THE COLD RAIN in London was a shock after the island with all that bright, golden light, the sound of seabirds wheeling about overhead, and the sea itself, there in the corner of every glance, every look.
Carliz found a certain comfort in it, however. She had always loved London. She’d spent a great deal of time here, over the years, and there was something about the muted colors and the layers of gray on gray. There was something about the bright pops of color, here and there, and the busy rush and tumble of an ancient city in modern times.
Not to mention, the bleakness suited her mood.
She had not expected Valentino to react this way. It wasn’t that she hadn’t hoped that he might—she had, she could admit, if only in the darkest part of the night when she couldn’t hide even from herself—but she’d thought that hope was foolish. In the light of day, she’d been certain she was kidding herself.
And now she felt strung out between those two extremes. What she’d braced herself for when she saw him versus that tiny little spark of hope she had tried her very best to extinguish. While the truth of things seemed strung out in the middle with her, since it didn’t seem as if she was really getting either one. Whatever this was, it seemed to be some sort of...uneasy compromise and she’d spent the entire flight from the island brooding about it.
She had the time and space to brood on forever, as it happened, because it certainly wasn’t as if Valentino spent any time talking to her. He had shown her to her seat, then removed himself to a different compartment of the plane, where he had conducted a number of extremely terse calls. She had been able to hear the sound of his voice in three languages, but not the words.
Maybe that was just as well. Carliz had stared out the window vaguely wishing that she might find herself a parachute and leap out when she saw the mountains, even though they weren’t the right mountains. They weren’t her mountains.
It was silly to yearn for home, but she had far bigger problems than a little bit of loneliness. Like that infernal little bloom of hope that she felt was deeply unworthy of her. It was sheer foolishness to let herself believe, even for a moment, that this man who had treated her so shabbily might somehow, magically, have gotten over that in the interim.
Right when she appeared to tell him she was pregnant, imagine that.
She already knew that he was happy to marry for convenience—why not for a child? It had nothing to do with her.
But still, there was that tiny hint of spring, down there in all that gray she’d been lost in since July. Even if it seemed to her a cruel trick of fate that all the time she tried to convince herself that she was getting over him, that she was moving on with her life, fate had been making sure she couldn’t.
It didn’t help that she knew too well that there had been that part of her that wanted to go back to the island all along. That had wanted to see him, once again, just to make sure that nothing had changed.
You mean, to see if something had changed, a voice inside challenged her. Despite everything.
Now, as she sat in the back seat of a sleek car that cut through the London traffic like a knife, she felt awash in too many competing emotions to count. While he sat beside her, typing on his phone and rolling calls as if he didn’t have a care in the world.
In her next life, Carliz thought, she would very much like to come back as a man who could compartmentalize so many things he might as well be a stack of tiny boxes masquerading as a person.
Eventually, the car stopped and Valentino led her into a listed house in a nosebleedingly expensive part of Central London, and that was saying something when one was a literal princess who had grown up in an actual palace. The house had its own entrance round the back, past a mews house that her security was dispatched into by a simple nod of Valentino’s head.
Carliz made as if to follow them, but was stopped short when Valentino merely lifted that brow of his.
She felt...chagrined, at once. Because her body reacted the way it had that night, long ago now. As if his command over her was absolute—but worse than that, as if she wanted it that way. Immediately, she could feel that telltale slickness between her legs. It made her want to wail out in a deep kind of grief that she refused to entertain. Not now.
Wailing would be too dramatic for a rainy afternoon. Instead, she simply followed him. As if her body was in control again, when it had already gotten her into a mess of vast proportions. Really, it shouldn’t have a say.
He let her in the back door of a very old house that was small compared to his stark little fortress on the island, but impressive all the same in London. Inside, there were beamed ceilings, uneven floors, and a sense of history with every step. The building itself was so old that it somehow made perfect sense that he had furnished it so minimally, so that the history itself was the centerpiece. It had a slightly richer feel than the more popular Scandinavian and midcentury American look that was all the rage everywhere, and felt cozier for it.
Carliz decided that she hated the fact that she liked both of this man’s homes. She would have fared much better with him if he’d brought her to some hideous corporate flat, all chrome, flash appliances, and the ubiquitous fitness center.
“You must have an excellent interior designer,” she said as she followed him through the built-out kitchen, all greenhousey and skylit. Perhaps, she could admit as she heard the words hang in the air, a bit accusatorily.
She expected his staff to come bustling in, but no one appeared. Instead he stalked before her into his surprisingly bright and airy kitchen, where he began moving around as if this really was his own space. As if no one was around to cater to him at all.
These insights should not have curled in her the way they did, like a soft heat all its own.
“I have never consulted an interior designer,” he said over his shoulder. He turned to look back at her, all arrogance. “I’m not particularly interested in the opinions of others.”
“How foolish of me not to intuit that from your whole...” She eyed him, and chose not to finish the sentence. “My mistake.”
“It is not that I think others should not have opinions,” he said, and she felt the touch of that faded blue gaze. As intense on hers that it felt like a physical caress. Her body reacted as if it was. “But I rarely let them affect me.”
She felt chastised, and that did not sit well. She turned away from him, crossing her arms over her bump, the brightness and unexpectedly welcoming feel of this house of his suddenly grating on her. “I thought you would be marching me into some kind of clinic. The better to poke and prod me so that other people can tell you things I already know. And I think you know, too.”
“Carliz.”
She hated the way he said her name like that. And hated far more that her body could not resist it. Could not resist him. Even now, when she knew what would happen. When she had lived through the ecstasy of that night—and the three bitter months that had followed.
Yet she found herself turning back to him anyway. Despite her ferocious desire to do the opposite. She wanted, desperately, to walk off. To leave him here, surrounded by stark walls and cozy beams. To show him that he had no power over her.
But that would be a lie.
Valentino was watching her with a certain glittering intensity from the other side of the kitchen, the long, central counter block between them. His gaze searched hers for a moment. A breath.
Carliz felt vulnerable in a way she did not like at all.
“I have always done my very best to do my duty,” he told her then, as if he’d come to some kind of heavy conclusion, and it was a dizzying thing to have what she’d thought she’d wanted all this time—Valentino finally talking to her—only to find she didn’t want it after all. Or not like this. Not when the light outside was nothing but a bright gray and in here she was feeling more raw by the moment. “Sometimes what is dutiful comes down to the details. It can be a tedious matter of crossing Ts, dotting Is, and documenting it all, but that does not make it any less of a necessary duty.”
She blinked at that, not sure why it made her feel hollow inside. And after a moment, when it was clear she wasn’t going to respond, he turned his attention back to the mail that had been left on his counter. Stacked neatly in a way that suggested there was some staff, somewhere. If not the butler, housekeeper, and many housemaids scenario he used on the island.
But the longer the silence stretched out between them, the more Carliz wondered if that had been... Not an apology. Not precisely. But an explanation, perhaps, which she supposed might be the same thing to a man like Valentino.
It was as if he was telling her that it wasn’t that he thought she was lying. But that he had to be sure all the same.
Or maybe, came that tart voice within, you are desperate to believe anything good about the man. No matter what he does.
She didn’t realize she let out a sound, some sort of sigh, until she found him looking at her yet again. And everything was raw. The sky above them, through the glass, was the same sort of gray that had been pressing into her for months now.
His baby was inside her. And now he knew.
Nothing was ever going to be the same. Everything had already changed, and they only had six months left to play catch-up before the real change came. Had she truly grasped that when she’d set out for the island this morning? Because right here, standing in a lovingly restored and cleverly remodeled kitchen in Central London, a world away from the palace in Las Sosegadas or his own island castle, she couldn’t believe she’d been so determined to hurry that change along.
“Carliz,” he said again, though his tone was different this time, as if he felt the rawness as much as she did. “I—”
And though her heart pattered about foolishly, almost too foolishly to bear, he never finished.
Because there was a knock on the door and then it opened almost immediately. And as a small crowd marched inside, it took her moment to get her bearings. Again.
By the time she did, she had been escorted into a small reception room and ushered into a seat while various medical personnel buzzed all around her. There were tests, a small interrogation dressed up like a medical exam, and within an hour there was no more doubt. Is were dotted and Ts were crossed.
Carliz was now officially having Valentino Bonaparte’s baby.
“I have my people working on this,” Valentino told her, his voice grave.
She couldn’t read him at all. Everyone had left again and it was just the two of them, sitting across from each other in a very old room with entirely too much information between them. This could mean anything. There were the years they’d played games around the truth of what had happened in Rome, a lightning bolt out of the blue that had never made sense, but was real all the same. There was the memory of the night they’d shared. And there was now the proof—to his satisfaction, apparently—that they had made a child out of all of that.
“Which part of this do you mean?” she asked, as if she had mistaken this for a charming garden party of some sort.
He stood and it made her heart hurt, then, that he was dressed so formally. That he had been dressed like that earlier. When he could not have known that she would descend upon him the way she had.
Meaning he needed that formality. That austere uniform of his.
She watched him cross to the fire and stand there, as if gathering his thoughts.
It poked at her, that he did not seem to have a casual setting. That there was only this. Valentino Bonaparte, the dutiful heir. Picture-perfect in every way.
Oddly enough, though she understood all the pressures that could lead to living that way, watching him wear the weight of it made her want to weep.
“These are the things that will occur,” he told her, in a quiet voice that was a lot like that voice he’d used on that dreadful morning after. So certain. So terrible. “We will marry, and quickly. It is regrettable that there will be inevitable speculation about the nature of our relationship these past few years. There already has been, as I’m sure you’re aware, following the wedding.”
“I have spent absolutely no time at all following anyone’s thoughts on what happened that day,” Carliz said, sharply. “It might surprise you to learn that your wedding and what happened after was not something that I wish to relive.”
Something flashed across his stern face and the ache in her intensified. But when he shot her one of those dark, compelling looks of his, she did not falter.
“What astounds me,” he said, sounding more and more as if he was actually having a feeling by the moment, “is that I go out of my way to live as blameless a life as possible. I have tried in every arena to act with honor, respect, and dignity. And yet, through no fault of my own, I am consistently and repeatedly dragged back down into a mud not of my own making.”
“Yes,” Carliz murmured with entirely false sympathy. “Poor little billionaire. What a tragedy it is to have even one moment of one day that is outside of your express control.”
The look he shot her then, all affront and astonishment, might have made her laugh on another day. But she was too churned up inside. There was too much happening, here in this quiet room, where she wanted more than anything else to scream.
But she locked that away inside, because she didn’t want to give him the satisfaction.
Or maybe she was afraid that if she started screaming, she wouldn’t stop.
It began to occur to her that maybe she had not been getting over him the way she’d thought she had been. That maybe all of that gray listlessness had been grief and mourning, not simply a new state of being.
But none of that mattered now.
“In any case,” he said, biting off his words, “we will get married here. I will not add an illegitimate child to the list of—”
“The list of what?” she asked, maybe a little sharply. “Slings and arrows thrust upon you, not of your own making? Because that’s not how I remember that night, Valentino.”
She was certain that she had intended to be civilized. But there was something about the fact that he was mad that wrecked all of her good intentions. If there’d been a heavy enough object nearby, she rather thought she would have flung it straight at his head.
“The doctors say you’re in your second trimester. But all is well.” His jaw tensed. His nostrils flared. “I am glad.”
“Yes. Noticeably glad, I’d say. The kind of gladness that fills whole rooms.”
“We will have to fashion the appropriate contracts,” he said then, sounding almost bored. And when that opaque mask settled onto his features once again, she felt it like a hand around her throat. Choking her. Leaving her feeling claustrophobic. Her fingers twitched with the urge to go stick her fingers into that mask, like maybe she could peel it away. As if it was made of a hard plastic and not simply his will.
“Yes, naturally, there will be contracts,” she agreed. “I’m sure you will have a great many offensive clauses for the palace’s legal team to object to. But there is another wrinkle.” He only stared back at her, as if daring her to continue. For some reason, that made her feel... Almost merry. “I am a princess of Las Sosegadas, as you know. That means that I cannot legally marry anyone without the permission of the sovereign.”
“That is archaic.”
“So are monarchies. Literally.” Carliz shrugged. “Mila has always assured me that she will give me no quarrel in this area, but then, you are a special case. I suspect she already dislikes you.”
“I have never met your sister.”
“No, but I am her baby sister. And according to all the tabloids, you broke my heart. It’s possible she holds a grudge.” She sighed as if, upon consideration, she liked his chances even less. “She is a just and fair-minded queen but she does hold a wicked personal grudge, it has to be said.”
“Everything I have ever heard about your sister suggests she is eminently practical,” Valentino replied, in that tone of great authority, as if the things he’d heard were more correct than her lived experience as Queen Emilia’s best friend and only true confidante. “I doubt very much that she is interested in the kind of scandal that will ensue if her sister to have a child out of wedlock.”
“Maybe,” Carliz said airily, because that was more likely to annoy him than if she exploded in temper the way she wanted to do. “Then again, it might make me more relatable. That’s of great concern to the palace these days. Relatability. Mila is forever weighing how to appear approachable, yet iconic. All at the same time.”
“Then I suggest you call her right now,” Valentino said, in that silken threat of a voice. His pale gaze moved over her like fire. “And explain to her that she has two options. She can cheerfully approve your marriage or she can oppose it. If it is the former, felicitations will abound on all sides. If it is the latter, you will be legally married in every single country on the planet...except hers.”
He let that sink in, in case she was tempted to misunderstand what he meant.
“I’ll be sure to make her well aware that you said that,” Carliz told him.
And in the end, that wasn’t even necessary. Mila laughed when Carliz called. “I knew it,” she said with the sort of glee she never showed in public. “And I’m not even going to ask you about complicated timing, overlaps with previous brides-to-be, or any of the rest of it. The heart will do as it pleases.”
“I hope that’s how you explain it to Mother.”
Her sister laughed again, and Carliz almost felt as if things might be all right. At last. “Absolutely not. I am not taking that bullet for you, my darling sister. You will have to tell her yourself.”
“Or she can find out in the papers like everyone else.” Carliz laughed too, and it was if surrendering to a little levity changed everything, even the sullen British weather outside. She could see a bit of sunshine out there, trying wanly to illuminate a hedge or two in the garden. “I can’t wait to hear if she finds Valentino Bonaparte appropriate.”
“No one will ever be good enough for you,” Mila said, her serene voice uncharacteristically absent, then. She sounded fierce. She sounded like a big sister. “Such a man can never and will never exist. So what I hope is that this time, Valentino has taken some time to reflect on his good luck that you will have him. And how little he deserves it.”
“I will be certain to let him know,” Carliz whispered.
Then she sat there in the reception room over the garden where he’d left her to make her call, staring about sightlessly. Because Mila had undone her. Effortlessly.
Her sister had not used or breathed the word scandal. She had not reminded Carliz of her promise never to embarrass the crown. She had acted as if this was all...perfectly reasonable and worth being happy about, even.
It made Carliz want to lie down somewhere and cry.
But she had no time for that, because she was in this strange old house that felt stuffed full of Valentino’s presence even when he wasn’t in the same room. She stood then, feeling far shakier than she’d like. For a moment she thought she might swoon like some overset princess of yore, felled by nothing at all, but then she remembered. She’d flown into Italy the previous night so she could catch the early tide and walk out to the island. She’d been so agitated, or what she had chosen to call determined, that she’d merely gulped down a few biscotti and set out.
She was starving. Not swooning and fainting because she was overcome by emotion.
Not yet, anyway.
Carliz put her hand over her belly and massaged the little bit of roundness that seemed obvious and prominent to her. It told her there was a baby in there, as odd as that seemed to her.
Though the oddness didn’t keep her from that fierce rush of love she’d felt the moment she’d known. Before she’d let herself think about the practicalities.
That love grew stronger by the day and fiercer by the minute.
“Don’t you worry,” she murmured to her bump. “It doesn’t matter if your father is terrible. He will do his duty by you.” She shook her head at that, hating the bitter way that the words sat in her mouth. “But I will love you enough for both of us, I promise.”
And she felt somehow cheered by that, no matter her emotions. They were buffeting her like one storm after the next and had been since that grotty toilet stall in New York. The reason she felt shaky now wasn’t those emotions. It wasn’t that she was in Valentino’s presence, because she had been all day.
This was pure physiology and that felt a bit like a reprieve. She was a pregnant woman who needed food, the end.
She picked her way through the house, back to the kitchen, and slowed as she entered. Because Valentino was there. He was dark and tall and gorgeous, and aggressively male simply because he was him. But the truly astonishing thing was that he appeared to be...cooking, though she found her brain could not accept that as a possibility.
“You must be hungry,” he said gruffly. Almost angrily, as if she was being hungry at him—
But she stopped herself from that train of thought. She had a sudden memory of her father from back when she’d been nothing but a naughty teenager. Her group of friends had gotten in a little bit too much trouble at boarding school and Carliz had been called before the king to account for herself, which she had done. But in a manner far too flippant for his taste.
He had shouted at her. And while he was not averse to expressing his disappointment in her in as many ways as possible, always hoping she might listen and shape up, he had never been the kind of man who shouted. She had been stunned into silence.
The king had sighed and pressed his fingers to one temple. You could have been hurt, he had said quietly. And it is easier to be angry about that than to accept the fact that sometimes, Carliz, your disregard for your own safety terrifies me.
She couldn’t get that out of her mind. She watched Valentino’s crisp, economical movements as he chopped things and then swept them into a bowl, moving around this kitchen as if he spent a great deal of time preparing food for himself here.
Maybe he wasn’t angry at her. Maybe he was simply scared, as anyone would be. Of the future. Of this new life they were going to have to do their best to raise well. Or of the two of them together, for that matter. Married to each other. Somehow figuring out how to build a life from all these bright, painful scraps of almost that they’d been running from for so long.
Maybe he didn’t know how to speak of these things.
And could she blame him? Neither did she.
Carliz went and slid onto one of the stools set on the other side of the counter, blinking when she needed more room than usual. Then smiling at that, because it would not be long before her belly impeded her from sitting in all kinds of places in the way she was used to.
It would be only one of many changes, one right after the next, resulting in the birth of a small human who would change everything even more, and irrevocably.
The truth was that it was impossible to really imagine. It was impossible to speculate on the magnitude of that change.
So instead, she said, “I’m very hungry, as a matter of fact. Thank you.”
He had taken off his jacket and rolled up his shirt sleeves to cook, and there was something unbearable about it. Something so beautiful and poignant in the sight of his exposed forearms. All of those astonishing muscles coming together to do something so parochial as cook a meal.
“Someday I will take cooking lessons,” she told him, as if she was making a confession. “I’ve always wanted to. I cooked a very little bit when I lived in halls at university. I can make a mean Bolognese, I want you to know. But I’ve always wanted to be the sort of person who can open a cupboard, scan the available ingredients, and come up with a whole meal. All of it delicious and bordering on gourmet.”
“I was taught that cooking for oneself is a life skill,” he said, though his voice...changed as he said that. As if he hadn’t meant to say anything.
“I’m surprised to hear that.” Carliz sighed happily when he slid a pair of dishes in front of her. One plate sported a fluffy omelet smothered in bright, cheerful vegetables. On the other was a stack of buttered toast. “I would have thought you had nearly as much staff as I did, growing up.”
He stood across from her, bracing himself against the counter, but it was his expression that stopped her midbite.
“Our housekeeper made it a game,” he said quietly, though not in that controlled quiet way he had. This was much rougher. “When I was young, I often played in the kitchens. I learned how to cook and to clean, all skills she assured me would serve me well no matter my station in life.”
“She sounds like a wise woman,” Carliz said, but carefully, because there was a stillness about him that she didn’t understand. And a kind of bitterness in his gaze. “For here you are, capable of producing a fine meal at the drop of a hat, all on your own. I promise you that I cannot do the same.”
“Ginevra made me think that she taught me these things for my own good,” Valentino said, and now the bitterness was in his voice, too. “But she did not. It was all a part of the sick games I did not even realize were being played all around me. So yes, Carliz, I can cook. But what I taste is betrayal no matter what spices I use.”
She thought he would turn and stalk off at that, but he didn’t. He pushed back from the counter, shifting back until he could lean against the cupboards and cross his arms.
Carliz had seen him stand like that before. It never boded well.
“I take it your sister was amenable.” It wasn’t really a question.
Carliz returned to the task of eating, though she could no longer taste the food. There were too many questions whirling around in her head and more, she felt for him. She wanted to go to him and offer him comfort for the childhood that still brought him pain—but she knew he would not accept it. Not from her, not from anyone.
That made her feel for him even more deeply.
She forced herself to take a few bites, then picked up the linen napkin he’d placed by her plate and pressed it to her mouth. “Mila was lovely about the whole thing,” she said as she lowered the napkin. “She never mentioned the scandal of it, though I know that must be a consideration. And I know that is your primary consideration. But I think there are other things that we should consider.”
Carliz could sense his disapproval, though that closed-off expression didn’t change. “Such as?”
“Maybe, Valentino, just maybe, I don’t want to marry a man who doesn’t like me at all,” she said quietly. “A man who has spent the bulk of what can only loosely be called our relationship doing his best to get away from me. Why would I want to marry a man like that?”
To her surprise, he smiled.
It was a dark thing, a hard curve of sensual and stern lips.
But it was hardwired deep into all the parts of her she’d been so sure had frozen into disuse over the past three months. She’d been so sure it would never again be a factor, having learned her lesson at last.
She had been wrong about that. Very wrong. Because one little smile, one little spark, and she was engulfed in flames once again.
“I can think of at least one excellent reason to marry me, Principessa,” Valentino said in that low, stirring way of his. “Do you need me to remind you what that is?”