His Two Royal Secrets

by Caitlin Crews

  “I remember you,” he said again, intent and sure, and threaded through with all that electricity. “You flowed over me like water. No hesitation, no concern.”

  “Perhaps I was significantly drunk,” she said, her voice tart, but he could see the softness in her gaze. The melting heat.

  “No,” he said, remembering. “You were not.”

  “Perhaps that’s what it’s always like. I assumed it was. All that...” Her cheeks pinkened even further. “Flowing.”

  “No,” Ares said again, though he sounded too hot, too dark. “That is not what it’s like. Not normally.”

  It had all seemed easy, to his recollection. As if they had been meant to meet like that, then come together in such a glorious, heedless rush. She had arched into his hands as if she’d done it a thousand times before. He’d found her mouth and the place where she was greediest, then tasted both. Her cries had broken over him as if it was a dance they’d practiced a hundred times. More. She had felt explosive in his hands. A glorious, greedy burst of light and sensation.

  But more than that, he’d thought when he’d first surged deep inside her and she’d shaken all around him, familiar.

  The word that had echoed in his head then was the reason he’d made no effort to seek her out afterward, no matter how often he’d thought of her since.

  Home.

  Ares, of course, had no home. He’d walked away from his kingdom and had no intention of assuming his throne. Any home he’d had, he’d buried with his mother.

  Homes were for other men. Men who deserved them.

  Men who were not poisoned with the blood of the Atilian royal family.

  He ordered himself to drop his hand. To step back. To put more distance between him and this woman who had shaken him months ago, and here, now, might as well have been a full-scale tsunami.

  But he didn’t let go the way he knew he should. And instead of stepping back, he moved forward.

  “Perhaps we should test it,” he said.

  “Test what?” She frowned at him. “The last time we tested something I ended up pregnant. With twins.”

  “Remind me how that happened,” he dared her, low and dark.

  And it didn’t make any sense. He shouldn’t want to be anywhere near her, not when his worst nightmare was playing out before him, inside her—

  But he couldn’t seem to help himself.

  Ares bent and pressed his mouth to hers.

  And the heat kicked through him, wild and hot. It lit him up, reminding him of that night in Manhattan while it stormed through him, new and mad.

  He wasn’t satisfied with the press of lips, so he angled his head, taking the kiss deeper. Making it dangerous. Making it clear how easy it had been to go from a conversation at a party to that very long night that had resulted in...this.

  He pulled her to him, sliding his hands over her shoulders, then down her back.

  And she kissed him back, meeting the thrust of his tongue. She pressed against him as if she, too, wanted to get closer. Her hands came up and found his chest, and he could feel her belly between them, pushing into him, and that, surely, should have woken him up from the spell—

  But instead, Ares kissed her deeper. Harder.

  He slid his hands between them and felt the insistent mound of her belly himself.

  Her belly. His babies.

  And she was the one who wrenched her mouth from his then.

  Everything was jumbled around inside of Ares. He had never put his hands on a pregnant woman’s belly before. He’d certainly never done so with the knowledge that the babes within were his.

  It should have disgusted him. He’d always been so revolted at the very idea of fathering a child.

  Or maybe it was his own father who had revolted him, now he considered it.

  And this was Pia, with her wide eyes, and that generous mouth that drove him crazy. Her taste was in his mouth again, making him wild. Making him hard. Making him feel like someone else entirely.

  Someone who put his hands on a woman’s belly, understood what he felt there were his own sons—sons—and felt a deep, possessive thrill at the notion—

  What the hell was happening to him?

  All of it was wrong. It was as if he’d been taken over by a different man. A stranger. And yet Ares didn’t step away. He didn’t even drop his hands. He felt that possessiveness in his chest. His sex.

  “I don’t think this is the answer to the situation we’re in,” Pia said, though her voice wasn’t any steadier than he felt. “I think sex has already caused enough trouble, don’t you?”

  “I don’t know that there are any answers,” Ares replied. “We might as well console ourselves with the one thing we appear to be so good at.”

  “I...don’t know how to respond to that. I don’t have any context.”

  “Then you’ll have to take my word for it.” He moved his hands over her bump, telling himself it meant nothing. That he was relearning her shape, that was all. That the fact his palms could not contain her belly, much less the lives within it, didn’t matter to him at all. “We are very, very good at it.”

  And something shifted in him, turning over too fast. Ares found he could no longer tell what, precisely, he meant by that. He was talking about sex, surely. Wasn’t he?

  But Pia was clearly not inclined to parse the nuances. She stepped back further, almost running into the settee behind her in her haste. And he couldn’t deny that there was something in him that took immense satisfaction in the fact that he affected her in this way.

  Because no one else had ever touched her. Only him.

  That primitive thing inside him, heretofore wholly unknown to him, stirred again.

  Her lips were swollen from his kiss. Her body was swollen with not one, but two of his children.

  And he might not want to accept what that meant. He might find all of this impossible and bewildering in turn, no matter what the doctor had said. But Ares couldn’t deny that the sight of her, lushly fertile and entirely his, made him...

  Deeply, darkly triumphant, on a level he hadn’t known existed.

  “No,” she said, very distinctly.

  “No?”

  “Whatever that look on your face is. Whatever it is, no. I want no part of it.”

  “But all bets are off now, are they not?” He felt...ferocious. “I am a man who never planned to have children, yet you are carrying two, and they are mine. Who knows what else we think we cannot have, or do not want, that will happen here against our will?”

  “I have no intention of spending the next few months trapped here,” she told him, in that same sober, serious way. “You now know that you’re the father of these babies. My babies. I’m glad. That wasn’t a secret I meant to keep from you in the first place. But now that you know, there’s no need for all these...” She looked around the room, and waved her hand as if to take it all in, and the whole of the palace besides. “All these royal shenanigans.”

  Ares had never felt the weight of the Atilian crown more than he did in the moment she dismissed it, and so easily.

  “Here’s the problem, Pia,” he said, feeling as growly and uneven as he sounded. “I cannot decide what to do with you.”

  “I don’t recall signing myself over into your care. You don’t decide what happens to me. I do.”

  “You are a quandary,” he told her, and the things that roared inside him were loud again. They competed with each other. They were made of furor and fang, and over and over again, they drew blood. That damned blood of his. “I have to decide how to proceed.”

  “Terrific. You go ahead and think on that to your heart’s content. Meanwhile, I’ll fly straight back to England and carry on with my life, shall I?”

  “That’s not going to happen.” When she scowled at him, he laughed. Because what was there to do bu
t laugh at the very notion that either one of them could wander back to their normal lives now? Or ever? “I think perhaps, cara, it is not I who am being unreasonable.”

  “Says the man who kidnapped me.”

  “You say you wish to go back to England. Where would you go?”

  Pia’s frown deepened. “Home. Obviously.”

  “The paparazzi already have their teeth in this story. Your brother is fielding calls for his resignation after his display of violence and I’m certain that the palace will already have received a thousand queries about whether or not his pregnant sister is the reason he belted me. Do you think they’ll magically leave you alone?”

  “They always have before,” she said, and for the first time, he understood how very sheltered she’d been. It should have appalled him, surely. But instead, he had the strangest urge to shelter her.

  “Convents and finishing schools do not capture the public’s imagination the way a scandal does,” he told her. “Or the world would be a very different place.”

  “We can still deny it.” She sounded almost...desperate. “Matteo is a Combe. Combes are always punching people. What’s a prince in the mix?”

  “I think you know better.”

  “I don’t see why anyone has to know about this if we don’t tell them,” she argued. “It’s always seemed to me that the people the tabloids hound the most are the ones who court the attention. If we don’t court it, surely they’ll move on to something else.”

  “Pia. Remember, please, that I am not some debutante’s gelded date, on hand to waltz on command at her coming-out ball. I am the Crown Prince of this kingdom, for my sins. The very hint that any woman’s baby could be mine will send my people into a frenzy.”

  She shook her head, her face pale again. “What does that matter? You told me that you don’t want children and don’t want a wife. Frenzy or not.”

  “I don’t.”

  “So there’s no point to any of these conversations, is there?”

  “What I want and what I plan to do with what has happened are two different things, I think,” he said.

  He wasn’t sure why her reluctance made his temper kick at him. Only that it did.

  And he stared her down until she lowered her eyes, there in the palace his ancestors had built while the blue blood he hated—and yet shared with all those who had stood here before him—stormed in his veins.

  It made him feel alive, like it or not. It made him want.

  It made him wonder how this was going to end.

  “If I were you,” Ares told her, all princely command, “I would resign myself to it.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  PIA HAD NO intention of resigning herself to anything, thank you, and especially not her own kidnapping.

  Sure, she’d gotten into his car and onto his plane of her own free will. It had seemed vastly preferable to the baying press outside Combe Manor. But she hadn’t expected to come here. That had to count against him. She was determined it did.

  She broke away from that room where she’d felt as if Ares was holding her in his grip, where her mouth still throbbed from his kisses—God help her, that man could kiss—and hurtled herself out into the palace corridors. It took her longer than it should have to find her way back to her suite, and by the time she made it she was tired, emotional, and shaking.

  Pia told herself she was peckish, that was all. Because once the morning sickness had stopped, she’d become ravenous. And hadn’t stopped.

  Her aide met her inside her rooms and quickly produced a lavish spread for Pia to choose from. And she wanted so desperately to be the sort of unwilling captive who could turn up her nose at anything she was offered. Not to mention, weren’t there too many tales about unwary virgins who were lured into treacherous places they could have left—if only they hadn’t eaten there?

  “Lucky that you’re no virgin, then,” she muttered to herself as she helped herself to a heaping plate of seconds.

  But after the palace staff had swept all evidence of her private feast away, Pia stayed where she was. She sat up straight in the most uncomfortable chair in her outermost sitting room. She channeled her many years of being taught manners by unimpressed nuns, sat so she wouldn’t drift off to sleep, and waited.

  The hours ticked past. The night wore on.

  And when she decided it was late enough that even infamous playboy princes—not that she’d worn down her phone battery by Googling him exhaustively—had taken themselves off to bed, if only because there was precious little other entertainment to be had here on the southern tip of the middle of nowhere, she stood. She stretched her protesting limbs, let herself out of her room again, and resolved that she would walk out of this palace if necessary.

  It took her a while to find her way through the maze of halls and corridors again, and she got lost more than once. But eventually she found herself on the ground level, where she set about looking for a door that led outside—instead of into yet another courtyard.

  Unfortunately, there were courtyards everywhere, as if every member of the royal family who’d ever spent time here had built their own.

  There were courtyards that opened up to the sky and others that were really more like squares beneath the floor above. There were courtyards that opened into the sea itself, but Pia couldn’t seem to find one that led to that road she knew they had taken in. She kept getting turned around. She thought she was retracing her steps when she turned a corner and yelped because someone was right there.

  “Imagine my surprise,” Ares said darkly, “to be roused from my slumber by my staff, and told that the palace was not under attack, but that one of my guests—my only guest—was creeping about the place like a criminal.”

  “I’m not creeping anywhere and I’m certainly not a criminal,” Pia threw at him.

  And only then did she take in what he was wearing.

  Or more to the point, not wearing.

  Because the Crown Prince of Atilia stood there before her wearing nothing but a pair of loose black trousers, slung low on his hips as if to suggest that he had been sleeping naked and had tossed them on when he came to find her.

  And everything else was just...him.

  Those wide, smoothly muscled shoulders. That broad chest that narrowed to lean hips. Ares kept himself in excellent physical condition—she hadn’t built that up in her fantasies since New York, it turned out—all rangy muscles and that loose-limbed elegance he wore so easily.

  He wasn’t the only one who remembered that night in Manhattan. She did, too. How she had crawled over him in sheer, greedy delight. How she had tasted him, tempting them both nearly past endurance. How she had filled her mouth with salt and man and the dark heat that rose between them still.

  Here. Now.

  “Why aren’t you dressed?”

  She all but shrieked out the question, half in a gasp, and knew even as it escaped her lips that she’d revealed herself. That she’d given herself away.

  Completely.

  “Why, pray, would I be dressed?” he asked mildly, though his green eyes glittered there, in the deserted hall. “Perhaps you have not noticed, Pia, but it is the middle of the night. Why are you still dressed as you were hours before? And more to the point, why are you lurking about as if you are casing the place? Are you?”

  Pia didn’t know what came over her. One moment, she’d had a clear sense of purpose. Of direction. Or intention, anyway, no matter if she couldn’t quite find her way.

  And then in the next, Ares was standing before her half-dressed. And she was still trapped here in this fairy-tale fortress. And she was an orphan and a mother, both at the same time. And all of that seemed to crash into her.

  As if that damned runaway train had looped around and plowed straight into her, flattening her.

  Her face crumpled, no matter how hard she fought to ke
ep it smooth. Unbothered. And as she fought off the huge sob that seemed to roll out of her, then on top of her like a great weight, she saw Ares’s expression...change.

  Pia kept thinking that she’d reached the absolute outer limit of the shame that any one person could feel. She kept thinking there could be no further depths to plumb.

  And then something else happened.

  She tried to cover her face, because she couldn’t stand the fact that he was right there, watching her as she quite literally fell apart in front of him.

  But his hands were on her, brushing her shoulders and then shifting. Before she knew what was happening he was lifting her up, hauling her high against his chest.

  “Don’t be foolish,” she sobbed at him, her hands still over her face. “I’m hugely pregnant. You’ll give yourself a hernia.”

  “Pia,” Ares said in the most regal voice she’d heard from him yet. “Please be so good as to shut up.”

  She obeyed him. Or she tried, anyway, but she couldn’t keep the sobs inside. And later she would find herself appalled and humiliated that she’d so easily surrendered. To her emotions, to him. To everything. But here, now, she tipped her head forward, rested against his shoulder, and let the tears come.

  Later she would regret this, she was sure of it.

  But for a while, there was only the width and strength of his shoulder, holding her steady as he moved. There was the scent of him, clean and male, with a hint of something else. Soap, perhaps. Cologne, maybe. She couldn’t quite tell, but she knew that scent. She remembered it. And it soothed her.

  She didn’t understand why he should be capable of calming her when no one else ever had. When her life was filled, in fact, with people and places and things that did the exact opposite of calming her. But she didn’t have it in her, just then, to fight him.

  Not when he was so strong, and so warm, and when his arms wrapped around her as if she was light and sweet and beautiful. As if he could carry her forever, and would.