Crowned for His Son (Royals of Cartana #1)

Chapter One

CHAPTER ONE

‘T O WILD OATS and Mommy issues. The first brought us into the world, the second has kept us on our toes and made us the men we are.’

Prince Azar Domene of Cartana groaned loudly, his crystal flute filled with Dom Perignon lowering a fraction as he shook his head. He could count on Teo making such outrageous toasts every year.

‘ Dios. You could just wish the old man a simple happy birthday so we can get on with the drinking, you know,’ griped Valenti, the older of his twin half-brothers by five and a half minutes. The scar slashing just above his temple twitched as he shook his head.

Teo grinned and punched him in shoulder. ‘I didn’t fly four thousand miles to make mediocre speeches.’

‘And watch it with the old. I’m only three months older than you,’ Azar warned.

Teo grinned. ‘Speaking of wild oats—’

‘Don’t,’ Azar warned, fully anticipating what was coming.

He didn’t need a reminder of those wild six months three years ago. They were branded into his brain indelibly. If there was even a sliver of comfort to be taken from the circumstances surrounding losing his best friend, it was that his half-brothers had been there to offer support.

Teo shrugged. ‘Not talking about it doesn’t mean it’s going to go away.’

To his credit, Teo now spoke in a more sombre tone, respecting the gravity of this part of their history. Of the paths of chaos their mothers had wrought with their bitter rivalry, leading to those ‘Mommy issues’ his brother mocked so glibly.

‘But there’s a time and a place, brother,’ Valenti muttered, sliding his twin a hard, speaking look. ‘Azar’s birthday may not be the right time. Hell, you own and run a multi-billion-dollar fashion house. How do you not know the art of subtlety and nuance?’

‘You know the part of the ostrich I like?’ Teo asked as Valenti rolled his eyes. Then he sobered. ‘Their feathers. You can make a sexy statement with those. The burying their head in the sand part? Not so much.’

‘You’re so busy pushing everyone into doing “the right thing”,’ Valenti said, with mocking air quotes. ‘What about you?’

Azar watched Teo’s face tighten with a punch of curiosity and pity. Those wild months in the Arizona desert, in Paradise Valley, had taken their toll in one way or the other. Valenti had delved deeper into his usual frozen solitude while Teo, the polar opposite of his twin, had given debauched revelry a run for its money.

Although they’d never spoken of it, Azar was very aware that his brothers had arrived in Arizona straight from a visit to their father, weighed down with more baggage than usual.

‘There’s nothing to report,’ Teo answered, surprising them all. ‘Sometimes you just have to cut your losses.’

Azar watched Valenti’s eyes widen and knew he was about to probe deeper, verify whether he spoke of their father or mother. Or if it had something to with the new creative director he’d hired. He was going to intercept by speaking words he wished he didn’t have to. But they were necessary, if only to quiet the demons for a hot second.

‘Another toast. And, yes, I can make a toast on my own birthday.’ He tightened his gut and raised his glass, his chest burning with anger, regret and shame-coated bitterness. ‘To absent friends.’

Teo’s face shuttered. A muscle ticked in Valenti’s jaw. For a handful of seconds they said nothing, all three dwelling on memories. Azar knew both Teo and Valenti felt guilty for being caught up in their own drama and not realising the chaos unravelling in Arizona until it was too late.

Teo raised his glass. A beat later, Valenti followed suit. ‘To absent friends.’

Azar nodded in gratitude.

Courtesy of his father’s wild-oat-sowing history—siring three sons born within months of each other by two different women—he’d learned a hard lesson in not glossing over things. Secrets led to festering wounds and shattered trust. Hell, he wouldn’t be toasting his absent friend if he’d taken his own advice three years ago. Nick’s death had been senseless and deeply shocking, a product of suppressed sentiments and acute misunderstanding that would’ve been salvaged if everything had been laid out in the open.

He couldn’t lay the entire blame on Nick or himself. No, a good chunk of that laid with another. The woman who’d created carnage, disappeared from the scene of the accident that had taken Nick’s life, and then seemingly off the face of the earth. It grated deeply that neither the police nor his own expert security team had been able to locate her after all this time. Depriving him of essential closure and, yes, a little retribution.

But that was an ongoing task he wasn’t going to dwell on today, on his thirty-fifth birthday. Not when he had other news to impart. Since it wasn’t happy tidings, he’d waited until the party was almost over. His half-brothers would need a minute to process.

‘I have news,’ he said, when another round of champagne had been poured.

‘You’re planning another months-long bender? Count me in,’ Teo said.

He managed a smile, until the weight of destiny wiped it away. ‘Papá is going to call you two this coming week. But I think you should hear it from me first. His health problems are worsening. His doctors say they’ve done all they can.’

Valenti surged to his feet, his champagne forgotten on the table. ‘What? When did this happen?’ His usual gravel-rough voice was even coarser.

‘And why did you wait till now to tell us? You stood there and made me toss out nonsense when you knew this all along?’ Teo growled, his face dark with disappointment and anger.

‘The news wouldn’t have been any different two hours ago. And he didn’t want me to tell you just yet—’

‘Because his bastard sons aren’t important enough to know?’ Teo grated, his nostrils flaring.

Since he knew what it felt like to be an afterthought, to be the unfortunate cog caught between warring spokes, Azar looked his brother in eye and answered firmly. ‘What he thinks doesn’t matter. I told him I wouldn’t keep it from either of you because you deserved to know.’

He let them digest that for a moment, then breathed in relief when they both nodded. Traces of anger lingered on Teo’s face but he folded his arms, his voice hard and serious when he demanded, ‘Has he sought a second opinion?’

Azar’s mouth twisted. ‘What do you think?’

Valenti grunted. ‘I’m sure he’s seen ten different specialists by now.’

‘Try a clean dozen,’ Azar said. ‘Where do you think we got our trust issues from?’

Teo’s mouth twitched, then he exhaled long and hard. ‘I’m calling him before morning. You know that, right?’

There was the faintest whiff of disquiet within the curt response, also familiar to Azar.

That need for a connection that repeatedly eluded all of them.

He nodded, then twisted his glass between his fingers.

‘There’s more?’ Valenti surmised, his eyes narrowing.

There was a reason Valenti excelled as one of the most sought-after security specialists. He watched. He listened. And he missed nothing.

Except that one essential time.

A time Azar knew had scarred his brother for life, driven him deeper into his silent turmoil.

Azar nodded again, fighting the different emotions attacking him. ‘ Sí. He’s stepping down from ruling. I’m to become King in three months.’

Their expressions morphed from sombre to shocked surprise. They didn’t offer immediate congratulations, as members of the soon-to-be-his council had, with their eagerness to switch allegiance and commence with the boot-licking and jostling for power almost nauseating to watch.

Teo spoke first. ‘Are you okay with that?’

Azar debated the tough, exposing question for a minute. It was what he’d been groomed for all his life. All he knew. And despite the odd self-indulgent occasion of wishing for another life, it was all he was destined to be. That unwavering duty had been driven into him from birth.

‘I have to be. For the sake of his health. For the sake of the kingdom.’

Valenti nodded, then a moment later he was offering a one-armed hug. ‘Congrats, hermano . I don’t envy you for a second myself, but you’ve got that kingly crap down to a fine art, so I think you’ll be fine.’

Teo laughed and offered his own hug. Then, ‘I’m guessing lengthy benders are a thing of the past? I’ll take a six-day one, if your kingly duties can swing it.’

‘Any more talk of benders and my first duty as King will be to force you both to use your proper regal titles.’

His brothers reared back, mirrored looks of horror on their faces. ‘Hell, no!’

Azar suspected that their rejection of their titles had something to do with the ugly vitriol with which their mother had fought for them to be titled. His mother had fought for the exact opposite, wanting ‘King Alfonso’s bastards’ —as she’d so scathingly labelled his half-brothers—not to be given their due titles.

There was a certain stain to using blackmail, subterfuge and downright emotional torture to gain the upper hand in the power and prestige dynamics that left a bitter taste in your mouth. Their mothers had fully engaged in both, often with their father absenting himself and leaving his sons at the mercy of the vitriol. That he had been embroiled in all of it through no desire or fault of his own made Azar understand his brothers’ inclination to distance themselves from the darker side of the throne of Cartana.

‘It’s bad enough that our mother insists on calling us by them in public,’ Teo griped.

‘And that you’ve been labelled the “Playboy Prince of The House of Domene”?’ Valenti added, one mocking brow raised at his twin. ‘A clunky mouthful, if you ask me, but if that what you need to ensure you’re not doing badly on the ladies’ front, then I don’t begrudge you…’

Azar started to smile as his brothers mercilessly ribbed each other. Then movement from the corner of his eye snatched his attention and he stared, the blood roaring in his ears.

It wasn’t.

It couldn’t be.

She’d been missing for almost three years. Rumoured to have either walked away from the wreckage or even presumed dead, even though her body had never been found with Nick’s.

It wasn’t her.

Was it?

He was moving before he fully clocked himself. The shattering of glass signalled that he hadn’t set his champagne glass down properly.

‘Hey! What the hell…? Azar? Is everything—?’

‘Excuse me,’ he grated roughly.

But why was she moonlighting as a waitress? Had she fallen this far from grace? Not that being a career hostess and a leech, dedicated to extracting as much money as possible out of billionaires, was in any way a pinnacle of grace.

‘Um…it’s just…you caught me by surprise.’

Azar sucked in a slow, sustaining breath. ‘You just admitted you know who I am.’

She nodded impatiently. ‘Yes. You’re Crown Prince Azar of Cartana. I’ve seen you…and your brothers…in the news—’

She stopped, bit her lip, and now they weren’t pinched at all. They were the deep pink he last recalled them being as they wrapped around his—

‘I’m sorry, I’m not sure what the correct form of address is.’

‘It is Your Highness ,’ Ramon, his head of security and a stickler for protocol, supplied icily.

The tray in her hand wobbled. Her breath stalled as she struggled to keep it upright. Another flick of his wrist and one bodyguard stepped forward and relieved her of it.

‘Wait—what are you doing? I’m working.’

‘Not any more. Come with me.’ While he was used to audiences, large and small, Azar wasn’t in the mood to air this particular item of dirty laundry in public.

He turned, nodded at his security chief, and headed for the corridor leading to his private suite.

‘What—? Why—? I haven’t done anything wrong.’

After a low-voiced warning from Ramon, her footsteps trotted behind him.

The moment she entered his suite her escape was effectively blocked by Ramon and his crew, and the door shut behind them all. He spun around.

‘Now. You have ten seconds to confess the reason behind this poor excuse for a disguise before I have you arrested.’

* * *

Eden stared at the man standing before her. The hands braced on his hips intensified his already formidable aura, rendering him more intimidating, and yet indecently hot enough to slam her heart against her ribcage.

She would’ve thought she was immune to such displays of power, wealth and privilege from drop-dead gorgeous people by now. This was Vegas, after all.

But no.

His Royal Highness the Crown Prince of Cartana was easily head and shoulders above the normal crème de la crème.

She’d been lucky to land this gig when one of the other girls had come down with a chest infection. She’d grabbed it with both hands, even though it had meant scrambling to find childcare for Max. The promise of double pay and a chance to repay her long-suffering elderly neighbour for stepping in with help was too good to pass up.

Except she stood to earn nothing at all if she got herself fired for whatever transgression His Royal Grumpiness deemed she’d committed.

She flinched as the door nicked shut behind her. Her ten seconds had passed. His security guards had left, leaving her alone with the most formidable man she’d ever met.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she ventured briskly.

Prince Azar’s square jaw, a source of infinite fascination in and of itself, with the chin cleft that was a disgraceful personal weakness for her, grew even more eye-catching as it clenched.

He didn’t need to pinch the bridge of his nose in a display of fraying patience. She got that loud and clear as his hands dropped, and he sauntered closer.

Eden would have backed away if her spine hadn’t snapped straight with the welcome reminder that she hadn’t done anything wrong.

During her frantic internet searches once she’d woken from her coma and discovered she was pregnant, most likely with Nick Balas’s baby, she’d come across pictures of this man. But even without the revelation that Crown Prince Azar was friends with Nick, whose car she’d been in that awful night, she knew what kind of man she was dealing with.

Ruthless. Conceited. Silver-spooned. With unfair good looks to match—and, in this one’s case, the breathtaking title of Crown Prince to go with them. And a mile-wide attitude that screamed that the whole world owed them adoration and worship.

Men like her father, who threw their power and privilege around just for the sake of seducing unsuspecting women, whose hearts and lives they shattered irreparably before walking away.

Her mother was one such woman, Eden the product of that kind of careless treatment. The reason her mother had lived in misery her whole life, pining for a man who’d treated her deplorably while lauding his power over her. The reason Eden actively detested men like the one standing before her.

‘This isn’t a costume party, and it isn’t Halloween, so what is it? A prank or a dare?’

His regal head turned, probing the corners and drapes in the room before arching a masculine brow at her.

‘Are your friends recording us right now, ready to jump out with their phone cameras? FYI, I will sue them all for every last cent if they dare to do such a thing. Or is it just something to giggle over later on your own?’

Despite his easy stance, thick layers of tension laced his words. Enough to make her spine of steel sway a little. But the surprising side effect of what she’d been through these last three years was the discovery that she could bend a long way, but she would never break.

The reminder tipped up her chin. ‘Should I not be asking you that? It’s your birthday party after all. So what is it?’ She echoed his question back at him. ‘Play a joke on the help? See whose life you can toy with by getting them fired?’

She blurted the words into her swelling panic. Dear God, if she got fired, paying her rent this month would be near impossible. She was already on the last few hundred in her savings. This double shift was the miracle she’d prayed for.

‘I would’ve thought that would be more the speed of privileged frat boys—not grown crown princes who should know better.’

Dear God, Eden, shut up!

Sadly, the unfairness of it all was choosing tonight of all nights to spill out. Months of keeping it together, of working her fingers to the bone, of lying awake at night praying for that essential gap in her memory to return so wouldn’t feel so…so lost, had eroded the last of her civility.

She wanted to punch and pummel and scream her frustration.

‘Excuse me?’

His words sizzled like ice on a hot griddle as regal fury blazed at her.

‘You had your people manhandle me in here—’

‘They didn’t touch a single hair on your head,’ he interrupted, with blade-sharp precision.

‘They didn’t need to. You waved your hand and they went into intimidation mode. Is that what gets you off? Standing back and watching others dance to your tune?’

‘From where I’m standing there’s very little dancing and a whole load of sass going on,’ he grated. ‘Not to mention a stupid attempt to cling to whatever lies you’re spinning.’

‘What the—?’ Eden took a breath and uncurled fists that had bunched without her conscious knowledge. ‘Look, I know you’re a big deal in royalty, with legions of acolytes on social media and around the world. And I’m sorry if your royal ego is affronted. But the truth is we’ve never met. I’m here on a waitressing gig.’

She waved her hand at the door, every bone in her body straining to sprint for it. But she knew those muscle-bound bodyguards would be waiting—that all it would take for them to restrain her would be another flick of his hand.

‘Maggie, my boss—the woman your people hired to cater your party—is out there, supervising the wait staff. She called me three hours ago and asked me to fill in for a sick colleague. If you don’t believe me, ask her.’

His gaze flicked to the door. Eden almost expected Maggie to materialise out of his sheer willpower alone. A moment later he pinned her again under those ferocious quicksilver eyes she swore could see beneath her skin.

‘You truly want me to believe you think you’ve never met me?’ he breathed in rumbling disbelief.

For the first time, Eden’s certainty fractured. She was reminded of those moments when shards of memory attempted to pierce the otherwise impenetrable fog shrouding those lost months three years ago.

Was he…?

Did he…?

The visceral need to know propelled her towards him, when she should’ve been ending this absurd confrontation and retreating.

The Good Samaritan she’d tracked down weeks after waking from her coma—a man who’d found her with a life-threatening head injury, wandering along the road near a remote truck stop in Southern California—had known very little of what had happened to her. The police, when they’d eventually turned up at the hospital, had only been able to trace her last known whereabouts to a hostel in Vegas, leaving her with no clue as to how she’d ended up in California—save for the possibility that she’d been going to see her mom—or what had happened to rob her of several weeks of her life.

The only tenuous connection—discovered desperate weeks later, after almost driving herself ill to the point of re-hospitalisation—had been the memory of snippets of conversation with Nick, in the Vegas casino where she’d worked.

Nick—another silver-spoon-fed millionaire who had frequently visited the casino where she’d previously worked—had not taken her firm refusal to go on a date with him with good grace. He’d been relentless in his pursuit. Throwing offers of riches and luxury at her feet until he’d realised that she wouldn’t be moved by them. That, in fact, she was repulsed by his obscene display of power and wealth.

He’d changed tack then, and stopped tossing around trips to Paris and life-changing shopping experiences. Instead he’d bought her a hotdog that time he’d caught her on a break. Walked her to the bus stop instead of thinking he could sway her with a ride in his Lamborghini.

It had been during those two curiously well-timed meetings that she remembered him dangling the offer of a job…somewhere. A job lucrative enough that she’d been tempted. But she had no clue whether she’d taken the job, and with the authorities’ very tepid reaction to her half-clues she’d drawn a frustrating blank.

And with Nick dead, and her sole attempt at contacting his family having resulted in the immediate harsh threat of a lawsuit, she’d accepted that dead end.

Her heart leaping into her throat now, she opened her mouth to ask. Only to recall her doctor’s dire warning not to go probing.

Familiar frustration and the naked fear of living permanently with this hole in her memory clawed through her.

Shaking her head, she pushed both heavy sensations away. ‘Are we done here? I’d like to salvage what’s left of my shift, if that’s all right with you?’

* * *

She was lying. Playing games. She had to be.

And yet if she’d been an actress, Azar would’ve fully endorsed an award for that performance.

‘You may leave,’ he said eventually.

He watched her head for the door, her hip-sway admittedly less prominent than it had been the last time he’d watched her walk away, but still hypnotic. Still enough to warm and rouse his shaft. To make his fingers curl into a fist with the need to touch.

Absolutely not happening.

But…

One last test.

‘Eden?’

She glanced over her shoulder in the exact way she had that last time too, the defiant tilt of her chin at once challenging and enthralling. That night it had been enough for him to stalk over to her and demand one last kiss, unaware that she was leaving his bed and going straight into betraying him with his best friend.

She was watching him warily, her breath turning a touch agitated, bringing his attention to the seductive curve of her breasts. ‘Your Highness?’

He ignored her tart tone and delivered his message. ‘We will meet again.’

There was no disadvantage to forewarning her. Now he’d found her again she would need supernatural powers or the help of Houdini himself to slip through his grasp again.

Her silken throat moved, but stopped shy of a swallow. It was almost admirable, the way she fought not to show her alarm. But it didn’t matter. Whatever game she was playing, he would get to the bottom of it.

Then pay her back a hundredfold.

‘Not if I can help it,’ she parried.

Then she slipped through the door, slamming it behind her.

He waited all of ten seconds before he yanked the door open. Ramon and his men hovered outside the door, along with his half-brothers.

Teo and Valenti sauntered in, eyes the same colour as his examining him keenly.

‘Want to fill us in on what’s going on?’ asked Teo. ‘I mean, she’s hot, sure…but you can’t just ditch us and—’

‘You don’t remember her?’ This came from Valenti.

Teo frowned. ‘Should I?’

Valenti’s droll gaze said he was internally rolling his eyes. ‘She’s the girl. From Arizona.’

Teo’s jaw dropped, but before he could speak Azar raised a hand, directing his next words to his security chief.

‘Follow her. Do not let her out of your sight. I want to know where she goes, who she sees, where she lives. I want to know everything there is to know about Eden Moss by midnight. Understood?’