The Prince's Nine-Month Scandal

by Caitlin Crews

  The only surprise was how much he wanted her. Again, now, despite the fact he’d only just had her. She made him...thirsty in a way he’d never experienced before in his life.

  But it wouldn’t have mattered if she’d stayed the same pale, distant ghost he’d met at their engagement celebration. The end result—their marriage and all the politics involved—would have been the same.

  He didn’t like to see her upset. He didn’t like it at all. It made his jaw clench tight and every muscle in his body go much too taut. But Rodolfo remained where he was.

  “If you mean what happened right here—” and he nodded at the pillow beside him as if could play back the last hour in vivid color “—then I feel I must tell you that it was always going to happen. It was only a question of when. Before the wedding or after it. Or did you imagine heirs to royal kingdoms were delivered by stork?”

  But it was as if she couldn’t hear him. “Why didn’t you let me leave the gala alone?”

  He shrugged, settling back against the pillows as if he was entirely at his ease, though he was not. Not at all. “I assume that was a rhetorical question, as that was never going to happen. You can blame the unfortunate optics if you must. But there was no possibility that my fiancée was ever going to sneak out of a very public event on her own, leaving me behind. How does that suit our narrative?”

  “I don’t care about your narrative.”

  “Our narrative, Valentina, and you should. You will. It is a weapon against us or a tool we employ. The choice is ours.”

  She was frowning now, and it was aimed at him, yet Rodolfo had the distinct impression she was talking to herself. “You should never, ever have come up here tonight.”

  He considered her for a moment. “This was not a mistake, princesita. This was a beginning.”

  She lifted her hands to her face and Rodolfo saw that they were shaking. Again, he wanted to go to her and again, he didn’t. It was something about the stiff way she was standing there, or what had looked like genuine torment on her face before she’d covered it from his view. It gripped him, somehow, and kept him right where he was.

  As if, he realized in the next moment, he was waiting for the other shoe to drop. The way he had been ever since he’d discovered at too young an age that anything and anyone could be taken from him with no notice whatsoever.

  But that was ridiculous. There was no “other shoe” here. This was an arranged marriage set up by their fathers when Valentina was a baby. One crown prince of Tissely and one princess of Murin, and the kingdoms would remain forever united. Two small countries who, together, could become a force to be reckoned with in these confusing modern times. The contracts had been signed for months. They were locked into this wedding no matter what, with no possibility of escape.

  Rodolfo knew. He’d read every line of every document that had required his signature. And still, he didn’t much like that thing that moved him, dark and grim, as he watched her. It felt far too much like foreboding.

  His perfect princess, who had just given herself to him with such sweet, encompassing heat that he could still feel the burn of it all over him and through him as if he might feel it always, dropped her hands from her face. Her gaze caught his and held. Her eyes were still too dark, and filled with what looked like misery.

  Sheer, unmistakable misery. It made his chest feel tight.

  “I should never have let any of this happen,” she said, and her voice was different. Matter-of-fact, if hollow. She swallowed, still keeping her eyes trained on his. “This is my fault. I accept that.”

  “Wonderful,” Rodolfo murmured, aware his voice sounded much too edgy. “I do so enjoy being blameless. It is such a novelty.”

  She clenched her hands together in front of her, twisting her fingers together into a tangle. There was something about the gesture that bothered him, though he couldn’t have said what. Perhaps it was merely that it seemed the very antithesis of the sort of thing a woman trained since birth to be effortlessly graceful would do. No matter the provocation.

  “I am not Princess Valentina.”

  He watched her say that. Or rather, he saw her lips move and he heard the words that came out of her mouth, but they made no sense.

  Her mouth, soft and scared, pressed into a line. “My name is Natalie.”

  “Natalie,” he repeated, tonelessly.

  “I ran into the princess in, ah—” She cleared her throat. “In London. We were surprised, as you might imagine, to see...” She waved her hand in that way of hers, as if what she was saying was reasonable. Or even possible. Instead of out-and-out gibberish. “And it seemed like a bit of a lark, I suppose. I got to pretend to be a princess for a bit. What could be more fun? No one was ever meant to know, of course.”

  “I beg your pardon.” He still couldn’t move. He thought perhaps he’d gone entirely numb, but he knew, somehow, that the paralytic lack of feeling was better than what lurked on the other side. Much better. “But where, precisely, is the real princess in this ludicrous scenario?”

  “Geographically, do you mean? She’s back in London. Or possibly Spain, depending.”

  “All tucked up in whatever your life is, presumably.” He nodded as if that idiocy made sense. “What did you say your name was, again?”

  She looked ill at ease. As well she should. “Natalie.”

  “And if your profession is not that of the well-known daughter of a widely renowned and ancient royal family, despite your rather remarkable likeness to Princess Valentina, dare I ask what is it that you do? Does it involve a stage, perhaps, the better to hone these acting skills?”

  “I’m a personal assistant. To a very important businessman.”

  “A jumped-up secretary for a man in trade. Of course.” He was getting less numb by the second, and that was no good for anyone—though Rodolfo found he didn’t particularly care. He hadn’t lost his temper in a long while, but these were extenuating circumstances, surely. She should have been grateful he wasn’t breaking things. He shook his head, and even let out a laugh, though nothing was funny. “I must hand it to you. Stage or no stage, this has been quite an act.”

  She blinked. “Somehow, that doesn’t sound like a compliment.”

  “It was really quite ingenious. All you had to do was walk in the room that day and actually treat me like another living, breathing human instead of a cardboard cutout. After all those months. You must have been thrilled that I fell into your trap so easily.”

  The words felt sour in his own mouth. But Valentina only gazed back at him with confusion written all over her, as if she didn’t understand what he was talking about. He was amazed that he’d fallen for her performance. Why hadn’t it occurred to him that her public persona, so saintly and retiring, was as much a constriction as his daredevil reputation? As easily turned off as on. And yet it had never crossed his mind that she was anything but the woman she’d always seemed to be, hailed in all the papers as a paragon of royal virtue. A breath of fresh air, they called her. The perfect princess in every respect.

  He should have known that all of it was a lie. A carefully crafted, meticulously built lie.

  “The trap?” She was shaking her head, looking lost and something like forlorn, and Rodolfo hated that even when he knew she was trying to play him, he still wanted to comfort her. Get his hands on her and hold her close. It made his temper lick at him, dark and dangerous. “What trap?”

  “All of this so you could come back around tonight and drop this absurd story on me. Did you really think I would credit such an outlandish tale? You happen to resemble one of the wealthiest and most famous women in the world, yet no one remarked on this at any point during your other life. Until, by chance, you stumbled upon each other. How convenient. And that day in the palace, when you came back from London—am I meant to believe that you had never met me before?”

  She pressed her lips together as if aware that they trembled. “I hadn’t.”

  “What complete and utter rubbis
h.” He stood then, smoothing his shirt down as he rose to make sure he kept his damned twitchy hands to himself, but there wasn’t much he could do about the fury in his voice. “I am not entirely certain which part offends me more. That you would go to the trouble to concoct such a childish, ridiculous story in the first place, or that you imagined for one second that I would believe it.”

  “You said yourself that I was switching personalities. That I was two women. This is why. I think—I mean, the only possible explanation is that Valentina and I are twins.” There was an odd emphasis on that last word, as if she’d never said it out loud before. She squared her shoulders. “Twin sisters.”

  Rodolfo fought to keep himself under control, despite the ugly things that crawled through him then, each worse than the last. The truth was, he should have known better than to be hopeful. About anything. He should have known better than to allow himself to think that anything in his life might work out. He could jump out of a thousand planes and land safely. There had never been so much as a hiccup on any of his adventures, unless he counted the odd shark bite or scar. But when it came to his actual life as a prince of Tissely? The things he was bound by blood and his birthright to do whether he wanted to or not? It was nothing but disaster, every time.

  He should have known this would be, too.

  “Twin sisters,” he echoed when he trusted himself to speak in both English and a marginally reasonable tone. “But I think you must mean secret twin sisters, to give it the proper soap opera flourish. And how do you imagine such a thing could happen? Do you suppose the king happily looked the other way while Queen Frederica swanned off with a stolen baby?”

  “No one talks about where she went. Much less who she went with.”

  “You are talking about matters of state, not idle gossip.” His hands were in fists, and he forced them to open, then shoved them in his pockets. “The queen’s mental state was precarious. Everyone knows this. She would hardly have been allowed to retreat so completely from public life with a perfectly healthy child who also happened to be one of the king’s direct heirs.”

  Valentina frowned. “Precarious? What do you mean?”

  “Do not play these games with me,” he gritted out, aware that his heart was kicking at him. Temper or that same, frustrated hunger, he couldn’t tell. “You know as well as I do that she was not assassinated, no matter how many breathless accounts are published in the dark and dingy corners of the internet by every conspiracy theorist who can type. That means, for your story to make any kind of sense, a king with no other heirs in line for his throne would have to release one of the two he did have into the care of a woman who was incapable of fulfilling a single one of her duties as his queen. Or at the very least, somehow fail to hunt the world over for the child once this same woman stole her.”

  “I didn’t really think about that part,” she said tightly. “I was more focused on the fact I was in a palace and the man with the crown was acting as if he was my father. Which it turns out, he probably is.”

  “Enough.” He belted it out at her, with enough force that her head jerked back a little. “The only thing this astonishing conversation is doing is making me question your sanity. You must know that.” He let out a small laugh at that, though it scraped at him. “Perhaps that is your endgame. A mental breakdown or two, like mother, like daughter. If you cannot get out of the marriage before the wedding, best to start working on how to exit it afterward, I suppose.”

  Her face was pale. “That’s not what this is. I’m trying to be honest with you.”

  He moved toward her then, feeling his lips thin as he watched her fight to stand her ground when she so clearly wanted to put more furniture between them—if not whole rooms.

  “Have I earned this, Valentina?” he demanded, all that numbness inside him burning away with the force of his rage. His sense of betrayal—which he didn’t care to examine too closely. It was enough that she’d led him to hope, then kicked it out of his reach. It was more than enough. “That you should go to these lengths to be free of me?”

  He stopped when he was directly in front of her, and he hated the fact that even now, all he wanted to do was pull her into his arms and kiss her until the only thing between them was that heat. Her eyes were glassy and she looked pale with distress, and he fell for it. Even knowing what she was willing to do and say, his first instinct was to believe her. What did that say about his judgment?

  Maybe his father had been right about him all along.

  That rang in him like a terrible bell.

  “Here is the sad truth, princess,” he told her, standing above her so she was forced to tilt her head back to keep her eyes on him. And his body didn’t know that everything had changed, of course. It was far more straightforward. It wanted her, no matter what stories she told. “There is no escape. There is no sneaking away into some fantasy life where you will live out your days without the weight of a country or two squarely on your shoulders. There is no switching places with a convenient twin and hiding from who you are. And I am terribly afraid that part of what you must suffer is our marriage. You are stuck with me. Forever.”

  “Rodolfo.” And her voice was scratchy, as if she had too many sobs in her throat. As if she was fighting to hold them back. “I know it all sounds insane, but you have to listen to me—”

  “No,” he said with quiet ferocity. “I do not.”

  “Rodolfo—”

  And now even his name in her mouth felt like an insult. Another damned lie. He couldn’t bear it.

  He silenced her the only way he knew how. He reached out and hooked a hand around her neck, dragging her to him. And then he claimed her mouth with his.

  Rodolfo poured all of the dark things swirling around inside of him into the way he angled his jaw to make everything bright hot and slick. Into the way he took her. Tasted her. As if she was the woman he’d imagined she was, so proper and bright. As if he could still taste that fantasy version of her now despite the games she was trying to play. He gave her his grief over Felipe, his father’s endless shame and fury that the wrong son had died—all of it. If she’d taken away his hope, he could give her the rest of it. He kissed her again and again, as much a penance for him as any kind of punishment for her.

  And when he was done, because it was that or he would take her again right there on the hotel floor and he wasn’t certain either one of them would survive that, he set her away from him.

  It should have mattered to him that she was breathing too hard. That her green eyes were wide and there were tears marking her cheeks. It should have meant something.

  Somewhere, down below the tumult of that black fury that roared in him, inconsolable and much too wounded, it did. But he ignored it.

  “I only wanted you to know who I am,” she whispered.

  And that was it, then. That was too much. He took her shoulders in his hands and dragged her before him, up on her toes and directly in his face.

  “I am Rodolfo of Tissely,” he growled at her. “The accidental, throwaway prince. I was called the spare when I was born, always expected to live in my brother’s shadow and never, ever expected to take Felipe’s place. Then the spare became the heir—but only in name. Because I have always been the bad seed. I have always been unworthy.”

  “That’s not true.”

  He ignored her, his fingers gripping her and keeping her there before him. “Nothing I touch has ever lasted. No one I love has ever loved me back, or if they did, it was only as long as there were two sons instead of the one. Or they disappeared into the wilds of Bavaria, pretending to be ill. Or they died of bloody sepsis in the middle of a castle filled with royal doctors and every possible medication under the sun.”

  She whispered his name as if she loved him, and that hurt him worse than all the rest. Because more than all the rest, he wanted that to be true—and he knew exactly how much of a fool that made him.

  “What is one more princess who must clearly hate the very idea of me, t
he same as all the rest?” And what did it matter that he’d imagined that she might be the saving of him, of the crown he’d never wanted and the future he wasn’t prepared for? “None of this matters. You should have saved your energy. This will all end as it was planned. The only difference is that now, I know exactly how deceitful you are. I know the depths of the games you will play. And I promise you this, princess. You will not fool me again.”

  “You don’t understand,” she said, more tears falling from her darkened green eyes as she spoke and wetting her pale cheeks. “I wanted this to be real, Rodolfo. I lost myself in that.”

  He told himself to let go of her. To take his hand off her shoulders and step away. But he didn’t do it. If anything, he held her tighter. Closer.

  As if he’d wanted it to be real, too. As if some part of him still did.

  “You have to believe me,” she whispered. “I never meant it to go that far.”

  “It was only sex,” he told her, his voice a thing of granite. He remembered what she’d called herself as she’d spun out her fantastical little tale. “But no need to worry, Natalie.” She flinched, and he was bastard enough to like that. Because he wanted her to hurt, too—and no matter that he hated himself for that thought. Hating himself didn’t change a thing. It never had. “I will be certain to make you scream while we make the requisite heirs. I am nothing if not dependable in that area, if nowhere else. Feel free to ask around for references.”

  He let her go then, not particularly happy with how hard it was to do, and headed for the elevator. He needed to clear his head. He needed to wash all of this away. He needed to find a very dark hole and fall into it for a while, until the self-loathing receded enough that he could function again. Assuming it ever would.

  “It doesn’t have to be this way,” she said from behind him.

  But Rodolfo turned to face her only when he’d stepped into the elevator. She stood where he’d left her, her hands tangled in front of her again and something broken in her gaze.