“I have already told you.” But it was harder now, wasn’t it? He concentrated on keeping his hands to himself. And that scant bit of distance everything in him wanted to close. “I am a king. My focus must be on my people, not on the pleasures of the flesh. A king who loses his focus loses his way. Believe me.”
“You’re going to marry me.” Her voice was fierce now, not cool at all, and there was a recalcitrant part of him that enjoyed that faint evidence that she was as shaken as he was. Reza didn’t like to think what that made him. “You told me you want heirs. How did you think that would happen?”
“Not like this.” He stepped back, putting distance between them the way he should have done from the start and keeping his damned hands to himself, no matter that he thought it might kill him. “I am a—”
“Stop saying that!”
He didn’t know which one of them was more shocked when she shouted at him. She looked as surprised as he felt, though she couldn’t have been. Reza wasn’t certain anyone had ever raised a voice in his direction.
Why did it make him want to do nothing but gather her close to him again? What was this? Why was he still standing here, engaging in this conversation?
But he still couldn’t move. He still couldn’t leave her.
He was tearing himself apart.
“Stop it,” she said again, her voice hoarse. “You’re a king, yes. I know that. But you’re also a man.”
“That is the trouble,” he grated out, unable to stop himself. Unable to keep himself in check the way he should. As if the tearing thing in him was a wrecking ball and he was splintering whether he liked it or not. “I must be more than a man. I must be above petty concerns. I am a creature of duty and honor, that is all. But you make me feel like a man and nothing more, Maggy, and I cannot have it.”
Her face softened and that was worse. Much worse. “Reza—”
“Silence.” His voice rang out, autocratic and regal. She stopped, making a faint sound, like a sob cut off before it could take root. But he was the king now. Not the man she could enchant and make into nothing more than her plaything. He had to be the goddamned king. “I should have delivered you to your brother the moment I found you. I should never have brought you here. I cannot allow this in my life.”
“This?”
“You.” He slashed a hand through the air. “I sit on a throne and hold the fate of a country in my hands. That must be my focus. That must be my only focus. My father split his focus and it cost him. He was blackmailed. Disgraced, if only privately. He nearly brought the country to its knees because he had a mistress he put before the crown. And his only excuse was love.”
His voice was scathing, but she didn’t back down. It was one more reason he couldn’t have her. He couldn’t risk it. “I don’t know anything about your father, but you and I have been betrothed since I was born. You could have married someone else, but you didn’t. Surely that means something.”
“You died.” His voice was so harsh. So cold. And he told himself he didn’t care when she flinched. “And I moved on.”
But Maggy had a spine of steel. She shook her head at him. “Clearly. That’s what last night was about, I’m sure.”
Reza ground his teeth together, and if his hands balled into fists and betrayed him, well. There was no way out of this. There was no fixing all the things he’d broken last night because he’d lost his hold on himself. There was only this, damage control and moving on.
He would not be his father, a disappointment to his wife, his son. A scandal on the throne, however hushed. A man who’d taken his own life and had left behind a son who had to clean up his mess. Reza had been twenty-four when he’d had to relocate his father’s longtime mistress to one of the crown’s far-off properties to keep her away from his mother and the royal court who’d despised her—and to keep her from blackmailing his father even after his death. He’d been paying for his father’s mistakes—literally—ever since.
“I must marry and I must hold the throne,” he told Maggy now, somehow keeping his voice in check. Somehow finding his control again. “These are the duties of every king of the Constantines across the ages. You make me imagine that I am something more than the throne. You make me feel as if I am a man instead.”
“You are a man.” Her voice caught. “You are the best man I know.”
“I am a king,” he gritted out, and if his chest felt crushed, too bad. He didn’t want to be the best man she knew. He didn’t want this. He couldn’t want anything like it, because he knew where it led. To a small cottage on the Isle of Skye, where a wretched old woman lived with the memories of a man who had never been hers, a man she’d tortured into taking his life, and the kingdom she’d been willing to ransom to serve her own ends. To his father’s early grave, the circumstances of his death hushed up and hidden, and a cloud forever over his name and legacy. “Do you know what happens when a king believes he is a man? When he acts like he is no different from the rest? He becomes it. He thinks with his sex, his temper. He allows himself to be flattered, to be small. To think in tiny terms that benefit him, not his country.”
He saw her swallow, hard. “Those are all bad things,” she said quietly. “But there are other ways to be a man. It’s not all sex and temper and war and pain.”
“I have spent my entire life keeping myself apart from the masses for the good of my kingdom,” he told her, fierce and rough. “I will not throw away what I have built on a woman. I refuse.”
“Reza.” His name in her mouth was a revelation, still. And he hated himself for it. “Don’t you think there’s another reason you feel so out of control? Maybe you feel the same things I do. Maybe this is your chance to be a king and a man, not one or the other. Maybe you lo—”
“Never.” His voice was too harsh then. It was beyond cold. It was nothing less than a slap—anything to keep her from saying that word. That impossible word. Love had no business here, with him. Love had nothing to do with the life he led, the kingdom he ruled. It had not one damned thing to do with that cracked feeling that was making his chest ache. “That will never happen. I will never allow it. Never.”
“Reza—”
But he couldn’t allow her to stand there, naked beneath his shirt, all his temptations made flesh. It would be too easy to weaken, as he’d already proved. He had to end this. Now.
“I am summoning your brother,” he told her, pulling the practicalities around him like a cloak. He moved around her, heading for the door, keeping his hands to himself no matter how little he wished to do so. “He will no doubt wish to carry you back to Santa Domini like the lost treasure you are. I hope that when I see you again at some or other event, we can be cordial.”
“Cordial? Are you out of your mind? Reza, we—”
He looked over his shoulder. “There is no ‘we.’ I release you from our contract.”
She looked lost, but she still stood tall. And made him feel tiny in comparison.
“What if I don’t release you?”
He shrugged as if he didn’t care about this. About her. “Then you will feel very foolish, I imagine, when I marry someone else. Which I will, Maggy. And soon.”
And then he walked out of that bedroom before he changed his mind the way he longed to do. Before he decided she was right and he could be both a king and the kind of man he’d imagined he was last night, sunk deep inside her. Before he went to her and kissed her mouth and took her back to his bed, the way every part of him shouted he should do, right now.
Before he let her make him forget who he was all over again.
* * *
Cairo Santa Domini was due to arrive on the island only a handful of hours later.
Maggy realized that Reza must have summoned him immediately after leaving her in his bedchamber. It suggested that the man must have leapt up from whatever kingly thing he’d been doing and raced to fly here, all to meet a sister he’d believed dead for twenty years.
“His Majesty expects the Santa Dominian plane to la
nd in two hours,” one of her smiling attendants told her when she’d made it back to her own room, still dressed in Reza’s shirt. The idea of wearing the dress he’d taken off of her with such sweet skill made her want to die. She’d decided it was far better to give the staff a little show, in case they’d missed Reza carrying her through the halls last night—
But it was better not to think about last night.
“Thank you,” she replied. Because what else could she say?
Maggy didn’t know what to expect from a brother. Especially not when he was a famous man in his own right. Another king, no less. And she certainly didn’t know how to feel. About anything, after a night that had scraped her raw and a morning that had left her feeling nothing but beaten up and bloodied.
She made her way to the state-of-the-art shower in her expansive bathroom suite and locked herself in. She made the water so hot the steam billowed up in clouds and first she scrubbed herself, over and over, trying to get him off of her. His scent, his touch. The memory of his mouth against her skin. Then she sank down, her back against the wall so she could tuck her knees up beneath her chin, and she cried.
For so long she thought she’d wrung herself dry, and yet she still didn’t feel any better.
When she was dressed, in a shift dress over soft leather boots and a lovely cashmere wrap she would have called princess casual if anyone had asked, she stood for too long at her own mirror. Remembering when he’d stood behind her.
You need to stop, that caustic voice inside her, the one that had kept her safe all this time, snapped at her. You’re only making this worse.
She went out into the villa while her attendants saw to her packing. Maggy expected Reza to ignore her. To stay out of her way. Surely that was the least he could do.
Maggy was picking at a meal she thought she should eat, though she wasn’t the least bit hungry, when Reza strode into the breakfast room.
She gaped at him. She didn’t pretend otherwise. She didn’t try to hide it.
And she hated herself for the little sliver of hope that wormed its way into her heart—
But this was Reza. He said nothing. He didn’t take back any of the things he’d said in his bedchamber. His gray gaze raked over her as if he was looking for evidence she was still her—but then he looked away again as he helped himself to some of the food the staff had set out on a side table.
He was hungry, apparently. He was the king—and that was all he wanted to be, the goddamned king—and he couldn’t have someone fix him a tray. Of course not. Of course he had to come here and torment her.
“Are you trying to torture me?” she asked him, through gritted teeth.
There was no sign of the man she knew on his set face when he turned to her. No hint of silver in his faintly astonished gaze. It was as if the Reza she knew had been replaced by a stranger.
“I cannot imagine what you mean.”
Maggy pushed to her feet. “If you want to do this, I can’t stop you. Believe me, I spent my whole life with my face pressed up to some or other glass, wishing I could have whatever was on the other side. I’m not doing it with you.”
That muscle clenched in his jaw, which she might have seen as a sign of hope twenty-four hours ago. But that was before that scene in his bedroom. That was before he’d thrown her out, like once again, she was nothing but garbage.
She’d thought becoming a princess would change that, but it didn’t. Maybe it was something in her that made her so easy to dispose of. So easy to toss aside.
“No one asked you to,” he said, and she told herself she was imagining the bite in his voice. As if this was hard for him when she knew it couldn’t be. Because if it was, why was he doing it?
“I’m not going to stand here and let you talk to me like a robot.” She threw her linen napkin on the table and pretended it was something harder and she was aiming for his face. “You might be one. You clearly want to be one. And you can hide all you want. But I won’t take part in it.”
And yet, after all her tough talk, she just stood there. She didn’t actually beg him to reconsider. She didn’t let him see her cry. But she might as well have.
He sat back in his chair, his mouth an unsmiling line that she wanted to taste. That was the trouble. She wanted him no matter what. No matter how little he wanted her.
“My investigators cannot be sure,” he told her in his chilliest, most distant regal voice. “But they believe they’ve traced what happened to you.”
Maggy wanted to hit him. And not with a linen napkin. But she wanted to hear this story, too. So she set her teeth and stood where she was.
“A man known to have been a member of the Santa Dominian military went on an unscheduled break not long after the car accident that killed your parents. Records trace him to London. Several weeks after that, a woman known to the British authorities after a botched drug smuggling attempt flew one-way to New York with a companion child. According to all records, the child named as that companion does not exist. The woman went underground soon after landing in New York City and was never heard from again. But three weeks later, you were discovered on that rural road in Vermont.”
It shouldn’t matter what the story was. She shouldn’t care. “You think she was hired to throw me away across the Atlantic, far from anyone who was looking for me?”
She thought she saw a glimpse of the Reza she knew then—and it turned out, that was worse. The hint of compassion only made the cold that much more bitter when it claimed him all over again.
“I think if they wanted to throw you away, they would have left you in that car,” he said softly. “I think someone took pity on an eight-year-old child. I suspect that woman was meant to care for you, not abandon you.”
“Well.” Maggy’s voice was as cold as his. She could feel the chill of it. “That appears to be something I bring out in people. Over and over again.”
Reza stared back at her and for a moment—only a moment—she was certain she could see something in his hard rain gaze. Something almost stricken. But it was gone in the next instant, leaving nothing but stone in its wake.
She told herself she was glad she felt empty inside as she walked from the room and left him there to his crown and his duty. Because the emptier she was inside, the less there was to hurt.
Maggy assured herself she was relieved when the Santa Dominian plane landed. During the ten minutes or so it took for the armored SUV to make it up from the airfield to the villa, she told herself what worked in her, leaving her feeling a little bit breathless, was happiness. Pure, unadulterated happiness. Because this was what she’d always wanted, wasn’t it? A family. A home. And without having to make herself over into some Very Special Princess so she could marry a man she hardly knew.
You’re just not used to all this happiness, she told herself stiffly. That’s why you feel like crying.
Reza had never been anything but a diversion. He wasn’t what she wanted. He’d been a means to an end, nothing more.
If she kept telling herself that, surely it would turn into truth.
And she was standing in the great open foyer when the SUV carrying Cairo Santa Domini pulled up in the circular drive, her hands in fists at her sides. Alone, of course.
Because she was always alone.
Buck up, Princess, she told herself. You always will be.
She heard a faint noise then and glanced over to find Reza beside her. He wore an expression she couldn’t decipher on his face and his eyes were much too dark.
“You don’t have to be here,” she told him, because she couldn’t stay quiet. That made her focus too much on all that emptiness. “I’m sure you have very important king things to do. Things that men would never do, only kings.”
Reza let out a small sound that she thought was a sigh of exasperation. Maybe she only wanted it to be. Then, his mouth in that flat line that still seemed to kick up all that longing inside of her, he inclined his head in that way of his. And something was wrong with her
that she felt that like some kind of support. As if he was holding her when he wasn’t.
When he’d made it so clear he wouldn’t.
Still, something inside of her curled at that. Like a small flame. Like hope that this thing between them wasn’t finished. Not yet.
Maggy jerked her head away from him, focusing on what was happening outside in the drive. She watched as if she was far, far away as a man climbed from the back of the SUV without waiting for it to stop fully or for the hovering attendants to open his door. He stopped once he was out, and didn’t move again until a redheaded woman followed him from the vehicle, then stood beside him, slipping her hand into his.
And there was no denying who he was. Cairo Santa Domini, known as an exiled king and a playboy of epic proportions before he’d taken back his kingdom. Maggy had stared at his face on tabloid magazines for years. It was hard to believe he was here. And more, that a vial of blood made them family.
Whatever that meant.
The woman—Queen Brittany, Maggy knew from the internet, once a reality star and a stripper and now the most beloved queen in Europe—gazed up at the man Maggy was supposed to call her brother as if she was giving him strength.
Cairo moved again then, his strides long as he headed for the villa’s glass entryway, and Maggy couldn’t breathe. Her palms stung and on some distant level she knew she was digging her nails into them, but she couldn’t bring herself to stop. She could hardly manage to breathe.
Beside her, Reza shifted. Then, impossibly, she felt his hand in the small of her back.
She wanted to scream at him. She wanted to ask him what the hell he was doing. But she didn’t want to do anything that would take the comfort of that hand away, no matter how cruel it was. No matter how little it actually meant.
Because that was the trouble. It was nothing to him. She was nothing to him, no matter how much hope she might carry deep inside her.
Yet to her, that hand was everything.
It was how she managed to stand there, straight and silent, as Cairo Santa Domini and his queen came swiftly into the hall. It was how she managed to breathe, just enough, as Cairo’s gaze moved from Reza to her.
Bride by Royal Decree Page 14
