The Prince's Nine-Month Scandal

by Caitlin Crews

  “It was a boat ride, sir.” Rodolfo had kept his voice even because he knew it irritated his father to get no reaction to his litanies and insults. “Not precisely a scandal likely to topple the whole of the kingdom’s government, as I think you are aware.”

  “What I am aware of, as ever, is how precious little you know about governing anything,” his father had seethed, in all his state and consequence.

  “You could change that with a wave of your hand,” Rodolfo had reminded him, as gently as possible. Which was perhaps not all that gently. “Yet you refuse.”

  And around and around they went.

  Rodolfo’s father, the taciturn and disapproving sovereign of Tissely, Ferdinand IV, held all the duties of the monarchy in his tight fists and showed no signs of easing his grip anytime soon. Despite the promise he’d made his only remaining son and heir that he’d give him a more than merely ceremonial place in the principality’s government following Rodolfo’s graduate work at the London School of Economics. That had been ten years back, his father had only grown more bitter and possessive of his throne, and Rodolfo had...adapted.

  Life in the principality was sedate, as befitted a nation that had avoided all the wars of the last few centuries by simple dint of being too far removed to take part in them in any real way. Rodolfo’s life, by contrast, was...stimulating. Provocative by design. He liked his sport extreme and his sex excessive, and he didn’t much care if the slavering hounds of the European press corps printed every moment of each, which they’d been more than happy to do for the past decade. If his father wished him to be more circumspect, to preserve and protect the life of the hereditary heir to Tissely’s throne the way he should—the way he’d raced about trying to wrap Felipe in cotton wool, restricting him from everything only to lose him to something as ignoble and silly as an unremarkable cut in his finger and what they’d thought was the flu—he needed only to offer Rodolfo something else with which to fill his time. Such as, perhaps, something to do besides continue to exist, thus preserving the bloodline by dint of not dying.

  In fairness, of course, Rodolfo had committed himself to pushing the boundaries of his continued existence as much as possible, with his group of similarly devil-may-care friends, to the dismay of most of their families.

  “Congratulations,” Ferdinand had clipped out one late September morning last fall in yet another part of his vast offices in the Tisselian palace complex. “You will be married next summer.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  In truth, Rodolfo had not been paying much attention to the usual lecture until that moment. He was no fan of being summoned from whatever corner of the world he happened to be inhabiting and having to race back to present himself before Ferdinand, because his lord and father preferred not to communicate with his only heir by any other means but face-to-face. But of course, Ferdinand had not solicited his opinion. Ferdinand never did.

  When he’d focused on his father, sitting there behind the acres and acres of his desk, the old man had actually looked...smug.

  That did not bode well.

  “You’ve asked me for a role in the kingdom and here it is. The Crown Prince of Tissely has been unofficially betrothed to the Murin princess since her birth. It is high time you did your duty and ensured the line. This should not come as any great surprise. You are not exactly getting any younger, Rodolfo, as your increasingly more desperate public displays amply illustrate.”

  Rodolfo had let that deliberate slap roll off his back, because there was no point reacting. It was what his father wanted.

  “I met the Murin princess exactly once when I was ten and she was in diapers.” Felipe had been fourteen and a man of the world, to Rodolfo’s recollection, and the then Crown Prince of Tissely had seemed about as unenthused about his destiny as Rodolfo felt now. “That seems a rather tenuous connection upon which to base a marriage, given I’ve never seen her since.”

  “Princess Valentina is renowned the world over for her commitment to her many responsibilities and her role as her father’s emissary,” his father had replied coolly. “I doubt your paths would have crossed in all these years, as she is not known to frequent the dens of iniquity you prefer.”

  “Yet you believe this paragon will wish to marry me.”

  “I am certain she will wish no such thing, but the princess is a dutiful creature who knows what she owes to her country. You claim that you are as well, and that your dearest wish is to serve the crown. Now is your chance to prove it.”

  And that was how Rodolfo had found himself both hoist by his own petard and more worrying, tied to his very proper, very dutiful, very, very boring bride-to-be with no hope of escape. Ever.

  “Princess Valentina, Your Highness,” the butler intoned from the doorway, and Rodolfo dutifully climbed to his feet, because his life might have been slipping out of his control by the second, but hell, he still had the manners that had been beaten into him since he was small.

  The truth was, he’d imagined that he would do things differently than his father when he’d realized he would have to take Felipe’s place as the heir to his kingdom. He’d been certain he would not marry a woman he hardly knew, foisted upon him by duty and immaculate bloodlines, with whom he could hardly carry on a single meaningful conversation. His own mother—no more enamored of King Ferdinand than Rodolfo was—had long since repaired to her preferred residence, her ancestral home in the manicured wilds of Bavaria, and had steadfastly maintained an enduring if vague health crisis that necessitated she remain in seclusion for the past twenty years.

  Rodolfo had been so sure, as an angry young man still reeling from his brother’s death, that he would do things better when he had his chance.

  And instead he was standing attendance on a strange woman who, in the months of their engagement, had appeared to be made entirely of impenetrable glass. She was about that approachable.

  But this time, when Valentina walked into the reception room the way she’d done many times before, so they could engage in a perfectly tedious hour of perfectly polite conversation on perfectly pointless topics as if it was the stifling sixteenth century, all to allow the waiting press corps to gush about their visits later as they caught Rodolfo leaving, everything...changed.

  Rodolfo couldn’t have said how. Much less why.

  But he felt her entrance. He felt it when she paused in the doorway and looked around as if she’d never laid eyes on him or the paneled ceiling or any part of the run-of-the-mill room before. His body tightened. He felt a rush of heat pool in his—

  Impossible.

  What the hell was happening to him?

  Rodolfo felt his gaze narrow as he studied his fiancée. She looked the way she always did, and yet she didn’t. She wore one of her efficiently sophisticated and chicly demure ensembles, a deceptively simple sheath dress that showed nothing and yet obliquely drew attention to the sheer feminine perfection of her form. A form he’d seen many times before, always clothed beautifully, and yet had never found himself waxing rhapsodic about before. Yet today he couldn’t look away. There was something about the way she stood, as if she was unsteady on those cheeky heels she wore, though that seemed unlikely. Her hair flowed around her shoulders and looked somehow wilder than it usually did, as if the copper of it was redder. Or perhaps brighter.

  Or maybe he needed to get his head examined. Maybe he really had gotten a concussion when he’d gone on an impromptu skydiving trip last week, tumbling a little too much on his way down into the remotest peaks of the Swiss Alps.

  The princess moistened her lips and then met his gaze, and Rodolfo felt it like her sultry little mouth all over the hardest part of him.

  What the hell?

  “Hello,” she said, and even her voice was...different, somehow. He couldn’t put his finger on it. “It’s lovely to see you.”

  “Lovely to see me?” he echoed, astonished. And something far more earthy, if he was entirely honest with himself. “Are you certain? I was und
er the impression you would prefer a rousing spot of dental surgery to another one of these meetings. I feel certain you almost admitted as much at our last one.”

  He didn’t know what had come over him. He’d managed to maintain his civility throughout all these months despite his creeping boredom—what had changed today? He braced himself, expecting the perfect princess to collapse into an offended heap on the polished floor, which he’d have a hell of a time explaining to her father, the humorless King Geoffrey of Murin.

  But Valentina only smiled and a gleam he’d never seen before kindled in her eyes, which he supposed must always have been that remarkable shade of green. How had he never noticed them before?

  “Well, it really depends on the kind of dental surgery, don’t you think?” she asked.

  Rodolfo couldn’t have been more surprised if the quietly officious creature had tossed off her clothes and started dancing on the table—well, there was no need to exaggerate. He’d have summoned the palace doctors if the princess had done anything of the kind. After appreciating the show for a moment or two, of course, because he was a man, not a statue. But the fact she appeared to be teasing him was astounding, nonetheless.

  “A root canal, at the very least,” he offered.

  “With or without anesthesia?”

  “If it was with anesthesia you’d sleep right through it,” Rodolfo pointed out. “Hardly any suffering at all.”

  “Everyone knows there’s no point doing one’s duty unless one can brag forever about the amount of suffering required to survive the task,” the princess said, moving farther into the room. She stopped and rested her hand on the high, brocaded back of a chair that had likely cradled the posteriors of kings dating back to the ninth century, and all Rodolfo could think was that he wanted her to keep going. To keep walking toward him. To put herself within reach so he could—

  Calm down, he ordered himself. Now. So sternly he sounded like his father in his own head.

  “You are describing martyrdom,” he pointed out.

  Valentina shot him a smile. “Is there a difference?”

  Rodolfo stood still because he didn’t quite know what he might do if he moved. He watched this woman he’d written off months ago as if he’d never seen her before. There was something in the way she walked this afternoon that tugged at him. There was a new roll to her hips, perhaps. Something he’d almost call a swagger, assuming a princess of her spotless background and perfect genes was capable of anything so basic and enticing. Still, he couldn’t look away as she rounded the settee he’d abandoned and settled herself in its center with a certain delicacy that was at odds with the way she’d moved through the old, spectacularly royal room. Almost as if she was more uncertain than she looked...but that made as little sense as the rest.

  “I was reading about you on the plane back from London today,” she told him, surprising him all over again.

  “And here I thought we were maintaining the polite fiction that you did not sully your royal eyes with the squalid tabloids.”

  “Ordinarily I would not, of course,” she replied, and then her mouth curved. Rodolfo was captivated. And somewhat horrified at that fact. But still captivated, all the same. “It is beneath me, obviously.”

  He sketched a bow that would have made his grandfather proud. “Obviously.”

  “I am a princess, not a desperate shopgirl who wants nothing more than to escape her dreary life, and must imagine herself into fantastical stories and half-truths presented as gospel.”

  “Quite so.”

  “But I must ask you a question.” And on that she smiled again, that same serene curve of her lips that had about put him to sleep before. That was not the effect it had on him today. By a long shot.

  “You can ask me anything, princess,” Rodolfo heard himself say.

  In a lazy, smoky sort of tone he’d never used in her presence before. Because this was the princess he was going to marry, not one of the enterprising women who flung themselves at him everywhere he went, looking for a taste of Europe’s favorite daredevil prince.

  There was no denying it. Suddenly, out of nowhere, he wanted his future wife.

  Desperately.

  As if she could tell—as if she’d somehow become the sort of woman who could read a man’s desire and use it against him, when he’d have sworn she was anything but—Valentina’s smile deepened.

  She tilted her head to one side. “It’s about your shocking double standard,” she said sweetly. “If you can cat your way through all of Europe, why can’t I?”

  Something black and wild and wholly unfamiliar surged in him then, making Rodolfo’s hands curl into fists and his entire body go tense, taut.

  Then he really shocked the hell out of himself.

  “Because you can’t,” he all but snarled, and there was no pretending that wasn’t exactly what he was doing. Snarling. No matter how unlikely. “Like it or not, princess, you are mine.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  PRINCE RODOLFO WAS not what Natalie was expecting.

  No picture—and there were thousands, at a conservative estimate, every week he continued to draw breath—could adequately capture the size of Europe’s favorite royal adrenaline junkie. That was the first thing that struck her. Sure, she’d seen the detailed telephoto shots of his much-hallowed abs as he emerged from various sparkling Mediterranean waters that had dominated whole summers of international swooning. And there was that famous morning he’d spent on a Barcelona balcony one spring, stretching and taking in the sunlight in boxer briefs and nothing else, but somehow all of those revealing pictures had managed to obscure the sheer size of the man. He was well over six feet, with hard, strong shoulders that could block out a day or two. And more than that, there was a leashed, humming sort of power in the man that photographs of him concealed entirely.

  Or, Natalie thought, maybe he’s the one who does the concealing.

  But she couldn’t think about what this man might be hiding beneath the surface. Not when the surface itself was so mesmerizing. She still felt as dazed as she’d been when she’d walked in this room and seen him waiting for her, dwarfing the furniture with all that contained physicality as he stood before the grand old fireplace. He looked like an athlete masquerading as a prince, with thick dark hair that was not quite tamed and the sort of dark chocolate eyes that a woman could lose herself in for a lifetime or three. His lean and rangy hard male beauty was packed into black trousers and a soft-looking button-down shirt that strained to handle his biceps and his gloriously sculpted chest. His hands were large and aristocratic at once, his voice was an authoritative rumble that seemed to murmur deep within her and then sink into a bright flame between her legs, his gaze was shockingly direct—and Natalie was not at all prepared. For any of it. For him.

  She’d expected this real-life Prince Charming to be as repellent as he’d always been in the stories her mother had told her as a child about men just like him. Dull and vapid. Obsessed with something obscure, like hound breeding. Vain and huffy and bland, all the way through. Not...this.

  Valentina had said that her fiancé was attractive in an offhanded, uncomplimentary way. She’d failed to mention that he was, in fact, upsettingly—almost incomprehensibly—stunning. The millions of fawning, admiring pictures of Crown Prince Rodolfo did not do him any justice, it turned out, and the truth of him took all the air from the room. From Natalie’s lungs, for that matter. Her stomach felt scraped hollow as it plummeted to her feet, and then stayed there. But after a moment in the doorway where she’d seen nothing but him and the world had seemed to smudge a little bit around its luxe, literally palatial edges, Natalie had rallied.

  It was hard enough trying to walk in the ridiculous shoes she was wearing—with her weight back on her heels, as ordered—and not goggle in slack-jawed astonishment at the palace all around her. The actual, real live palace. Valentina had pointed out that Natalie had likely visited remarkable places before, thanks to her job, and that was certainly
true. But it was one thing to be treated as a guest in a place like Murin Castle. Or more precisely, as the employee of a guest, however valued by the guest in question. It was something else entirely to be treated as if it was all...hers.

  The staff had curtsied and bowed when Natalie had stepped onto the royal jet. The guards had stood at attention. A person who was clearly her personal aide had catered to her during the quick flight, quickly filling her in on the princess’s schedule and plans and then leaving her to her own devices. Natalie had spent years doing the exact same thing, so she’d learned a few things about Valentina in the way her efficient staff operated around her look-alike. That she was well liked by those who worked for her, which made Natalie feel oddly warm inside, as if that was some kind of reflection on her instead of the princess. That Valentina was not overly fussy or precious, given the way the staff served her food and acted while they did it. And that she was addicted to romance novels, if the stacks of books with bright-colored covers laid out for her perusal was any indication.

  Then, soon enough, the plane had landed on the tiny little jewel of an island nestled in the Mediterranean Sea. Natalie’s impressions were scattered as they flew in. Hills stretched high toward the sun, then sloped into the sea, covered in olive groves, tidy red roofs and the soaring arches of bell towers and churches. Blue water gleamed everywhere she looked, and white sand beaches nestled up tight to colorful fishing villages and picturesque marinas. There were cheerful sails in the graceful bay and a great, iconic castle set high on a hill. A perfect postcard of an island.

  A dream. Except Natalie was wide-awake, and this was really, truly happening.

  “Prince Rodolfo awaits your pleasure, Your Highness,” a man she assumed was some kind of high-level butler had informed her when she’d been escorted into the palace itself, with guards saluting her arrival. She’d been too busy trying to look as if the splendor pressing in on her from all sides was so terribly common that she hardly noticed it to do more than nod, in some approximation of the princess’s elegant inclination of her head. Then she’d had to follow the same butler through the palace, trying to walk with ease and confidence in shoes she was certain were not meant to be walked in at all, much less down endless marble halls.