by Lucy Monroe
He opened the door to his room on her first knock.
She grinned, delight at his eagerness overshadowing her nerves. “You were waiting.”
“I’ve been checking the hall every few minutes,” he admitted.
“You’re amazing, you know that?” She threw herself in his arms, and just like every time she did that, he caught her and pulled her close as if she was the most precious thing in the world.
He led her through to the bedroom, but she held back from the bed. “Wait, we need to talk.”
He stopped and looked at her consideringly. “Would you feel better having this discussion on the sofa in the living room?”
“Yes. Not really, but I think we should.”
He smiled at her indulgently. “Then, by all means, let us return to the outer room.”
They sat on the sofa, and she took several breaths, but the words wouldn’t come.
“I think I know what you want to talk about.” He laid his hand over hers.
“No, no, I really don’t think you do. You think I want to talk about us continuing to see each other and bringing our relationship into the real world. Which I do.” Oh, man, did she.
“But?” He was looking wary.
She grabbed the small clear plastic bag containing the tiny white stick out of her pocket. She handed it to him. “We’re pregnant,” she blurted out.
He stared at her, his mouth opening and closing, but no sound came out. He took the stick, stared at it. “Two blue lines means pregnant?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. The doctor told me that only eight couples in one hundred will get pregnant while using the patch.”
“That makes us one of the lucky eight percent then.” He smiled at her, his joy blinding.
Tears burned her eyes, choking her, but she hugged him and kissed him hard. “I love you so much, Mich. I didn’t know how you were going to take this.”
“It was not planned, but every baby is a blessing.”
Maybe that was a Sicilian thing, because she was fairly certain her parents weren’t going to be so calm about it. “My dad is going to freak.”
“Because you are pregnant?”
“We aren’t married. Not that I expect you to marry me. We can take our time, make this work. He might not understand, but I do.”
“Why should we take our time? I have known I wanted you for the rest of my future since you walked away from me that morning in Palermo.”
“How could any guy be more perfect than you?”
“Well, this perfect guy has the perfect solution.”
“What?”
“We elope. Tonight. My family has a house in the Caribbean. The island has no waiting period on a marriage license. The local priest and magistrate are indebted to my family. We can be married by tomorrow afternoon.”
“Isn’t that crazy?”
“Isn’t love?”
“But—”
“If we don’t elope, our families will get ahold of this and it will become a circus. It will stop being about us, about the family we’re starting, and be about the families we come from.”
He was so right about that. Relief-driven euphoria and adrenaline poured through her. “Yes, let’s elope.”
She’d never wanted the huge wedding. Had dreaded the day her mother and father got their teeth into that milestone event.
“You know I always wanted something small on the beach. No reporters, no business or political allies. Just me, the man I love and our immediate families.”
His espresso gaze said her dream sounded wonderful to him. “We’ll share our happiness with them after the event.”
“Yes.”
Kiki was so glad she’d prepped her family for meeting Mich in a couple of days, not tomorrow like she’d led him to believe. She’d known she and Mich needed time to formulate a plan in response to the pregnancy. Now she’d have that time to elope before her dad sent the troops after her.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE SAND ON the beach outside Mich’s borrowed Caribbean villa was golden, fine and moister than what she’d grown up knowing in either California or the pebbly beaches of Spain’s eastern coastline.
A gentle breeze, heavy with humidity, lifted her hair, and Kiki was glad she’d foregone the sun hat she’d worn the last time with this dress.
She was getting married in the white Oscar de la Renta sundress she’d worn the day she had met Mich in Palermo. But she’d left off the hat and her sandals. She’d added the white gold diamond teardrop necklace and earrings her parents had given her for her graduation.
It helped her to feel as if they were there with her, witnessing the vows she spoke on the beach with the man she’d fallen in love with so quickly and deeply.
Mich was barefoot too, wearing a pair of Calvin Klein chinos and a white Spanish-style shirt of fine lawn, embroidered in traditional patterns around the hem and neckline in white silk thread.
When Kiki had asked him to wear the shirt her dad had left behind on a visit, Mich had given her a strange look.
“It’s a connection to my Spanish heritage. It will make my parents happy to see it in the pictures later,” she’d explained.
Mich had shrugged and taken the shirt. “I will wear it. Our future will hold a multitude of opportunities for us to bow to my own heritage.”
She was so relieved he’d agreed to her request, she hadn’t questioned the odd wording of his answer. Kiki didn’t know why it was so important to her to feel as if her parents were there, even though if they were, she just knew the wedding wouldn’t be happening. Her dad would insist on investigating Mich to the nth degree and forcing him to somehow prove he wasn’t marrying Kiki for her father’s money.
Miguel Menendez would never believe that Mich didn’t know anything about Kiki’s family background. But their name was a common one, and she didn’t make it a habit of getting her picture taken by the press.
One of the reasons she’d gone to university in New York had been to maintain her anonymity.
All thoughts of family and past choices flew out of her head when the priest asked her to speak her vows. Mich’s eyes flared when the priest said her full name.
But she figured he would understand why she didn’t use her stuffy first name, Constanza.
She spoke her vows while looking directly into Mich’s eyes, meaning every syllable of the promises with every fiber of her being.
The priest turned to Mich and started to say, “Prin—”
“Father,” Mich cut him off with a serious glower.
The priest nodded and began again, his voice more nervous than when he’d led Kiki in her vows. “Vittoro Micheli Scorsolini, will you take this woman…”
Ah, so he had a first name he didn’t like or use, either.
The vows were traditional, but Kiki felt she was the first woman in the world to hear the promises uttered in such a determined, rich masculine voice. Mich’s words were thick with a Sicilian accent, one she had never heard outside of lovemaking with him.
When he slid the diamond-encrusted platinum band on her finger, it was accompanied by a second ring with a diamond that rivaled her mother’s in a gorgeous setting of rubies and more diamonds.
She stared up at him, questioning how he’d managed to produce such a dazzling wedding set for their unplanned elopement.
“I had it overnighted,” he mouthed.
The priest still gave them a disapproving look but continued with his blessing at a nod from Mich.
Kiki dipped her head to hide her smile and the happy tears filling her eyes. Her ring for him had a ruby too, set in antique white gold. It was her grandfather’s, an heirloom that he’d given to Kiki when she had turned sixteen to save for her future husband.
Kiki took the fact that the two rings both bore the stones of passionate love as a good sign for their future.
That passion was very much in evidence when they returned to the master suite in the villa. Mich
couldn’t keep his hands off her, and Kiki didn’t mind at all.
They were naked together in every way as he poised to slide inside of her, no condom, no security of birth control. Just her and him and the baby they’d made together.
He looked down at her, his expression so intense she shivered. “We are a family now.”
“Yes.”
He surged inside her, sending her nerves skyrocketing.
“Oh, yes,” she moaned, the sensations different in an undefinable way.
She didn’t know if it was that they were man and wife, committed to a lifetime, or that she was pregnant, or simply that they’d both admitted their love. But laced with the overwhelming passion was a primal and profound connection they had never achieved before.
And although he made love to her with undeniable sexual urgency, there was a new tenderness and care to his movements.
They came within a second of each other; she couldn’t even tell which one had climaxed first. It didn’t matter. Their bodies had just consecrated their union with as much power and worship as the priest’s final blessing.
“And the two shall become one,” Mich said, still inside her and proving that their thoughts were on the same page.
“Forever,” she promised.
“Invece.” His beloved was a vow all on its own.
*
Mich was watching his wife…saints above, his wife…as she slept the morning after their wedding. Bright sunlight filtered through the gauze covering the windows, illuminating every perfect, beautiful line of the woman he’d fallen for. The mother of his child.
His family was going to have a royal conniption. He thought his mother, Queen Therese, known so well for her patience and calm, might even yell. A prince did not elope.
For the heir to the throne to do so? A criminal offense in his grandfather’s eyes, Micheli had no doubt.
And yet, even knowing the storm he faced—they faced—could not make him regret that so very precious ceremony on the beach.
He moved to touch her shoulder, not to wake her, only to feel the satin smoothness of her skin under his hand. A thunderous pounding on the villa’s front door aborted his movement, Mich’s fingers a centimeter from her shoulder.
A masculine voice shouted in Spanish—the open windows allowing cross breezes to cool the house making it almost as loud as if he were in the room with them.
Kiki sat straight up in bed, her eyes going comically wide as she turned her head side to side. “What? Who… Papa?”
“Constanza Kiki Menendez, open this door immediamente, or I will break it down!”
Then Mich could hear a female voice, but not make out her words.
“I will not call her Scorsolini. I have not even met this man who dares to steal my daughter away!”
Mich had no trouble hearing that.
Kiki had heard the words too, because she was out of the bed, rushing around the room looking for clothes and then just grabbing the sheet.
Wrapping it around her, she ran for the door. “Papa, calm down. You’re upsetting Mom. You know you are. She hates it when you yell.”
Oh, no. Mich’s wife was not tearing through the house to appease another man. Not even her father.
He leaped from the bed, then grabbed his chinos and pulled them on even as he followed Kiki at speed.
He reached her just as she went to open the door. He grabbed her arm and shook his head. “Go back and dress. I will let them in.”
Pure panic glowed in her storm-gray eyes. “No. You don’t understand. I need—”
Another loud knock at the door, what sounded like a single kick and more Spanish, which was close enough to Italian for Micheli to know the older man had demanded once again for the door to be opened.
It was the sound of distress Kiki made that convinced Micheli to open the door, not her father’s clearly increasing ire.
He gently pushed her back so Micheli stood between his new wife and the irate man on the other side. Then he reached out, unlocking and opening the door in one movement.
It could have been his own family on the other side, the group seemed so eerily familiar. A tall man, who was clearly Kiki’s father, vibrated with incandescent fury. Beside him stood a stunning older version of the woman he’d married—Kiki’s mother. Behind them was a full contingent of security.
Micheli drew his royalty around him like the suit he wasn’t wearing and stepped back. “Come in. Signore e Signora Menendez, I presume.” He could have used their Spanish titles, but that would have established a different power dynamic than the one he wanted: the one in which they recognized him as the primary man in Kiki’s life now.
Kiki’s father glowered, making no move to enter the house after all his demands to be let inside. “And you are?”
His wife slapped his arm. “You know very well who he is, Miguel. He’s your daughter’s husband, and if you don’t want to alienate her, I suggest you get your temper under control.”
Miguel’s gaze slid past Micheli to Kiki, and a slight tightening of his mouth said maybe his wife’s warning had been heard and heeded.
“Mom,” sounded from behind him, the single word expressing happiness, anxiety and even desperation.
It was the tiny quaver that had Micheli turning around to see his wife. She was blinking back tears and looking too damn vulnerable.
Ignoring the people behind him, he reached for her. “All will be well, invece. We knew this moment was coming.”
They just hadn’t expected it this quickly.
“Don’t make my daughter promises you may not be able to keep,” Miguel said in strained voice.
His arms firmly around his trembling wife, Micheli turned back to her parents, no doubt in his heart to come through in his expression or tone. “Any promise I make to your daughter, I will honor. All vows I have made to her are permanent.”
Some of the fury in Miguel’s eyes seemed to bank, and it was then Micheli realized the man was worried for his daughter. But why?
“You two need to get dressed immediately. I convinced your father to allow me to collect you, but you are facing a storm of epic proportions when we reach the palace. I will not allow my daughter to be hit by its lightning. You understand me?”
“Palace?” Kiki asked. She tipped her head back to meet his eyes. “Mich, what is my dad talking about?”
Miguel replied before Micheli could. “Kiki, meet your husband. Principe Vittoro Micheli Scorsolini.”
“You’re a prince?” she asked in shock.
“And you are a billionaire’s daughter.” Micheli’s brain had finally started firing on all cylinders, and he recognized Miguel Menendez from the financial news.
Incredibly, she blushed. “Um, yeah, about that…”
He shook his head. “No. It doesn’t matter. I fell in love with you, Kiki Scorsolini.” He wasn’t forgetting her new last name like her father. “And you fell in love with me, not my role.”
“But you are a prince?”
“Heir to the throne of Isole dei Re,” her father answered again.
Micheli glared at him. “I’m capable of speaking for myself.”
“Really? Then why is it that my daughter is not aware that one day she will be queen?” Miguel looked at Kiki, one brow raised. “And you had issues with taking over my company.”
The temptation to clock the billionaire had Micheli clenching his hands into fists.
“Don’t,” Kiki said softly.
He looked down at her.
“I know. The temptation to smack him is almost overwhelming, but it won’t solve anything.”
“I was going to tell you, before—”
“Before you found out I was pregnant with your heir?” she asked, interrupting.
Her mother gasped. Her father cursed.
Kiki ignored them both. “Before you whisked me off to marry you so no one, not even a king, could stop us?”
She understood. The relief flowed through him in a near-debilitating wave. �
�Sì. I was going to tell you everything today.”
“You do not think you should have told her before you married her?” Miguel demanded.
“Forgive me, please,” he said to Kiki, refusing to acknowledge the Spanish billionaire.
“Yes, Mich. I love you, and there is nothing to forgive. We both wanted to be loved for who we are, not where we come from. Our future is a little more complicated than I thought, though.”
“A little.” He smiled down at her, very glad when she returned it.
“We do need to get back on the plane. The royal family’s PR team is working with ours, but we must face this news with a united front.” Surprisingly, that came from Kiki’s mother.
“Amber, as always, you are the voice of intelligent reason, mi amor.”
“I’m going to be a grandmother,” the voice of reason said emotionally to her spouse.
“They’re kissing. That should give us enough time to shower and dress anyway,” Kiki said drily.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE ROYAL PALACE of Isole dei Re impressed Kiki, but it was the royal family, gathered en masse in their private reception room, that intimidated her.
There were a lot more of them than in her family, and not one person looked particularly welcoming. The prevailing emotion didn’t seem to be anger so much as utter shock. Apparently Mich was the responsible one, the guy everyone counted on to do the right thing.
He hadn’t left her side though, not even to greet his parents, making it clear where his loyalty lay.
Her own parents and their top two security men flanked them.
King Claudio looked a lot like his son, except for the gray at his temples and the chill in his dark eyes as they took Kiki in.
“So, you are the woman who has convinced my son to disregard his training and obligation to marry you in some elopement.” He made their beach wedding sound so sordid.
“She is the woman I love,” Mich replied, ungiving steel in his tone.
Whoa. That was not a voice she’d want directed at her.
“You love her so much, you did not think enough of her to introduce us?” the queen asked, sounding more upset and confused than angry, her lovely Italian features wreathed with concern.
