She shook her head at him, afraid that if she investigated any further she would discover that the lump in her throat and the glassiness in her eyes could tip over too quickly into tears. And would.
Because she kept telling herself that he was joking. Or if not joking, precisely, saying these things she’d always wanted to hear because he thought he could convince her that way. Not because he actually believed them.
But the trouble was, she wanted to believe him. And the more of these sorts of things he said, the more she wanted to believe.
When she knew better.
“Ares,” she began.
“We are magic in bed, Pia,” he said, in a voice as intense as the way he looked at her. “That is how we came to be here in the first place. Is the worst thing in the world to think we might as well make it official?”
“You’re the one who gave me a lesson in the lines of Atilian succession.” She wanted to roll out of the bed and storm away. But it took her too long to do such things—or anything—these days. So she settled for rolling away from him, and pushing herself up into sitting position.
And as she did, she was suddenly too aware of how naked she was. How huge her breasts had become. How misshapen her belly was, sticking so far out, with her belly button protruding.
“Yes,” Ares was saying, watching her. “I’m concerned about the lines of succession. Should I not be? I told you the day of your father’s funeral that it was no small thing to claim you carry my child. That hasn’t changed. If anything, the closer we get to your due date, the more serious the matter becomes.”
“Because all of a sudden now you care deeply about these things?”
“I may not have set out to make myself heirs.” And there was something granite in his voice. In the gaze he leveled on her. It made something deep inside her start to tremble. “But they exist. They will be here sooner rather than later. And I would prefer it if they had access to all the rights and privileges their position as my heirs allows them.”
“Why?” She was rubbing her belly, and made herself stop. “You felt one way about all of this, then you interacted with your father and everything changed. It’s hard not to think you simply want to defy him.”
His expression changed, and she wondered if he’d thought she didn’t know. That she hadn’t seen the pictures of the two of them—King Damascus Takes Errant Heir to Task! the papers had cackled—and seen the dark look on Ares’s face.
“What do you think will happen?” he asked her, and she thought she hated it most when he sounded so patient. So reasonable.
“Do you need me to explain to you where babies come from, Ares?” she asked him, proud that she kept her voice calm.
“The world already believes you are pregnant with at least one of my children,” he replied, only that cool gleam in his eyes indicating that he was even aware of the question she’d asked. “Let us say, for the sake of argument, that I let you go right now. And you set out into the world, footloose and fancy-free as you claim to want. You’re lucky enough not to be impoverished, which means you will no doubt be capable of raising these babies just fine on your own.”
“I’ve been making this argument for months.”
“But the world will continue to think they are mine, no matter what lies we tell or lengths we take to conceal that truth. And what then?”
“What do you mean, ‘what then?’ Rumors are just rumors—”
“Rumors are rumors, yes. But thrones are thrones, cara mia.” And she didn’t know what that note in his voice was then. Or that look in his eyes. Only that it made her tremble—again. “And we may have grown progressive in these latter days. We prefer to have our fights in ballot boxes rather than in the streets or on poppy fields. But that does not change the fact that you will be raising two boys with a direct claim to the throne of Atilia. I understand that means nothing to you, but I assure you—it will not only mean something to my people, it will mean even more to whoever succeeds me.”
“Succeeds you?” She didn’t understand.
“I will take the throne, and then I will die,” Ares said, with certain matter-of-factness that made her want to scream. Or do something to protest the ruthless inevitability in his voice. “And whoever comes next, whether it be a cousin or whatever issue my father manages to rustle up in his waning years, your boys will be out there. Some will inevitably claim that one of them is the rightful king. And do you know what will happen then?”
“Let me guess,” Pia said, more sharply than she intended, surely. But she couldn’t seem to pull herself back. “Another war.”
“The blood of Atilia runs in my veins,” Ares told her, his voice low and insistent. “It is poison. It is war and it is pain. And I am sorry to be the bearer of this news, but it is in you, too, now. It is in those boys. It is who we are.”
“I don’t know what any of that means.” But she had moved herself back as she spoke, so she was sitting up against the headboard. And she was watching him as if he might snap at any moment, and then God only knew what might happen. Or what she might do. “Of course there’s nothing in your blood. Royalty is not a virus.”
“I beg to differ,” Ares said, with a short sort of laugh, bitter and dark. “Royalty is power, nothing more and nothing less. And power infects. It could be that some successor seeks you out, and tries to neutralize any threat that your boys present. That is horrifying enough to contemplate.”
That he had already contemplated that stung Pia. When she hadn’t. She hadn’t thought much beyond her pregnancy. She had been too busy settling here in this palace of his. She had been too focused on her hopeless little heart.
She was already a bad mother and her children weren’t born yet.
“But there is also another possibility,” Ares said in that same powerfully mild way that was wreaking havoc on her. “Who knows who our sons will grow up to become? Either one of them might decide that they deserve their birthright. What do you plan to do then?”
Pia’s heart clattered around in her chest. And all she could seem to do was beat herself up for the possibilities she hadn’t considered.
She tried to shake it off—because she could beat herself up on her own time. She didn’t have to do it when Ares was watching her like this, close and very nearly ferocious. “So your position is that we should marry, and that will somehow...prevent your sons from taking the throne? Or prevent someone else from taking it? Or prevent...something else? I’m not following you.”
“Pia—”
“And I’ve already told you that I won’t restrict your access from them. I mean that. But a marriage between you and me isn’t about them. It’s about me.”
She hated the fact that her voice cracked on that last word. That it gave her away so completely. That it showed him things she didn’t want him to know.
“Pia,” he said again, even more calmly than before.
And this time, she didn’t care how hard it was. She got herself to the edge of the bed, and shoved herself off. She had to stand still for a moment, her hand on the small of her back, and she almost burst into tears because she wanted to storm away. But there was no storming in her current state. There was only waddling. And she already felt bad enough. She certainly didn’t need to waddle in front of him. Naked.
She grabbed at the coverlet that had been kicked to the foot of the bed. It was something spun from gold and unicorn dust, or so it appeared, like everything else in this place. Pia wrapped it around herself like a makeshift dress.
And she didn’t understand how she had let all this happen.
It was as if she hadn’t quite been paying attention. There had been all that mind-altering sex to distract her. And the exquisite sweetness of their nights together made her forget herself during the day. He’d moved her into his rooms and she’d just...let it happen. She hadn’t put up so much as a token protest. In fact, it hadn�
��t occurred to her to protest.
She’d been enjoying herself too much.
And now she was in her eighth month of this pregnancy. She was enormous. And she couldn’t tell if she was finding it hard to breathe because she was emotional, or because she had two babies pressed up hard against...everything.
But she knew that she’d miscalculated. Greatly. She had more than miscalculated.
Because what she couldn’t tell him was that while he had been indulging himself, and playing whatever game this was with her, she had been doing something far more dangerous. He had been playing a long game, trying to get her to marry him for his own suspect reasons.
But Pia had been falling in love.
And she had to bite back a little sob as that word poured through her, so bright and hot she was shocked he couldn’t see it.
She couldn’t think of anything more stupid. Or embarrassing. But it was true. She had fallen in love with Ares. If she was honest, she suspected that it had happened at first sight at that party in New York. Because she had never been affected by any other man.
But one look at Ares and she’d wandered off with him, happily. Then she’d gotten herself wildly, irrevocably knocked up. And to add insult to injury, as was apparently her specialty, she’d gone off with him again at her own father’s funeral.
She’d let him lock her up here. And sure, she had a thousand excuses for herself. There were guards. There was only one road out and it was closely watched. But the truth was, she hadn’t tried very hard to get away from him after that first night.
Pia had told herself she was nesting. That was what pregnant women did—every article she found online said so. She wrote columns about trusting one’s gut and how best to handle awkward social interactions, while all the while she was handling her relationship with this man just about as badly as it was possible to do.
Because Ares might have decided he wanted something other than what he’d told her he wanted at the start, but it didn’t matter. Because any way she looked at it, what he really wanted was his sons without the trouble of custody agreements. Which was fair enough.
But it felt even more brutal now that he didn’t want her.
He would have sex with her. Extremely good sex, if what he said was true about this wild, greedy thing they shared. But he didn’t love her. He couldn’t love her. He hadn’t been looking for her when he’d found her at Combe Manor that day. He’d been on one of his royal engagements, doing his duty to the family.
When Pia knew, thanks to her father, that when a man loved a woman he could not rest. He would seek her out, no matter what damage it did. No matter what.
It was long past time Pia faced the facts here, no matter how little she liked them.
“I don’t understand why everything changed,” she said to him, trying to keep her panic tamped down. And worse, that bright beacon of a word she couldn’t say and a thing she shouldn’t feel. “You were very certain about the things you didn’t want.”
“It’s not a question about what I want,” Ares said, his green gaze hooded. “It’s a question of what is right.”
He was still on the bed, lounging there in that seemingly careless way of his. And it made her heart kick at her. He did, even now.
She tightened her grip on the coverlet. “Because somehow, what is right involves war in the blood and something about poison. Oh, yes, and infectious power.”
“I want to make you my queen,” Ares said, and he no longer sounded quite so mild. “Do you not understand that part of it?”
“I understand it,” Pia heard herself say, though she hardly recognized her own voice. “That’s the problem.”
She turned her head away, not sure what might be written all over her face then. What he might see. She wrapped the coverlet even tighter around her, bitterly aware that the only thing she could wrap around herself at all these days was a piece of fabric that had been made to stretch across a bed. A very large bed.
Her throat ached, but she made herself speak anyway. “I’m the size of the barn. But even if I were not, you and I both know what I look like on any normal day.”
There was only silence, and Pia was forced to turn back and look at him.
Ares only gazed back at her, a baffled sort of look on his gorgeous face.
Pia made a frustrated sound. “I’m not a queen!”
“You are a queen if you marry a king. It is really that simple.”
“The very idea is laughable, Ares. Do you understand me?” Her voice sounded like a sob. But she couldn’t seem to stop herself. She couldn’t do a single thing to avert this horror as it happened. “People would laugh.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
FOR A MOMENT there was nothing but the echo of Pia’s raw words hanging there between them.
She wanted to snatch them back with her own two hands. Her fingers twitched as if they might try, all on their own.
“Now I am the one not following you.” Ares looked bemused and haughty at once, every inch of him royal as he lay there on the bed as if he was entirely at his ease. Perhaps he was. “People would laugh why, exactly?”
Pia was shaking. Everywhere. She wrapped her hand around the nearest bedpost, hoping it would steady her. Hoping something would, when the floor seemed so treacherous beneath her. She couldn’t believe he was going to make her say it out loud. And worse, she couldn’t tell if he was taunting her.
“A man like you is on a certain level,” she said, pulling herself up as straight as she could, despite the weight of her belly. And the far greater weight of her shame. “You must be aware of this.”
“You mean that I am the Crown Prince? Yes, Pia. I am aware of it. It is the sort of thing they tend to tell you from a very young age.”
“I don’t mean the fact that you’re a prince, although that’s part of it. I mean... You.” She waved her hand in his direction. Trying to take in all of it, all of him, as he lounged there. Golden, rangy and athletic, as if someone had come in and carved a god from marble and breathed life into the stone. “You are a beautiful man. You are meant to find a beautiful wife. No one would accept a queen like me for a man like you.”
Ares stared at her for a long while. As the panic and worry inside her intensified, she focused on strange things. Like the muscle in his jaw that clenched, seemingly of its own volition. Or the way his green eyes seemed darker. More dangerous.
“I will take it that what you are telling me is that you do not believe you are beautiful,” he said. Eventually.
Pia made herself smile, though she was terribly afraid that the humiliation of this might take her out at the knees. Or maybe she only hoped it would.
“My mother was widely held to be the most beautiful woman in the world. Yes, she had her issues. She was not always kind, or good. Or even polite. And judging by the pills and the alcohol she took at the end, she was also not very happy.” She blew out a breath, and hoped he couldn’t hear how it shook. “My brother thinks it was deliberate, but I don’t. For a while I thought maybe I pushed her to it, and my father, too, having fallen pregnant the way I did. But now I think it was an accident, because the one thing I know about Alexandrina San Giacomo is that she had no intention of going out with a whimper.”
Alexandrina had been an opera heroine, always. Any death scene she’d planned would have been long-winded, theatrical, and would have required a vast audience. Most important, she would have needed to make certain she stayed beautiful throughout.
Pia didn’t know when her certainty that she was to blame had...shifted. She suspected it had to do with spending all this time with Ares. All she knew for certain was that somehow, it had been a long while since she’d felt personal guilt about her parents’ deaths. One had been an accident. The other had been inevitable. Her pregnancy had nothing to do with either.
Which didn’t make it any easier.
She remembered that Ares was watching her. Waiting, all that leashed power of his coiled and tight.
“What my mother always had, what everyone knew and agreed on, was that she was beautiful. No matter how drunk, or tired, or under the weather. Men would stop in the street to stare. Sometimes they burst into song. Does that sound ridiculous?” She shrugged. “A serenade in the street was merely an unremarkable day in my mother’s life. I grew up knowing exactly what beautiful meant. And seeing exactly what it looked like.”
“I see.” Ares’s voice sounded almost...strangled.
“Do you?” she demanded.
Pia didn’t understand what was sloshing around inside of her then. It was too much sensation. It was too much emotion. It was too much.
And maybe Alexandrina had it right. Maybe it was better to make everything an opera. Because at least then you could be in control of when the curtain went up, when it went down, and everything in between. How funny that she’d never understood that until now.
She took the coverlet from around her, and tossed it aside, the way her mother would have. With flourish.
“Do you really see?” she demanded. “Look at this body, Ares. It was never much to begin with, and after this? It will be a different body altogether. Forever. It will never snap back. There will be stretch marks, everywhere. And that’s the least of it. I’ve seen pictures of my mother when she was pregnant. She looked like at any moment, someone might happen by and write a sonnet to her beauty.”
“Is this an argument you truly wish to win?” he asked.
“It’s not an argument. It’s reality. I’m not my mother, and I’m certainly not beautiful like she was.”
“I don’t know how to say this,” Ares said, as if he was choosing his words carefully. “But I cannot think of much I care less about than your mother’s supposed beauty.”
“It wasn’t ‘supposed.’ It wasn’t an opinion, it was a fact.”
“Your mother was a lovely woman,” Ares agreed, shrugging one shoulder. “But what of it? The world is filled with beautiful women.”
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