CHAPTER FOUR

JOAQUIN HAD MISCALCULATED.

Grievously.

They spent the day in his bed—and all over the rest of the home he had abandoned when she had left him that summer. When the feast of her body could not sustain them any further, he had fixed them simple meals from the small kitchen he kept here, custom built for those times he did not wish to go to the trouble of walking all the way back to the main part of the hotel.

He had not thought that part through, either. He had spent a lot of time in this place while he was overseeing the renovation of the island. He had been new to wealth then and had wanted to keep an iron control over every aspect of the project. But he had not been that man in years. These days he preferred to control the many teams that did his bidding, not necessarily the projects he had them handle for him.

That was different. When it came to Amalia, however, he was as wholly invested as he had ever been.

He kept telling himself to snap out of it. But always, that same rush of desire would rise in him anew and they would end up back in his bed, learning each other all over again.

Now it was late. Outside the glass walls of the dungeon he had transformed into quiet elegance because it pleased him to know he could do such things, he stood by the window and watch the moon rise over the dance of the waves.

Behind him, the only living creature he had ever loved slept, her dark hair fanned out across the pillow and her cheeks flushed with the force of her dreams. All of him, he imagined. If they were anything like the ones he had of her more often than he liked to admit.

He did not have to look over his shoulder to confirm it. He knew the image would be burned into him forever.

Just like every other image, every other moment.

Joaquin had always intended to taste her again. He was not a man who believed in once-in-a-lifetime events—not he, who could so often dictate the course of both time and events. And lives, come to that.

He had not believed it was possible that he would never encounter her again, and the need to hasten that moment had burned in him. For years. He had liked the fire of it, because he’d been so certain it was hatred.

That it was what she deserved from him after her betrayal. He had taken a kind of pleasure in letting it grow, knowing that sooner or later, their paths would cross again. When they did, he would be ready.

This had seemed too good to be true.

First, that for all the haughtiness she had showed him at the end of that summer—all her talk of her station and what she owed her subjects—she was no princess, after all. He was a mongrel from the streets of Bilbao and yet he had as much right to the Ile d’Montagne throne as she did.

Joaquin knew all too well what it was like to be cast out, mocked and ridiculed, but no one had dared treat him in such a fashion in a long while. It was true that he had taken no small pleasure in the notion that she—so unprepared for these things, so insulated by a lifetime of imagining herself so high and mighty—must face them all the same.

Perhaps that made him as petty as he was sometimes accused of being. Though he noticed that those who called him such things were always the same people who reaped what they, themselves, had sown.

When he’d found that she actually dared return to Cap Morat, he had felt the way he often did when the world arranged itself to suit him. That all was as it should be. That all was right and good.

He had anticipated wanting her, for who would not want her? Amalia’s beauty was exquisite and inarguable. Much had been made her whole life of the delicacy of her features, the stunning blue of her eyes, her innate grace.

All of which, it turned out, came courtesy of a cornfield. Not the royal heritage that was supposed to have produced it.

He had anticipated enjoying all of that, as he always had, because he had been captivated by her beauty once before. And enjoying more, perhaps, that all along, they’d been commoners together here. Despite her attempts to put him in his place.

Now the only difference between them was that he’d earned his money. Hers was a parting gift from the Queen—not her mother—who simply wanted the inconvenient farm girl she’d raised as her daughter and heir to go away. That tidbit had not made the papers yet, but it would. In the meantime, his sources had come through for him.

Joaquin had expected to enjoy that part, particularly.

What he had not anticipated was the punch of her.

Even though he knew better this time. Even though he would never be so foolish as to love her again.

The attraction between them was outsize and astonishing, still. He hadn’t expected the electricity of it to shock him the way it did. He hadn’t expected that merely meeting her gaze would make him feel winded.

He had decided long ago that none of the things he’d thought he felt here, with her, were real. How could they be? He had lost her and he was Joaquin Vargas. He did not lose.

It had not occurred to him that she could be stripped of all the things that had made her who she was and yet still have her own power to spare.

Worse, that she would still have that same power over him.

When he had allowed no one else that kind of leverage. Ever.

Even so, he had expected it would work itself out. He had come to humble her, and he assumed it would be easily done. He would order her to kneel, she would refuse, and he would have the great pleasure of throwing her off his island.

Instead, she had knelt.

He was not sure that he had actually used the brain in his head between that moment and this. Indeed, he knew he had not.

So he stood still. He watched the moon and the sea. And he despaired of himself.

“You look appropriately ferocious for a man who lives in a dungeon half beneath the sea,” came her silvery voice from his bed. “Even from behind.”

Joaquin did not respond. Perhaps he could not. He heard a whisper of sound and then she came to stand beside him, wrapped up in the sheet from his bed. Making a sheet he had given little thought to, ever, look like the finest garment ever made to caress a woman’s form. It looked as if it had been created to pour all over her like that, as if the moonlight had spun itself into silk.

“I’m going to be honest with you about something, though I probably shouldn’t,” she told him softly, as if this room had become a confessional.

Her gaze was directed out toward the sea, and his chest felt tight, because she looked almost...troubled. The frown he remembered but had not seen in years, in her press appearances or here today, had insinuated itself between her brows again. Her black hair tumbled down her back, looking anything but smooth. For a moment, it was like looking back through time.

Back to the meat of that summer, before she’d turned into a statue. Before she’d acted as if nothing about him or them concerned her at all. For a moment, he could see once more the bright chaos of the younger Amalia he’d known. Not the measured creature, the Crown Princess, who seemed to know too well that anything she said or did could be used against her.

It was unfair, he knew, when that was what he wanted from her. Anything and everything that he could use to do to her what she had done to him.

“Is honesty a factor here?” he asked, his voice hardly seeming like his own. He blamed the moon. “It was not before.”

The moon he was busy blaming for his weakness had captured his attention, so he sensed her reproachful look more than saw it.

“I was nothing but honest with you, Joaquin. All summer long, and then at the end, too. Could I have tempered my words? Certainly, and I wish I had. But the message was still the same. There was no possibility that Queen Esme would permit any relationship between us. At the end of the day, what could possibly have prettied that up?”

Joaquin didn’t want to touch that. Or maybe the real truth was, he wanted nothing but to touch it. To tear it apart with his fingers. To bellow out the five years’ worth of wounded pride and all those other shattered things inside him he refused to accept were there.

He refused. “Was this the honesty you meant? I could do without it.”

She turned, putting her back to the glass. Then she tipped her face toward him, still swaddled in that sheet, but he saw her there. Amalia, as deep in this as he was.

As he had been, he corrected himself.

“I had convinced myself that nothing could be as intense as that summer was,” she told him, as if she was offering him a confession. And God knew he would take it, especially when her voice was so low, so raw. “I was wrong.”

Joaquin looked down at her, though he knew it was dangerous. Her hair was tangled now, messy from his fingers. Just the way he liked it. Her lips were slightly swollen from his, and if he wasn’t mistaken, the faint hint of his jaw was all over the tender skin of her neck.

This was how he liked her. Thoroughly debauched, and all his.

But none of this mattered. None of it was real.

“The intensity is the only reason I allowed you to return here,” he told her, and even that felt like too much of an admission.

And he was staring down at her face. He could see her reaction.

She blinked, once. That was all.

And then the Amalia he remembered, the Amalia he craved, disappeared as he looked at her. Her face smoothed out, and became serene.

Eerily serene, to his mind.

Something in him turned over at that, because surely that was a loss. Surely that was something less than honesty—though he doubted if she even knew how much she’d changed from that open girl back then, so filled with sunshine and wonder.

But he knew.

“Joaquin,” she said, in a quiet voice that matched the sudden steadiness of her gaze. “I hope you know there was never a day—”

He moved then, sliding his palm over her mouth and holding it there as her eyes widened.

As blue as the sea behind her. And as treacherous.

He needed to remember that above all things.

Because he could not allow this. She had been the exception that proved the rule, and she’d proved herself unworthy of it. He had let her in. He had allowed her to see parts of him he hadn’t known were there. He had never given anyone else that privilege.

And she had squandered it. It didn’t matter why.

Joaquin could not go back there. He could not tolerate her inevitable betrayal once again.

He had grown up hard, but it had been his life. He had never cried about it. He had been far too busy digging himself out of the hole he’d found himself in by virtue of his birth. And it turned out that no matter what all the soft, well-fed wellness gurus liked to say, empires really could be built on spite.

Joaquin had built his that way, and happily. There had been nothing soft in him, ever, until he’d encountered a princess on his island.

She had made him feel. Then she had left him. He could not forgive it.

He would not.

Joaquin refused to entertain even the barest hint that they were headed in that direction again. If he could have dug out his heart with his own hands and gotten rid of it, he would have. He did not intend to risk it again.

This was about revenge and nothing more.

He could have moved his palm from her lips, but he didn’t.

“There are only two things, maybe three, that I wish you to do with your mouth,” he told her with a certain grimness that still didn’t manage to cut that same desire for her that burned in him, always. “None of them involve talking.”

He felt her smile there beneath his hand, and that did not help. She pulled her head back, so he could see that smile whether he wished to or not. And it did not exactly keep him focused on making this moment work to his advantage.

Because she might have changed in the years since he’d seen her. But she still looked at him as if he was a wondrous, magical creature when he knew otherwise.

“No one has ever spoken to me the way you do,” she said, still smiling. Even her eyes were shining, bright enough to rival the path of the moon across the water. “I still don’t understand why I like it so much. Or don’t hate it the way I should. It was one thing when I was the Crown Princess and you could reduce me to nothing but a half-wild woman with a few dirty words. But now I really am nothing but a woman, and still. It has the same effect.”

Joaquin couldn’t listen to this. He couldn’t engage with her in this way.

Allowing her to talk at all was the problem. He knew that. Because he wanted, still and always, to glut himself upon her. There was no changing that, apparently. There was no pretending otherwise.

But he saw no reason why he should risk liking her again. When he looked back, he could pinpoint that as the disaster that had precipitated all the rest. Liking Amalia had been the beginning and the end. When had he ever liked anyone?

His life had not lent itself to such luxuries. It had all been about extremes. Living by his wits on the streets, viewing others as marks or possible future marks as he’d set about getting out of Bilbao. And then teaching himself a rudimentary understanding of finance, mostly because he had once encountered a group of hotshot bankers in Madrid who had sneered at him and told him to get a job.

I’ll take yours, he had replied.

And so he had. By virtue of buying everything that particular group of bankers had put their grubby fingers in, then firing each and every one of them. Simply because he could.

He had liked every step of the journey. He had liked how easy it was, once he put his mind to something, to make it happen. He had certainly liked firing the men who had thought themselves so much better than him on a city street.

But that was liking things he did. Not who he was.

Joaquin had never had friends. He had allies or enemies, with no in between. And well did he know that a friend one day was often an enemy the next.

He banked on it.

It had not been until Her Royal Highness Princess Amalia had gazed at him as if he was a sheer delight—there on a patio he’d built in the sweet Spanish sun he’d always taken for granted—that he had discovered there was something else.

He hadn’t understood it at first. What was this overwhelming compulsion he felt when he was near her? Not merely the urge for sex. He was used to that. He had always had healthy appetites.

It was only Amalia whose company he desired.

And look what it had got him.

He rubbed at his chest, annoyed that his heart still beat there. And worse, that he could feel it, as if it was a commentary on his behavior.

Joaquin could not allow this to happen again.

He would not.

“You were a virgin,” he told her now, his voice dark. Almost as dark as the sea outside, gleaming beneath the moon. “You do not know the ways that men are with women.”

And he could see the hint of a crease appear between her brows. He knew she would argue. Or say something that he would ignore in the moment and then spend the next eternity turning over and over in his head.

So he took her mouth instead.

And he wrested the sheet from her fingers, letting it pool at her feet, before lifting her up and wrapping her legs around him. Because surely, if he sank into her completely—if he indulged himself completely—he would burn this out, whatever this was.

This unwelcome poltergeist of sensation inside him that had never abated.

No matter how he had tried these last few years to blot her out as if she had never existed.

He carried her back to the bed and lowered them both down.

Her sighs were like music. Her taste was addictive.

But he’d already answered the question to his own satisfaction. She’d been a virgin that summer and he had been foolish. Neither of those things applied to this situation. Neither of those things were factors any longer.

He did not have to be careful with her. He could treat her as he had treated any woman, though he rarely allowed them more than a night. Perhaps a weekend, on rare occasions, usually because he needed a date for some or other event in some far-off locale. He always made certain the women he took with him knew where they stood.

If they didn’t like his bluntness, he was always more than happy to find someone else.

Joaquin Vargas was known for his business decisions, ruthless and sometimes cruel. He treated women the same way.

And anyone else who happened into his orbit.

That was what he’d learned on the streets. That was how he’d survived.

This would be no different.

Having already made mistakes with her, he would not be so foolish as to repeat them. He would treat Amalia the way he treated any obsession he happened upon. He would give himself to it totally, knowing all the while that soon enough, his obsession would burn itself out.

Maybe then he could be free.

Of this. Of her.

And as he moved over her in the bed, sinking deep into her flesh, and losing himself in that glorious burn, he assured himself that was what he wanted.

Freedom above all else. Because nothing else that he had ever touched had lasted.

Only his freedom to do as he liked, then move on when he was done.

Soon enough, he would leave here again, and he would be free. But this time he would not carry her with him, forever lodged in his heart, in his sex, and too many dreams at night.

Joaquin told himself he was tired of being haunted.

So he set about vanquishing this particular ghost the only way he knew how.