BEING BACK IN Ile d’Montagne felt like an out-of-body experience.
Especially when Amalia was picked up at the private airfield by the same palace driver who had always picked her up. But then, instead of taking her to one of the private entrances as she’d expected, he delivered her to the front of the palace where anyone could see her arrival. See it and report it to the world.
Someone was making a statement.
Amalia had to adjust her approach to, well, everything in a flash. Because she’d been expecting that they’d sneak her in the side door, cutting down on the possibility of any photographic evidence of her presence. Since she was likely still considered to be an embarrassment. Our Fake Princess the papers had called her.
The senior aides had never looked at her the same way again.
It had never occurred to Amalia that the palace might not hide her.
But as the car slowed in front of the public entrance, all her training came back to her in a rush. As if she’d never been away. How to exit the car. How to walk, with perfect posture and a slightly inclined head, to indicate respect for the institution of the monarchy as well as her own quiet confidence. She had dressed for the palace in an understated dress and unobtrusively elegant cashmere cardigan, even if her heels were a trifle too exuberant for a person who could make no claim to the throne. She knew the courtiers would whisper amongst themselves and say she had aspirations above herself.
But the good news was, she didn’t have to care what courtiers thought about anything any longer. Besides, they would say such things about her no matter what she wore.
She was ushered into the palace’s grand foyer and expected to be marched off to some reception room or other, where she would wait to be given instructions. No doubt by some or other member of the senior staff—and likely someone she already knew. She was prepared to pretend she felt no shred of awkwardness whatsoever, because, it turned out, the moment she set foot inside this palace she knew exactly how to play her role.
Any role.
Because she had always been very good at this.
She stopped walking when she realized no one was escorting her, and more, someone appeared to be waiting for her. And Amalia was shocked when she realized that the person standing there beneath a chandelier that had inspired no fewer than seven separate well-known poems was none other than Delaney Clark.
“Well, thank God you’re here,” the other woman said in her warm American accent, which shouldn’t have surprised Amalia at all. And yet it did. When was the last time there had been Americans in the palace? Had there ever been Americans in the palace? Having so recently been in Kansas herself, Amalia found she loved it. “I’m making a mess of everything.”
“You shouldn’t even be greeting me,” Amalia said, in tacit agreement. “That’s the sort of thing you have your staff take care of, if possible. Just so everyone remembers their place.”
Delaney was wearing a similar outfit to Amalia’s. Amalia thought they both recognized that similarity in the same moment. And as Delaney walked—too briskly, too energetically—toward Amalia, it was impossible not to notice how similar they looked, no matter what they happened to be wearing. They both had long black hair. They both had blue eyes. There were differences, of course. The shape of a nose, a chin. Amalia was taller. Delaney had a spate of freckles across her nose.
But they could easily have been sisters.
“I’m an American,” Delaney said as she drew close, smiling. “The only places I’m aware of are geographic.”
“Welcome to Europe,” Amalia murmured. “We like a hierarchy.”
Delaney came to a stop before her, dropping her smile. Her gaze became more intense. “I know how kind you were to my mother. I won’t ever forget that.”
Amalia smiled. “If you mean the Queen, I’ve spent a lifetime being kind to her. If you mean Catherine, well. She’s actually my mother, too.”
“I can’t pretend to understand how hard this must have been for you,” Delaney said, her blue eyes no less intense. “For me, everyone keeps going on and on about my change in fortune as if every moment should be a nonstop delight. I’m a Cinderella for the ages, apparently.”
That reminded her of something. Amalia made herself smile, though thinking of Joaquin hurt. But then, trying not to think about him hurt, too.
It all hurt.
“Someone told me that I’m Cinderella in reverse,” she told this woman who looked like her and who was now living her life. “And there are no stories for that.”
Delaney’s gaze turned shrewd. And Amalia remembered the first time she’d met this woman, in a press call that had been all about flashbulbs and fixed smiles. Even then, she’d liked her. Now, though, she liked her even more—maybe because she’d spent some time in that farmhouse. She’d sat on that much-loved couch in the living room and heard stories about people Delaney had known and loved.
They’d exchanged lives more than once already. How could they do anything but like each other?
“It seems you came to exactly the right place,” Delaney was saying. “Because it looks like we have a lot of new stories to write, you and me.”
Instead of summoning the servants to escort her to a guest suite, Delaney walked with her. And Amalia was so involved in pretending not to be overwhelmed by being back in the palace that it took her a moment to realize that they were walking directly to her old rooms.
“You can’t be serious,” she said when they stopped outside her old door. “These are the Crown Princess’s rooms.” She remembered herself. “They’re yours, Your Royal Highness.”
“Call me Delaney, please.” And Delaney shrugged when Amalia stared at her instead of proceeding into her old rooms. “I don’t actually stay in the palace.” At Amalia’s look of astonishment, she sighed. “My husband prefers to stay under a separate roof than the one the Queen enjoys.”
“I see.”
And Amalia did see. Of course Cayetano Arcieri, sworn enemy of the Montaigne family for the entirety of his life—a grudge he had inherited from untold generations in his very blood—would not lay his head down in the palace. Not until it was his.
“Did you choose the dower house?” she asked. “I’ve always thought it would be the best place to live. Near enough to the palace, yet also far enough away.”
“This is why you are the only person in the world I can turn to for help,” Delaney said then, her expression fierce and serious. “You already know everything I’ve had to learn on the fly.”
And this felt weird. There was no getting around that. It was weird.
But still, Amalia knew—just as she had in London when Delaney had extended this offer—that this was where she belonged. She thought of Catherine and the cornfields, and even though it was in complete defiance of all known protocol, she reached out her hand and put it on Delaney’s arm.
“I was very, very good at being the Crown Princess,” she said softly. “And it will be my honor to make you even better.”
And that was precisely what she set out to do.
She spent her first few days sitting down with Delaney—because Esme was unavailable, she was told each time she tried to see her—and her seethingly ferocious husband, who looked at Amalia with frank suspicion. Which she returned in kind.
“This is not my idea,” he told her, seeming far too large and dangerous for the elegant dower house.
“I think we all know it wasn’t mine,” Amalia replied, princess smile in place. “Or I would be the one wearing the tiara.”
“It was my idea,” Delaney told him, with a private sort of smile. “And it’s a good one.”
Cayetano and Amalia, born and raised to be mortal enemies, were just going to have to learn how to deal with each other.
Amalia set up an office in the palace. She knew precisely which staff members she needed to ask to join her, and which ones she would allow nowhere near this particular enterprise.
“I think this means you’re my chief of staff,” Delaney said one day, sitting slouched in the corner of Amalia’s new office, wearing clothing that would likely give Queen Esme the vapors if she were to see it. A T-shirt reading MIDWEST IS BEST and a pair of jeans that Amalia’s former aides would have removed from her wardrobe and burned, without asking.
“The Crown Princess does not have a chief of staff,” Amalia told her. “That sounds like something a common politician might require. You are a member of a royal family stretching back into antiquity.” She smiled. “I believe you can call me your lady-in-waiting.”
Delaney sighed. “That seems a very silly name for all the things you do.”
Amalia eyed the true heir to the kingdom over the span of her desk. “Here’s the thing about real power. It doesn’t matter what it’s called. All that matters is if you can wield it.”
“I take it the lessons have begun,” Delaney said with a laugh.
And every moment she wasn’t in the palace or in the dower house on the grounds with Delaney, Amalia was exploring. She’d decided that she did not wish to live in the palace, and certainly not in the very same rooms were she’d been a different person. She was a private citizen now. And she might serve the crown yet again, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t permitted her own life as well.
Besides, she had lived on this island her entire life, yet knew it very little. She knew what their main city looked like from the safety of her motorcade. She’d visited any number of sites and toured them, but always in staid and formal arranged engagements.
Now she had the freedom, at last, to walk anywhere she liked. To do anything she pleased.
At first she worried that the citizens would respond badly to her presence, but it was the opposite. Everywhere she went, she was recognized, but that wasn’t a bad thing. People stopped to talk to her. Many complimented her for going away with such grace.
“I think I might’ve had a tantrum or two, me,” said one woman she met in the open-air market.
“I would bring the palace down,” vowed another.
“I might have lit a match,” Amalia replied, smiling. “But I stamped it out again.”
After she’d been back on the island for a solid ten days, she had narrowed down her favorite spots and toured the various neighborhoods—on foot, not in a royal procession. She bought herself a lovely little cottage on the hillside, where she could look at the palace but also the sea beyond.
And if she stood there in the first place she’d ever owned, just for her, and looked for the hint of an island fortress on the horizon...she couldn’t really blame herself. That was the good thing about a heart so thoroughly broken. Amalia doubted that any more damage could be done to it. Why not stare at the horizon? Why not cry herself to sleep?
It was just life. Her life, like it or not.
“You must be some kind of saint,” sneered her least favorite paparazzo one morning.
Amalia liked to walk to work, because it gave her time to clear out the cobwebs of the dreams she had each night, all of them featuring Joaquin. She got to breathe in the air that smelled as she recalled it, salt and flowers. She got to be a part of the island instead of in it, yet apart from it. And she liked to tell herself, as she walked along, that this was what being alive was all about.
Feet moving. Heart aching. Breathing in deep, and still, enjoying it all in its own way.
“I hope I’m not a saint,” she replied, smiling when she really did not feel like smiling at all. “Doesn’t that usually involve horrid death?”
“Want to tell me what kind of person gets kicked out of the royal family only to come back and set herself up as an advisor to the very person who kicked her out?” He shook his head, the odious man. “I’ll tell you what kind of person. A snake or a con.”
“Believe what you like, Maurizio,” she replied, with an airiness she was delighted to discover she actually felt. Because as little as she liked this man, she really didn’t care what he said about her. It reflected badly on absolutely no one. He could think whatever he wanted about her. “You will anyway, and I’m sure your paper will love that.”
Later that day, after preparing Delaney for a series of engagements that were deemed ceremonial but would actually be a test, Amalia ducked into a salon she knew was little used to make some notes.
And when she glanced up again, the Queen was there.
For a moment she could only stare. Then she remembered herself, and rose to her feet so that she could execute a proper curtsy. And not the one she’d used to greet her mother the first time she saw her each day, but the kind of curtsy she had not been called upon to give before. Deep and low, as befitting a commoner before a queen.
“I think that by rights you are an American,” Esme said coolly. “And as such are not required to curtsy to anyone.”
Amalia rose. “But I still think of you as my mother,” she replied simply. “And I don’t have it in me not to honor you.”
She’d meant that to come out lightly. She wasn’t prepared for the fact that lightly wasn’t how it seemed to land. It hung there between them instead.
Then, as she watched, Queen Esme of Ile d’Montagne, who eschewed weakness in all its forms...looked very much as if there were tears in her eyes.
“I hope you know,” the Queen said after a very long moment, and not in her usual ringing tones. “That is, I hope you understand...”
There was a time when Amalia would have leaped in to finish the sentence for her. To save her mother from anything, even what passed for her maternal duties. She didn’t do that today. She was a new person, wasn’t she?
So she waited.
“I only know how to care about one thing,” Esme said stiffly, still with eyes far too bright. “This did not distress me overmuch, because I raised you to care deeply about the same thing. And I believed, for all these years, that whatever I lacked as a mother I would make up somehow as Queen. It never occurred to me that I could lose you, Amalia. I find what has happened...” She sighed. “It is unthinkable. I cannot fathom any part of it.”
“Delaney will be a far better crown princess than I ever could be,” Amalia said, and she knew she would have said that anyway. But she found she meant it as much when Delaney wasn’t in the room as when she was. “And she’s the rightful Princess besides. That matters.”
“But she has gone and married an Arcieri,” Esme said bitterly. Then she blew out a breath. “And she is not mine. Not the way you are.”
The old Amalia would have been replete at this. For a woman who was in no way demonstrative, Esme might as well have taken up skywriting with those two small sentences that set years of her life aglow in retrospect.
But Amalia was not the person who had stuck away from this palace, under cover of night. She was the Amalia who had knelt upon stone and walked through fire. She was the Amalia who had found a kind of peace in a Kansas cornfield and who had looked a stranger in the face and known her instantly.
She was the Amalia who had lost the man she loved three times. And had no hope that anything could ever change that. Some fortresses could be renovated and made into luxury hotels. She’d seen that with her own eyes.
But others were like the old fortress she’d toured right here on Ile d’Montagne two days ago. Once used by the coastal dwellers to ward off the mountain rebels, it had been impregnable in its day. And now was nothing but a ruin, worn away by sand and sea and beaten down by the sun. It was good for nothing but atmospheric photographs.
Amalia knew too well what kind of fortress housed Joaquin’s heart.
She knew too well what she had lost.
And somehow, that gave her the courage to look Esme in the eye.
“That Delaney is not yours is a good thing,” she told the Queen she would always consider her mother. “I was too much yours. I would have married one of those milksop men you chose for me and obeyed you in all things. And that would suit you well, I’m sure, but only as long as you live.”
“It is my intention to live for some time,” Esme said sharply. “Especially now.”
“Long live you,” Amalia said, with a smile. “But no one lives forever, Your Majesty. Even you. And how would our plans have left the country? A weak king and a new queen too used to taking orders? I think in time you will find that Delaney will be a far better queen than I ever could have been.”
Esme sniffed. “Maybe she could have been, if it weren’t for the warlord.”
“You know that he is right to want to unite the kingdom,” Amalia said softly. “And he might not answer to you, but then, he listens to only one person on this earth. Luckily, she is your daughter. She will do great things.”
The Queen looked over her shoulder, frowned, then shooed away whoever waited in the hall with the tiny flick of one finger. Then she returned her attention to Amalia.
“You did not take such liberties with me when you lived here.”
“I did not dare,” Amalia agreed. “Yet another reason I would have been an uninspired queen.”
“Then you do not miss it?” Esme’s voice was sharper now. “Have you taken this role so that you can relive the glory that was once yours?”
Wasn’t that what that toad of a paparazzo had suggested? He wouldn’t be the first or the last, she knew.
“I will tell you a secret,” Amalia said then. “Because you were my mother and you will always be my Queen.” She waited for Esme to lean toward her, slightly. She did the same in reverse. Then she whispered, so no lurking courtiers could hear, “I don’t miss being the Crown Princess at all. I much prefer telling Delaney exactly what she should do, and then retreating out of the spotlight into civilian life.”
Esme took that in, a canny look in her blue eyes. Blue eyes that Amalia had always thought were like hers. But now, having spent so much time with Delaney, she could see that hers were an entirely different shade. More like the Balearic Sea, less like the calm waters of Ile d’Montagne’s Royal Bay. She didn’t know how to feel about that.
“And your sudden delight in civilian life and all its charms,” the Queen said, as if she was musing. When Esme rarely mused. Commands were her preferred mode of address. “This would not have anything to do with your enthusiastic embrace of one, particular civilian, would it?”
Because, of course, Joaquin was everywhere she turned. Even in this conversation, where Amalia had not expected to find him.
“I suppose I should be horrified and outraged that you’ve had me watched,” Amalia said after a moment. She shook her head. “But I find that instead I’m rather touched. That’s as good as a love letter from you, Mother. Forgive me. I meant, Your Majesty.”
Esme did not exactly unbend. There was a considering gleam in her gaze. “You are the only one I intend to forgive for familiarity of address,” she said, with a slight inclination of her head, as if bestowing a gift. “But Amalia. Joaquin Vargas? He is unmanageable at best.”
“Entirely so,” Amalia agreed. She did not say, And that’s why I’m in love with him.
But then, perhaps she didn’t have to say that out loud.
“You may have been raised to be a princess you are not,” Esme said, and Amalia thought she sounded almost...careful. “But that still means that you have one of the finest educations in the land. You’re poised and graceful. And you’re in possession of a considerable fortune that will, of course, only grow over time. You could have anyone at all, child. Must it truly be an uncivilized Spaniard who has not one respectful bone in his entire body?”
Amalia blew out a breath at that. “I appreciate the warning,” she managed to say. “But this is all a bit embarrassingly after the fact. The choice was not mine to make.”
When Esme only gazed back at her without seeming to understand, she felt her cheeks turn pink, and not in the happy way they did when Joaquin was near. This time it was straight embarrassment. “He doesn’t want me.”
She was proud of herself for saying that the way she did. A statement of fact, not laced through with self-pity, or any kind of whine. Amalia was proud that her voice didn’t crack and that she didn’t split wide open and bawl. That she could state an unpleasant truth like that, and still save her tears for the privacy of her own cottage.
When she was not under the gimlet gaze of a woman who would never approve of Joaquin in the first place—and would certainly not approve of any mourning for him now he was gone.
Esme seemed to study her for a long, long while.
So long that Amalia’s cheeks lost some of their embarrassed pink.
The Queen appeared to come to a decision. She drew herself up. “This is not something I would have told you if things had gone as planned,” Esme said. “I would have had it cleaned up, swept away. I would have made certain you never knew.”
When Amalia only stared at her, Queen Esme waved a regal hand in the direction of the salon’s casement windows. “I think you may have underestimated how much your uncivilized Spaniard wants you, after all.”
And even though her heart kicked into gear then, pounding at her, Amalia felt as if she was trapped in some kind of iron grip that made it impossible to move. It slowed her down as she turned and headed toward those windows, making her feel as if she was fighting her way through some kind of quicksand. All she could hear was the drum of her own heart in her ears. She struggled to put one foot in front of the other when what she wanted was to run.
This particular salon was set up in the front of the palace, looking down over the ceremonial forecourt and beyond it, the grand square where the public could gather and often did.
But today, though the square was teeming with its usual number of tourists, stalls, and bored teenagers, there was a bit of a crowd at the gates.
Because a man was there.
And Amalia’s heart stopped in her chest, because the man was Joaquin.
Her Joaquin, here in Ile d’Montagne.
Her Joaquin, except it couldn’t be, because this Joaquin was on his knees.