Secrets of His Forbidden Cinderella

by Caitlin Crews

  Since the physician had let drop the fact that yes, it was a boy.

  Amelia had vehemently not wanted to know—but now that she did know, it was as if she had always known that she was having a son. And she could hardly wait to meet him.

  If she survived this car trip, that was.

  Eventually, it ended. And not because Teo turned off somewhere or slowed down, but because the road simply...ended. And delivered them to what she thought was a gatekeeper’s cottage, perhaps. It was a small sort of hut, hewn from wood and topped with layers of snow, and looked dark and unfriendly in the SUV’s headlights.

  Amelia expected one of Teo’s staff to come out then and lead them somewhere else. But Teo turned off the engine, leaving the headlights bright. He sent a swift, shuttered look in her direction, then climbed out of the car.

  And it turned out that she no longer felt any particular urge to follow him around. She stayed where she was, one hand creeping over that thickness in her belly that she knew, now, would be a little boy one day. She watched the father of that little boy—the father, which might be the correct thing to call him, but still felt a little too much, too intimate—march over to the front door of the little shack. He pulled something from his pocket that she understood was a key when he used it to open the front door. He disappeared, and for moment, there was nothing but darkness inside the hut, the headlights and Amelia’s own too-fast breath.

  Then, slowly she saw light inside. Moments later, Teo came back out. He switched off the headlights and pocketed the car keys, then went to the back of the SUV and she heard him removing things. And when he trudged past her, carrying not only her bag but several others, she finally stirred, and made herself get out of the SUV, too. Even if everything in her was telling her that was a mistake.

  He’d left the front door open, so she pushed inside, not sure what she expected to see. And also not sure why the whole thing filled her with the greatest unease.

  Inside, there was a fireplace that looked nothing short of medieval. It was large, a sort of grate stuck in the middle, and some kind of iron apparatus that held a pot over the flames. She was so struck by how archaic it was that it took her a moment to take in the rest.

  It was a hut. A hunting cabin, maybe, if the decor was anything to go by. The fireplace was in what she supposed was the kitchen part of the great room. It boasted a small table, a counter next to the sink, and little else. The rest of the room was taken up with two very old leather couches, and a door behind them that led into the bedroom. She could see it was a bedroom because Teo was standing in there next to a large bed, doing something that didn’t make sense. Until he straightened and she saw that he had lit a lantern.

  A lantern. An actual lantern.

  Her heart understood before she did, kicking wildly. She looked around again. The fire. A few lanterns here and there.

  Unless she was mistaken, they were on top of a mountain with no electricity.

  “Teo,” she said when he came out of the bedroom, that enigmatic look on his beautiful face. “What are we doing here? Time traveling?”

  And her pulse picked up when the Nineteenth Duke of Marinceli...smiled.

  Like the spider to the fly.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  HE IS A DUKE, not a spider, Amelia told herself crossly. And you are certainly not a fly.

  But Teo’s smile still made the back of her neck prickle.

  “I come here at least once a year to escape the many pressures of modern life,” he told her, his voice cool and unbothered in a way that she found very nearly offensive. Especially as he prowled back into the great room and settled himself on the couch facing the door. In a decidedly leisurely fashion. “I hunt for my food or make my own meals from what’s on hand, I marinate in the silence of nature, and I often learn a great many things about myself. I can’t recommend it highly enough.”

  Amelia lived in California. She could talk about communing with nature around the clock without batting an eye...but not with Teo.

  “You thought that it was time for us to go on a rustic retreat?” she asked, her voice much too high-pitched. Because she wasn’t really taking this the way she was sure she was supposed to. Then again, how was someone supposed to take this?

  “I don’t know how you will enjoy the accommodations,” Teo continued. He looked almost smug, she thought. Entirely too self-satisfied, and something cold trickled down the length of her spine. “If you will enjoy the remoteness. But I can’t say I particularly care. You are carrying the heir to the Marinceli dukedom.”

  “Yes, Teo. I was already aware of this when we were still standing in your other antique property. You know. The one with electricity.”

  “The trouble with all my other properties is that they’re too connected to modernity,” he said, almost as if he was musing his way through this conversation. When the look in his dark eyes suggested otherwise. “Up here, there is nothing between a person and her God. Ample time and space to reflect.”

  “I have nothing to reflect on, but thank you.”

  And she could hear that higher pitch in her voice with her own ears. Again. She refused to call it hysteria, but it sure was close.

  Teo moved farther into the room, and tossed himself down on one of the couches. “We will do our reflecting together, I think.”

  “What?”

  He smiled at her, but again, it wasn’t any kind of nice smile. It reminded her that he was directly related to warlords. To men who stood in the shadows behind kings, dark puppet masters who never minded that the light shone elsewhere.

  “All my life I have done my best to avoid this moment, Miss—” But he stopped. That smile of his deepened, and that definitely wasn’t good. “Excuse me, Amelia. And yet here I am. Well and truly trapped into something you knew perfectly well I would never have wanted if I’d had any choice.”

  “We both saw you use a condom,” she gritted out. “If you’re trying to say I tricked you by deliberately getting pregnant, you’ll have to explain to me how I managed to do that when you’re the one who had the condom, put it on and supposedly knew how to use it.”

  She was perilously close to telling him that she’d been a virgin that night—and Amelia didn’t want to go there. It felt like a weapon, but one that could be used against her. She swallowed it down.

  Teo was watching her in that same cold, considering way that she was beginning to understand was where he hid his temper. “We would not be having this discussion if I had known who you were last September.”

  “That doesn’t—”

  “Stop, please.”

  He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to. Her tongue seemed to stop of its own accord, freezing there in her own mouth.

  And it occurred to Amelia that she’d thought she’d seen all the power this man carried with such offhanded grace. That she’d made a study of it. Of him.

  When the truth was, she’d had absolutely no idea.

  Until now.

  Here, in a bare-bones shack stuck on the top of a mountain in the middle of Europe. Without the slightest possibility that she could get help. There wasn’t only no electricity, there appeared to be no phone lines. A quick glance told her there was no cell phone signal.

  There was nothing but him.

  It turned out that panic tasted metallic.

  “I am not going to argue with you about what happened,” Teo said in that same soft yet thunderous voice. “I do not wish to hear evasions or excuses, and it wouldn’t matter what you said in any case. We both know what you did.”

  She found her hands on her belly again, and his gaze dropped to track the movement.

  It felt shocking. Like a touch.

  “And now here you are, Amelia.” He sounded as dark as the cold night that had fallen hard outside, and her name in his mouth made something deep inside her quiver. “Pregnant with my
child.”

  Amelia took a breath, aware that she was standing inside the door of a place this man owned, again. Just as she had earlier, she felt very much as if she’d been summoned to see the headmaster. It was probably a good moment to remind herself that she hadn’t been. There was no headmaster here.

  Teo might be the Duke of Everything and Then Some, but he wasn’t the boss of her.

  She looked back over her shoulder, through the door that still stood open. But she knew he hadn’t left the keys in the SUV, so she didn’t bother to race for it. She slammed the heavy front door shut, which had an instant result, both positive and negative.

  In the positive column, it was significantly warmer. Instantly and happily.

  But the downside of that was that she was now standing sealed in a room with Teo.

  She shrugged out of her coat and tossed it on one of the kitchen chairs, then took her sweet time sauntering over to sit on the couch opposite him, stretching out her feet just as he was doing.

  As if neither one of them had a single care in the world.

  “Forgive me, Your Excellency,” she murmured, smiling edgily right back at him. “But this is starting to feel an awful lot like a kidnapping.”

  Teo did something with a single finger that might as well have been a shrug. “You can call it what you like. I brought you here because it is such an excellent place for...contemplation.”

  He wanted her to react to the emphasis he put on that last word, obviously. So, clearly, she refused to give him the satisfaction.

  Amelia gazed back at him steadily. “I live in San Francisco. I enjoy contemplation as much as the next girl. But somehow, I’m getting the feeling that this is rather more of a guided meditation than an opportunity to pursue my own thoughts.”

  “This is the situation before us, cariña,” he said, and the endearment was like a scrape. Because he wasn’t above infusing it with all that sharp, acid mockery. Amelia hated that it got to her. “The Marinceli heir cannot be born out of wedlock.”

  “I’m not marrying you.”

  “This has nothing to do with preference or inclination. It is a simple statement of fact. My child—my son—will be the next Duke. The Twentieth Duke. Not only must he be born with my name, he must be raised to uphold the traditions that come with it. And he must learn a great, bone-deep awe for the responsibilities inherent in his position.”

  “I’m not marrying you, and you’re certainly not raising my baby.”

  She only realized she sounded a shade too shrill when Teo’s eyes gleamed with what she was terribly afraid was satisfaction. Especially when he relaxed back against the leather.

  “It will perhaps not surprise you to learn that you are not the first reluctant Marinceli bride,” he said after a moment, his voice...more caressing, somehow. “Some say a reluctant bride is what spurred the first Duke to build what would later become the family home... El monstruo was as fine a prison as he could make her.”

  Amelia lectured herself against the odd sensation in her jaw—and throughout her body—that made her teeth want to chatter. And then shake her, everywhere.

  “You’re not listening to me, Teo,” she made herself say, in repressive tones. “There will be no wedding. I made a vow a long time ago that I would never get married.”

  “I vowed I would never touch Marie French or anyone associated with her.” He really did shrug, then. “Vows are made to be broken, apparently.”

  “I should probably tell you now, but I have a very strict rule about dating only normal men,” Amelia continued as if she hadn’t heard him. “Regular, down-to-earth men who think a typical first date is meeting for coffee. In an actual coffeehouse, where you have to pay entirely too much money to drink burnt coffee and eat insipid pastries. That’s a good first date, Teo. It doesn’t involve security details. Or stately homes. Or more titles than sense.”

  “Or, to pick an example at random, disguising oneself and seducing the unwary.”

  She laughed. “I would never call a man with your investment portfolio unwary.”

  “Is that the appeal of the date you described? Because I prefer dating women who require more from me than an insipid croissant.”

  That frozen, almost affronted look on his face suggested she was lacking, somehow, in not being one of those women.

  “The thing about being around very wealthy people for a lifetime is that it ruins the mystique of it all.” Amelia lifted a shoulder, then dropped it, in a delicate sort of shrug that she’d seen her mother perform a thousand times. “I want credit card debt, pizza takeaways and a real, decent man who wants me for me. No trophies, no talk of bloodlines, just...a normal life.”

  His lip didn’t actually curl. “That sounds like a remarkably squalid fantasy.”

  “You don’t have to fantasize about it, then.”

  “Whereas you can fantasize about it all you wish,” Teo replied silkily. “But it won’t change a thing. You will marry me. You will become the Duchess of Marinceli, and if you think it gives me any pleasure to say this, you are gravely mistaken.”

  She would not pay attention to the teenager inside her, who shriveled into the fetal position at that. The teenager who had wanted nothing so much as Teo’s approval and affection, no matter how unlikely it was she might ever witness either. Much less receive it.

  Not being that teenager any longer came with a great many benefits. And one of them was not letting that hurt her.

  Much.

  “It must be some kind of pleasure,” she said, pleased when she sounded as unbothered as he did, “or you would not have abducted me, marooned me on the top of a mountain, and then think it made perfect sense to sit around making pronouncements.”

  “You have a mouth on you.” And something flickered in Teo’s dark eyes that made her catch her breath. And wonder if she would ever let it go again. “You had it when you were a child. I see time and maturity have done absolutely nothing to temper it.”

  She sniffed. “All the more reason you shouldn’t marry this untempered mess, then.”

  And she almost believed what she was saying. She could almost convince herself that she was as blasé about this whole situation as she should have been. Almost.

  “You are beneath me in every possible way,” Teo said, so lightly that it took her a moment to register what he’d said. And that bright fury in his gaze. “It is a humiliation almost beyond bearing that I should be forced to sully my name, my station and the whole of the Marinceli bloodline with the daughter of a known mercenary.”

  That, too, he said so politely, so quietly, that it was tempting to imagine she’d misheard him.

  “Not just any mercenary, out to dig for whatever gold she might find, but Marie French,” he said, and there was nothing soft about the way he said her mother’s name then. His eyes flashed. “But there is nothing to be done. You chose to do what you did, it is done, and now we both must pay the price for the rest of our lives.”

  His conversational tone made insult into injury. As if this was hardly worth discussing. As if it was simple fact.

  As if she was a bit dim and very foolish indeed not to have acquiesced already.

  “You’re not such a prize yourself,” she retorted.

  But all Teo did was laugh.

  “I am far more than a mere prize, Amelia. And well you know it.” He laughed again, though there was more offended astonishment than amusement in the sound. “The price you have to pay for the actions you took is an almost inconceivable elevation in status you in no way deserve. An unfathomable reward. I can’t think of a single member of any royal family in Europe who would not consider it a privilege to become a Marinceli, and instead el monstruo may well crumble to dust in protest after all.”

  Amelia was shaking again, but this time she knew full well it was temper, not temptation.

  “I’m not sure I’m
getting your point,” Amelia said, not bothering to conceal the edge in her voice. “It almost seems as if you’re suggesting that I’m beneath you in some way? I can’t really tell. Maybe you could give me more insulting examples.”

  “It is what it is,” Teo said, with another aristocratic shrug. “The bloodline will no doubt be improved by the application of all this unexpected...”

  “Peasantry?”

  His eyes gleamed again, and Amelia really, really wished she couldn’t feel that the way she did. Inside and out.

  “None of this matters,” Teo said, back to silken menace. “We have months yet before you will bring my heir into the world. Ample time, in my opinion, to concentrate on what is truly at stake.”

  “My child is the only thing at stake, obviously,” she threw back at him. “Or I would be safe at home in my apartment in San Francisco, happily continuing to forget you exist.”

  He watched her as if she was an exhibit in a rather distressing zoo. “Can you categorically state that you did not deliberately go out of your way to create this situation?”

  “I didn’t set out to have your baby, if that’s what you mean.” She’d set out to do something else entirely, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to say that. Not here, when they were the only people around for miles, and he had that knowing look about him that made her think he already knew everything already. “This pregnancy was a complete shock. Whether you believe it or not, it was an accident. But let’s you and I be really clear about something, Teo. The child—my child—will not be.”

  But Teo was sitting forward, that black-gold gaze tight on her. “You didn’t deliberately entrap me into this in a bid to enrich yourself. Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Yes, you’ve found me out. What I wanted most in this world was to link myself to a man who hates me but will force me to marry him anyway. A man who cares more about his bloodline than is at all healthy and proves that by a spot of kidnapping to liven up a January evening.”