Secrets of His Forbidden Cinderella

by Caitlin Crews

“You will have to remind me of your name,” he said, and there was a gleam in his eyes now. It made her feel quivery in a completely different way. And she didn’t believe for a second that he didn’t know who she was. “I’m afraid that I did not retain the particulars of my father’s regrettable romantic choices.”

  “I understand. I had to block out a whole lot of my mother’s marriages, too.”

  A muscle worked in his lean, perfect jaw. “Allow me to offer a warning now, before this goes any further. If you have come here in some misguided attempt to extort money from me based upon an association I forgot before it ended, you will be disappointed. And as I cannot think of any other reason why you should intrude upon my privacy, I will have to ask you to leave.”

  Amelia considered him. “You could have had the butler say that, surely.”

  “I will admit to a morbid sense of curiosity.” His gaze swept over her. “And it is satisfied.” He didn’t wave a languid hand like a sulky monarch and still, he dismissed her. “You may go.”

  Amelia ordered the part of her that wanted to obey him, automatically, to settle down. “You don’t want to hear why I’ve come?”

  “I am certain I do not.”

  “That will make it fast, then.”

  Amelia could admit she felt...too much. Perhaps a touch of shame for having to come to him like this—especially after the last time she’d shown up here, uninvited. Her pulse kicked at her, making her feel...fluttery. And she was, embarrassingly, as molten and soft as if he’d smiled at her the way he had in September.

  When he hadn’t ventured anywhere near a smile.

  “Never draw out the ugly things,” Marie had always told her. “The quicker you get them over with, the more you can think about the good parts instead.”

  Just do it, be done with it and go, she ordered herself.

  And who cared if her throat was dry enough to start its own fire?

  “I’m pregnant,” she announced into the intimidatingly, exultantly blue-blooded room. To a man who was all of that and more. “You’re the father. And before you tell me that’s impossible, I was at the Masquerade last fall and yes, I dyed my hair red.”

  She could only describe the look on his face as a storm, so she hurried on.

  “And because you asked, I’m Amelia Ransom. You really were my stepbrother way back when. I hope that doesn’t make this awkward.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  HIS EXCELLENCY MATEO ENRIQUE ARMANDO DE LUZ, Nineteenth Duke of Marinceli, Grandee of Spain, and a man without peer—by definition and inclination alike—did not care for American women in general or the loathsome, avaricious Marie French in particular. He had viewed her corruption of his once proud father as a personal betrayal, and had celebrated their inevitable divorce as if it were his own narrow escape from the grasping woman’s mercenary clutches.

  That his father had fallen for such a creature had been a deep humiliation Teo was terribly afraid stained him, too. They were de Luzes. They were not meant to topple before such crassness, much less marry it.

  His father’s subsequent wives had, at the very least, been from a certain swathe of European aristocracy. Only Marie Force had managed to tempt the Eighteenth Duke into breaking from centuries of tradition. Only her, a coarse and common woman whose gold digging had already been a thing of legend.

  Teo was the only heir to dukedom that had never been polluted in living memory—until Marie.

  By extension, Teo had never cared for Marie’s daughter, either, with those same unearthly purple eyes that had always seemed to him a commentary on her character. Or decided lack thereof.

  Even though Amelia had been little more than a child—sixteen is not precisely a toddler, came a contrary voice inside him that he chose to ignore—Teo had been certain her sins had been stamped upon her then, every new curve a bit of dark foreshadowing. With such a mother, she had only ever been destined to head in one direction.

  “Pregnant,” he said, as if tasting the word.

  “Coming up on eighteen weeks,” she replied, with rather appalling cheer. When he only gazed at her in disbelief, she continued. “If you count backward, you’ll find that it matches right up with the Masquerade.”

  “Thank you, Miss Ransom,” Teo replied after a moment, in the frigid tones that usually made those around him quail, scrape and apologize. The woman standing just inside the door of his study looked notably unaffected. “I am capable of performing simple mathematical equations.”

  All she did was smile. As if she doubted him, but was magnanimously keeping that opinion to herself.

  It...irritated him. And Teo was rarely irritated by anything—because his life was arranged to avoid anything and anyone who might dare to annoy him in any way.

  Perhaps he should have expected something like this. Pregnancy claims upon him were always and forever naked attempts to grab a chunk of the de Luz fortune and then bask in the glory of the many titles, honors and estates that went along with the name. It wasn’t really a surprise that this impertinent, insolent creature of questionable parentage had developed ideas above her station when she’d spent those mercifully brief years thrust into the exalted realm of his family.

  Teo understood it, on some level. Who wouldn’t wish to be a de Luz?

  Amelia Ransom, still cursed with those indecorous purple eyes, stood before him on a rug so old that its actual provenance was still hotly contested by the historians who periodically combed through the de Luz house and grounds and wrote operatic scholarly dissertations on the significance of the family collections. That she should be deeply shamed by her presence here—and the fact that the carpet beneath her feet boasted a pedigree while she did not—seemed not to have occurred to her.

  Especially while she was issuing preposterous accusations. Involving fancy dress and dyed hair, of all things.

  It was all so preposterous, in fact, that Teo could hardly rouse himself to reply further.

  Because he was the current head of one of the most ancient houses in the world, and the favor of his time and good temper was not granted to any bedraggled creature who happened along and turned up at his door.

  Not that many creatures, bedraggled or otherwise, usually dared “turn up” in his presence. Or managed to “happen along” in the first place even if they did dare, as he employed what he’d believed until now to be an excellent security service. He made a mental note to replace them. Before the next dawn.

  And remembered as he did that Amelia’s mother had been notable chiefly for the things she’d dared. All of which she’d gone ahead and executed without the faintest notion of her own gaucheness.

  Hadn’t he always known that her daughter would turn out just like her?

  “I’ve learned many things since September,” said the creature before him. He had recognized her on sight, of course, though he had not intended to gift her with that knowledge. Because she should have assumed that she was entirely unworthy of his notice and his memory alike. Instead, she was talking at him in that same offensively friendly voice that made him think of overly bright, manic toothpaste commercials. “One of them—which you would think ought to go without saying—is don’t disguise yourself and have relations with your former stepbrother and think there won’t be repercussions.”

  “I have yet to accept that any ‘relations’ occurred,” Teo said in what he thought was a mild voice, all things considered.

  “Acceptance, or the lack of it, doesn’t change the facts,” Amelia replied, and Teo saw a glimpse of something steely in those garish eyes of hers. “And the fact is, I’m pregnant with your baby.”

  “How convenient for you.”

  He watched her from his position against his desk, where he felt significantly less at his ease than he had moments before. Amelia, meanwhile, did not seem particularly thrown by his reaction. There were no tears. No wilting or wailing, the way ther
e normally was during outlandish pregnancy claims—if the reports he’d received were to be believed. If anything, she brightened.

  “I’m informing you because it’s the right thing to do,” she told him, with a hint of self-righteous piety about her, then. “Not because I need or want you to do anything. Consider yourself informed.”

  She turned then, and Teo almost let her go. Purely to see if she would do what he thought she meant to do, which was march straight off—but only so far, as it was difficult to extort money from a man once ejected from his presence. He assumed she knew it.

  He decided he wouldn’t play her game. “Surely the point of disguising yourself, as you claim you did, and then deciding to have ‘relations’ with me under false pretenses, would be to stay. Not to flounce off because I’ve failed to respond as you would like.”

  It would have been easy enough to find photos of the Masquerade, he told himself. He had danced with a luscious redhead, then disappeared with her for a time. Anyone might have guessed what they’d been up to.

  That certainly didn’t mean that this woman was that redhead. His mind reeled away from that possibility even as his body readied itself, remembering.

  Amelia waved a distinctly impolite hand in the air, and compounded the disrespect when she didn’t turn back to face him. “I don’t care what you do with the information, Teo. I think we can all agree that it’s appropriate to inform a man of his paternal rights. That’s all I wanted to do, it’s done, the end.”

  “Surely a letter would have sufficed.”

  She did turn then. Not all the way. She looked back over her shoulder, and he was struck against his will.

  Hard.

  Teo truly hadn’t believed that Amelia Ransom, of all possible people, was the mysterious woman he’d enjoyed so thoroughly at the Masquerade last fall. But he remembered...this. Almost exactly. The hair had been a bright red, the eyes a dramatic shade of green that now, in retrospect, he should have known was false, and she’d worn an intricate mask that took over the better part of her face. The mask had been a steam punk design and so intricate, in fact, that she’d claimed she couldn’t remove it—and he hadn’t cared, because her mouth had been sweet and hot, her hands had been wicked, and he’d had his fingers deep inside her clenching heat mere steps from his own damned party.

  “Right,” she said. Drawled, really. And “disrespectful” didn’t begin to cover the tone she used. Or that direct stare. “Because you would have opened a letter that I sent.”

  “Someone would have.”

  “And believed it right away, I’m sure.”

  “I don’t believe it now, Miss Ransom. I’m not certain what you thought a personal visit would accomplish. All you have done is remind me of the low esteem in which I hold your entire family.”

  “I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that you don’t have a lot of feelings about my poor grandma in Nebraska. I doubt you know about her at all, so lowly is her existence next to this whole...display.” And Teo felt the umbrage of nearly twenty generations of de Luzes rise within him as she managed to do something with her face to indicate how little she thought of him, this grand house where history had been made and was still revered, and more or less everything he stood for. “So that low esteem, I’m guessing, is aimed directly at my mother.”

  “Your mother is little better than a terrorist,” he retorted. Icily. “She sets herself a target, then destroys it.”

  “Yes,” Amelia said drily. “This house is virtually rubble at our feet. It was the first thing I noticed.”

  “Once she got her claws in him, my father was never the same.”

  Teo discovered, with some consternation, that he was standing straight up from the desk when he hadn’t meant to move. More, he was far too tense, with the temper she did not deserve to see kicking through him.

  “My condolences.” Amelia did not sound the least bit apologetic, much less sympathetic. “I must have misunderstood something. I thought he was Luis Calvo, the Eighteenth Duke of Marinceli, a man possessed of the same great wealth and immeasurable power you now wield. While my mother is...a mere divorcee. Who was the victim?”

  “You must be joking. Calling Marie French ‘a divorcee’ is like calling a Tyrannosaurus rex a salamander.”

  Amelia’s gaze flashed a deeper, darker shade of violet.

  “There are very few things that I know to be incontrovertible truths,” she said. And though her voice was soft enough, her gaze seemed to slap at him. “But one of them is that wealthy men fend off paternity suits the way a normal person slaps down mosquitoes on a summer night. Since our parents actually were married, no matter what opinions you have about that union, I thought I owed you the courtesy of telling you in person.”

  “Such courtesy. I am agog.”

  She turned all the way around to face him then, but if he thought she would lower her gaze meekly, it was his turn for disappointment. Amelia held his gaze steadily, and Teo could admit he found it...surprising.

  Not discomfiting. He was the Duke. He was not discomfited.

  But the truth was that most people did not dare hold his gaze. Or not for very long. Most people, as a matter of fact, treated Teo with the deference due his title.

  A deference he had come to believe was due to him, personally, as the holder of the title, because of course it was no easy thing to quietly command an empire while pretending he did nothing but waft about to charity balls. Thrones were for the powerless in these supposedly egalitarian times, and the de Luzes had always trafficked in influence and strength.

  Teo was somehow unsurprised that it would be this bedraggled American, daughter to a woman so coldly mercenary that she was her own cottage industry, who not only dared—but kept staring him down.

  As if he was a challenge she could win.

  But the fact he was not surprised did not mean he liked it.

  “What is it you want, Amelia?” he asked, aware that his tone was cool. The word of a de Luz had once been law. These days it merely sounded like the law, which was close enough.

  She blinked at him as if he was...obtuse.

  It was not a sensation he often had.

  “I’ve already told you what I want. What you need to hear, at any rate. That’s all I wanted. To tell you.”

  “Out of the goodness of your heart. You wished to inform me of my supposed paternity, and then...what? Blow away like smoke in the wind?”

  “Nothing quite so poetic. I thought I’d go back home to San Francisco. Try to enjoy the rest of my pregnancy and prepare for life as a single mother.”

  And she smiled sweetly at him, though he would have to truly be obtuse not to hear the decided lack of sweetness in her voice.

  “I see. You are keeping this miraculous child, then?”

  She tilted her head slightly to one side, her gaze quizzical. “I wouldn’t trouble myself with coming all this way, then storming your very gate—literally—if I wasn’t planning on keeping it. Would I?”

  It was Teo’s turn to smile. Like one of the swords that hung on his walls, relics of the wars his ancestors had won.

  “It is with great pleasure, Miss Ransom, that I tell you I have not the slightest idea what you would or would not do in any given circumstance.”

  “Now you do.”

  “I’m taken aback, you see.”

  He had already straightened from his desk, and he suddenly found himself uncertain what to do with his hands. It was such a strange sensation that he frowned, then thrust his hands in the pockets of his trousers, as he would normally. It was almost as if he wanted to do something else with them.

  But no. He might have shared a few explosive moments of pleasure with this woman—a circumstance he had yet to fully take on board—but he was a grown man stitched together with duties and responsibilities. He did not have the option to be led around by his urges
.

  “That must feel like a revolution,” Amelia said. Rather tartly, to his ear. “What’s next? Will the serfs rise up? Will they march on their feudal lord?”

  “You seem to have mistaken the century.”

  “Right.” Again, that insolent drawl. She made a great show of looking all around her, as if she could cast her glinting eye into every corner of the rambling house that had stood here—in one form or another—for so many centuries. “I’m the one stuck in the wrong century. Got it.”

  “What astounds me is the altruism of your claim,” he said, finding his temper rather thinner than he liked. When normally he prided himself on being the sort of lion who did not concern himself overmuch with the existence of sheep, much less their opinions. “Out of the goodness of your heart, you chose to come here and share this news with me. That would make you the one woman in the world to claim she carries an heir to the Dukedom of Marinceli, yet has no apparent intention of claiming any piece of it.”

  “I’m hoping it’s a girl, actually,” the maddening woman responded. In a tone he would have called bland if he couldn’t see her face. And that expression that seemed wired directly to the place where his temper beat at him, there beneath his skin. “If I remember my time here—and in truth, I prefer to block it out—there has never been a Duchess of Marinceli. Only Dukes. One after the next, toppling their way through history like loose cannons while pretending they’re at the center of it.”

  His temper kicked harder. And he found he had to unclench his jaw to speak. “If you do not wish to make a bid for the dukedom, and you claim your only motivation is to inform me of this dubious claim of yours, I am again unclear why this required a personal audience.”

  “I was under the impression that this was the kind of thing that was best addressed in person,” she said. Very distinctly. As if she thought he was slow. “Forgive me for daring to imagine that you might be an actual, real, live human being instead of this...caricature.”

  “I am the Duke of Marinceli. The doings of regular people do not concern me.”