“You’re making my point for me,” Pia said, wishing she hadn’t tossed the coverlet aside. She could hardly go scrabbling after it now she’d made such a show of casting it off. She was forced to stand there instead, tall and proud, when she wanted nothing more than to curl up in a ball and cringe away into oblivion somewhere. “The world is filled with beautiful women, and you ought to go out and find yourself one of them.”
“Pia. Cara mia.” And Ares looked as if he was biting back a smile, which Pia couldn’t understand at all. “Perhaps you do not understand to whom you are speaking. I am Crown Prince Ares of Atilia. I have dukedoms and earldoms to spare. I am, by definition and royal decree, possessed of the finest taste. Any woman who graces my arm is beautiful by virtue of her presence there. Obviously.”
Pia opened her mouth to argue, but stopped when he rolled himself up to sitting position, never shifting his gaze from her face.
“But you? The mother of my children? The only woman alive I have ever asked to be my queen? Of course you are beautiful.” He shrugged again, so arrogant and assured that it should have hurt him. Yet clearly did not. “It never occurred to me that you could imagine otherwise.”
“You can’t throw compliments at me and think that it will change the fact that I am not, in any way, the kind of woman a man like you goes for.”
“I suggest you look down at your very pregnant belly,” Ares said, his voice slightly less patient and mild. “I have already gone for you. Repeatedly.”
“Stop saying these things!” She threw the words at him, unable to control her voice—or anything else—any longer. “I know what I look like. I know what I am. Pretending that I’m something else isn’t going to get me to marry you.”
“Then what will?”
And Pia kept trying to suck in more air. She couldn’t seem to form another word.
And that was when Ares moved again. He rolled to his feet, then came to her, wrapping his hands around her shoulders and holding her up.
“You are the only woman I have ever asked to marry me,” he told her, his voice serious and his gaze darkly intense. “But if that is not enough for you, think back to the party where we met. Why do you think I was drawn to you? At first, before we spoke a word to each other? If you are so misshapen, such a hideous troll—do you imagine it was curiosity that drew me to your side?”
This was ridiculous. Tears were spilling over, tracking their way down her cheeks, and Pia wanted to die. She wanted to sink to the floor of the palace, and be swept out to sea.
“I don’t know,” she said, her voice cracked and much too thick. “I looked up and you were...there.”
“I was there because I saw you smile,” Ares said. “I heard you laugh. I was there because I followed that smile across the room, simply because I wanted to get close to it. And then, when we met, I wanted to get even closer. None of that has changed.”
“Ares...”
“Marry me because every time I have asked you to follow me so far, you have,” he said, words in his eyes that she was afraid to believe in. “Follow me because I have yet to lead you anywhere you didn’t like. You call this palace a prison, yet here we are, together—and it feels more to me like an escape. Marry me, Pia, and we will make our marriage another kind of refuge. The sort we can take with us wherever we go.”
“You only want—”
“Our sons,” he finished for her. “Yes, of course I want them. Let’s raise them together.”
And maybe she had always been this weak. Maybe it was the way he made her feel, and she couldn’t help herself. She liked it too much.
She knew better, but Ares looked at her as if she was beautiful. And when he did, she was tempted to believe it. Here, now, she did believe it.
And that belief trickled down into her, making her feel warm. Safe.
And there were worse things, surely. There were men who didn’t want their own babies and who went to great lengths to avoid their responsibilities. There were men who didn’t make her heart kick at her the way it did whenever Ares was near.
A whole world full of them, in fact.
There were marriages, especially amongst the sort of people she knew, that were little more than business transactions. There were cold, brittle unions, husbands and wives who were faithless, others who exulted in causing each other pain.
There were a thousand ways to have a terrible marriage.
But maybe what that meant was that Pia could decide how to make hers a good one. Or a decent one, anyway. Better than most. And maybe there wasn’t only one fairy-tale way to get there.
Maybe there were twin boys. A palace fit for Rapunzel. And months spent doing nothing but circling around and around the inevitable. Maybe there were wild, hot nights of sex and longing with the only man she’d ever wanted to touch.
Already that sounded better than half the marriages she’d ever heard of.
And Pia loved him, though she knew better than that, too. She loved him even though she was sure that the years would pass and whatever protestations he’d made here tonight about her supposed beauty would fade. He would regret this. He might take his own father’s path.
Pia knew that she would still love him then. That she would always love him. So what would be worse? Never having any part of this? Or losing what little she had?
In front of her, Ares shifted. He dropped onto his knees, his gaze locked to hers as the afternoon sun poured in and highlighted every last perfect, glorious inch of him.
Both of them were naked. Pia’s belly was so big it could take over the whole of the room on its own, and maybe the world. Ares didn’t put his hands there. Instead, he reached up and took hers in his.
“Pia,” he said, very gravely. “Marry me. Be my queen and mother to my sons. And promise me that from time to time, you will smile at me the way you did in a stranger’s party in Manhattan.”
And her heart kicked at her, but she couldn’t tell if it was signaling danger or excitement. Hope or anxiety. All of the above.
And she knew better. She knew better.
The worst thing she could possibly do was believe.
But her hands were in his much bigger ones. And his gaze was so serious that it made her flush a little.
And she had two baby boys inside her who deserved their father.
What do you deserve, dear girl? that voice inside asked her, the way Alexandrina would have. Do you really think you deserve a prince?
But Pia shoved that aside.
Right here, right now, he believed she was beautiful.
She didn’t have to believe him to hold on to that for as long as she could.
For as long as he’d let her.
“Very well, then,” she said, surrendering. Or, if she was honest, taking a leap into faith, despite everything. And having no idea where she might land. “I will do it, Ares. I will marry you.”
* * *
Ares didn’t realize until Pia finally agreed to marry him that a part of him had worried that she would not. That she would actually refuse him.
And it was one thing to make pronouncements about how he wished to live his life wifeless and childless and alone. It was another to be rendered such things because the woman he wanted would not have him.
But she had agreed at last. And he was ready—had been ready, in fact, since the day he’d met with his father and had decided on a different future.
And two days after Pia finally acquiesced, he found her on an achingly perfect morning by the sea, having her breakfast out on one of the palace’s many terraces. For a moment he stood away from her, taking her in as she gazed out toward Kefalonia. This woman who had made him into a man he didn’t recognize. A crown prince who wanted to claim his throne. A man who was no longer content to step aside for the father he had always hated.
Pia sat in the loose, flowing dress he had chosen
for her, her dark hair back in a loose braid. The breeze from the ocean picked up strands and made them dance, this way and that, and he thought the sea itself paled beside her.
He could not believe she had ever imagined she was anything less than beautiful. Stunning, even.
He had met her mother. And he had found Alexandrina San Giacomo beautiful, yes, but brittle with it. Expectant. Her beauty was her currency, and she had been well aware of it. There was nothing wrong with that, to Ares’s mind. He admired it, as he certainly knew when his own looks worked in his favor.
But Pia was beautiful in a different way altogether. Her beauty was unstudied. Artless. Her gray eyes were dreamy, her sweet mouth soft. Right now she was gloriously pregnant, ripe and lush, and it only added to her many charms.
Alexandrina had been a weapon. But Pia was a precious gem. As perfect as she was pretty.
And soon to be his princess. And one day, his queen.
He must have made a noise, because she glanced over then. And Ares had the pleasure of watching the way her eyes glowed with pleasure before she blinked it away to something far more guarded.
But the smile that curved her mouth was as bright and engaging as that first one back in New York.
It made something in him seem to turn over, then hum.
This one, a voice in him said, like some kind of gong. This one.
Mine, Ares thought.
He moved over to her, sliding a hand over her cheek and loving the way she leaned into his touch. The way she always did. She had no walls. She held nothing back. She was heedless, hedonistic in bed, and he found that she made him insatiable.
There were no ways he didn’t want her.
“I don’t know what you have planned for today,” he said.
Her gray eyes were soft and bright as she looked up at him. “I’m very busy, actually. I plan to lounge about, pretending to work, for several hours. After which I will very officiously go seat myself somewhere, open up the laptop, and type very studiously. I won’t be working, of course. I’ll be checking email and scrolling through things I don’t care about on the internet, which is a very important part of my process. After several hours of that, I will write a single sentence, which will be so exhausting that I will instantly need to send for snacks. I plan to repeat this several times throughout the day, until I can break for an early dinner, and pretend none of it ever happened. And you?”
And that was the part Ares couldn’t understand. He found her...entertaining.
He didn’t understand it, but he liked it. True, he’d never seen anything like her before, anywhere in the royal family, or, for that matter, in any of the dreary noble houses of Europe. Everything was duty and history. Ancestral obligation and debts paid in to the future. Marriages were solemn contracts for the production of heirs, and everyone in those marriages worked hard to appear studiously joyless—if his own parents were any guide.
But the woman he would reign with was entertaining. She smiled, laughed. She even dared tease him. Ares chose to see it as a gift.
He went down before her, on the traditional single knee. Then he reached into his pocket, pulling out a small box with great flourish. He cracked it open, looking up to find Pia with her hands over her mouth and her gray eyes wide.
“I do not know if you recognize this ring,” he said. “It has a legend attached to it. It was handed down through my family for generations, and each woman who wears it is said to be the queen the country deserves. Good, kind. It was my grandmother’s. She left it for me when she died, that I might put it on the hand of my own queen one day. Will you take it?”
And he found that something in him was tense and tight until she let out a breath, nodded once, jerkily, and extended her hand that he might slide the ring into place.
Together, they stared down at the collection of three perfect sapphires, ringed with diamonds. Taken together the stones created the sense of something bigger than the sum of its parts. The ring itself was history. But on Pia, it looked like art.
“Thank you,” she whispered, her voice catching. “It’s so beautiful.”
“I was hoping you would think so.”
He helped her to her feet, aware that it was harder for her to rise these days. He swept his eye over the dress she wore, white and flowing, and making her look very nearly ethereal. He reached down to the table and picked up one of the flowers that sat there in a small vase, then tucked it into the top of her braid.
She was breathing loud enough that he could hear it. And her eyes were glassy when he was done with the flower. He wanted to lean down and kiss her, claim her—
But kissing Pia was no quick affair. It required time because Ares never stopped at one kiss. How could he?
“Come with me,” he said.
And Pia held out her hand, because Pia always held out her hand. She trusted him enough to follow him into the unknown, and that was a responsibility Ares took seriously. More than seriously. He felt the weight of it move through him, and he vowed as he led her through the palace that he would honor it. Care for it.
And her.
Always her.
He hadn’t planned for any of this. And he hadn’t known, until that day in his father’s study, how best to handle his impending fatherhood.
But now it was all so beautifully clear.
“What are we doing?” Pia asked, as he led her through the great salons and out to the wide terrace overlooking the steepest part of the rocky cliffs below. The ocean stretched itself in the sun, rambling out to the horizon. And there, beneath the makeshift canopy he’d had his staff prepare from sweet-smelling vines and bright flowers, a priest waited.
He felt her hand shake in his.
“Is this...?”
“This is our wedding, Pia,” he said, looking down at her. Another tension gripping him because she could still balk. She could demand the cathedral on the Northern Island. She could refuse him. She could still refuse him. “Here, now.”
“But...”
Ares took her hands in his. And he thought that he could lose himself forever in all that gleaming gray. He intended to. “Do you trust me?”
“I... I don’t...”
“It’s a simple question. You either trust me, or you do not.”
“I trust you,” she whispered.
“Then why wait?” he asked. “You know as well as I do what a royal wedding will be like. The pomp and circumstance, all in aid of a future throne. We can do this here. You and me, no one else. And our babies.”
Her eyes glistened. Her smile seemed to tremble on her lips. Even her hands in his shook a little.
“Just you and me,” she whispered.
There was a faint breeze from the sea spread out below them. The priest spoke his words, and when it was time for their vows, Pia had stopped shaking.
“I vow to honor you, keep you safe, and pledge my life to yours,” Ares said, intoning the traditional vows of the kingdom.
“And I you,” Pia replied.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out another box. Inside sat two rings. Two bands of gold. He slid the smaller one onto Pia’s finger, so it sat flush against his grandmother’s. And something dark and primitive roared through him at the sight.
He handed her the bigger ring and she took it, shifting her hand to slide it onto his finger.
And that was it, Ares thought. It was done.
“And now, Your Highness, you may kiss your bride,” the priest declared.
And Pia was smiling again as he angled his face to hers, then took her mouth with his.
For a moment there was nothing but that kiss, sweet and perfect. Then another.
There was only the two of them, and the vows they’d made. Ares moved closer, pulling Pia further into his arms, because she was his. And he couldn’t get enough of her.
And he dou
bted he ever would.
He kissed her again, deeper and wilder—
And that was when the helicopter rose up from below. It bristled with reporters, cameras in hand and pointing straight toward them.
Pia started to pull away, stiff with horror.
“Kiss me again,” Ares commanded her.
“But the paparazzi—” she began.
“Kiss me, Pia,” he told her, and he could hear the satisfaction in his own voice. He could feel it thrumming in his veins. He could very nearly picture the king’s apoplectic rage when he saw these pictures—and understood what they meant. “I want them to see. I’m the one who called them here.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
PIA DID AS Ares asked—as he commanded—because she could see no alternative.
And because she couldn’t think. She kissed him, and the helicopter was right there, and everything was whipping around while she knew there were pictures being taken—
She was sure she could hear them laughing already.
Before she could object, or scream, or do any of the things that clambered inside of her and threated to come out of her, violently—Ares pulled away. He shouted something to the priest over the noise of the helicopter’s rotors.
He even waved.
Then he was leading her back inside the palace, leaving the helicopter and its paparazzi cargo behind. For a moment she let him lead her on, because she was too busy reeling to do anything else. She was blind and her heart hurt and it was a lie.
It was all a lie.
What had happened—what had just happened—hit her, hard.
I called them, he had said.
She dug her heels in, yanking her hand from his, and moving her hands around to the small of her back as she panted a little at the exertion and the low, dull pain that bloomed there. And she didn’t know whether to look at him directly, or do her best to look away, maybe up and down the gallery where they’d stopped.
“What did you do?” she demanded. “What do you mean, you called them?”
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