’d called Princess School in a rare flash of her old self one evening made him that much more annoyed with himself.

  The truth, and he was all too aware of it, was that he was something far more dangerous than simply annoyed with himself.

  Reza couldn’t quite believe that he found himself missing the sharp-tongued bottle blonde who had looked at him with such blatant disrespect in Vermont. He told himself that of course he didn’t. Not really. It was just that Maggy was immersing herself in her studies of all things royal and, in so doing, becoming the princess she’d always been meant to be. The real Maggy would come out the other side, he was sure of it.

  Why on earth would you want her to come out the other side of decent behavior? he asked himself then, deeply irritated with his own frailties where this woman was concerned.

  But he had no answer for that. The more appropriate she became, the harder he found it to resist her. It was as if the veneer of the princess he’d always wanted stretched over that fearless creature he’d met in Vermont made this woman into his own, personal, walking and talking downfall. No matter how steadfastly he refused to go there.

  Meanwhile, he suspected he was a little too insistent about the dinners they shared every night. He told himself that these formal meals were a way to assess her progress. That they were necessary, and perhaps that was true. But he knew full well that wasn’t w
hy he found himself anticipating the dinner hour all day.

  He was betraying himself and everything he stood for and he couldn’t seem to stop.

  One night he found her in the grand hall an hour or so before the bell was due to ring to announce dinner. She was counting out loud as she practiced waltzing by herself, her lovely face screwed up into a frown as she stared at her feet and held her arms in a rigid box in the air before her.

  It was one thing to want her. That was bad enough. But this...melting sensation in the region of his chest was something far worse than simply unacceptable. It was a different sort of danger entirely, he knew it. And it got worse the more she transformed before him. Tonight it very nearly ached.

  Reza ordered himself to move on. To retire to his rooms and dress for dinner the way he knew he should, and maintain the level of formality between them that was the only thing keeping his sanity in check, he sometimes thought.

  Instead, he walked into the ballroom.

  Maggy was too busy counting to see him approach. “One, two, three, four. One two three four. Onetwothree—”

  She stopped the moment she saw him. She seemed to freeze into place where she stood, those caramel eyes of hers wide on him, her arms still in the air as if she danced with a ghost.

  And he was many things, most of them deeply unsavory at present and entirely too much his father’s son, but he was no liar. He knew exactly what that heat was in her gaze. He felt the same thing storm through him, tying him into a thousand intricate knots that felt like fire.

  “What are you doing?” she asked. He could tell from that strange tone in her voice that he must look particularly intense.

  He should have cared about that. It should have set off every alarm inside of him, that he should betray himself at all, much less so obviously. But if it did, he couldn’t bring himself to care.

  If this was how his downfall started, he couldn’t seem to mind. Not tonight. Not when she had transformed herself into every last thing he’d always, always wanted.

  “Allow me to assist you,” he said, his voice dark and low.

  Reza didn’t wait for her to respond. He had crossed the room by then, so he simply took her in his arms, ignoring the heat that blazed between them.

  Well. It was more like he marinated in that heat. Soaked in it. Dared it to try to drown him.

  He wrapped his fingers around hers. He liked, too much, her grip on his opposite shoulder. He held her at the correct distance and thought he deserved a medal or ten for refraining from pulling her up hard against his body the way he wanted to do.

  And then he started to dance, sweeping her along with him. The fact that there was no music did not signify. There was her breath. There was his heartbeat, hard and deep and needy. Nothing else mattered.

  Reza let himself admire her as they moved. His princess. His queen. Tonight her hair was piled on the top of her head, that dark, rich color he preferred, and she was wearing a shift dress that made her look very young and very chic at once. She was still slender, though she’d lost that hungry look over the past weeks. There was nothing at all to distract from her beauty now. Not one single thing.

  And he liked having her in his arms almost too much to bear.

  “It’s hard to reconcile the woman I met in that coffee shop with you now,” he said, because he couldn’t seem to help himself. He couldn’t keep from poking at the very thing he shouldn’t touch. “You are so alarmingly agreeable.”

  “I’m the exact same person,” Maggy replied, but he thought her response was too quick. Too pat. And he didn’t like that she kept her gaze trained on his chin, as if she was deliberately keeping her eyes from him. Hiding, right there in his arms. “It’s just that instead of trying to remember to pay my rent on time, I now have to remember which fork to use.”

  There was no reason so smooth and rehearsed a response should have bothered him. Reza told himself it didn’t. This was what he’d wanted, after all. Indeed, this was what she deserved. She was a royal princess. She should appear this way, without any cracks and wholly unobjectionable. His odd nostalgia for the creature she’d become to survive what had happened to her demeaned them both, surely.

  He was disgusted with himself. Still, he spun her around the room again and again because he couldn’t bring himself to let go. He couldn’t make himself do it.

  You are a king, said a voice from deep inside of him, sounding very much like his mother’s crisp, faintly starchy tones, in those dark days following what they’d all known was his father’s suicide to avoid the mess he’d made of his life, his country. Do you rule or are you ruled?

  He stopped then, abruptly. Maggy’s momentum kept her going and she almost fell against him. He almost let her, to serve his own hunger—but at the last moment he righted her.

  “I will instruct your dance instructor to pay more attention to your footwork,” he heard himself say, his voice like a winter chill. “You cannot trip over foreign dignitaries without causing international incidents.”

  Her chin rose and she tugged at her hand to get him to release it. He only held it tighter.

  “Given that I didn’t know how to dance at all until a week or so ago, I think I’m doing fine.” Her voice was even, but he was sure he heard a hint of that old fire beneath it.

  How sad that he thrilled to it. But he did.

  “It is not what you think that matters, Princess.” His voice was too low, too telling. But all he could seem to do was stare at the tender place in the hollow of her neck, watching the way her pulse jumped. Reza told himself it could mean anything. That he shouldn’t take it as a matching fire, no matter that he could see the echo of it in her gaze. “It is what I think.”

  He let her go this time when she tugged at her hand again. Maggy stepped back, her chin tilted at that mutinous angle he’d missed far more than he should have, and then, her challenging gaze on his, she executed a crisp and perfect curtsy.

  It was perhaps the most eloquent up yours gesture he’d ever seen. Certainly directed at him.

  “Bravo,” he said. He wanted to laugh. But that wasn’t the thing that wound tight inside of him, pulling him taut and making him ache. “But I must warn you not to attempt a repeat in front of any other monarch you might encounter. Particularly with all of your attitude on display. You might find yourself beheaded for the insult, and no matter that such things were outlawed centuries ago.”

  “If that was an insult, I must have learned how to do it wrong,” she said, but her caramel eyes gleamed with that same hot challenge when they met his. “My deepest apologies if I offended you, Your Majesty.”

  And that was the last straw. His title in her mouth, crisp and pointed, as if it was another insult, even as it licked over him like something else entirely.

  Reza didn’t mean to move. He didn’t know he did, but somehow the distance between them was gone, and worse, he had his hands wrapped around the smooth, entrancing place where her upper arms became her shoulders.

  He was touching her skin, and not merely her hand. At last.

  “Reza...” she whispered.

  He ignored her. Because he was too close to her, he was touching her, and that changed everything.

  All these games he’d been playing these last weeks fell away.

  There was only this. There was only her.

  He thought she said his name again, but it was as if it came from somewhere far away. Lost in the storm that washed through him. His thumbs dragged over her soft skin, back and forth as if he couldn’t help himself. He watched, fascinated, as a fresh set of goose bumps rose and then swept across her throat, giving her away. Telling him everything he needed to know.

  “You cannot taunt me with your brand-new manners and then take it back with my name, Princess,” he told her, bending his head toward hers. “You cannot imagine that will work.”

  Her hands were flat against his chest, but she didn’t push against him. Her fingers seemed to curl in, as if she was trying to find purchase
against his jacket. As if she wanted to hold on to him.

  And her full, lush mouth was right there within reach.

  Reza stopped pretending he had any control left. He stopped pretending he could resist her when that resistance had grown more and more scant with every passing day.

  He stopped pretending, full stop.

  He damned himself fully, and then he took her mouth with his.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  HIS MOUTH WAS as hard as it looked. Uncompromising and stern as it moved on hers, taking her and tasting her, encouraging her to do the same.

  And when she did, when she met him, his taste filled her. Hot and ruthless and entirely Reza.

  It was glorious. It was better than glorious.

  This is no dream, something inside her whispered. This is the fairy-tale kiss to end all fairy-tale kisses, and it’s real.

  But for once, Maggy didn’t care either way. She just wanted more.

  She gave herself over to his demanding mouth. His kiss was heat and light, pouring into her and through her, kicking up fires wherever it touched. Her heart cartwheeled in her chest. Her head spun around and around. Her breasts seemed to swell with all the hunger that stormed through her, her nipples pulled to tight points, and between her legs she was nothing but a soft, molten ache.

  His hands gripped her upper arms, firm and sure, and lifted her closer to him. And there wasn’t a single thought in Maggy’s entire being except yes. More. More of Reza. More of that stern, hard mouth. More of this wild, stirring electric hunger that tore through her, making her greedy and half-mad. Making her entirely his, as if this right here was where she truly belonged.

  She wanted more.

  Maggy surged up on her toes and she dug her fingers into the stone wall of his chest, and that was when he angled his mouth for a deeper, better fit.

  And the world exploded.