PIA HAD NO intention of resigning herself to anything, thank you, and especially not her own kidnapping.
Sure, she’d gotten into his car and onto his plane of her own free will. It had seemed vastly preferable to the baying press outside Combe Manor. But she hadn’t expected to come here. That had to count against him. She was determined it did.
She broke away from that room where she’d felt as if Ares was holding her in his grip, where her mouth still throbbed from his kisses—God help her, that man could kiss—and hurtled herself out into the palace corridors. It took her longer than it should have to find her way back to her suite, and by the time she made it she was tired, emotional, and shaking.
Pia told herself she was peckish, that was all. Because once the morning sickness had stopped, she’d become ravenous. And hadn’t stopped.
Her aide met her inside her rooms and quickly produced a lavish spread for Pia to choose from. And she wanted so desperately to be the sort of unwilling captive who could turn up her nose at anything she was offered. Not to mention, weren’t there too many tales about unwary virgins who were lured into treacherous places they could have left—if only they hadn’t eaten there?
“Lucky that you’re no virgin, then,” she muttered to herself as she helped herself to a heaping plate of seconds.
But after the palace staff had swept all evidence of her private feast away, Pia stayed where she was. She sat up straight in the most uncomfortable chair in her outermost sitting room. She channeled her many years of being taught manners by unimpressed nuns, sat so she wouldn’t drift off to sleep, and waited.
The hours ticked past. The night wore on.
And when she decided it was late enough that even infamous playboy princes—not that she’d worn down her phone battery by Googling him exhaustively—had taken themselves off to bed, if only because there was precious little other entertainment to be had here on the southern tip of the middle of nowhere, she stood. She stretched her protesting limbs, let herself out of her room again, and resolved that she would walk out of this palace if necessary.
It took her a while to find her way through the maze of halls and corridors again, and she got lost more than once. But eventually she found herself on the ground level, where she set about looking for a door that led outside—instead of into yet another courtyard.
Unfortunately, there were courtyards everywhere, as if every member of the royal family who’d ever spent time here had built their own.
There were courtyards that opened up to the sky and others that were really more like squares beneath the floor above. There were courtyards that opened into the sea itself, but Pia couldn’t seem to find one that led to that road she knew they had taken in. She kept getting turned around. She thought she was retracing her steps when she turned a corner and yelped because someone was right there.
“Imagine my surprise,” Ares said darkly, “to be roused from my slumber by my staff, and told that the palace was not under attack, but that one of my guests—my only guest—was creeping about the place like a criminal.”
“I’m not creeping anywhere and I’m certainly not a criminal,” Pia threw at him.
And only then did she take in what he was wearing.
Or more to the point, not wearing.
Because the Crown Prince of Atilia stood there before her wearing nothing but a pair of loose black trousers, slung low on his hips as if to suggest that he had been sleeping naked and had tossed them on when he came to find her.
And everything else was just...him.
Those wide, smoothly muscled shoulders. That broad chest that narrowed to lean hips. Ares kept himself in excellent physical condition—she hadn’t built that up in her fantasies since New York, it turned out—all rangy muscles and that loose-limbed elegance he wore so easily.
He wasn’t the only one who remembered that night in Manhattan. She did, too. How she had crawled over him in sheer, greedy delight. How she had tasted him, tempting them both nearly past endurance. How she had filled her mouth with salt and man and the dark heat that rose between them still.
Here. Now.
“Why aren’t you dressed?”
She all but shrieked out the question, half in a gasp, and knew even as it escaped her lips that she’d revealed herself. That she’d given herself away.
Completely.
“Why, pray, would I be dressed?” he asked mildly, though his green eyes glittered there, in the deserted hall. “Perhaps you have not noticed, Pia, but it is the middle of the night. Why are you still dressed as you were hours before? And more to the point, why are you lurking about as if you are casing the place? Are you?”
Pia didn’t know what came over her. One moment, she’d had a clear sense of purpose. Of direction. Or intention, anyway, no matter if she couldn’t quite find her way.
And then in the next, Ares was standing before her half-dressed. And she was still trapped here in this fairy-tale fortress. And she was an orphan and a mother, both at the same time. And all of that seemed to crash into her.
As if that damned runaway train had looped around and plowed straight into her, flattening her.
Her face crumpled, no matter how hard she fought to keep it smooth. Unbothered. And as she fought off the huge sob that seemed to roll out of her, then on top of her like a great weight, she saw Ares’s expression...change.
Pia kept thinking that she’d reached the absolute outer limit of the shame that any one person could feel. She kept thinking there could be no further depths to plumb.
And then something else happened.
She tried to cover her face, because she couldn’t stand the fact that he was right there, watching her as she quite literally fell apart in front of him.
But his hands were on her, brushing her shoulders and then shifting. Before she knew what was happening he was lifting her up, hauling her high against his chest.
“Don’t be foolish,” she sobbed at him, her hands still over her face. “I’m hugely pregnant. You’ll give yourself a hernia.”
“Pia,” Ares said in the most regal voice she’d heard from him yet. “Please be so good as to shut up.”
She obeyed him. Or she tried, anyway, but she couldn’t keep the sobs inside. And later she would find herself appalled and humiliated that she’d so easily surrendered. To her emotions, to him. To everything. But here, now, she tipped her head forward, rested against his shoulder, and let the tears come.
Later she would regret this, she was sure of it.
But for a while, there was only the width and strength of his shoulder, holding her steady as he moved. There was the scent of him, clean and male, with a hint of something else. Soap, perhaps. Cologne, maybe. She couldn’t quite tell, but she knew that scent. She remembered it. And it soothed her.
She didn’t understand why he should be capable of calming her when no one else ever had. When her life was filled, in fact, with people and places and things that did the exact opposite of calming her. But she didn’t have it in her, just then, to fight him.
Not when he was so strong, and so warm, and when his arms wrapped around her as if she was light and sweet and beautiful. As if he could carry her forever, and would.
And when he finally set her down again, she had to bite her own tongue to keep from protesting.
She wiped at her face, then looked around, and it took her longer than it should have to recognize that she was in a bathroom. A huge, suitably palatial bathroom, that was. If she wasn’t mistaken, he had taken her back to her own rooms.
And she sat there, feeling limp and fragile with the force of her own feelings—none of which she could name—as the Crown Prince of Atilia filled her bath. She sat where he’d put her, there on the wide lip of the oversize tub. And she watched him, vaguely astonished that His Royal Highness knew how to go about such a mundane task.
The beauty of her convent education was that she and the rest of the girls from wealthy families who could afford to go there had been taught how to function like regular people. It was one of the convent’s primary missions, in fact.
“You do realize I have servants to do this, don’t you?” one of the girls in Pia’s year had thrown at Mother Superior one morning as they’d all been scrubbing the floors of their dormitory.
“My dear child,” Mother Superior had replied, in that mild voice that made them all wince, “you are being taught basic chores not for you, though you can certainly benefit from learning them, but for those servants. In the perhaps vain notion that a dose of empathy might allow you to inhabit your place in this world with more consideration for others.”
That had stuck with Pia, along with the punishment Mother Superior had levied against their entire class for the rest of the semester—that was, scrubbing the whole of the great hall. On their hands and knees.
Now she sat in a palace with a man she barely knew but would have sworn didn’t lift a single finger if someone else could do it for him. A prince who’d given her twins and spirited her away from her life—twice, now. And she wondered who’d taught him the same lesson.
And then wondered what was wrong with her that she wanted, so desperately, to believe that he was capable of something like empathy. Because that might make him into the father she knew he didn’t want to become.
Why do you want him to be a father? she asked herself, harshly enough that she could have been one of her own parents. You can raise these babies perfectly well on your own. You don’t need him.
That was true. She knew that was true. And still, Pia watched Ares sprinkle bath salts over the hot water as if this was church. Then she didn’t know what to feel when he came back to her, there on the edge of the tub set in an alcove with the sea outside.
“I think it is time you took off this shroud you are wearing, cara mia,” he said in a low voice.
Pia looked down. She knew she hadn’t changed her clothes, but she hadn’t really processed the fact that she was still wearing that same black dress, severe and solemn and not remotely comfortable, that she’d worn to her father’s funeral. And then to his grave.
She raised her gaze to Ares. “I don’t think I want to.”
Something moved over his face. He crouched down before her so he was on eye level with her. His arms were on either side of her legs, caging her there against the tub, and she thought that on some level, she should hate her heart for the way it beat so hard when he was close. She really should.
Ares shifted, moving back on his heels, but he did not rise. And his eyes were green and gold and that, too, felt like betrayal.
“I understand,” he said, astonishing her anew.
Pia wanted to believe that, too. With a fervor that boded ill for her.
A faint smile moved over his mouth as he saw her expression. “When my mother died she lay in state, as is the custom here. And then my father and I walked through the streets as we transported her to her final resting place. I wore the typical regalia of my station, a uniform I have never found comfortable in the least. And yet, when it was over, when I was out of the public eye and back in my private rooms, I found I couldn’t bear to move. I couldn’t bear to change out of that uniform.” His gaze seemed particularly green then. “Because I knew that doing so would indicate that I was moving on in some way.”
“You loved your mother very much.”
“I did. Did you not love your father? Or your own mother?”
He moved a hand to rest it on her thigh, and Pia was...astounded. She could feel the heat of him, all that power and strength, and be aware of him as a man. But she could also find that grip of his comforting, apparently.
She felt too many things to choose one, much less name it.
“There is no right answer,” Ares said. “I had an excellent relationship with my mother. I have no relationship with my father. Parents are complicated.”
And Pia was sure she wasn’t the only one of them who was painfully aware that they were soon to be parents themselves. That they could inflict God knew what on their own children.
It was an unbearable intimacy to share with a man who was as good as a stranger.
“My parents had children only as an afterthought,” she heard herself blurt out.
Anything to stop thinking about herself and Ares as terrible parents. Or any kind of parents.
What she’d said was true, of course. She’d read articles that had said as much, and less nicely. But she had never said it out loud herself before. And in a way, it felt like grief to hear her own voice, speaking that truth.
But somehow, she wanted to keep going. “Or at least, I was an afterthought. I suppose they always planned to have my brother. The heir of my father’s dynastic dreams, et cetera.”
She stared down at Ares’s hand, and wanted to slide her own on top of his more than she wanted to breathe. She would never know how she kept her hands to herself. Or how she pushed on when she wasn’t sure how or why she was speaking in the first place.
“When they focused on me at all, I think they saw me as a project,” she told Ares as the scent of the lavender bath salts filled the room. “I don’t honestly know that they were capable of loving anything but one another. I don’t mean that in a bad way. I loved them both, I think. But it was always bound up in the ways I disappointed them.”
His green eyes were grave. “How could you possibly be a disappointment?”
Pia didn’t know how to answer him. And she knew that the reason for that was ego, nothing more. Pride. She didn’t want to tell this man what he should have been able to see with his own two eyes.
And would, now. Now that he knew who she was. And therefore knew who her mother was. It was one thing to be herself, Pia knew. She could do that. It was when she was compared to Alexandrina that people felt the most let down.
Her parents most of all.
But she couldn’t bring herself to point that out to Ares. She didn’t have it in her.
“I’m glad I’m having boys,” she said instead. “I think that must be easier.”
Whatever light she’d seen in his gaze shuttered then. He moved his hand, which struck Pia as yet another tragedy she was unprepared to face, and reached into the water behind her.
He tested the temperature, then moved back, rising to his feet in a lithe rush that was nothing short of dazzling, with all that muscle and grace.
“You should get in,” he told her, sounding distant and royal again. “Then I suggest you get some sleep. I cannot promise you that grief goes anywhere, but the sooner you start the process of moving on, the sooner you’ll get to the part that’s easier. Eventually, you’ll find it hurts a lot less than it did.”
“I think that must feel like losing them all over again,” Pia said, without thinking.
Ares’s gaze was too hot, too arrested as it snapped to hers.
“It does,” he bit out.
And he left her there, sitting in her funeral dress on the side of a hot bath, wondering how and why he’d made drawing her bath feel like a gift. And why she wanted nothing more than to sink into it, fully clothed, and lie there until she stopped feeling.
When she stood, she felt unsteady on her feet. She found herself crying all over again as she pulled the dress off, then folded it neatly, placing it much too carefully on one of the nearby counters.
As if it was precious to her when really, she wanted to burn it. She had worn it twice in six weeks’ time. She would never wear it again.
And when she sank down in the bath, and lost herself in the silken embrace of hot water, lavender, and steam, she let the tears fall until they stopped of their own volition. Pia didn’t know who she cried for. The mother who had never loved her the way Pia had wished so desperately she would. The father who had viewed her as something to barter, or an amusement, but never a real person.
Or this new life she’d stumbled into, whether she wanted it or not. The babies she carried, the prince who had fathered them, and the terrifying, unknown future that loomed ahead of them all.
She cried herself dry, and only then did she rise up from the tub, towel herself off, and take herself into the vast, airy confection of a four-poster bed that waited in the bedroom. She crawled into the center of the bed, turned over onto her side to find the only position where she could be remotely comfortable, and wrapped one arm around her belly.
“I promise you this,” she murmured out loud to the twin lives inside of her. “I will never barter you away. I will tell you I love you every single day of your lives. And you will never, ever find yourself wondering on the day of my death if you grieve because you miss me—or because you don’t.”
And still murmuring vows to the sons she would bear within a few short months, but treat better if it killed her, Pia finally fell asleep.