The Prince's Nine-Month Scandal

by Caitlin Crews

  Eventually, she would have as little power over him as she’d had when they’d met. Eventually, he would not want to go to her when she looked at him like that, as if she was small and wounded and only he could heal her. Eventually. All he had to do was survive long enough to get there, like anything else.

  “It can only be this way,” he told her then, and he hardly recognized his own voice. He sounded like a broken man—but of course, that wasn’t entirely true. He had never been whole to begin with. “The sooner you resign yourself to it, the better. I am very much afraid this is who we are.”

  * * *

  Natalie didn’t move for a long, long time after Rodolfo left. If she could have turned into a pillar of stone, she would have. It would have felt better, she was sure.

  The elevator doors shut and she heard the car move, taking Rodolfo away, but she still stood right where he’d left her as if her feet were nailed to the floor. Her cheeks were wet and her dress caught at her since she’d pulled it back into place in such a panicked hurry, and her fingers ached from where she’d threaded them together and held them still. Her breathing had gone funny because her throat was so tight.

  And for a long while, it seemed that the only thing she could do about any of those things was stay completely still. As if the slightest movement would make it all worse—though it was hard to imagine how.

  Eventually, her fingers began to cramp, and she unclasped them, then shook them out. After that it was easier to move the rest of her. She walked on stiff, protesting legs down the long penthouse hallway into her bedroom, where she stood for a moment in the shambles of her evening, blind to the luxury all around her. But that could only last so long. She went to kick off her shoes and realized she’d lost them somewhere, but she didn’t want to go back out to the living room and look. She was sure Rodolfo’s contempt was still clinging to every gleaming surface out there and she couldn’t bring herself to face it.

  She padded across the grandly appointed space to the adjoining bathroom suite and stepped in to find the bath itself was filled and waiting for her, steam rising off the top of the huge, curved, freestanding tub like an invitation. That simple kindness made her eyes fill all over again. She wiped the blurriness away, but it didn’t help, and the tears were flowing freely again by the time she got herself out of her dress and threw it over a chair in the bedroom. She didn’t cry. She almost never cried. But tonight she couldn’t seem to stop.

  Natalie returned to the bathroom to pull all the pins out of her hair. She piled the mess of it on her head and knotted it into place, ignoring all the places she felt stiff or sore. Then she walked across the marble floor and climbed into the tub at last, sinking into the warm, soothing embrace of the bath’s hot water and the salts that some kind member of the staff had thought to add.

  She closed her eyes and let herself drift—but then there was no more hiding from the events of the night. The dance. That kiss out on the terrace of the villa. And then what had happened right here in this hotel. His mouth against her skin. His wickedly clever hands. The bold, deep surge of his possession and how she’d fallen to pieces so easily. The smile on Rodolfo’s face when he’d turned her around to face him afterward, and how quickly it had toppled from view. And that shuttered, haunted look she’d put in his eyes later, that had been there when he’d left.

  As if that was all that remained of what had swelled and shimmered between them tonight. As if that was all it had ever been.

  Whatever else came of these stolen days here in Valentina’s life, whatever happened, Natalie knew she would never forgive herself for that. For believing in a fairy tale when she knew better and hurting Rodolfo—to say nothing of herself—in the process.

  She sat in the tub until her skin was shriveled and the water had cooled. She played the night all the way through, again and again, one vivid image after the next. And when she sat up and pulled the plug to let the water swirl down the drain, she felt clean, yes. But her body didn’t feel like hers. She could still feel Rodolfo’s touch all over, as if he’d branded her with his passion as surely as he’d condemned her with his disbelief.

  Too bad, she told herself, sounding brisk and hard like her mother would have. This is what you get for doing what you knew full well you shouldn’t have.

  Natalie climbed out of the tub then and wrapped herself in towels so light and airy they could have been clouds, but she hardly noticed. She stood in the still-fogged-up bathroom and brushed out her hair, letting the copper strands fall all around her like a curtain and then braiding the heavy mess of it to one side, so she could toss it over one shoulder and forget it.

  When she walked back into the bedroom, her dress was gone from the chair where she’d thrown it and in its place was the sort of silky thing Valentina apparently liked to sleep in. Natalie had always preferred a simple T-shirt, but over the past couple of weeks she’d grown to like the sensuous feel of the fine silk against her bare skin.

  Tonight, however, it felt like a rebuke.

  Her body didn’t want silk, it wanted Rodolfo.

  She would have given anything she had to go back in time and keep herself from making that confession. To accept that of course he would call her by the wrong name and find a way to make her peace with it. Her mind spun out into one searing fantasy after another about how the night would have gone if only she’d kept her mouth shut.

  But that was the trouble, wasn’t it? She’d waited too long to tell him the truth, if she was going to. And she never should have allowed him to touch her while he thought she was Valentina. Not back in the palace. Certainly not tonight. She should have kept her distance from him entirely.

  Because no matter what her traitorous heart insisted, even now, he wasn’t hers. He could never be hers. The ring on her finger belonged to another woman and so did he. It didn’t matter that Valentina had given her blessing, whatever that meant in the form of a breezy text. Natalie had never wanted to be the sort of woman who took another woman’s man, no matter the circumstances. She’d spent her whole childhood watching her mother flit from one lover to the next, knowing full well that many of the men Erica juggled had been married already. Natalie always vowed that she was not going to be one of those women who pretended they didn’t know when a man was already committed elsewhere. In this case, she’d known going in and she’d still ended up here.

  How many more ways was she going to betray herself?

  How many more lives was she going to ruin besides her own?

  Natalie looked around the achingly gorgeous room, aware of every last detail that made it the perfect room for a princess, from the soaring canopy over her high, proud bed to the deep Persian rugs at her feet. The epic sweep of the drapery at each window and the stunning view of Rome on the other side of the glass. The artistry in every carved leg of each of the chairs placed just so at different points around the chamber. She looked down at her own body, still warm and pink from her bath and barely covered in a flowy, bright blue silk that cascaded lazily from two spaghetti straps at her shoulders. Her manicure and pedicure were perfect. Her skin was as soft as a baby’s after access to Valentina’s moisturizing routine with products crafted especially for her. Her hair had never looked so shiny or healthy, even braided over one shoulder. And she was wearing nothing but silk and a ring fit for a queen. Literally.

  But she didn’t belong here with these things that would never belong to her. She might fit into this borrowed life in the most physical sense, but none of it suited her. None of it was hers.

  “I am Natalie Monette,” she told herself fiercely, her own voice sounding loud and brash in the quiet of the room. Not cool and cultured, like a princess. “My fingernails are never painted red. My toes are usually a disaster. I live on pots of coffee and fistfuls of ibuprofen, not two squares of decadent chocolate a day and healthy little salads.”

  She moved over to the high bed, where Valentina’s laptop and mobile phone waited for her on a polished bedside table, plugged in an
d charged up, because not even that was her responsibility here.

  It was time to go home. It was time to wake up from this dream and take back what was hers—her career—before she lost that, too.

  It was time to get back to the shadows, where she belonged.

  She picked up the mobile and punched in her own number, telling herself this would all fade away fast when she was back in her own clothes and her own life. When she had too much to do for Mr. Casilieris to waste her time brooding over a prince she’d never see again. Soon this little stretch of time would be like every other fairy tale she’d ever been told as a girl, a faded old story she might recall every now and then, but no part of anything that really mattered to her.

  And so what if her heart seemed to twist at that, making her whole chest ache?

  It was still time—past time—to go back where she belonged.

  “I am Natalie Monette,” she whispered to herself as the phone on the other end rang and rang. “I am not a princess. I was never a princess and I never will be.”

  But it didn’t matter what she told herself, because Valentina didn’t answer.

  Not that night.

  And not for weeks.

  CHAPTER TEN

  RODOLFO WAS CONFLICTED.

  He hadn’t seen Valentina since that night in Rome. He’d had his staff contact her to announce that he thought they’d carried out their objectives beautifully and there would be no more need for their excursions into the world of the paparazzi. And that was before he’d seen their pictures in all the papers.

  The one most prominently featured showed the two of them on the dance floor, in the middle of what looked like a very romantic waltz. Rodolfo was gazing down at her as if he had never seen a woman before in all his life. That was infuriating enough, given what had come afterward. It made his chest feel too tight. But it was the look on the princess’s face that had rocked Rodolfo.

  Because the picture showed her staring up at the man who held her in his arms in open adoration. As if she was falling in love right then and there as they danced. As if it had already happened.

  And it had all been a lie. A game.

  The first you’ve ever lost, a vicious voice inside of him whispered.

  Today he stood in the grand foyer outside his father’s offices in the palace in Tissely, but his attention was across Europe in Murin, where the maddening, still-more-fascinating-than-she-should-have-been woman who was meant to become his wife was going about her business as if she had not revealed herself to be decidedly unhinged.

  She’d kept a low profile these last few weeks. As had Rodolfo.

  But his fury hadn’t abated one bit.

  Secret twins. The very idea was absurd—even if she hadn’t been the daughter of one of the most famous and closely watched men in the world. There was press crawling all over Murin Castle day and night and likely always had been, especially when the former queen had been pregnant with the heir to the country’s throne.

  “Ridiculous,” he muttered under his breath.

  But his trouble was, he didn’t want to be bitter. He wanted to believe her, no matter how unreasonable she was. That was what had been driving him crazy these past weeks. He’d told himself he was going to throw himself right back into his old habits, but he hadn’t. Instead he’d spent entirely too much time mired in his old, familiar self-pity and all it had done was make him miss her.

  He had no earthly idea what to do about that.

  The doors opened behind him and he was led in with the usual unnecessary ceremony to find his father standing behind his desk. Already frowning, which Rodolfo knew from experience didn’t bode well for the bracing father/son chat they were about to have.

  Ferdinand nodded at the chair before his desk and Rodolfo took it, for once not flinging himself down like a lanky adolescent. Not because doing so always irritated his father. But because he felt like a different man these days, scraped raw and hollow and made new in a variety of uncomfortable and largely unpleasant ways he could blame directly on his princess, and he didn’t have it in him to needle his lord and king whenever possible.

  His father’s frown deepened as he beheld his son before him, because, of course, he always had it in him to poke at his son. It was an expression Rodolfo knew well. He had no idea why it was harder to keep his expression impassive today.

  “I hope you have it in you to acquit yourself with something more like grace at your wedding,” Ferdinand said darkly, as if Rodolfo had been rousted out of a den of iniquity only moments before and still reeked of excess. He’d tried. In the sense that he’d planned to go out and drown himself in all the things that had always entertained him before. But he’d never made it out. He couldn’t call it fidelity to his lying, manipulative princess when the truth was, he’d lost interest in sin—could he? “The entire world will be watching.”

  “The entire world has been watching for some time,” Rodolfo replied, keeping his tone easy. Even polite. Because there was no need to inform his father that he had no intention of marrying a woman who had tried to play him so thoroughly. How could he? But he told himself Ferdinand could find out when he didn’t appear at the ceremony, like everyone else. “Has that not been the major point of contention all these years?”

  His father ignored him. “It is one thing to wave at a press call. Your wedding to the Murin princess will be one of the most-watched ceremonies in modern Europe. Your behavior must, at last, be that of a prince of Tissely. Do you think you can manage this, Rodolfo?”

  He glared at him as if he expected an answer. And something inside of Rodolfo simply...cracked.

  It was so loud that first he thought it was the chair beneath him, but his father didn’t react. And it took Rodolfo a moment to understand that it wasn’t his chair. It was him.

  He died, Rodolfo, his princess had said in Rome, before she’d revealed herself. You lived.

  And he’d tried so hard to reverse that, hadn’t he? He’d told himself all these years that the risks he took were what made him feel alive, but that had been a lie. What he’d been doing was punishing himself. Pushing himself because he hadn’t cared what happened to him. Risking himself because he’d been without hope.

  Until now.

  “I am not merely a prince of Tissely,” he said with a great calm that seemed to flood him then, the way it always did before he dropped from great heights with only a parachute or threw himself off the sides of bridges and ravines attached to only a bouncy rope. Except this time he knew the calm was not a precursor to adrenaline, but to the truth. At last. “I am the only prince of Tissely.”

  “I know very well who you are,” his father huffed at him.

  “Do you, sir? Because you have seemed to be laboring under some misconceptions as to my identity this last decade or two.”

  “I am your father and your king,” his father thundered.

  But Rodolfo was done being put into his place. He was done accepting that his place was somehow lower and shameful, for that matter.

  All he’d done was live. Imperfectly and often foolishly, but he’d lived a life. He might have been lying to himself. He might have been hopeless. But he’d survived all of that.

  The only thing he was guilty of was of not being Felipe.

  “I am your son,” Rodolfo replied, his voice like steel. “I am your only remaining son and your only heir. It doesn’t matter how desperately you cling to your throne. It doesn’t matter how thoroughly you convince yourself that I am worthless and undeserving. Even if it were true, it wouldn’t matter. Nothing you do will ever bring Felipe back.”

  His father looked stiff enough to break in half. And old, Rodolfo thought. How had he missed that his father had grown old? “How dare you!”

  He was tired of this mausoleum his father had built around Felipe’s memory. He was tired of the games they played, two bitter, broken men who had never recovered from the same long-ago loss and instead, still took it out on each other.

  Rodolfo wa
s done with the game. He didn’t want to live like this any longer.

  He wanted to feel the way he did when he was with Valentina. Maybe it had all been a lie, but he’d been alive. Not putting on a show. Not destined to disappoint simply by showing up.

  And there was something he should have said a decade or two ago.

  “I am all you have, old man.” He stood then, taking his time and never shifting his gaze from his father’s, so perhaps they could both take note of the fact that he towered over the old man. “Whether you like it or do not, I am still here. Only one of your sons died all those years ago. And only you can decide if you will waste the rest of your life acting as if you lost them both.”

  His father was not a demonstrative man. Ferdinand stood like a stone for so long that Rodolfo thought he might stand like that forever. So committed to the mausoleum he’d built that he became a part of it in fact.

  But Rodolfo wanted no part of it. Not anymore. He was done with lies. With games. With paying over and over for sins that were not his.

  He inclined his head, then turned for the door. He was reaching for the knob to let himself out—to leave this place and get on with his life—when he heard a faint noise from behind him.

  “It is only that I miss him,” came his father’s voice, low and strained. It was another man’s sob.

  Rodolfo didn’t turn around. It would embarrass them both.

  “I know, Papa,” he said, using a name he hadn’t thought, much less spoken aloud, since he was little more than a baby himself. But it was the only one that seemed appropriate. “I do, too.”

  * * *

  The first week after that shattering trip to Rome, Natalie tried Valentina so many times she was slightly afraid it would have bordered on harassment—had she not been calling her own mobile number. And it didn’t matter anyway, because the princess never answered, leaving Natalie to sit around parsing the differences between a ringing phone that was never picked up and a call that went straight to voice mail like an adolescent girl worrying over a boy’s pallid attentions.