PIA REGRETTED HER impulsiveness the moment the car started moving.
She regretted it as they left Combe Manor behind, taking the little-used back road off the hill and leaving the paparazzi—and her brother, and her entire life—behind them.
Pia told herself she was only getting a few tests. That she wasn’t leaving anything, not for long. That this would all be perfectly fine once she and Ares were on the same page and plans were made for the future.
But she couldn’t shake the sense of foreboding that squatted on her, there on the smooth leather seats of the royal town car.
The car swept them off to a private airfield, and Pia dutifully trooped up the stairs into the jet that waited there, assuming that the prince would take them off to London. Where there were doctors aplenty who could administer the necessary tests, and give him the answers she already had, but he needed to see on official letterhead of some sort or another.
She told herself that she didn’t mind that he needed proof. After all, wasn’t that at the crux of all this? He didn’t know her. She didn’t know him. That would perhaps suggest that they shouldn’t have slept together, but they had, and it was only to be expected that he would require proof. Even if he really had been just some guy named Eric.
But the sound of the jet engines lulled her to sleep, and when Pia woke again because the air pressure was making her ears pop, she felt as if she’d been sleeping for a very long time.
“Where are we?” she asked sleepily, because a glance out the window into the dark didn’t show the mess of lights she would expect above a city like London.
Ares sat across from her on one of the royal jet’s low, gold-embossed leather couches.
“We will be landing shortly,” he said, without looking up from his tablet.
Pia always forgot that her body had changed, and kept changing. She went to sit upright and struggled a bit, certain that she looked as ungainly and inelegant as she felt.
“Yes, but where?” she asked, hoping her businesslike tone would divert attention away from what her mother would have called her persistent ungainliness. “That can’t be London, can it?”
Down below the plane, there were great expanses of darkness, and a few lights. They were headed toward the light, but it was far too contained to be a city.
“It is not London,” Ares said, something in his voice making her turn her head around to look at him directly. “It is the kingdom of Atilia. My home, after a fashion. I’m taking you to the Southern Palace.”
“But... Why on earth would you take me...?”
“Where did you imagine I would take you?”
He considered her, and she became aware—in a hot rush that made her cheeks flare into red—that they were, for all intents and purposes, alone in this compartment of his plane. His security detail had stayed in the main bit, while Ares had escorted her here and closed the door. She had no idea how she had possibly slept so deeply when Ares was right here, taking up all the oxygen.
And that was all before she started thinking about the ways this man could take her.
Not to mention the ways he already had.
“I assumed, reasonably enough, that we would pop down to London.”
“London is far too exposed. Here in the islands I can control who sees you and me together, what conclusions they might draw, and so on. And I can have my own doctors administer any tests.”
“I didn’t bring anything,” Pia protested. And when that aristocratic brow of his rose, as if she wasn’t making any sense, she felt her face get hotter. She cleared her throat. “Like a passport.”
“I am the Crown Prince,” Ares said dryly. “I do not suffer bureaucracy.”
“Because you are the bureaucracy?”
She regretted that. Especially when all he did was fix that overtly calm green gaze on her, making her want to squirm about in her seat. She refrained. Barely.
“And after I take all the tests you need me to take?” She blinked a few times, trying to clear her head. And the sleep from her eyes. “My life is in England.”
“If by some chance you are truly carrying my child and the unexpected heir to the kingdom of Atilia,” he said, with something far too complicated to be simple temper in his voice, “then you can be certain that life as you know it has changed irrevocably.”
“Well, of course it has,” Pia said. Crossly, she could admit. “But it has nothing to do with you. Impending motherhood generally changes a girl, I think you’ll find. It’s fairly universal.”
The jet was dropping closer to those lights below, and Pia felt something like panic clawing at her. Maybe that was why she didn’t wait for him to answer her.
“You can’t spirit me away to an island and keep me there, Ares,” she said instead. But if she was looking for some kind of softness on his face, there was none to be found. He could as easily have been carved from marble. “You know that, don’t you? That’s all well and good in the average fairy tale, but this is real life.”
“I keep trying to explain to you who I am,” Ares said quietly. Almost apologetically, which made every hair on her body feel as if it stood on its end. Because he was the least apologetic creature she had ever met. “I have never been a good prince, it is true, but I’m a prince nonetheless. And we have entered my kingdom, where my word is law. I am afraid that you will discover that I can do as I like.”
“But—”
“Call it a fairy tale if you like, cara mia,” he murmured. “If it helps.”
It did not help.
That panic continued to claw at her as the jet landed. As Pia was marched off—escorted, she supposed, and politely, but it all felt rather more kidnap-ish than it had before—and bundled into yet another gleaming car. This time they were driven along a precipitous coastal road that hugged the looming hills on one side and dropped off toward the sea on the other. They skirted around the side of the island, until they came upon what looked to Pia like a perfect fairy-tale castle.
Just in case she didn’t already feel as if she’d stumbled into the pages of a storybook already.
It rose as if from a pop-up children’s book, blazing with light as it sat up over the sea on a jutting bit of hillside. It even had turrets.
“What is this place?” she managed to ask, half-convinced she was still dreaming.
“It is the Southern Palace, as I said,” Ares said from beside her in the car’s wide backseat. “If, as I suspect, you are merely pregnant yet not with any child of mine, you will stay here only as long as it takes you to sign the appropriate legal documentation that asserts you have no claim to the throne of my kingdom. And never will.”
“I don’t want your throne. Or your kingdom.”
“Then it will all go very quickly.” He turned then, the light from the palace as they approached the first wall beaming into the car and making him gleam. Making him even more beautiful, which was unhelpful. “But if, by some miracle, what you say is true? Then allow me to be the first to welcome you to your new home, Pia. You can expect to be here for some time.”
“Once again,” she said, working hard to keep her voice calm when she felt nothing but that panic inside her, shredding her, “you might be a prince and this might be your kingdom—”
“There is no might, Pia. I am who I say I am.”
“Well, Eric,” she replied, glaring at him, “you cannot actually kidnap women and hold them captive in your palace, no matter who you say you are. I think you’ll find it’s generally frowned upon.”
Ares settled back in his seat as the car slipped into some kind of courtyard, then continued under a grand archway that led deeper beneath the palace. And if he was bothered by the name she’d used—the name he’d given her in New York—he didn’t show it.
“You are welcome to register a complaint,” he said after a moment, as if he’d taken some time to consider the matter. “In this case, your only recourse would be the king.”
And he let out a laugh at that, which was not exactly encouraging.
Still, Pia kept glaring at him. “Is he more reasonable than you? He would have to be, I’d think. You could take me to him right now.”
Ares laughed again. “My father is not a safe space,” he assured her. “For you, or anyone else.”
The car finally came to a stop. And Pia couldn’t help the sense of doom that washed over her then. It was that same clawing panic, and something more. Something that made her heart ache.
Ares exited the vehicle with an athletic grace Pia would have preferred not to notice, nodding at the guards who waited there.
Her heart in her throat, Pia followed him, climbing out of the car to find herself in yet another courtyard. She was surrounded on all sides by thick castle walls. Far above was the night sky, riddled with stars. And it had never occurred to her before that there could only really be turrets where there were steep walls all around. That turrets belonged to fortresses, like this one.
But there were no walls steeper and more formidable than the man who stood there, watching her much too intensely as she looked around at her lovely, remote, fairy-tale prison.
Ares. Her prince.
Her jailer.
And whether he was prepared to accept it or not, the man who’d gotten her pregnant.
“I don’t want to be here,” she told him. But quietly.
“I do not want women wandering about the planet, telling people that I have left them pregnant when I have taken great care never to do such a thing,” he replied, almost too easily. “Life does not often give us what we want, Pia.”
“If you insist on keeping me here for the moment, I want an exit strategy. I want to know how and when and—”
“If I were you,” Ares said, his voice low, “I would be very careful about making any demands.”
He moved one finger, and a smartly dressed woman appeared before them as if by magic. “This is Marbella. She will be your chief aide. If you have any questions, you may address them to her.”
And he didn’t wait for her answer. He simply strode off, princely and remote, his footsteps echoing against the stone until they disappeared.
Pia watched him go, much longer than she should have, and then turned to face the woman who waited at her side.
If she expected a friendly chat, or even a smile, she was disappointed. The other woman bowed slightly, then beckoned Pia to follow her as she set off in a completely different direction into the palace. Each room they passed was more fanciful than the last. Everything was open, airy. Though it was dark, Pia could still sense the ocean all around them. The seething. The whispering. As if it was just there, around the next corner, out of reach—
Marbella led her down a very long corridor that opened up this way and that into galleries and salons, all of them lit up and done in bright, cheerful sort of colors that she imagined did nothing but encourage the sun to linger.
“Who lives here?” she asked after they’d walked a while.
“The Southern Palace has been the preferred retreat of the royal family for centuries, madam,” Marbella replied with severe formality. “His Highness is the only member of the family who uses it with any regularity these days, though even he has not been here in some time.”
“Does that mean no one else is here?” She thought about what he had said by the car. “Is the king here?”
She thought the other woman stiffened, but that seemed unlikely, given how straight she already stood. “His Majesty resides and remains in the Northern Palace, madam.”
Pia nodded sagely, as if she knew the first thing about Atilia, its geography, or its palaces.
Marbella led her on until they reached a beautiful suite of rooms that was to be Pia’s for the duration.
Pia did not ask how long that duration was expected to last.
Inside her suite, she found a selection of clothes laid out for her use, that she supposed had to have been flown in from somewhere. She flushed, trying to imagine how Ares had come by the measurements. Had he measured her while she slept? Or did he simply...remember her? And had only added a bit of pregnancy weight to his estimate?
It was amazing how red her face could get at the slightest provocation.
She was grateful when the other woman retreated, leaving her to a glorious set of rooms that she suspected overlooked the water, not that it mattered. A prison was a prison, surely, no matter the view.
Pia took out her phone, was delighted to find she had service, and quickly pulled up what she could find on the kingdom of Atilia. And better still, the Southern Palace.
The palace where she sat was on the southernmost island of the kingdom. What population there was here was spread out across the island in the small villages dotting it. The palace, on the other hand, had been carved out of the side of the mountain as a kind of folly for a long-ago queen. It looked like a fairy-tale castle, but it was, as Pia had felt when she’d looked around, a nearly inviable fortress. There was the Ionian Sea in front and a mountain in back, with only one road in and out.
If anything, she’d been underplaying what was happening here.
The man who had impregnated her was a prince. She had hardly had time to take that on board. But in case she’d had any doubt, the castle put it to rest. Everything he’d said to her was true.
Ares was a prince. The prince. And he had every intention of holding her here.
Until and unless he felt like letting her go.
She was still in her funeral garb when the doctors came, an hour or so later. They’d set up their own makeshift exam room in the palace, and Pia thought about fighting it. Because she, after all, knew what the test was going to say. Surely there had to be a way to keep this from happening. She could refuse to submit herself to the examination...
But she knew without asking, or trying, that there was little point. Ares would keep her here either way until he had his answers. No matter what those answers were.
That runaway train barreled across uneven ground, far off the track, hurtling Pia right along with it.
And the funeral garb felt fitting, really, as she sat in one of the many brightly lit sitting rooms with Ares after the doctors were done with her, awaiting the results.
He stood by one of the open, arched windows that were really doors, looking out at the dark expanse of the ocean. The air this far south was thicker. It insinuated itself against her skin like a caress—but she told herself it was only the humidity. She sat, very primly, on the sofa and tried to keep herself calm.
She tried.
The door opened after what seemed like several eternities. Possibly more. All passed in the same tense silence.
Ares turned and the doctor bowed low. “Congratulations, Your Highness,” the man said. “You are indeed the father.”
Pia couldn’t seem to look away from Ares’s face. That arrested expression. Something cold and bleak in his gaze.
It made her heart flip over, then sink.
But the doctor wasn’t finished. Because of course he wasn’t finished. Pia braced herself.
“They are both male,” the doctor said.
There was a short, electric pause.
“Both?” Ares asked, his voice a slap.
Neither the doctor nor Ares so much as glanced at Pia, and still she felt as exposed and vulnerable as if she’d been stripped naked and pinned to the wall.
“Both?” Ares asked again.
And the words Pia knew were coming sounded to her like bullets when they came, as inevitable and terrible as they’d been when she’d heard them for the first time.
“Yes, Your Highness.” The doctor bowed lower. “It is my great honor to inform you that you have been blessed with twins.”