“You and I are to marry.”
Had he said that he planned to ride a dinosaur down to Independence and back, or perhaps catapult himself high enough into the air to swat down the sun—that would not have been any more astonishing.
“I... What?”
“You are the key,” Cayetano Arcieri, self-styled warlord of a country she’d never heard of, who had earned his place in blood and fire, assured her.
Delaney’s throat was upsettingly dry. “I feel pretty sure I’m not.”
“You are the lost heiress to the crown of Ile d’Montagne, little one,” Cayetano informed her. “And I have come to take you home.”
He said that the way something as over-the-top as that should be said, really, all ringing tones and certainty and that blaze in his burnt gold eyes. Delaney thought the corn bowed down a little, that was how impressive he sounded.
But all she could do was laugh.