Bride by Royal Decree

by Caitlin Crews

  All the heat and fire of these past weeks, all the sensation and need and longing, burst through her. He claimed her mouth, again and again, merciless and almost too hot to bear, and she couldn’t seem to get close enough.

  Maggy wanted more. She wanted everything.

  He made a low noise she didn’t recognize, but still it rolled through her and made her even warmer, as if there was some deep, feminine part of her that understood him in ways the rest of her couldn’t.

  She had always kept a part of her separate, no matter what, but here, now, in his arms, she melted. He kissed her again and again, and she met him with everything she was and everything inside of her and all the wildfire and yearning she’d been pretending wasn’t there and Maggy knew, somehow, that there was no going back from this.

  A princess was one thing. She could play that part, apparently. She even liked it.

  But he kissed her as if she was the woman she’d always wanted to become.

  As if she was truly his.

  Very much as if he heard that dangerous thought inside her head—as if she’d shouted it out into the empty ballroom—Reza wrenched his mouth from hers. So fast and so unexpected that for a head-spinning moment, Maggy thought maybe she really had said it out loud.

  Which would have been a disaster. She knew that. Having feelings for Reza could only complicate everything. Even this. Maybe especially this.

  Would any of this have happened if you didn’t have feelings for him already? an arch voice inside her asked. She ignored it.

  His breath sawed out between them as if he’d been running, or maybe that was hers—she couldn’t tell. But he didn’t let go. His hands were strong and elegant at once, and he kept them wrapped tight around her upper arms.

  Maggy knew she should have felt trapped. But she didn’t. She felt safer than she could remember ever feeling before, and it didn’t matter that the look on his face was anything but sweet.

  “This cannot happen,” he gritted out.

  He was still holding her to him. His face, so harsh and fierce and stern and beautiful, was close to hers. And Maggy was plastered up against him, her breasts pressed to his chest, so hard she could feel her own nipples like twin points of fire where they brushed against him.

  She should have been upset, surely. She should certainly have disliked his tone. She should have been...something. But instead she couldn’t think of a single place she’d rather be than right here in his arms, no matter how or why or what intense reaction he was having to it.

  “I thought you intended to marry me,” she whispered, from that same, strange place she hadn’t known was there, feminine and wise. She’d never flirted in her life. Why put something out there if she didn’t care enough to mean it? But here, now, she tilted her head back and arched into him, smiling when his breath caught. “How will you manage that if we don’t do this?”

  He set her back from him then, and that felt like a much greater loss than it should have, surely. It felt as if he’d kicked her. For a moment she swayed as if she might topple over, so badly did every part of her want to be close to him again. Closer. The distance between them felt like a slap.

  But yeah, that voice inside her poked at her. Good thing you don’t have any feelings for him.

  His gray gaze was so dark it looked nearly black. “Our marriage will be based on civility and respect,” he grated at her, and he didn’t sound like the Reza she knew at all. There was no distance there. No regal certainty. Something inside her prickled to awareness. “Not this...relentless hunger.”

  Maggy tilted her head to one side, then folded her arms over her chest, and who cared if her deportment instructor had forbidden her to do that. Repeatedly.

  “I hate to break this to you, Reza,” she said quietly. She realized as she spoke that she had no idea where her sense of calm came from. As if her body knew, way down deep inside, that she was safer here than she’d ever been anywhere else. Here, with him. No matter what was making him look at her that way. “But heirs are not made out of civility and respect. That sounds more like a handshake, which, unless it’s different for kings, won’t quite get the job done.”

  “This is who I am.” His voice was even more ragged, his gray eyes were more storm than rain, and Maggy stared. That was temper on his face, she was sure of it. Dark and furious. And with something else beneath that she understood instinctively, though she couldn’t name it. She felt it inside her, like a new heat. “There is absolutely no place in my life for this kind of distraction.”

  “By this kind of distraction, do you mean a wife? Or a queen?” She studied him. “Or are you talking about a kiss?”

  And then she watched him change, right there before her. She watched him beat back the storm and close himself off, one breath to the next. It was as if he rolled himself up tight into an armored ball. She watched his expression clear, then go cold. His gaze lightened, his mouth firmed. He stood straighter, somehow, and that intense, ruthless power that seemed to blaze straight out from inside him filled the whole of the ballroom.

  This was the king of the Constantines in all his glory. But Maggy had kissed the man. She wanted him back. She wanted the storm.

  She wanted to dance in it.

  “You have taken to your role admirably,” he told her, back to that stern, stuffy tone that she knew she should hate. She knew it. But instead it pulled taut inside of her, fire and need. “I anticipate we will be ready to introduce you to the world sooner rather than later.”

  “Do kings not kiss?” she asked mildly, in a provoking sort of tone her former employers and battalions of counselors would have used to prove her attitude was eternally bad. “I didn’t realize that was a breach of royal protocol.”

  He looked at her with that arrogant astonishment she remembered from the coffee shop. But something had changed—inside her. She could see that same expression. She remembered how she’d felt about it the first time—or how she’d told herself she felt. But now it was like a lit flame, burning her from the inside out.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  It might have been phrased as a question, even if he used that scaldingly remote and royally outraged tone. It wasn’t one.

  Maggy shrugged. Deliberately. “You seem so...” She waved a hand at him, not quite as dismissive as his, but certainly a contender. “Upset. I thought maybe there was some royal proclamation forbidding the kingly lips from touching another’s.”

  That muscle in his jaw clenched tight. “There is not.”

  “Then it’s me that’s the issue.” She eyed him. “Is that what you’re trying to tell me? That you have a problem with trailer trash after all? Even after all these weeks of playing Henry Higgins, just for me?”

  Reza seemed to expand, hard and harsh, to fill the room, though he didn’t move. Maggy could feel him everywhere. Pressing against her. Temper and divine right like a fog that stole inside and clogged the whole of the chamber.

  “I will see you at dinner at the appointed time,” he told her, his voice so cold she was surprised icicles didn’t form. “We will discuss the history of the Constantines and the Santa Dominian line of succession.”

  She managed, somehow, to keep her expression blank. “That sounds thrilling.”

  His jaw looked tight enough to shatter. “We will never mention this unfortunate episode again, so allow me to make this clear now. You are not trailer trash. You are the daughter of a revered and ancient bloodline. And for the record, I do not have problems with anyone or anything. I solve problems or am otherwise above the fray, as is appropriate for a man in my position.”

  “Is that why you’re so grumpy after a little kiss?” Maggy smiled at him when he glared at her, and she’d gotten a whole lot better at smiling since she’d come here. She was almost good at it now. “Because you’re so above it?”

  She thought he meant to say something. That perfect mouth of his moved and his dark gray eyes flashed, but he didn’t speak. He merely inclined his head in that cooll
y dismissive way of his. Then he turned on his heel with military precision and marched from the room.

  Maggy stood where he left her. She made herself breathe, deep and long, to get the shakiness out. Her mouth felt slightly swollen, sweetly battered from his, and she indulged herself, there in the middle of a fairy-tale ballroom on a faraway island, by pressing her fingers against her own lips. As if she could conjure up his kiss again that easily.

  The truth was, everything had changed tonight. She thought he knew it, too, or why else would he have reacted that way? All this time, she’d told herself that she was happy to go along with this because it got her out of her hard, cold, empty grind and allowed her to live the sort of storybook life she’d tried so hard to stop letting herself dream because it was too painful every time she woke up. Because doing this meant she belonged somewhere, and she could never be rejected from a place she claimed with her blood. She’d told herself that was all that mattered.

  But she’d been lying to herself. It had been as much about Reza as it had been about her remarkably stubborn princess dreams and the reality of that blood test. Maybe more.

  She’d agreed to marry him, not a fairy tale. She’d left everything she knew because he’d come and found her. Him. Not some random person. Not one of the tabloid reporters who dogged the steps of every royal in Europe. Not the brother she was still coming to terms with having in the first place.

  And she’d thrown herself headfirst into this crash course in becoming something other than trailer trash, which Maggy knew she’d been all her life no matter what he said to the contrary. No one in the foster care system had cared too much about her ancient bloodline. She hadn’t done all this because she was particularly fired up about being a queen. Or even because the clothes were exquisite and she’d discovered things about herself she’d never have known before and would never have found out—like the fact emeralds didn’t suit her, she preferred Louboutins to Jimmy Choos, and had an abiding appreciation for a very particular bath salt her attendants told her was handmade in one specific boutique in Bali. That was all its own delight, to be sure.

  But deep down, if she was brutally honest with herself, she’d been trying her hardest to make herself into the kind of woman Reza wanted.

  Maybe it wasn’t even that deep down.

  Every night she sat at the table in the formal dining room and turned herself inside out trying to make that ruthless mouth of his soften, just a little bit. Every night she trotted out pertinent facts and used the right utensils to show she was learning her numerous lessons. She sat with elegant posture and made the sort of easy and yet sophisticated conversation she’d been told—repeatedly—set a woman who would be queen apart from the masses. Educated and yet wry, compelling and yet not overly opinionated.

  “The formal dinner table is no place for strong opinions,” Madame Rosso told her again and again.

  “Because heaven forbid it put a man off his food,” Maggy had muttered once, glaring mulishly at the empty plate before her, several hours into a crash course on formal manners.

  The king’s former nanny had fixed her with a frank stare, all the way down the impressive length of her nose, the force of it making the white hair piled on top of her head seem to wobble.

  “This is about diplomacy,” she’d said in her crisp, clear-eyed way. “You are a royal princess. You will not be dining with people rounded up off the streets who might be in any doubt about the issues of the day. It is likely, in fact, that you will be seated with those who decide those issues. And when policy is served in the middle of a meal, it can only cause indigestion. A meal is the time one behaves as if the world is already perfect, war and strife do not exist, and everyone near you is a close, personal friend.”

  “Because no one needs to hear the opinion of a princess.” Maggy had wrinkled up her nose. “I get it.”

  “Because the point of a princess is that you are a symbol,” Madame Rosso had returned, her tone faintly chiding. “You are an amiable and benevolent reminder of what is for many a bygone time. It is called being gracious, Your Highness. In public, it is your greatest weapon. In private, of course, one expects you will have no trouble whatsoever making your opinions known however you choose and to whomever you wish.”

  And Maggy discovered that, in fact, she wanted to be gracious. She wanted to be a symbol of something positive as opposed to the poster child for neglect. She wanted to make this new role of hers her own in every possible way.

  But most of all, she wanted to be Reza’s.

  Maggy could finally admit it, with her mouth still tingling from his mercilessly beautiful kiss. She wanted to be his.

  She’d assumed that inhabiting the role of perfect princess was the way to do it, because that was what he’d said he needed from her, or wanted for her. The perfect princess, then the perfect queen. And all that entailed—heirs and grace and whatever else. But that was before he’d kissed her. That was before she’d seen that storm in him and wanted nothing more than to bathe in it.

  That was before he’d claimed her mouth with his and brought her alive. Wickedly, deliciously, beautifully alive. More alive than she’d ever been before in all her life.

  Which meant, she realized as she stood there in that ballroom filled with need and longing and Reza long after he’d left it, she needed to come up with a different plan.

  Two nights later, after a series of such excruciatingly stiff meals she was surprised she hadn’t turned to stone in the middle of them, Maggy decided it was time she tested the waters. He’d called what happened between them a relentless hunger. She wanted to see just how hungry he really was.

  Because it turned out she was ravenous.

  After another long, stiff dinner packed with a barrage of dry facts and the king’s dark glower from across the exquisitely set table, they moved into one of the many salons that littered the villa. Reza chose a different one every night, but what happened in each was always the same. They would sit and talk about things even more innocuous than what had passed for dinner table conversation.

  “This is ridiculous,” she’d said on one of the first nights they’d done this, scowling at him. “I’m not going to tell you what I did in the summers while I was growing up. Why would you want to know?”

  “This is called a conversation,” he’d replied, his expression like granite, though she’d been sure she’d seen a hint of that silvery gleam in his gaze. Or maybe she’d just wanted it there, more than was probably healthy. “It is much like dancing. It is all about the appearance of being light and airy, the better to put the person you are speaking with at his ease.”

  “If the person I’m speaking with isn’t at his ease after nine hundred courses and too much dessert, I don’t think me sitting here making up pleasant lies about my summertime activities is going to help.”

  “You are not required to lie.”

  “Oh, okay.” She’d glared at him, but she’d remembered to fold her hands in her lap so at least she looked like a lady while she did it. “I’d be happy to tell you about the summer I worked in the convenience store because I wanted to save up enough money to buy myself new shoes for school in the fall. My foster mother stole it from under my bed and spent it all on booze. Or wait, maybe the time the only job I could get was as a waitress in a sleazy motel restaurant, but the manager fired me because I wouldn’t have sex with him. Or I know, the summer I got a great job in a cute boutique on Main Street, but they let me go because I didn’t have a car and it took me so long to walk there every morning that I was always a sweaty mess when I arrived. That just wasn’t the trendy boutique look they were going for, you see.”

  “You’ve made your point.” His voice had been silken reproval, all the way through. She’d ignored it.

  “What did you do in your summers?” she’d asked him. “Polish the crown jewels? Behead a few peasants for a little giggle? Use your scepter as a machete as the mood took you?”

  “My summers were devoted to charity wor
k,” he’d said, surprising her more than she wanted to admit. “A different charity every summer from the time I was ten. Usually in a different country and for a different cause, and all of them quite hands-on. Many sick children, I’m afraid, though I also spent some time digging ditches. I was not raised to be the vicious and selfish monarch you seem to imagine.” His brows rose. “Beheadings and machetes and the crown jewels do not figure strongly under my rule, you might be surprised to learn.”

  “I thought that was the point of being king,” she’d said, but the edge had gone from the conversation. She’d seen that silver gleam in his gaze, the one that made her feel warm all over.

  “The point of the kind of light, easy conversation we have after dinner is twofold,” he’d told her after a moment. She’d become fixated on his hands then. The way he held one of them in the air as he lounged in his chair, looking as if he sat on a high throne instead of in an armchair. “First, it is happy. Sparkling. It allows you to guide the room in whichever direction you choose. And second, it is more intimate. Guests will have eaten, perhaps have had too much to drink. It is highly likely this is where deeper topics will be discussed—but that won’t happen if we all sit about in silence.”

  She’d looked at him. “I’m a diversion, then?”

  He hadn’t quite smiled. “My mother once held a room filled with men on the brink of war spellbound as she waxed rhapsodic about the balls she’d attended as a young woman. It was silly talk, but she made them laugh. It allowed my father to have a much needed casual aside with a man known at that time as the Butcher of the Balkans, and after that, the drums of war beat a little more quietly.” He’d swirled something amber in his glass for a moment before fixing her with that fathomless gray stare. “Never underestimate the importance of that diversion, Princess.”

  Tonight, they settled into Maggy’s favorite salon after their meal, which she decided was a good omen. It was an old study that felt more like a cozy library than a chilly sitting room. There was an ancient globe on a stand that had all the wrong names on countries with borders that had shifted a long time since. Hardbound books with gold-edged pages lined the walls. The fire was bright and warm tonight, holding the stormy winter weather outside at bay.