QUEEN ESME INSISTED on throwing Amalia a wedding. She brought Catherine over from Kansas, and Amalia knew that both she and Delaney were equally taken aback and entertained by the way the two older women, each powerful in her own way, danced around each other—and yet seemed to like the dance.
“I guess we really are sisters, after a fashion,” Amalia said after witnessing her two mothers laughing together, when she could not recall ever seeing the Queen laugh like that.
“Oh, this is definitely our family,” Delaney agreed cheerfully. “There’s no getting out of it now.”
And so that was how Amalia Montaigne, no longer the Crown Princess of Ile d’Montagne, married the one true love of her life in the Royal Cathedral where she had been expected to marry a tedious bore at her mother’s command.
This, she thought as she floated down the length of the church in a dress that had made both of her mothers teary, is much better.
Because it was Joaquin who waited for her at the head of the aisle, looking deliciously disreputable in his wedding clothes, his green eyes glinting all for her.
And when it was done, not one, but two mothers kissed her and hugged Joaquin, too.
Amalia supposed that all the papers the next day would try to outdo each other with their clever commentary—though the swords had been dulled by the world’s delight in Joaquin’s kneeling response to yet another vile paparazzo—but, in truth, she didn’t care.
Because she and Joaquin returned once again to Cap Morat. Only this time, they stayed in the honeymoon suite there at the top of the fortress. And the sensual pull between them would always be a huge part of who they were, but this time, though they enjoyed each other as they always did, their hearts were unguarded. They were wide open.
And so they talked.
They took walks around the island together, hand in hand, and it was as if they’d talked like this forever. There was no subject too grand or too small. They told each other stories, they made each other laugh.
They got to know each other all over again, the way they had that first summer.
The way, Amalia thought, they always would.
And that was what they did.
They put love first, and when they did, love followed.
They left the island sometime later, but didn’t discover that Amalia was pregnant until a month or so after that, when they were back on Ile d’Montagne. Joaquin, who liked her cottage but preferred more room to move around, had bought up the properties on both sides and was already meeting with architects to create the perfect home for them. One, he assured her, that would not be filled with refurbished jail cells or uncomfortable midcentury furniture. He could fly in and out of the island as easily as anywhere, and it was nothing to go back and forth to London as needed.
“You had better build a nursery,” Amalia told him.
“I told you that I want children,” he said, looking at her intently in a way that never failed to make her knees go weak. “Your children. I do not go back on promises, mi cariño.”
“I never said you did. But we’ll be needing that nursery,” she told him. And slid her hands over her belly in case he’d missed her point. “In about eight months?”
She was somehow unsurprised when her husband reacted to this news by swinging her up into his arms, spinning her around, and then making sure she was well and truly pregnant by taking her right there on the cottage’s small sofa.
Their son was born a month before Delaney gave birth to a black-haired, blue-eyed daughter, the new heir to the kingdom. She and Cayetano named the new Princess Catarina Amalia, in honor, Delaney said, of two of the finest women she had ever known.
In time, Amalia gave Joaquin three more sons, each one of them more delightfully disreputable than the last. And she was not the least bit surprised that her beloved, who had never wanted a child, was such a good father to his boys that it could still make her cry. And often did.
But it was not until the eldest Vargas boy, the extraordinarily stubborn and too-much-like-his-father Roderigo, married Princess Catarina that Amalia and Delaney stopped calling themselves sisters after a fashion.
Because they all became family in truth.
“And if I had to do it all over again,” Amalia told her first royal grandchild, in the nursery of the palace where she had played herself, as a child, “I would not change a thing.”
When she looked up, she found Joaquin standing there, watching her as he always did.
With love in his heart and written all over his face.
They had spent their life alive, and had fought to keep from squandering love along the way. They had treated their life, their love, and their happiness as gifts.
Because that was the way that happy ever after came true.
Every single day.
Did you think Reclaiming His Ruined Princess was magical? Then you’ll love the first installment in The Lost Princess Scandal duet, Crowning His Lost Princess.
And why not explore these other stories by Caitlin Crews?
The Secret That Can’t Be Hidden
Her Deal with the Greek Devil
The Sicilian’s Forgotten Wife
The Bride He Stole for Christmas
The Scandal That Made Her His Queen
Available now!
Keep reading for an excerpt from A Diamond for My Forbidden Bride by Jackie Ashenden.