Forbidden Royal Vows

Chapter Four

CHAPTER FOUR

A FEW WEEKS later Caius helped himself to a drink at the latest party he had been invited to personally and not as an escort to someone else, looked around yet another crowded ballroom, and congratulated himself on a campaign waged well.

He had single-handedly made Las Sosegadas a premier destination for the very rich and very, very bored set, who were always listlessly trailing from yacht to beach, complaining that the dog days of August were tedious in the extreme.

Now they were all cavorting about this pretty little jewel of a mountain kingdom instead, swanning up and down the boulevards and talking in their disaffected drawls as if they’d spent their whole lives holidaying in the kingdom.

“Why broil on the beach when we can be in the mountains instead?” brayed one pouting, supposedly fashionable heiress with a breathlessness she considered her trademark. She waved her cocktail in a manner designed to draw the eyes of her rivals and friends, clustered near the looming pillar. It drew Caius’s gaze too, though not for the same reasons. “Besides, I prefer my skin to look like porcelain, not leather.”

Hotels were suddenly overbooked all over the kingdom. Housing prices skyrocketed as the sorts of people who liked a fashionable pied-à-terre wherever they might find themselves found their way here.

And all Caius had to do was the same thing he always did: wander about these same parties with a smirk on his face. Very much as if he knew something everyone else didn’t, the better to drive them all mad.

Because without exception, they all threw themselves into a frenetic competition to pretend they knew exactly what it was that Caius Candriano knew. Whatever it happened to be.

It worked like a charm every time.

That was the power of the mask he’d learned to wear.

It had taken very little time to ingratiate himself with the grand hostesses of the realm, who, naturally, quickly found him indispensable. Was it even a party, they queried each other both in public and private, if Caius was not in attendance?

But he was always in attendance. And he had merited his own invitation shortly after that first party at the palace, followed by every invitation. To everything. It was child’s play to make certain that he turned up wherever the Queen was expected.

Sometimes he even got to talk to her, though he made no effort to do so.

Because he knew she expected him to do just that. To push . To encroach . And the more she expected him to do it, the less he tried.

The glorious result of that was that every night he went out to an event where the Queen was expected, he could feel her temper rise as if she was holding the flame of it to his own skin.

A flame that grew higher and higher each evening he wandered through rooms she was in, pretending he was unaware of her presence. Or better yet, uninterested.

Tonight it was nearing inferno levels, that temper of hers he could feel from clear across the ballroom.

It was possible that he enjoyed it a little too much. Particularly because he knew that he was the only one who could see it. To everyone else, she might as well have been a portrait of herself, stood in her usual place so they could gaze at her from afar.

There was something about that notion that got under his skin, worrying its way deep.

“You should make me your one-man tourism board,” he told her later that night when they ended up seated next to each other at the long, sumptuous banquet table.

Not because he had asked for such a manipulation, because he hadn’t. He wouldn’t. But because the hostess thought she was doing Her Majesty the great favor of bestowing Caius’s much-sought-after company upon her. He was the prize at these gatherings.

Accordingly, he beamed at Mila and smiled lazily as she committed acts of restrained violence against each and every course that was brought before her.

“We already have a tourism board.” She stabbed a succulent shrimp with the tines of her fork. Hard. “And I was unaware that you had ever worked for a living. Or at all.”

“You can be sure, Your Majesty, that I’m very good at...” He waited for her gaze to find his, clearly against her will. He let his smile get even lazier and tinged with wickedness. “Working.”

He should not have taken so much pleasure in making her react. But he did. There was something about watching the hint of color bloom in her cheeks. About tracking the precise tautness of her lips. Because Caius liked that he could see beneath her mask when no one else seemed aware it was there.

Having seen beneath it, how could he keep himself from trying to pry it off?

Or pretending he might pry it off, anyway. Out here in public, where anyone can see—something he was certain she sat up nights worrying about.

Just so long as you think of me , he’d said when she’d said something like that, though in a way that suggested her worry was cool and rational. Not hot and bothered and yearning at four a.m., the way he often was.

“How curious,” she said now, in that cool, repressive tone that he could feel directly in his sex. It made him grin. “I was under the impression that you were nothing but a dilettante. Flitting about Europe like an intoxicated butterfly.”

“I have also spent rather a lot of time on the West Coast of America,” he said, grinning wider at that faint narrowing of her gaze that was as loud as shout to him. “It’s the most interesting place. A very rugged sort of beauty. Not nearly as manicured as the Continent can be.” He let his smile go guileless. “Have you been? On a state visit, perhaps?”

She did not dignify that with either a glare or a reply. She turned to the person on her other side instead, engaging the older woman in what sounded like a very dull discussion of economic programs that had failed to achieve their stated goals.

When the next course came, she returned her attention to Caius with a baleful sort of glare. Because, he knew, she would have continued to ignore him all night but that would elicit as much comment—maybe more. She was expected to divide the favor of her notice equally and Mila was scrupulous when it came to managing the expectations put upon her.

He would have made a terrible queen, he had often thought.

“How long do you intend to grace the kingdom with your presence?” she asked.

“I had originally thought to stay only a day or so.” He leaned back in his chair so he could lounge at her, boneless and unfazed by her regal consequence, which was not strictly polite. But then again, he was already the darling of society here, and everywhere. He was allowed leeway and what was the point of such allowances if he couldn’t take advantage of it. “I am looking into buying some property here.”

“Whatever for?”

“Surely your kingdom’s charms advertise themselves, Your Majesty.”

“I have always found the charms of the kingdom profound. It is the kind of place that becomes a part of a person’s soul.” That smile of hers flashed then, and he saw how easily she could make it a weapon. She aimed it straight at him. Then held it to his throat. “Are you in possession of one of those?”

Caius should not have found himself disarmed. So easily.

But he was.

Later, maybe, he would piece together what happened just then. That flash of the girl he remembered there in that gleaming gaze of hers, for only him to see. And the joy of it, that unexpected attack.

She’d enjoyed it, and so he had, too.

“I doubt I have ever known the touch of a soul,” he answered honestly. And quite without meaning to. “Yet somehow I muddle along.”

“Pretending, is that it?” Mila was no longer stabbing at her food. And though he knew better than to indulge this in public, he could feel the current between them then, blocking out everything else. When that was nothing but dangerous. “Just preening in the dead center of whatever stage you can find? Playing whatever role will get you whatever it is you want in that moment?”

He forgot himself entirely. “I thought that was your role. Your entire objective is to disappear until you become your own statue, is it not?”

And they were both lucky, he thought, that the hostess chose that precise moment to surge to her feet and start making proclamations in the form of a deferential speech, so that no one heard him.

But Mila did.

There were cheers all around, applause and toasts, but their gazes seemed tangled together with too many ghosts in between.

Until she tore her gaze away and cooled back into her preferred state of flesh become stone, the perfect queen.

The next morning, he woke before dawn, as was his custom. Though he went to great lengths not to let that sort of thing get out. It would ruin his reputation as a debauched hedonist entirely.

Caius slipped out of his hotel before the sun’s rays fully penetrated the grand valley. He went on a long, hard run, out there beside the sparkling alpine water of the Royal Lake.

But no matter how many kilometers he ran, or how fast he ran them, he couldn’t outrun Mila.

And it was only when he was out there with his legs pumping, his heart pounding, and his breath coming hard and fast to remind him that he was alive, that he accepted the fact that seeing her like this—all the time, but never close enough to touch, not really—was perhaps backfiring.

Because the truth was that he’d expected that he would have one or two interactions with her and no longer find it necessary to even play these games. Or he had hoped. He had assumed that the girl he had known was the part she’d played, and that there would be no trace of her in the dauntingly serene Queen Emilia .

Instead, he could see the girl he’d known peering out of the Queen’s eyes sometimes. Every time her cheeks flushed, but only slightly. Every time there was that snap of temper in her gaze that no one else seemed to notice.

He could see her there, peering out. Reminding him that he hadn’t made her up. That she had existed all this time. She was just there , just out of reach.

With only the small matter of a throne and a crown between them.

He ran for hours and when he made it back to his hotel, he wasn’t surprised to find all kinds of messages on his mobile. He ignored them. And when the phone rang as he stood there, gulping down water and staring out the window at the palace that rose on the hill, he almost ignored it.

But that would only make call more .

“Caius,” said his sister when he answered, “what in the world are you doing? Since when do you hunker down in one place like this? I’ve never known you to turn your back on your vagabond ways. It’s chilling.”

“Good morning, Lavinia,” Caius replied mildly. “That’s a bit dramatic, don’t you think? It’s been a few weeks. Not years.”

“You once told me that anything more than a long weekend in a place was dangerous. Roots might spring up when you least expected it and hold you there forever.”

“That sounds like teenage poetry and I, happily, never wrote such trash.”

Though he had almost certainly said exactly that when he was an adolescent. It sounded like him.

Lavinia laughed at that, because the two of them were the only members of their sprawling, complicated, maddening family who had always gotten on. Probably because they had endured such a nomadic existence when they were young, forever being dragged from one hotel to the next, in service to their mother’s bottomless need for attention.

In those days, the Countess—as his mother preferred to be known, though her pretensions to the title were questionable at best—had in fact been homeless. But that was not a word anyone used when the person in question was of a certain social strata.

Or when she was a particular strain of attractiveness. The right width. The right way of dressing. The right friends, the right parties, the right way of manipulating events until she got what she wanted.

Another word for his mother was grifter , but it was so impolite to say such things out loud.

Along with other words like narcissist. Alcoholic.

Countess was easier.

“I know why you’re calling me,” Caius said. “I would have thought my not answering was its own clear message.”

Lavinia laughed again. “The Countess is becoming alarmingly tedious about this. She refuses to ask you herself, but she will be absolutely devastated if you don’t come to this wedding of hers.”

“I was at her last five weddings. Speaking of tedium.”

“She claims this one is different.”

“She always does,” he reminded his sister. “And why are you accepting her calls? Last I heard, you vowed not to be a party to this nonsense any longer.”

“Someone has to answer her calls,” his sister said, with the sort of defeated sigh he recognized only too well. Having made that sound himself more than he cared to recall.

He could hear some city or other in the background of wherever she was. Honking horns, spirited snatches of conversation. Whole lives that were conducted without the slightest interest in what one deranged woman they happened to be related to was or wasn’t doing.

“That is false,” he told his sister. “Someone always does answer her calls, but that doesn’t mean you need to be that person, Lavi.” He pronounced it Lovey , as he had since they were small. An unfair weapon then and now. “Besides, she has other children.”

“None of them would dare call you,” Lavinia said with a cackle. “They are far too protective of their own skins. I find it absolutely hilarious that the papers are filled with all the stories of ‘Caius Candriano, the most beloved and delightful guest at every society event,’ but anyone who knows you knows the truth. You’re a holy terror.”

“There is absolutely no difference in my behavior anywhere I go,” Caius told her with great dignity. He took another swig of his water, still glaring out at that palace. “I can’t help it if our family doesn’t like the way I tell a truth.”

“Tell yourself whatever you need to,” Lavinia said with an audible eye roll. “The Countess is getting married again, whether we like it or not. I don’t even know what number it is, because I have chosen not to process the final tally. As it so often changes.”

“I cannot for the life of me understand why you’re engaging with this, Lavi.”

But she continued as if he hadn’t spoken. “It would be one thing if you were simply unreachable, forever here, forever there. But it seems as if you’ve settled in this place. You’re in the papers every day. How would it look if you couldn’t come to your own mother’s wedding?”

“One can only hope it will be seen as a complete lack of interest in a very boring subject, as we all know there will be another wedding to attend.” Caius rubbed his hand over his face but the palace was still there, looming, when he opened his eyes again. Mila might as well have been on the other side of the glass, staring him down with that look of hers, unknowable and imperious at once.

“Have you met him?” Lavinia asked.

“I don’t need to meet him.”

“Anyway, Caius,” she said in the resigned tone of one who is forced to soldier on despite unforeseen and obnoxious resistance, “it will hurt her feelings if you don’t make an appearance.”

“You and I both know that the Countess does not have any feelings.”

“Forgive me.” This time the sigh was aggrieved and aimed directly at him. “What I meant to say is that you are by far her most famous offspring. She will be humiliated and outraged if you don’t turn up the way she wants. You know how she gets when that happens.”

“Goodbye Lavinia,” Caius said in the same mild voice he’d been using all along, because he knew it would annoy her. “Stop doing her dirty work.”

And he could hear his laughing as he rang off.

He stayed where he was for a moment, frowning down at his mobile and wondering if he should add insult to injury and give his father a call. Just to see how badly the old man was messing up his life these days, what with his addictions to fast cars, too much gambling, and making a mockery of his family’s once good name.

It was enough to give a man a complex, if Caius was the kind of man who allowed himself such things. But that was another thing that had never been allowed when he was a child. Only his mother was permitted feelings.

And hers were operatic.

He and Lavinia were the oldest of his mother’s five children. Each of them was the product of a different father and all of those fathers also had other children elsewhere. This had led to what Caius liked to call the dark comedy of family events, not that anything was ever very funny. But because the Countess had kept Caius and Lavinia with her for the longest period of time—there being at least ten years between Caius and the next in line, which had led to all kinds of bonding between him and his older sister—the two of them had always considered themselves their own family.

As for the rest, he sometimes had to do a bit of research on his Wikipedia page to figure out all the ins and outs of who he was related to.

If asked in public, he liked to make a joke of it. There were all kinds of unflattering terms to describe a woman like his mother, who was forever jumping from one man to the next and having babies many of them as possible, so that they were forced to feel responsible for her forever. There were many ways to describe the kind of woman who made her living that way, but because the Countess came with a pedigree and had a claim to exiled royalty of one form or another, no one ever used those terms. No one would dare.

The fact that she was a cruel, vain, vicious woman seemed to trouble absolutely no one at all. She wandered from man to man, dragging her kids along as props and abandoning them to hotel staff when she bored of them, or might be asked to parent in some way. She threw them into schools then yanked them out again, without caring at all how they might feel about it—and woe betide anyone if they complained or so much as drew her attention when she was not in the mood to remember their existence.

She had left Caius on his own in a hotel room in Berlin once for bothering her. She’d sent for him ten days later, and had punished him for the inconvenience. He had been eight.

Caius had hated every moment of his childhood.

But he had made that same kind of lifestyle his entire personality as he grew older. He was a man who followed his limbs whoever they took him. He had not allowed himself to stop and attempt to fix his childhood, because if he did, that might indicate that it needed that fixing in the first place. That he did.

And he had decided at some point in his adolescence that he was perfect as he was.

There was absolutely no need to change a thing.

One significant benefit of growing up the way he had was that he could charm anyone. He’d had to do it more times than he could recall—at his mother’s command or to get out of a tricky situation—and now he chose to use that skill all the time. He could charm anyone. He could fit in anywhere. He could be anything to anyone, and he had taken pride in that.

Until Mila.

And that was the part he couldn’t forgive, not even after all this time. She had looked at him as if she could see who he really was. Not the person he pretended to be. Not the role he’d been playing all his life.

She had spent only those few months with him and she had been a revelation.

And all of it was a lie.

Maybe, he thought as he looked out the window at her palace, he shouldn’t blame her for that. Maybe it was his fault for imagining that what had happened between them could be real once they let the world back in. Because he really should have known better. He had always prided himself on being a realist.

And then one look at her and it was as if he’d never learned a thing.

Maybe he needed to accept that even though he’d vowed that he would never marry—so he could never divorce, much less as many times as his parents had—he had gone ahead and done it anyway.

And maybe he really should go to his mother’s latest wedding, where he would learn her husband’s name just in time for them to separate, because it might teach him a valuable lesson that he’d never wanted to learn.

He was exactly the same as everyone else in his tangled and embarrassing family tree. He was certainly no better than the rest of them.

It had been madness to think so.

Caius stared out at the palace where Mila was, there and yet gone the way he should have known she always was and ever would be, and let out a kind of groan that seemed to come from deep in his bones.

He would give her that divorce. He should have done it long ago.

Then he would leave this pretty kingdom of hers and he would never come back. He would never stay put anywhere, ever again, because that was what he knew. That was who he was.

Slow down and your devils can find you , his mother had liked to say when she was drunk. You’ll meet yours soon enough, my boy. You are one.

And he thought that really, he should never have imagined that he could be a different kind of man than the one the Countess had raised.

Just a pretty face, a charming smile, and the good sense to never overstay his welcome.

That night, he dressed exquisitely. Everywhere he went in the ballroom du jour women watched him, laying down palm fronds with their covetous gazes.

Caius knew he was resplendent. Just as he knew Mila would be able to see him even if he wasn’t, the moment she entered the gala.

He would simply have to take comfort in the fact that she would read about him in the tabloids forever. And that he would do the same.

It was more than some people had, but at least he could make sure she would never forget him.

“Have you heard?” one of his companions asked him. When he only looked at her and shook his head, she clapped her hands together. “The Queen is looking for a husband at last. Everyone is talking about it.”

“Is she indeed.”

And the woman beside him saw only his charm. His smile. Not the chasm that had opened wide beneath him and was filled with sharp teeth that were now sinking into him, deep.

“Maybe you should apply for the position,” the woman said, laughing shrilly. She even put her hand on his arm, as if they were friends. As if he was alive. “Wouldn’t that be a laugh? Can you imagine King Caius ?”

But that was going to be a problem, he thought, his gaze on Her Majesty as she entered the room in a sweep of deep lavender and gray serenity.

Because it turned out, he could imagine King Caius.

Vividly.