ARES HAD NO idea what was happening to him as each day bled into the next, then a week slipped by. Then another.
And he and Pia stayed suspended in the same waiting game.
It was easy enough to make the Southern Palace his base of operations. So easy, in fact, that he couldn’t quite remember why it had been so important to him to live apart from Atilia in the first place.
He flew in and out, from one royal engagement to another. And despite the barrage of scandalmongering headlines about him and Matteo Combe—and the expectant state of the Combe heiress the world had ignored until the funeral—his actual life was the same as it had been before. Did it matter what he called his base when he flew everywhere anyway?
Ares assured himself that nothing had changed. Nothing but his location.
Except he noticed that he found himself almost eager to return to the palace at the end of each engagement.
Almost as if he couldn’t truly be easy until he’d seen Pia again.
If she had cried again after that first night, she never showed it. Nor did she make further attempts to break out of the castle, which was a relief if only because it prevented Ares from sharing parts of himself when he never, ever did such things.
The reports Ares received about her in his absence were always glowing. She was unfailingly polite and kind to all members of the staff. She went on walks, around and around the many courtyards, and at low tide, down to the beach, where she was known to spend time on the rocks, staring out toward the horizon. She never tried to lose her security detail. She seemed perfectly happy to have regular checkups with the doctor.
Her only request had been a laptop computer, which Ares had been more than happy to provide, particularly as it gave him leave to monitor what she did.
After all, he had never promised her privacy.
And that was how he discovered that what Pia did with her time was write an online column for one of those internet magazines that Ares had always personally believed were the scourge of the earth. He found this discovery so astounding that he sat with it for nearly a full week before it occurred to him to do anything about it.
One night, after he’d flown back from some or other formal charity event in mainland Europe, he found her curled up in what the staff had informed him was her favorite room of the palace. It was known as the Queen’s Sitting Room, in the ancient wing, and had been built to accommodate a queen who had loved the ocean, her books and needlework, and liked to sit where she could look out all day while the business of the court carried on elsewhere. During the day the light cascaded in through the arched windows. At night, light made to look like candles blazed from every surface while the waves surged against the rocks outside.
Ares moved soundlessly into the room, not sure what to do with the wall of sensation and something perilously close to longing that slammed into him the moment he saw her.
Every moment he saw her, if he was honest.
Pia sat cross-legged on the chaise pointed toward the windows, a pillow over her lap—or what lap she had, with her huge, pregnant belly in the way. She was frowning down as she typed, worrying her bottom lip between her teeth, and Ares was only a man.
And it had been a long time indeed since he had taken a woman, now that he thought about it. Too long. Months.
Ares found he didn’t actually want to scour his memory, because he was terribly afraid that Pia really had haunted him. That he might not have touched another woman since that night in New York.
He didn’t want to consider that possibility, so he considered her instead.
His gaze traced the elegant line of Pia’s neck, and the little wisps of dark hair that had tumbled down from the knot at the top of her head. He leaned against the doorjamb, letting his gaze drift lower. Her breasts swelled against the loose top she wore and he remembered covering them with his hands in New York. Now he wondered if they would spill over from his palms, so generous had they become. His mouth watered.
And there was something about her lush, swollen belly that got to him, no matter how he tried to pretend otherwise.
There was something about the fact that she carried his babies, that she was big and round by his doing, that made something dark and primitive wind around and around inside him until he was tight like a coil.
He didn’t know how he felt about becoming a father, but that had nothing to do with his appreciation of what he had done to her body. Or how she seemed to take to it so easily, so naturally, like one of the ancient goddesses that the locals claimed had first lived here on the site where the palace stood.
He shook himself, bemused at the direction of his own thoughts.
“When did you become an advice columnist?” he asked her, unaware until he spoke that his voice had gone all...gravelly.
But he couldn’t worry about that when he had the distinct pleasure of watching Pia jolt in surprise. She whipped her head around, and then Ares’s pleasure turned to a deeper joy as her cheeks reddened.
The way they always did when she saw him.
As if she couldn’t keep herself from flushing pink and deeper red, which made him wonder if she was pink and red all over.
The possibilities made him ache.
“How do you...?” she began.
But her voice trailed off. She looked down at the laptop before her, and Ares braced himself for her temper. For the outburst that was almost surely coming.
He had to wonder if he’d asked the question specifically to provoke her.
If he’d lowered himself to such games.
But when Pia looked at Ares again, her gray gaze was resigned. “You’re monitoring this laptop. Of course you are. I don’t know why I didn’t assume you were from the start.”
Ares inclined his head slightly. “For security purposes, naturally. This is a royal palace.”
“And because you’re nosy.” Her gaze stayed steady. “You want to know things about me without having to ask.”
He could see that moment shimmer between them, Pia in her funeral dress on the side of that tub and him too close and much too open, and he was sure she could, too. But she didn’t say anything.
“You could be in league with the tabloid reporters who swarmed us in Yorkshire,” Ares said mildly instead. “You could have been planted by my enemies.”
“Do you actually have enemies?” Pia asked, her voice even more mild than his. It scraped at him. “Or is this a part of those many wars you appear to be waging, though no one is waging them back at you?”
Ares leaned one shoulder against the doorjamb, crossed his arms, and regarded her sternly. “I suppose you could say I am my own war.”
He certainly hadn’t meant to say that. He didn’t even know where the words had come from. Only that once they were out there, he couldn’t deny the stark truth of them.
Or the acrid taste they left behind in his mouth.
It was like the first night she’d been here and that bizarre urge he’d had to tend to her. Ares wasn’t certain he had tended to another person in the whole of his life, save his own mother in her final days. He hardly knew her. He knew the urge even less. It felt as if he’d been hit on the head and had only come to—and back into himself—when she’d reminded him of the fact that she was having sons.
His sons.
Every time he thought less of the sweet ripeness of her body and more about what that ripeness would result in, it hit him in the same way. Hard. Debilitating.
A full-on body blow.
“If you are your own war, you are lucky, Ares. That means you can call it off at any time.” She closed the laptop and set it aside, her gray gaze on him. “You can have an armistice whenever you like.”
“It is not quite that easy.”
But he sounded more uncertain of that than he should have.
“Why are you spying on me?” she asked him, direct and to the point, that gaze still firm on his.
And if her voice had been sharp, or accusing, Ares would have known what to do. He could have handled it with a dose of royal arrogance, or that edgy thing in him that was always too close to the surface when he was in Atilia. Or near her.
Instead, he felt something like...outgunned.
“I would not call it spying,” he replied, after a moment, but the words didn’t seem to fit right in his mouth. “I told you. There were security concerns.”
“Yes,” she said, lifting up that chin of hers again. “I write a column. It’s silly, really. There are lots of people who go through life without having to suffer through a finishing school. After all, its only real purpose is to make a person—and let’s not kid ourselves, it’s always a female person—so scrupulously well mannered that she could be a queen, if necessary.”
Something powerful seemed to roar between them at that.
But Ares refused to acknowledge it. And Pia’s cheeks only got redder.
“Hypothetically speaking, of course,” she hurried to say. She looked away then, and Ares wondered if he was reddening, too, deep inside. “There’s that story of the Queen of England at some dinner party. They’d set out finger bowls and the guest of honor picked his up and drank from it, which ought to have humiliated him. And would have, if he’d known. Everyone froze, not sure what to do in the face of such a breach of etiquette. But what did the queen do? She reached over, picked up her own finger bowl, and downed it like a shot. I don’t know if that’s true, but I like to think it is.”
“Because you like to advise your readers to drink the contents of the finger bowls they encounter?” Ares asked. Darkly.
He felt...not himself, already. But even more so when Pia only gazed at him so calmly that he felt as if he’d turned into some kind of beast where he stood, misshapen and overlarge.
“Figuratively speaking,” she replied. “I pretend to talk about good manners in my column. But really what I’m talking about is how to be kind.”
“Kindness is overrated,” Ares heard himself growl.
But Pia only shook her head. “No. It’s really not.”
“I admire these lofty sentiments, I do,” Ares said in that same dark tone, all beast and very little prince. “But if you know that I have been monitoring what you do on that laptop, you must also know that I’m aware you monetize those columns of yours.”
If he expected that to get to her, he was disappointed when all she did was smile. Patiently. In a manner that made him want to...break things.
Or get his hands on all that round, tempting lushness.
“No one knows it’s me, do they?” That smile of hers was so bland it bordered on offensive. “I can assure you, no one wants to hear from poor little rich girl Pia Combe about how to be a better person.”
“You have been writing this column for years. Since your second year of university, if my math is correct.” He knew that it was.
“Well, there’s only so much finishing a girl can do,” Pia said lightly. Airily. She didn’t actually wave her hand through the air dismissively, but it felt as if she had. “I thought it was a more reasonable outlet than some of the other ones my friends took up. Unsuitable men, for example. Or tempting scandal and often fate itself in all sorts of disreputable nightclubs. Unfortunate substances. A little column I never expected anyone to read seemed rather tame in comparison, but then, I have always been the little brown sparrow in a family of nothing but brightly plumed parrots. It felt very me.”
Ares scowled at her. “I have absolutely no idea why you are suddenly talking about birds. Much less plumage.”
“I know who I am. That’s all I’m saying.”
“You certainly don’t need the money,” Ares said, as if he’d caught her involved in some kind of con.
“I don’t keep the money,” she said, making a face as if he was the one drinking out of finger bowls at formal banquets. “It’s not a lot, or not by the standards I imagine you’re used to, but I give it away. There are always needy people trying to raise money for various causes, and I like to give where I can. Without any strings.”
“You could do that with the interest off a single month of your trust fund, one assumes.”
“I could. But I was raised by Eddie Combe, who liked to rant and rave about the value of an honest day’s work. I’m not pretending to work in any mines, but there’s something to be said about earning my own money and spending it how I like.” Her gaze searched his. “In fairness, I suppose crown princes aren’t generally encouraged to do such things.”
“There are some kingdoms that exult in the sight of their royals getting dirty with the common folk, but Atilia is not one of them,” Ares said. “My mother spent time in the Royal Hospital, but ministering to the ill was about as far as the country was willing to let her go.”
Thinking of his mother didn’t bring the stab of grief it normally did. Possibly because he kept thinking that his mother would have loved Pia unreservedly. Ares could almost see them together, sitting in this very room, passing that laptop back and forth and discussing who next to help.
He found he was clenching his jaw so hard he was surprised he didn’t snap a tooth.
“If you can help, you should,” Pia said quietly, so much an echo of his childhood that Ares had to blink to make certain he wasn’t sitting with his mother again, letting her quiet goodness cancel out his father’s latest tantrum.
“I had no idea when I met you in New York that you were such a saint,” he heard himself growl then.
Pia blinked, then flushed a deeper shade of red, and he felt as if he’d slapped her. That made him feel monstrous again. A cartoon beast, all fur and fury.
But he couldn’t seem to stop himself from making every one of these moments with her...worse.
“Did you not?” she asked, lightly enough, though her gaze had gone cool. Wary. “I felt certain I was wearing my halo.”
“I don’t recall you wearing anything at all.”
And that electric thing was back, bright and hot between them. Ares could feel his pulse thick and hot in his temples. In his chest.
In his greedy, hungry sex.
“I sit here every day,” she said, though her voice was scratchier than it had been a moment before and there was a light in her eyes that made his pulse...worse. He decided to take that as a kind of victory. “I read a lot of tabloid takedowns. Alternate reality versions of me. Versions where I cold-bloodedly trapped a prince with my uterus. Then pitted said prince against my own brother, using my unborn child as collateral. I spend a lot of time wondering how it’s possible that a person who never appeared in a single scandalous story before, ever, could attract the hatred of so many so fast.”
“Is this about to veer into sparrows and parrots again?”
“I already feel stripped naked, is what I’m trying to tell you.” Pia swallowed, hard. “It’s bad enough that every time I pick up my phone or open a search engine I’m treated to more side-by-side comparisons between me and my mother, who, you may have heard, is still widely held to be the most beautiful woman who ever lived. I don’t need you to come in here and taunt me.”
“Taunt you?”
Ares hadn’t expected that. Just as he didn’t see it coming when Pia rose to her feet, betraying a gracefulness he felt certain she didn’t know she possessed—but he could feel. All over him like a caress. She picked up the laptop and clutched it to her chest, then looked at him as if he was still very much that cartoon monster.
“I don’t know what you want from me,” she said, so quietly that it felt like condemnation. As if she could see the poison in his blood from where she stood. “I don’t think you know either, which is the only reason why I’m tolerating this.”
“This palace, renowned the world over for its beauty and never made available to the public. A life of ease, waited upon hand and foot. This is what you feel you must ‘tolerate.’”
“You didn’t liberate me from a gutter,” Pia said, in that same quiet, deliberate way. “I’m not dazzled by your material possessions. I can see quite clearly that this is a prison no matter how lovely the furnishings might be.”
What Ares didn’t understand was why he felt as if he was in prison, too, when he was the one who came and went as he pleased.
“Consider this a grace period,” she told him, very much as if she was the one with the control here. “I had months to get used to the fact that I was pregnant with twins. It wouldn’t be fair of me not to accord you the same span of time to come around to the notion. But the clock is ticking, Ares. You can’t keep me here forever and even if you could, there will soon be three of us.”
“I would not challenge me if I were you.” And his voice was a dark ribbon of sound he hardly recognized.
“You will have to make a decision,” Pia replied as if she couldn’t see the threat in him. Or didn’t care. “Or do you think that I will have these babies locked away here, and then raise them like this, isolated from the world? As if we don’t exist? You may be ashamed of them. Of me. But I am not.”
“I never said I was ashamed.”
She drew herself up, which only made him more aware of her lushness.
“Your indecision might keep me here,” she said, as if she hadn’t heard him. “I might even like it, as it keeps me from having to have unpleasant conversations with my older brother and everyone else who is suddenly dying to know my personal business.”
She moved toward him then, the laptop in one arm and the other one wrapped over her belly.
“Pia—” he began, as if her name in his mouth didn’t remind him too much of her taste. As if he didn’t ache.
“But you will not lock these babies away from the world, Ares. They will not be victims to your indecision. Do you understand me?” And he had never seen that expression on her face before. Fierce. Sure. Maternal, something in him whispered. “My children will walk in the sun. They will be loved. They will not be hidden away like someone’s dirty secret, and I don’t care if it is in a palace. I won’t have it.”
And he wanted to stop her. He wanted to somehow talk his way through the great mess inside of him, but he found himself frozen solid.
Unable to do anything but stand there, more monster than man.
And Ares wasn’t sure that ratio was moving in his favor as she swept past him and disappeared down the hall.
Leaving him to feel the true weight of this palace he’d made a prison, as surely as if he’d fitted it with bars.
* * *
Ares had learned a long time ago not to read tabloid interpretations of his life, but he still found himself flipping idly through the worst of them on his tablet the next day as he flew to the Northern Island for the grand dedication of something or other.
A bank, perhaps. A monument.
He didn’t care about that. Because the tabloids were filled with base speculation and nasty insinuation. Nothing new, but Ares found it clawed at him in a whole new way when the subject was Pia instead of him.
His own face was everywhere, with shots of him laid out on the ground and the bloody lip Matteo Combe had given him.
Matteo had been taken to task by his own Board of Directors, who were muttering about a no-confidence vote. They’d even gone so far as to sic an anger management specialist on him for a time, which Ares couldn’t help but find amusing.
But there was nothing amusing about the things they almost but not quite called Pia. Because instead of fading away with nothing new to add to the story, it seemed the tabloids had only gotten bolder in their coverage during the time he and Pia had been in the Southern Palace.
Playboy Prince’s pregnancy scandal! the headlines screamed.
Ares supposed he should count himself lucky that no one had dared mention the tabloids to his face.
He was congratulating himself on that as he stood in the grand, marble lobby of the Royal Bank of Atilia that was being dedicated to the King, where he was meant to say a few words. But there was a change in the crowd, suddenly, as he prepared himself to speak. He could feel it in the air. The ripple effect. The whispering and the gasping, followed by deep bows and curtsies all around.
Ares swore beneath his breath.
But he knew that he betrayed not a single emotion on his face when his father came in all his considerable state to stand beside him. Ares turned, as was required, and performed his own bow to his monarch.
“Prince Ares,” the King said by way of greeting, and only because people were watching and would likely expect him to greet his only son.
“I did not expect to see you here, Your Majesty,” Ares said beneath his breath as they stood for a rousing go at the Atilian national anthem. And he should not have seen his father, because it was well-known amongst the palace staff that the crown prince and the king preferred never to be in each other’s company. “My secretary must have made a mistake.”
“There was a mistake, all right,” King Damascus retorted, making no attempt to hide his glare and no matter that the crowd was on the “long may our king in grace and wisdom preside” part of the song. “It’s about time you and I have a word.”
Ares could think of very little he would like less.
But they were in public. There was the brief ceremony to get through, made ten times worse by the presence of his father and all the extra pomp and circumstance that went along with the presence of the King of Atilia at such a banal event. And when it was done, he had no choice but to exit several steps behind his father as custom dictated, then follow him as commanded.
Because a son could rebel against his father. But Ares’s father was also his king, and what the king decreed was law.
The old man insisted that they return to the Northern Palace, where Ares had made it a point not to set foot since his mother had died.
He knew his father was well aware of this.
But King Damascus wanted to draw it out, because he was as sadistic now as he had ever been. He marched Ares straight back to that private sitting room of his, where he had been lecturing Ares in between bouts of temper for as long as Ares could remember.
This time, Ares took the seat his father indicated and lounged in it. Not insolent, necessarily, but not reverent, either.
“This feels nostalgic,” he said after the silence had dragged on too long.
“I’m glad you think so,” the king said. “I feel nauseated, myself.”
Ares smiled. Thinly. “Shall I contact your staff, sir? Do you require medical attention?”
The king moved to his personal bar, and Ares watched with a certain sense of resignation as his father poured himself a drink from yet another crystal decanter that Ares imagined would soon be in broken shards all over the stone floor. He did not offer Ares a drink, because he was still as petty as ever.
“Do you want to explain to me why your pregnant little piece is all over every paper?” the king demanded.
Ares wasn’t sure what, precisely, it was that surged in him then. But he knew it was violent. Dark and furious, and aimed at his father.
Which he knew was treason.
But he didn’t care.
“I beg your pardon, Your Majesty,” he said icily. “You must surely be referring to yourself. I have no ‘piece,’ as you put it.”
“You told me this would never happen,” his father snarled at him. “You promised me, or I would have married you off years ago.”
“Nature will do what it will do, father,” Ares said, with a great flippancy he in no way felt about Pia or the babies she carried. “I don’t understand your concern. I am not married. There is no actual scandal, there are only tabloids making noise.”
“Was it noise that knocked you flat?”
Ares made himself stay where he was, seated and unthreatening. “That was a misunderstanding, nothing more.”
“Do not expect my permission to marry her,” his father said, and though he grew smaller and more wizened every time Ares saw him, that glare of his was as baleful as ever. “Do not think that the fact she is a San Giacomo in any way makes up for all that peasant blood in her.”
“I will remind you, sire,” Ares said, acidly, “that I do not require your permission to marry. You struck down that law yourself, the better to make way for your own mistress.”
“You mean your queen,” his father growled. “Her Majesty Queen Caprice to the likes of you, and I warn you, I will tolerate no disrespect.”
Ares forced himself to lounge back in his chair, though he wanted to be the one to start breaking things, this time. “And what of our great and glorious Queen Caprice? My understanding was that her chief attraction was her supposed fertility. Yet I’ve seen no sign that she is expecting your heirs.”
“Watch yourself, boy.”
“One is tempted to conclude that the reason you sired but one disappointing child was your fault. Not my mother’s, as has been commonly agreed.”
He meant: by you and your doctors.
“Is that your goal? You think that if you start having illegitimate children it will make you the better man?” His father laughed, but in that angry way of his that allowed for no actual humor. “On the contrary, Ares, all it does is remind the kingdom what a waste of space you are. A profligate playboy, governed by his base appetites. I should thank you for doing me a favor.”
Ares stared back at this man that he had feared and hated for most of his life. Here in this room, where he had been threatened, belittled, and shouted at more times than he could count. Here where he had made decisions based entirely on how not to be the man facing him.
And he could cite chapter and verse about the things he didn’t want. The man he didn’t wish to become. The blood in him he hated, that had run hot just now, so desperately did he want to respond to the sneering violence in his father’s voice in kind.
But he had other weapons.
You are always in a war, Pia had said.
And Ares supposed that was true. He had always been in this war. He had been dropped in it at birth.
But all that meant was that he knew how best to aim, then take fire, at the man who had taught him how to fight—never realizing, apparently, that in so doing he betrayed his own weaknesses.
“Did I not tell you the good news?” he asked his father mildly. Almost kindly. “Pia has made me the happiest man alive. She has agreed to be my wife. I know you—and the kingdom—will extend us your deepest congratulations.”
And the first wedding gift he received was the splintering sound of his father’s decanter against the castle wall. It was such a touch of nostalgia he very nearly came over all emotional as he took his leave.
And it was not until he was on his plane, heading back toward the Southern Palace, that it dawned on Ares that he would have to figure out how best to share these glad tidings with the woman he had yet to ask to be the wife he’d never wanted.