SHE TURNED AROUND and exited the house so quickly that, at first, Valentino was tempted to imagine that this was yet another one of his far too realistic fantasies where the troublesome Princess Carliz was concerned. He’d been plagued by them since the night of his doomed wedding. They’d so far showed no sign of abating.
Surely this was yet another indication that the woman was still haunting him—that he needed to work harder to exorcise the demon in him that was this infernal need for her. This impossible wanting.
He stood there as if he was a part of the statuary that lined the hall, but the way his heart was beating—much too fast and much too hard—told him otherwise. Despite his best efforts, he was not made of marble. He was all too regrettably human. And that likely meant he had not made her up.
Much less what she had come to tell him.
Before he could form a thought, much less a plan based on reason rather than the chaos of desire, he was following her.
He threw open the door she’d slammed shut behind her and was surprised to see that she was moving at a fast clip through the garden, when he would have said that Carliz was not the sort to hit such speed. He had never seen her do anything but glide. And she was not running, exactly, but she was clearly doing her best to get away from him as fast as she could.
It was an unnerving sensation to see her moving away from him.
Valentino could not say that he liked it. At all.
Grimly, he set off after her. He had told himself—repeatedly—that he would not keep tabs on her, but he had failed in that. Almost immediately. He had found himself scouring the papers both on and offline, telling himself he was only looking to see what had become of his reputation in the wake of the wedding scandal his brother had forced upon him. Handily enough, every article or segment on the subject mentioned Carliz too. He’d steeled himself to see her out on the party circuit once again, selling her take on the scandal to the paparazzi so they could torture him with his brother’s perfidy and his fiancée’s shirking of her vows, but instead it was as if Carliz had fallen off the face of the earth.
It only went to show how hard she had worked in the first place, he had been forced to conclude, to make the relationship they’d never had a topic of such interest to so many.
Valentino had never thought he would miss that.
Then again, he’d also imagined that he’d have better sense than to put his hands on that woman. The woman he’d wanted from the first moment he’d seen her, but had known at a glance was not for him.
Because he knew what happened when people gave in to their wants at the expense of their responsibilities—and even their souls. He’d watched it play out before him in real time and he’d lived through the aftermath. He was still living through the aftermath.
And now, to add to the trauma of his father’s love triangle and all the pain it had caused, now Carliz haunted him too. All night, every night, and all through the day as well.
Valentino was ruined in ways he had not imagined possible.
He was a wreck of himself and it was all her fault, but he knew that he was the one to blame.
The proof of that was the fact he was chasing after her now, when he should have let her go. The way he should have done that night in Rome. He should have turned and walked away from her, not toward her. He should never have taken her in his arms. They should never have danced.
But it was too late for all of that now.
Valentino caught up to her at the base of the hill, in front of the chapel where he had not gotten married.
He reached out, then dropped his hands before he caught her by the elbow and steered her around to face him. Because nothing good came from putting his hands on Carliz.
Nothing good at all, no matter how it felt at the time.
“I beg your pardon,” he said, falling into step with her and sounding far calmer than he felt, because he knew that was perhaps the only weapon he had in a situation like this. Assuming there were any weapons to be had when it seemed he’d gone and blown up his own life—as if, after all, his father’s poison was not as deeply buried in him as he’d thought if that was even possible. “I could not have heard you correctly. It sounded as if you said...?”
“That I’m having your child?” Carliz stopped walking with the same sort of force she’d used to slam his door behind her, and rocked back on her heels as if she nearly bowled herself over. She swept the wide-brimmed hat she wore off of her head and smoothed a hand over her hair, never shifting that wary, clever gaze of hers from his, its very steadiness its own affront. Or so he chose to call it, that tension inside of him. “Do you want to guess how far along I am? Go ahead. I bet you’ll get it on your first go.”
“Impossible,” he said at once.
Except...was it?
He had spent a lot of time going over that night in minute detail. And one thing that he could not remember doing, at any point, was taking a moment to handle his own protection. He had thought of that failure later, but not in terms of any potential pregnancies. More in terms of the fact that he should not have been surprised it felt so good. As if she’d been fashioned specifically for him.
Everything feels good without a condom, he’d lectured himself scathingly. That wasn’t revolutionary, it was simply a fact that men had been whining about for ages.
“Do you need me to give you a lesson on human biology?” Carliz was asking, her own voice too close to scathing for his liking, though he should have exulted in it as more evidence that she belonged far, far away from him. “It’s really very simple. If you have sex and don’t do anything to prevent pregnancy, lo and behold, a pregnancy can occur.”
“I assumed you were on the pill,” he said. Because it was the only thing he could say. It was also the truth.
But she looked back at him in the same narrow way, with no change of expression. “Why would I be on the pill?”
“You cannot possibly depend on your lovers to protect you.” He detested saying that out loud, as Valentino found he did not wish to imagine her with other men. Equally, he did not wish to ask himself why that was when he had never been at all interested in the other pursuits of his partners. “Men, as I proved myself to my shame, are not equal to the task.”
He didn’t like saying that, either, having prided himself his whole life on being more than the equal of any task set before him. But it was true no matter if he liked it. Or didn’t like it.
Carliz shook her head, still looking at him as if there was something wrong with him. “Is that... Are you putting on the fact you got caught up in the heat of that moment—like anyone else would and I certainly did—as another hair shirt for you to wear?”
She made a scoffing sort of sound while he tried to take that in. A hair shirt? Another hair shirt? He had never been quite so Catholic, surely. But he suddenly had the urge to adjust the shirt and coat he was wearing.
He repressed it.
“Spare me, Valentino,” Carliz said before he could protest her characterization of him. “Please. I wasn’t on the pill because I’ve never had any reason to be on the pill. And I didn’t ask you to use protection because it quite literally never occurred to me.” She let out a bitter little laugh. “Not a mistake I intend to make twice but really, once does the trick.”
And he couldn’t stand this. Not just what she was saying about her pregnancy or the way she was looking at him. All this time he’d been so sure that he knew her, if against his will. This woman was irrepressible. There was nothing bleak about her.
Until now.
It was like looking at his mother all over again.
Except this time, it wasn’t his father who had done this thing. It was him. He had turned into his father without even realizing it.
The very idea made him feel sick.
“You are right,” he managed to get out, tersely. “I should not attempt to make this a failure of responsibility on your part. We share the blame. I apologize. I will admit that I’m surprised that a woman like you made mistakes like that, but then, I’m equally surprised that I did the same.”
He was pleased with that. It was equitable. They were both adults. There was no need to descend into any puerile mudslinging when they’d both been in the same bed.
But Carliz tilted her head to one side and stared at him in a way that he found...distinctly uncomfortable.
“A woman like me,” she repeated, as if they no longer spoke several of the same languages. “Do you mean a virgin, Valentino? Because I was a virgin that night. You took my virginity, as a matter of fact, and quite thoroughly. You even spanked me, and I liked it. And then you told me that you never wanted to see me again.” Her eyes were bright in a way he’d never seen before, and there was color on her cheeks that he assumed was the bloom of her temper. “I apologize if in the middle of all of that I didn’t have the time or wherewithal to give you chapter and verse on my feelings about birth control and my lack of experience overall.”
He only stared at her, not sure whether he wanted to let his own temper surge, or possibly just kiss her again, and both options made him loathe himself. Carliz made a noise, somewhere between frustration and disgust.
Then she stepped around him, and carried on stomping back toward the beach and the sandbar that was still visible at this point. Though the tides were always turning, wholly uninterested in the affairs of men.
There were very few moments in Valentino’s life where he had felt as if the world had been picked up and shaken from end to end like a tawdry snow globe. As if at first it stopped abruptly enough to send everyone reeling, and then everything he knew was shaken away.
The first time had been when he was twelve. And had discovered that the best friend he considered a brother was, in fact, his actual brother.
The second was the night his mother had died, and the understanding he hadn’t wanted that night—that his father could have saved her, or at least tried to save her, but he had not. He had chosen to wait for the tide to go down.
This was the third.
Because if his princess had been a virgin that night, and he could not imagine why she would lie about something like that, then everything he thought he’d known about her was wrong. Or off-center, somehow.
He, who had always prided himself was wrong. Horribly, shockingly wrong.
Again, something in him whispered, like a terrible smoke winding deep inside him. The way he had been about his family and his whole damned life as a child. The way he had been about his father, who he had never liked much, but had not understood was an actual monster until that night.
He didn’t know how long he stood there, but then, once again, he had to chase her down the lane in an effort to catch up.
“Let me guess,” she said, her cheeks flushed with more of that hot temper he hadn’t known she had, as she charged toward the beach, “now you’re going to tell me that you don’t believe me. You will demand that I somehow prove that I was a virgin then, when it is obviously much too late. When you know perfectly well that pain was part of the pleasure that night, because you taught me that.”
“Carliz.”
And he didn’t mean to use that voice. He didn’t think he meant it, but it was the one that she’d obeyed without thinking that night. She did again, now. She stopped dead.
And when she looked at him, there was a wariness in her gaze.
“I believe you,” he told her, in a low voice that was not that voice, but was raw all the same. “And I did not mean to hurt you.”
Something crackled through her, like that electricity that was so much a part of her spilling over. But this time, it was fused with that flushed hot temper of hers, too.
“I didn’t say you hurt me,” she belted out at him. “I wasn’t hurt. I wasn’t the one who woke up that morning and decided to be awful, pretending once again that there was nothing between us. I don’t know what this is right now either.” She threw out a hand toward him, and he didn’t know if she meant to point at him or it was simply a decorative gesture. “Suddenly you’re understanding? Suddenly you have some deep interest in my well-being that you’ve never shown before now? Let me guess. You’re already calculating how you can use my pregnancy to your advantage. You’re already wondering how you can spin it so that you once again come out on top of your brother. Whatever that looks like this month.”
He hadn’t been thinking that. But he couldn’t deny that it was entirely likely that he would have started at any moment. Had he not been so shocked by her announcement, he likely would have convened his press people already to get them working on the appropriate stories to seed.
Still, Valentino didn’t like the fact that she’d called him out on that. He didn’t like it at all.
“What exactly was your plan?” he demanded. “You thought you would drop in, drop a small bomb and then...what?”
“I have a great many opportunities available to me, as a matter of fact,” she told him with a certain loftiness that he assumed royals were taught at birth. “Thank you so much for asking. I spent most of the last three months looking for an appropriate husband.” He must have made some kind of face at that, when he prided himself on being unreadable under all circumstances. But she laughed. “I’m sorry. Is that upsetting to you? Are you the only person alive who gets to go out and find someone to marry because they fit a checklist?”
His jaw was so tight that he was afraid he might snap a tooth, but he couldn’t seem to unclench it enough to respond. She made that noise again.
Then she turned once more, and kept going.
Valentino had to stay where he was for a moment, breathing a little more heavily than was wise, because while he did not want to think about her other lovers, he really did not like the idea of her married to someone else.
He found that he hated it.
But he told himself that was perfectly valid. After all, she was carrying his child.
This time when he drew up beside her she had made it to the small path that led down from the lane to the beach.
“Obviously any marriage plans you might have will have to be put on hold,” he told her, possibly with a touch more severity than was called for. “I do not intend to share custody of my child, Carliz. You should know that at once.”
“You’ve known about this child for exactly fourteen minutes,” she threw back at him without even looking over his way. Then she did, even shoving that hat backward on her head to really make sure he saw the seriousness all over her face. “I will not be putting anything on hold for you. Ever again. Of that, you can be one hundred percent sure, Valentino.”
“Then why did you bother to come here?” He moved closer to her than was necessary, and much closer than was wise. “Why would you tell me that you are carrying my child, the heir to my family legacy, if you intend to marry another?”
Carliz made a slight, instantly repressed movement, and he had the mad notion that what she really wanted to do was put her hands on him. He wanted that too. Badly.
Because if she put her hands on him, he knew exactly what would happen next, and he didn’t care if his brother, his former fiancée—his sister-in-law, he reminded himself—his awful father, and the whole of the Italian mainland lined up to watch them.
Maybe some of that showed on his face too, because she wisely kept her hands to herself.
“You act as if I’ve done something to you, Valentino.” The wind caught at her hair and he could see the pert impression of her nipples behind her shirt, though he knew it was not the temperature that was pinching them to attention like that. Or not only the temperature. Because the chemistry between them, as ever, was nearly all-consuming. “You act as if this is all my fault.”
She blew out a breath, but before he could counter that he had not even once suggested that she’d tried to trick him, or that she was foisting another man’s child on him, or even questioned her too closely on the matter—as he had heard in places like the Diamond Club that many of his peers had done from time to time—she kept on.
“Something happened between us in Rome that changed everything,” she said, as if saying it was forbidden but she was doing it anyway. Her eyes got big, trained on him the way they were while the fall sunshine spilled down over her shoulders like it was as attracted to her as he was. “I’m sorry that you’re too terrified of that reality to even have a conversation about it. But I’m not an idiot. I’m fully aware that neither one of us walked into that event planning for anything like that to happen. At any point over the past few years, you could have had an honest conversation with me about the fact that it did, but you never have. I regret how I acted in the course of those years, but I did it because I truly believed that there was something there worth fighting for. I have no idea what you were doing.”
Valentino wished he couldn’t hear the way her voice scratched at that. He wished he couldn’t remember those years himself.
“And no,” she said, raising her voice when he started to say something—though he wasn’t sure if he meant to defend himself or possibly just apologize, “I don’t want to hear what you have to say about it now. It exploded the night of your wedding the way it was always going to, sooner or later. There’s no going back from that. But now I’m carrying a child.”
She reached down to put her hand on her belly, and he had been too busy drinking in the sight of her. The fact of her, not the shape of her. The brightness all around her. The way light seemed to find her wherever she went, sunlight or lamplight alike. The way her eyes gleamed and her cheeks flushed.
Then, too, he’d been remembering the way she squirmed as she lay over his lap, sobbing first in pain and surprise, then with the pleasure of it.
But now that she put her hand on her belly, he could see that her shape had changed. That she had a notable roundness there, when before her stomach had been slightly concave. Something he would know, because he had spent a great deal of time tasting every inch of the span between her hipbones that night before moving lower.
“I never really thought about having children,” she told him, still holding her belly and his gaze with the same sort of steel. “It was something I assumed I would do, somewhere down the road, because everyone does. My mother has always been going on at me about doing my duty to the family and producing potential heirs, particularly since my sister seems dead set on reigning as the Virgin Queen of our time. Someone will have to succeed her and if it is not me, or one of my children, it will all have to go to a cousin who none of us can stand. So you see the dilemma.”
“I don’t.”
She scowled at him. “I was going to have to have a child anyway. And I have accepted the fact that it will happen now, not later. I did not intend to have your child, Valentino. And that is really all I came here to tell you. The child exists. I expect nothing from you. And you can continue to play these games of denial and blame that you’ve been engaged in from the start, but I don’t want to be involved in them anymore.”
Carliz turned around again on that note, but this time with great dignity, as if she thought that might shame him. And maybe it could. Maybe it would.
But not right now.
She set off across the beach, but the tide was already coming in. Still, she was moving at a fast enough pace that if she kept it up, she should only get a little bit wet on the other side. There would likely be no compulsory swimming to make it to shore.
He watched her leave him again.
He didn’t like it any better.
And once again, Valentino’s heart was heaving about behind his ribs as if he’d run a marathon or two today. These had been a strange few months. There had been the fact that his brother had stolen his bride and married her, right under his nose, that he kept waiting to hit him like the betrayal it was. But he knew it wasn’t going to. He was furious that his brother had spoiled his plans, that was all. He didn’t really care that Aristide and Francesca were married. He only cared that they’d embarrassed him.
He only cared that he’d had to hear his father’s taunts and jeers on that topic, when he had dutifully stopped by for a dinner he’d put off as long as possible. He subjected himself to one per season, so little could he tolerate anything that Milo said or did.
This time, it had been even worse than usual, but not because Milo was getting any hits in with his snide remarks about what Aristide and his worthy little heiress wife must be up to. But because he had been thinking of the wedding night he’d had despite misplacing his intended bride. And because that night with Carliz had left him too raw. As if she’d flayed some essential armor away from his skin without him realizing it and he didn’t know how to go about replacing it.
He told himself it was irritating, nothing more.
But the truth was that he had spent far too much time remembering all the details of that night over the course of these last three months. And all the ways that she had proven herself to be absolutely perfect for him in every way.
Sexually compatible, he liked to correct himself. That was all he meant by that.
Because a truth he had come to accept a long time ago was that he had certain needs and preferences. And it was a fact that mostly, he could not allow them to be met in any satisfying manner. He had vowed that he would be the respectable Bonaparte. That he would live up to his mother’s ideals of who he could be, though she had fallen far short herself. And he had held his grandfather’s example of dignity and moderation above all else.
None of that went hand in hand with the kind of sex he liked best.
Valentino also knew that a great many men on this earth had allowed themselves to be brought low because they were controlled by their sexual urges. He did not intend to become one of them—though her comment about hair shirts just now cut deep, because that was precisely how he’d thought about his marriage.
He and Francesca had never had any chemistry, though he thought she might have attempted to manufacture some, at the start, because it was expected. But he had not wanted that from her. It had been easy to tell at a glance that she was not the kind of woman who would find the games he liked to play at all entertaining.
Valentino had assumed that he was done with them. That he would sacrifice those things on the altar when he made his vows. He had been planning to get married that day not knowing if he and Francesca would even have a sex life. There were other ways to have heirs, after all. At best he had expected something dutiful and rare, and otherwise had expected they would go about their lives as they pleased.
Then the princess had appeared the way she always did. The Carliz storm, sweeping into his bedroom, and making a mockery of every vow he’d ever made to himself.
And then to discover that on top of all the other ways that she had ruined him already, it turned out that she was the kind of very special, very unusual woman who could meet every need he had...
She had wrecked him.
Again and again.
He had woken so early that morning that he wondered if he’d slept at all. He had felt not simply replete, the way anyone could after a release such as that. He’d felt something else. Something he wanted to call recharged, though it had felt something far more than merely physical.
Valentino had not wanted to accept that feeling at all.
He had rolled out of bed, telling himself that he absolutely would not look back at her, but then he did.
Breaking one more vow where she was concerned—and that had been the part that had pricked at him. To him, Carliz was nothing more than an addiction. That was her role in his life. He’d had one taste and she might as well have been heroin.
The way he had hungered for her.
When he’d looked back, he could muster up his own outrage. Because she’d looked more beautiful every time he looked at her. And never more so than on that morning, curled up in his bed with smudges of exhaustion beneath her eyes as she slept—because she had met him no matter what he’d thrown at her. She had exceeded expectations he hadn’t even known he’d had.
He was very much afraid that she had ruined him for all other women.
That was unacceptable.
He had left his rooms, like a ghost. And he had built this place himself, a monument to the family he’d never had and the legacy he’d hoped to build, though his brother had always called it a mausoleum.
So perhaps it was not a surprise that he found himself in the gallery he kept because all great houses had galleries, featuring portraits of his family. Never his father. But his mother sat there, looking regal and lovely, whole and almost happy. And the next portrait, his grandfather stood behind a chair where his grandmother was perched, the two of them smiling just slightly. As if they did not wish to get too overwrought in the presence of the artist.
And he had seen where passion led. He had watched it play out in real time, to desperate and terrible ends. If there was one promise that he could keep in his time on this earth, it would have to be that one that he’d made when the truth about his family had come out.
He would never, ever allow himself to become a slave to passion.
Valentino had watched it rip his mother apart. Because she had loved his father despite everything. And it had not made even one bit of difference.
His father, for his part, had only shrugged, or laughed, and asked what a man could be expected to do? Passion always wins in the end, Milo had told them all.
Valentino had sworn it off then and there.
So that was what he did when he next saw her. He had sworn Carliz off, because it was the right thing to do.
But now she was walking determinedly out of his life, while carrying his baby.
And he was forced to recall that there had always been one thing that he’d held far above passion. His duty.
And his family legacy, whether he cared for his current family or not.
He caught up with her one final time, standing there on a sandbar while the sea closed in on two sides.
This time, she only glared at him.
“We will fly to London,” he told her. “I wish to have my doctors there run every test there is, to make sure that both you and the child are well.”
“Because, obviously, I have failed to do that myself.”
“You’re not the only one who requires peace of mind, Carliz,” he bit out.
But she studied him. “And you’d also like a little blood test, I imagine. Just be sure.”
He neither confirmed nor denied that. “Either way, there is no need for you to hike back to the mainland. We’ll be leaving shortly.”
“To what end?” Carliz demanded, and she really did yell that out then. To the sea. To the sky. To Italy in the distance, where it had sat for millennia. Where they would be nothing but a wisp of memory, one day, like everything else. Valentino did not find that thought as comforting as he usually did. He did not like the thought of Carliz disappearing. Even while she continued to yell at him. “No matter what you discover with that testing won’t admit you’re going to do, what does it matter? I’ve already told you—”
“I will need to confirm that the child is mine,” he told her, as dispassionately as he could. “Not because I question you, but because my legal team will, and so will anyone else who tries to contest my will and testament.” He expected her to argue that, but she didn’t. Because, of course, she was a royal. She knew all about contested wills and the importance of a documented trail of bloodlines. “Once I do, Carliz, we will be married.”