CAYETANO COULD SEE the exact moment Delaney registered his presence, because she actually stopped still. Her eyes went wide. It was charming, really. A doe in headlights right here in his private dining room, and his body reacted in what was becoming a predictable way to the little puzzle that was Delaney Clark.
His farm girl who insisted she was no princess when tonight, she looked like a goddess.
That red gown was a wonder, sweeping from one shoulder as if she was competing for a spot in the pantheon. Her black hair was set in a complicated French twist with hints of something sparkly to catch the light.
God, how he wanted her.
That ill-considered kiss had set off a wildfire in him, and even though he’d kept his distance these last two weeks, the sparks remained. One look at her and he could feel them all begin to smolder.
He liked the way she flushed at the sight of him. He liked that he could see exactly how aware she was of him. And he suspected that he was not the only one remembering how that kiss had tasted. And the heat.
That silken, delirious heat that had nearly made him forget himself.
But there was more to concern himself with tonight than the memory of that kiss. For one thing, she no longer in any way resembled that farm girl he’d encountered that day, dirt on her cheeks and all over her clothes.
Her attendants had worked the precise miracle he had entrusted them to perform. There was no hint of overalls and kerchief about her tonight. Her gown skimmed over her figure and made her skin seem to glow. Her hair was not left to the weather and its complex elegance highlighted the fine, inarguably royal features she’d inherited from a long line of Montaignes. That sophisticated nose. Those soaring cheekbones.
He wanted her. This was true. It was always true. He had become uncomfortable with how true it was these last weeks, but tonight it was on another level. She took his breath away.
Because tonight he saw the diamond, not the rough.
And it was a complicated triumph that pumped through him then. Because Cayetano was attracted to her either way, and the man in him wanted nothing more than to explore her femininity with all the tools at his disposal. His mouth. His hands. His sex.
Until they were both weak with desire.
But the warlord in him, who meant to be King at last, saw his Queen.
And it took more willpower than it should have to stay where he was. To stay put, there at the far end of the room, waiting to see if she would continue to come to him or stay frozen where she was.
Waiting to see what he would do if she stayed put, staring at him as if he was an apparition.
But one that made her cheeks red and her eyes overbright.
He wasn’t sure which he would prefer, now that he considered it. Because looking at her was no hardship.
Neither was imagining what he would do with each and every version of her. Farm girl. Vision. Princess. Queen.
And all of them his.
All of them as wild and hot as she’d been in his arms.
It seemed to take her a lifetime or two to straighten her shoulders, then find a practiced sort of smile that he knew came straight from the Signorina. He recognized the particular contours of what the old woman had called her company smile.
But he had never wanted to lick a smile like that off anyone’s face before.
“This is very disappointing,” Delaney said, but she sounded arch and amused, not disappointed. And not really like Delaney, either. “The Signorina has been at great pains to tell me that you’re an excellent conversationalist. Yet all I get is glowering.”
“I’m looking at you, this is true. But I am not glowering.”
“Did you know that conversation is an art?” Her smile deepened. “It seems you and I have something in common after all. We are both of us artless.”
And that caught him so completely off guard that he laughed.
But, however surprised he might have been at his own laughter, that was nothing next to Delaney’s clear astonishment that he was even capable of making such a sound.
She looked...spellbound.
He had not intended to move from where he stood and yet he found himself crossing the room. When he reached her side he took her hand, perhaps because the last time he’d done so, she had looked equally astonished. In the same way she did now, shot through with heat and awareness and the same kind of wonder he could not help but feel when he looked at her.
He led her not to the table that waited for them, but out through the doors to the wide balcony that let in the cool spring night. The stars were already out, thick in the night sky. The valley was inky black below them, the lights in the villages soft, buttery clusters against the dark. The air was not warm, but it was soft as it moved over them.
Usually, Cayetano took this view as seriously as he did everything else. Every point of light he saw before him represented a swathe of people. His people. He had spent years standing here, renewing his commitment to them. Night after night, he had rededicated himself to the cause.
But tonight he let himself marinate in the sweetness of this moment he had often worried would never come. His very own princess in his castle, his wedding in a couple of weeks, his future finally secured.
And through him, his people’s destiny forever changed.
Justice was winning. After all these centuries. And it was all because of her.
He had been delighted to find his lost princess, particularly when so many had been certain she didn’t—couldn’t—exist. He would have brought her here no matter what. But tonight Delaney had transformed herself. She had made herself his dream come true.
Cayetano doubted that had been her goal, or if she’d even had one, but she had done it all the same.
He could not help but take a moment to bask in it. In her.
There were lanterns lit all around, and he liked the way the soft light played over her face.
“What I cannot understand,” he said quietly, as if not to disturb the dark, “is how no one in that cornfield of yours recognized the fact that you could not possibly be one of them.”
That was as much a statement of fact as some kind of compliment, so he was unprepared when she frowned. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Look at you.” He was still holding her hand as they stood there against the railing. He indulged himself with his free hand and traced the curve of her cheek. “Your sculpted and aristocratic lines. The House of Montaigne is in your face. It is unmistakable.”
“The funny thing about that,” she said, in a voice that made it very clear that she did not think anything was particularly funny, “is that what I look like is a Clark. Salt of the earth. Kansas through and through. The freckles on my nose come from working in the Kansas sun. I have calluses on my hands that are there thanks to Kansas dirt and stubborn Kansas fields. Until you showed up, anyone who’d ever known me would’ve laughed at the notion that I could ever be anything but a Clark.”
Cayetano managed to keep his sigh in check. “I understand this is difficult for you.” He did not, in fact, understand. But what could it harm him to say otherwise? He was not precisely lauded for his empathy, but he cast about for some now. “It cannot be easy to be so far from your home, thrust into unfamiliar surroundings, and expected to behave according to others’ wishes. I do not envy you.”
Her frown eased somewhat. But then it turned speculative. “Is that what it was like for you? When you were sent off to boarding school at a young age?” He must have stared, because she blinked. “The majordomo told me all kinds of history. Some of it was yours.”
Cayetano felt himself tense, but tried to dismiss it. “If there were hardships, they pale in comparison to the hardships my people have suffered.”
Normally when he said things like that, anyone who heard him started nodding vigorously, because the cause was always paramount—and especially for him. No one actually said amen, but it was implied.
Delaney did neither. If anything, she looked quizzical. “It’s not like suffering is a pie and if one person gets a piece no one else can have some. Tragically, there’s always enough to go around.”
Cayetano felt something inside him...tilt and go precarious, suddenly. He didn’t understand what it was. “I don’t believe I attempted to quantify suffering.”
“It’s what you do, though, isn’t it?” She phrased that as a question, yet did not appear to actually be asking. “You never actually talk about your feelings. You talk about your country.”
“My country matters,” Cayetano retorted. His fingers tightened, ever so slightly, on hers. “My feelings do not.”
She looked down at their joined hands as if there was some significance there that he had missed. He found himself looking, too, and was furious with himself.
“Is it that your feelings don’t matter or that you don’t know how to identify them?”
“What is the Signorina teaching you?” And he recognized the new sensation rising inside him. It was as if he was preparing for battle. He felt the way he sometimes did, honed and ready, as if at any moment he would be required to fight to the death.
Not the physical battles of his ancestors, swords and blood. His battles had mostly been in the press. But the preparation within him was the same. And he always landed his blows.
And there was a very specific battle he wished to undertake with this woman—but it was not this one. And it was not about blows, but passion.
“You look angry,” Delaney observed with maddening calm.
“I doubt that very much,” he managed to reply, with a reasonable facsimile of calm. Through his teeth. “I cannot get angry. As policy.”
“Says the man who identifies himself as a warlord, angrily.”
“Warlord is a title.” Cayetano made himself smile. Or curve his lips, anyway. “A title I take seriously. A warlord cannot afford anger. Not in these uncertain times.”
She tilted her head to one side, her blue eyes seeing far too much. “Do you actually know when you’re angry?”
And it was suddenly as if everything inside of him was jumbled all around and out of place. He felt out of control again, and he wasn’t even touching her the way he wanted to do. He could not abide the mess of it.
Or the fact that it was more than that madness that had overtaken him when he’d kissed her before. It was as if she’d reached inside him and threw everything out of place, and he couldn’t understand how that could be. He was a fortress. And while this was an odd conversation, it was innocuous. Surely it was no more than idle talk.
Yet inside him, the call to battle kept sounding.
Cayetano attempted to settle himself down in the usual way, by thinking about their upcoming wedding. Because nothing mattered but that. All roads led to that ceremony.
“Plans for our wedding are well underway,” he told her. Gruffly.
And only when she drew her hand from his, then crossed her arms, did he understand that he had deliberately changed the subject so that she could be the one on the defensive here.
He couldn’t say he liked what that said about him.
“The wedding of the warlord would normally be an international affair,” he said, pushing forward despite the way she was regarding him. “We have many allies in different countries and we usually like them to take part in our rituals. It legitimizes them. Not that we require legitimacy, but it does make claims to the contrary from the palace below more difficult.”
He trusted that the majordomo had done his job and Delaney knew that the palace below was how his people had referred to the seat of the Montaigne family’s power, sitting pretty in its own rocky cove on the island’s prettiest beach.
Because of course it did.
“No one’s consulted me about any wedding plans.” And while her tone was still calm, Cayetano could easily read the temper in her gaze.
“Why would they?” he asked, finding it far easier to make himself appear at ease now that it was her temper on the rise. “You have far too much on your plate as it is. Learning to accept your new role. Exploring your new home.”
Becoming his Queen.
She glared at him. “I think that if there are wedding plans, they should include the bride. That seems reasonable, doesn’t it? Otherwise it starts to look a lot like you’re hiding something. Or plotting something.”
“Anyone can be a bride, Delaney.” He was enjoying himself now, even if, somewhere deep inside, where everything seemed to have found its place again, he questioned himself and his motives. And deeper still, he wondered why it was that only she managed to penetrate all the shields he’d spent his whole life nailing into place. “All a bride need do is appear at the wedding. But not everyone can train to become the next Queen of Ile d’Montagne.”
Then he watched as she clearly wrestled with her reaction to the idea of becoming Queen. Very clearly. Very obviously.
He found it more intriguing than he should have.
“One thing at a time,” she said after a moment, though her eyes darkened. “First I need to become a bride. I should focus on that. Something that would be easier to do if I was actually included in my own wedding plans.”
“And by focus on that do you mean you wish to actually plan our wedding?” He wanted to touch her again, so he did, reaching over to run his hand down the length of one bare arm, delighting in the way she shivered at the contact. And the goose bumps that marked the path he’d taken. “Or do you mean you would like to obstruct any wedding plans so that they never come to pass?”
He hadn’t intended to accuse her, or not so directly. It had been more of an idle question, really, because he knew what she did not—that nothing would stop their wedding. This was Ile d’Montagne and he was the warlord. It was his vow that made them one, not her compliance.
But he opted not to share that nugget of ancient law with her. Because it made sense to wait, to create a scene that could be extensively photographed and beamed around the world. To make sure valley artisans made a dress that was worthy of a queen.
To make sure that she was already considered a queen before he made it clear to everyone that she would be the next one here.
Yet her response showed him that the question was not idle at all. Her cheeks bloomed a new red. And she looked as guilty as if he’d caught her in the middle of a desperate act.
“I’m shocked,” he drawled. When, in truth, he was charmed. Captivated. It should have worried him more than it did. “Do you truly imagine you can scheme against me?”
“You said I had a month. It’s been two weeks. Barely.”
“I said the wedding would be in a month and so it shall be.” She made as if to argue and he shrugged. “You knew the choices before you, Delaney. Perhaps I should remind you that at any time I can make my claim upon you. We do not need to plan a wedding at all.”
“No,” she said hurriedly, and maybe there was something wrong with him that he took such pleasure in the panic in her gaze. “I want to plan it. That’s all I meant.”
“You’re a liar, little one.”
But he couldn’t muster up the sense of outrage that should have accompanied a statement like that. He, who prized honesty so dearly. There was something about the genuine distress in her blue eyes that made it impossible.
“Cayetano,” she said, sounding as if she was working very hard to consider each word carefully. Or maybe she wanted to taste his name as much as he liked to taste hers. “I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. I’m not lying. Or I don’t mean to lie. But you want me to accept two overwhelming things, and you want that acceptance immediately.”
She paused, as if waiting for him to argue, but all he did was incline his head.
Delaney let out a shaky breath, then continued. “One overwhelming thing is that I’m not the person I thought I was my entire life. That instead, I’m this completely other person, who is meant to live in places like this and has to worry about artful conversation as a potential weapon of diplomacy when what I know is corn. And the other is your apparent belief that it’s perfectly reasonable to marry a total stranger. It’s only been fourteen days, Cayetano. That’s not enough time. For acceptance. For anything.”
He settled in against the railing, studying her lovely face. She didn’t need the cosmetics she wore, but he liked the way they enhanced her natural beauty. The truth was, he liked every version of her that he’d encountered so far. Including this one tonight.
The one who spoke of needing more time when the Signorina reported that she came to her daily lessons eagerly. And enjoyed herself, by all accounts. Almost as if she’d already accepted more than she wanted to admit.
To herself.
“And what amount of time do you imagine it would require for you to make yourself easy about both of these things?” he asked her.
She dropped her arms and opened her palms to the sky. “A year? Five years? A lifetime?”
“I sympathize.” And the strange thing was that he did. But it would not save her. “And yet you must know that these things cannot wait.”
“Maybe not forever.” Her voice was a whisper. Her eyes had gone big in the lantern light as she pled her case. “But surely they can wait a little while.”
The strangest sensation washed over him then, more shocking to him than if he’d suddenly lost his footing and plummeted over the steep side of the castle walls. It was something about how plaintive her voice was. Or how wide her eyes were. Maybe it was her voice. All of it. None of it. How could he tell?
Maybe it was the simple fact of her, so unlike any other woman he’d ever known, with her talk of dirt and calluses on the one hand and her interest in his bloody feelings on the other. When what he was used to was simpering and flattery and attempts to spend more time in his bed than he wished. From women who apparently failed to comprehend that he was actually a man, flesh and blood and possessed of a few stray thoughts that did not involve the cause.
His own people had never seen into him like this woman did.
No one ever had.
It should have been dizzying. Perhaps it was. Perhaps that was this new sensation inside—a kind of mad intoxication that would lead to peril, whether he toppled over the walls or lost himself the way his parents had.
But he rather thought instead it was something far more curious.
There was a part of him that wanted to give her time. That wanted her to find her way into this. To meet him here.
Yes, they were strangers. Yes, this was swift, and there were a thousand reasons not to marry in haste and only one reason to go ahead—a reason that had nothing to do with her, save a trick of DNA and a careless hospital.
Yet the part of him that wanted to give her time was the part that didn’t care about any of that. It cared that at the root of it all, he wanted her.
He had set eyes on her in that yard, before he’d even exited his car, and he’d wanted her.
The way normal men must want, he’d thought at the time. With so much desperation and uncertainty when he should have been filled instead with purpose. Because she was the answer to generations of prayers.
She was his endgame.
And still he wanted to wait. Not so he could stage a wedding that would captivate the imaginations of the world as he was doing now. What he was doing now made sense. This urge in him to let her find her way to him was a traitor.
Because you want her to want you, came a voice within. Not the warlord of this valley, the true King of this island. But you. Cayetano. The man.
But that was a treachery he did not intend to allow this night. It was far too seismic to take on.
“I’m sympathetic to the whiplash you must feel, given your change in circumstances,” he told her, hoping he gave no hint of his inner turmoil. Or how desperately he wanted her in all the ways he shouldn’t. “It cannot be easy to have the world you know swept from beneath you so swiftly. I cannot apologize for it, but I do understand it can’t be easy.”
She looked at him for a long while, there in the darkness with only the lantern light between them. It made everything seem closer. Warmer.
It made him wonder if feeling was not so terrible after all.
“I suppose I am trying to think of it all as a gift,” she said, as if she was confessing. As if it was not easy to get out the words. “It’s not a gift I would have chosen. But it’s better to know the truth than live a lie, right?” She let out a laugh, though it was rueful. “That’s what my grandmother always said.”
“She sounds a wise woman,” Cayetano said.
He chose not to point out that her actual grandmother had been the icy Queen Carlota, notable for both her cruelty and her voracious appetites. Not a font of wisdom, the little-mourned Carlota.
But he kept that to himself.
And felt virtuous in his restraint.
“I can’t say that I’m coming to terms with it, exactly,” Delaney told him in the same confessional tone. “It helps that every time I try to call my mother, she’s too busy setting up her new life to talk to me for more than five minutes. And she sounds happy. Two weeks ago she barely had a life. For that alone, I guess I’m grateful.”
“Then perhaps, little one, you do not need so many years after all.”
“Accepting that it’s true isn’t the same thing as accepting it’s who I am.” Delaney pulled in a breath and straightened her shoulders, and the way she looked at him changed. Intensified, maybe. “But it’s the other part that I’m more worried about. Because what I accept or don’t accept doesn’t have a time limit, does it? But this wedding of yours does.”
“You said that your primary objection is marrying a stranger,” Cayetano reminded her. “But I’m not so strange, am I?”
That fine line between her brows made an appearance. “I don’t know you at all.”
“You know the most important things.” He inclined his head. “You know that I need you, which gives you power.”
If he’d expected that to make her easy, he was disappointed. She scowled at him.
“When my grandmother used to talk about falling in love with my grandfather, she talked about a lot of things. How quiet he was with everyone except her. How he looked at her as if she was prettier every day. The nicknames that were only theirs. She never once mentioned power unless it was a story about waiting out a tornado.” Delaney shook her head. At him. “Weirdly, she was much more focused on love.”
Once again, he was struck by how much he liked the sheen of temper in her gaze. He wanted to taste her fire. He wanted a woman who could handle his own. He could not help but think this all boded well.
Despite this talk of feelings.
“Love is a wondrous thing, or so I’m told,” he said dismissively. “But it is not all things. Love is blind, but with the power you already possess, you also know certain truths. I cannot harm you, for how would that look? The eyes of the world will be upon us the moment your true status is known. That makes you safe. I assume it is why you came with me so easily.”
She did not nod along enthusiastically to that. On the contrary, her eyes narrowed, and she looked at him as if he didn’t make sense. “It hadn’t actually occurred to me to be worried about my safety. Until now.”
“Then you are even more sheltered than I imagined.” He could hear that his voice had gone rough. “What could possibly be more important than your safety?”
Delaney laughed a little, and looked something like dazed. “When you put it that way, it does seem silly. But I’ve always felt safe.” She shook her head slightly. “Even though it’s very clear to me that you are by far the most dangerous man I’ve ever met.”
There was something so innocent in the way she said that. It nearly unmanned him. Because she did not seem to understand the great compliment she was giving him.
And he could not bear to tell her.
Though turned out, he could not bear to let it slide by unremarked, either. “I will never hurt you, Delaney,” he managed to grit out. “Know this, if nothing else.”
She nodded, slowly, as if she was busy considering him. “Cayetano. Why would you think that my expectation is that you would hurt me?”
Once again, this all seemed to be inching a little too close to topics he did not discuss. Ever. “I only wish to make you feel easy about the choice before you.”
“Is that it?” That blue gaze seemed to see straight through him, again. When he had always considered himself opaque. He had reveled in it, in fact. “Because this is starting to seem as if it’s a great deal more personal.”
But Cayetano thought only of the history of his people. Not his history. Not his family.
Not the choices that had been made when he was too young to have a voice.
Not the things that had happened that he’d been unable to prevent. The wild, raging displays that were his legacy—the legacy he had decidedly turned his back on.
All in the name of one love or another, so that the word itself was suspect.
He spoke of none of this.
And still his heart hammered against his ribs, as if he was that young boy once again. Trapped in the decisions of others so far away from home.
“I’m glad you’ve given no thought to your safety,” he told her silkily. “That either makes you very foolish or me very trustworthy. I choose to believe it is both.”
“Wait—” she began.
“The fact of the matter is this,” he said, cutting her off, no longer worried that he might sound too forbidding. Too ruthless. He was both. “It is not that I dislike the modern take on marriage. I am modern myself in many ways. But falling in love, getting to know another, and wasting so much time... These might seem like virtues, perhaps, on a farm. In this Kansas of yours. But here we speak not of cornfields, but kingdoms. And you already know all you need to know. I am not brutal. I have vowed not to harm you and I have not. In cases like ours, this should be enough.”
“Maybe that’s enough for you. It’s not enough for me.”
And she lifted her chin while she said that, clearly not recognizing that doing that only made her more beautiful to him. Because he was not brutal, that was true. But he was still a warlord. He liked the battle. It was only that the battleground had changed in this modern era. He did not intend to fight Queen Esme on horseback, surrounded by warriors. He did not intend to use his hands. But his future wife?
Well. He would use the weapons he had.
“Do you want romance?” he asked her. “Love?”
He had been taking care not to sound mocking, but she still jerked her head away as if he’d slapped at her. “And if I say yes?” Her eyes flashed. “What then? Will you start spouting poetry?”
“I have already given you a sample of the only poetry I know,” Cayetano told her, dark and low. “And if memory serves, my little farm girl, you loved it.”
“You have never given me a poem.” She glared in that way that sent a bolt of pure desire straight to his sex. “I think I would remember.”
“Memories are so fickle,” he murmured.
Cayetano reached over and hooked his hand around her neck. He pulled her close, taking a deep pleasure in the way her lips parted immediately. The way heat and awareness bloomed in her gaze. And the way she melted into him as if this edgy, encompassing wanting was in her, too. As if it had claimed them both.
“Pay attention, Delaney,” he told her. “This is a sonnet.”
And then he fit his mouth to hers once more.