Forbidden Royal Vows

Chapter Five

CHAPTER FIVE

“C OULD YOU PLEASE tell me why it is,” Mila said in an undertone to her mother, her perfect smile never wavering, “that every man on the palace grounds who does not work here appears to be looking at me?”

“You are the Queen of Las Sosegadas. Pray, where else should they look?”

“They are looking at me less like I am their beloved sovereign and more as if I am a piece of meat hanging in a marketplace,” Mila replied, bestowing her smile upon a group of women, who did not make her want to check to see if she’d accidentally walked out of her dress before exiting the palace. “And what is more, I believe you know it.”

Beside her, Alondra was gazing serenely about, with an air of satisfaction that boded ill. “Your Majesty, forgive me, but I am unaware of any time you have spent in any marketplaces. Particularly marketplaces that have raw meat hanging on display.”

Mila was far too well trained to give her mother the look that comment deserved. “If I’m not mistaken, old Lord Stefano, who I believed entirely too withered and ancient for such sport, licked his lips in my direction.”

Alondra sniffed, gazing censoriously in Lord Stefano’s general direction. “How terribly uncouth.”

They continued walking at the usual sedate pace that Mila had been told her entire life was the appropriate speed at which a queen should cover ground. Sometimes, like today, every muscle inside her body fairly hummed with the need to do something...explosive.

That didn’t mean blowing up her life, the way she would have done if she’d returned home from the far reaches of America to announce to all and sundry at her father’s funeral that she had taken the notably unsuitable Caius Candriano as her husband. Not just as her husband, but as the future king.

That was not the sort of explosiveness she meant. She had no intention of stumbling over that sort of landmine. She wasn’t sure she knew how she’d done it in the first place.

What she thought sometimes was that it might be quite pleasant indeed to take up an actual sport of some kind. She had always been discouraged from such pursuits because, her mother had told her icily years ago, no one wished to see the future Queen heaving about on a court in a red-faced sweat.

An image so horrifying that Mila wasn’t sure she’d allowed herself to perspire for years afterward.

On days like today, however, she rather thought that whacking something with a racket sounded like nothing short of a delight. Especially when she thought about Caius—something she forbade herself and yet she found herself doing it anyway—who had taken up...lurking.

If anyone that dramatically beautiful and attention-getting could be said to lurk, that was.

Today was an annual late-summer event in the kingdom. The Royal Gardens were opened to the public once in spring, once at the end of summer, and once not long before Christmas when the gardens were done over into a veritable pageant of a Christmas card. Mila was currently doing her usual August promenade from the sweeping steps of the palace down the long, paved walk that cut through the heart of the gardens and allowed for press pictures, meet-and-greets, and the like.

But unlike all the balls she threw and attended throughout the season, this was the sort of event that was open to the entire kingdom. Not simply the aristocracy and the usual touring heirs to this and scions of that, where a certain level of snobbish hierarchy was expected.

These were the three events a year where, once her initial promenade was finished, she could simply...wander as she liked. She could talk to her subjects more freely when she encountered them. She did not have to work as hard on seeming approachable and relatable because, for once, she did not have to exude them through a smile. She could simply be those things one-on-one.

Normally she loved everything about the Garden Galas. But today she could not say that she liked the way a great number of the particularly high in the instep were looking at her. Something that did not go away as they walked.

“This is not the first time I’ve noticed this, Mother,” Mila said from beneath another smile. “It’s been going on for at least a week. What have you done?”

“I have done nothing at all, Your Majesty, except what I have always done. Which is to adhere, as ever, to your every stated wish.”

Mila nearly forgot herself and laughed. “That has a rather ominous ring.”

A sideways glance from the Queen Mother indicated that it was finally occurring to her that Mila was losing her patience. She cleared her throat, something she managed to make sound delicate. “It was at one of our private dinners the other week. You were brooding down at your game hen and said that you were thinking of marrying.”

Mila actually did laugh at that, and had to cover it by pretending that she was that engaged in the antics of a set of squealing children who stood along the path. But as soon as they walked past she actually turned her whole head and pinned her mother with a glare, and she wasn’t even certain she managed to keep a smile on her face while she did it.

“I am absolutely certain I said no such thing.”

Her mother looked startled. But the Queen Dowager Alondra was made of nothing soft, inside or out. She lifted her chin and barreled forth the way she always did. “You may not have used those words, I grant you. We were talking of your sister. And how impossible it seemed that Carliz would ever settle down. How can you not recall this?”

“I said that life is endlessly surprising.” Mila’s voice was quiet, but she knew her mother did not mistake the hint of steel in it. “That it was impossible to say what the next turn of the season might bring. We were speaking of Carliz , Mother.”

“And then Your Majesty said, and I quote, ‘The mistake we make is believing anything can be set in stone.’ ”

Alondra looked at her in triumph.

Mila gazed back. “I am waiting in breathless anticipation to see how you interpreted that to mean that I would like to walk about my kingdom being slobbered over by every man who dares look at me. Truly. I cannot wait.”

“There has only ever been one thing you have declared set in stone,” her mother said primly. “I merely whispered in a few ears that perhaps, after all this time, the stone has begun to shift.”

Mila fumed for the rest of what was normally her happy promenade.

When it was finished, she took the requisite photos with the gardening team, shook the hands of expected dignitaries, met the people who had been selected to receive her special notice this day, and then lost no time setting off for her wander when it was all done.

But she didn’t follow her normal route. Usually she made her way through the summer flowers, happening into conversations as she found them, with whoever she discovered along the way. It was one of her favorite things to do.

Today, however, she headed for the maze.

Unlike some garden mazes that were built as follies and design elements and would not have confused a toddler, the palace maze here had been the brainchild of one of the kingdom’s darker figures. Prince Clemente had poured his animosity for his long-lived and famously unpleasant father into this particular creation on the palace grounds, where it was said he preferred to tarry so as to avoid the intrigue of the royal court as much as possible.

Much of the maze was made of tall evergreens that did not fade away with the seasons at this elevation, but continued to stand tall and impenetrable all winter. Its narrow little passages twisted this way and that as it rambled about in its dizzying manner. It was impossible to see into it from above, and entirely too easy to get lost in it on the ground. Some even claimed it was haunted, and the routes to the center some believed did not exist changed at the whim of the maze itself.

But for Mila, the maze had always been a place of refuge.

Because of its reputation, most people avoided it, so filled was it with superstition and all the whispered stories of dark things that might have happened within it.

What that meant, she knew from experience, was that very few people braved the narrow, thorny, gnarled little pathways. Most people never made it to the center. But she knew where it was—she could get there blindfolded—and she headed there now.

And the farther she moved away from the sound of all of those voices—all of that polite laughter, the buzz of gossip, speculation, and apparently, now, talk of marriage—she felt more and more like herself.

Like the Mila she got to be when she closed the door to her bedroom each night.

The Mila she was when Caius looked at her and the world fell away.

The farther she went, the better it felt, so she actually let herself move faster, then faster still, until she was running flat out.

Until she was breaking a damned sweat.

As if she was just a woman. Just a human being, hurtling unseen and yet protected by these hedges. Just out here running on a pretty summer day because it felt good to run. Using her body because it was hers. Because she wasn’t simply a figure stamped on the side of a coin. She breathed. She bled.

Every once in a while, she even wept.

And for a few months, long ago, she had let herself feel every single thing a human could. Every beautifully mortal sensation, on every centimeter of her body, and she hadn’t cared what she looked like while it was happening. She had spared not one thought for the sounds she made or the position of her lips on her face.

She had been alive in a way she hadn’t been before or since.

Mila ran faster and faster, filled with a kind of mad, desperate exultation.

She burst into the center of the maze at last, skidding to a stop in the sweet-scented grove and blowing out a long breath that seemed to take from every part of her. As if it was scooping out everything inside of her, all those old ghosts and long-held fears and regrets, and releasing them all into the sacred geometry of this hidden place.

Here in the center, the grim hedges gave way to flowering trees. They cast shade, dancing over the sparkling pool that gleamed there in the sunshine. As if that long-ago crown prince, despite his dark feelings for everything within the palace, had been unable to prevent himself from showing his soft center to the very few people who ever made it here.

Mila was panting a bit as she walked to the edge of the pool. She gazed down at it, looking less for her reflection and more for the sense that she could, if she wished, be the woman she had only ever been in a real sense for a scant few months on the other side of the world.

I want to feel as if I chose not to be her , she thought fiercely.

Then she said it out loud. “I chose to come home. I chose to be Queen. I chose this.”

Her dress felt heavy all around her after running as she had in it, but she didn’t mind. Because for once, for a moment, she felt light. Airy.

And the same old dark thoughts pressed in, but she ignored them. Here, now, she shoved them aside.

Because she did not need to spend more time litigating her own behavior. Or her choices. That was in a past she could not change.

She had chosen to marry Caius long ago in a civil ceremony on a beach during a golden sunset, presided over by stranger who had never heard of either one of them.

And she had kissed Caius here in her own palace, though she certainly knew better. She could pretend that he had stolen that kiss, as if she had been a piece of candy in a store somewhere that someone could palm on their way out the door. Instead of what she actually had been, a grown woman, a literal queen, who had known exactly what he intended to do and had let him do it.

If she was honest, she had wanted him to do it.

Mila could lecture herself about what she owed her country and do a few more rounds about what her duty was and what she owed her family and her people and the very ground she stood upon, but not today.

Not here, where no one could see her.

Because this was the only place on the palace grounds where she ever felt like that anonymous girl she’d been for only those very few months of her life.

That was the gift her father given her before his death. That was the magic he had bestowed upon her.

It is too dangerous , she had said at once when he’d called her into the bedchamber where he’d spent his last days. She had sat on the edge of the bed as indicated when he’d inclined his head toward the mattress and had frowned at him. All the while ignoring that fluttering, leaping thing inside her at the very idea. What if I were to be kidnapped? What if I were to get myself into trouble? It would reflect badly on you and the whole kingdom.

You will not travel with an entourage , he had said quietly. Only one guard who has been training for the position. She will be tasked to look and act the part of a friend. The two of you will fly commercial. You will drive a rental car, eat in regular restaurants, sleep in unsecured hotels, and at no point will you do a single thing that would make anyone imagine you are in fact the Crown Princess of a royal house.

That fluttering thing was threatening to take her over, but she had learned her lessons well. But...

The King had reached over and rested his hand on her leg. My father sent me off to do the same thing when I was about your age. It was his belief that no one can fully commit themselves to this life without experiencing a different one, however briefly.

But the risk... She’d tried again.

I trust you, Mila , he had said simply. I trust you to take care of my kingdom when I am gone, you know this. But I trust you to take care of yourself, as well. I’m certain you possess discernment enough to track your own course and the wisdom to do so in a way that shames neither you, this family, nor the crown.

He had paused as if he’d expected her to mount another argument, but she couldn’t.

This is the greatest gift I could give you , he’d said then. A small window of anonymity before you become, as you inevitably will, public property in almost every way.

She had wanted to cry, though she hadn’t.

And then she had gone and planned not simply a trip, the way many did for gap years and the like. Mila had planned a mission. She had reveled in the challenge. She’d had Noemí collect the items they would need from shops where normal people went. Things the Crown Princess of Las Sosegadas would never possess.

When it was time, they had snuck out of the palace under cover of night, and Mila had laughed as they’d crossed the border. That had the last time someone had recognized the name on her passport. After that, even if there was a second look, she was instantly dismissed.

Because it beggared belief that a woman with the name Emilia Christiana de Las Sosegadas could possibly have anything to do with a princess or a crown far off in the mountains between Spain and France.

They had spent two months wandering where they liked, through cities Mila had never had the opportunity to explore on her own, before they decided to take that particular guided hike through a dangerous stretch of the Pacific Crest Trail.

Nothing but nature for weeks , Noemí had said. Hard to be more anonymous than that.

That was where Mila had finally met Caius, who she had certainly heard of before. And had possibly even seen at some or other event, though they had never interacted.

Someone had likely seen to it that they never crossed paths.

She could admit that she hadn’t known whether to be thrilled or disappointed that he hadn’t seemed to recognize her at all.

It was only later, when they had been telling each other truths at last, that he’d admitted that he’d known who she was at once. That he had hoped that if he didn’t indicate that he knew who she was, she wouldn’t say anything either, and none of the others in their group would be any the wiser. None would know that they were in the presence of two extremely famous people in a place no one would think to look for them.

They had spent the last few months of her six-month adventure completely inseparable. To the point where Noemí had allowed them time to themselves, and Mila had not thought twice about taking it.

It was something she had never had before. Something it had not occurred to her to treasure—though she knew, even then, that she would miss it. For days on end she got to feel what it was like to have no eyes on her at all save those she loved, from morning until night.

It was like a prayer she hadn’t known she needed answered.

And it was only here in this quiet, secluded place where no one knew she liked to come to see her real face in a pool no one else could critique, and breathe her own breaths with any expression on her face she liked, that she could let herself remember those months.

Really, truly remember them.

And that person she’d been then, when she’d been as close to free as she’d ever come.

It wasn’t the freedom she missed, Mila knew. It was the way she’d felt in her own skin. Invincible. Entirely herself.

Not subject to any whim but her own.

Her fist clenched involuntarily, as if she was still holding the ring he’d given her. As if she hadn’t carefully tucked it away again, back behind the desk drawer, vowing not to give in to the urge to take it out again.

Vowing she would leave it there for future generations to wonder over when they found it, a mystery forever unsolved.

She stayed there until her breathing slowed. She smoothed down her dress and composed her features. Only then was she ready to be the Queen again. Only then did she turn, shoulders straightened, to head back out and face the music.

“The music is your life,” she said under her breath. “You love your life.”

But before she could launch into a series of fierce affirmations to remind herself of why that was true, she stopped.

Because he was there.

He was right there and there was no telling how long he’d been there.

Caius stood in the opening to the hidden central grove, seeming to gleam like sunshine though he stood in the shade. He was dressed like the perfect male fantasy of a garden party. All creams and whites, yet slightly rumpled, as if he was far too uncontained, too languidly dangerous, to suit such elegance.

He didn’t say a word.

She didn’t ask him how he had managed to follow her through the maze or if he’d simply found his own way. He was capable of either, she knew.

“I suspect you heard that I’m looking for a husband,” she said, because he would have to have heard. And there was that certain glinting thing in his gaze that made everything in her... tremble. “Never fear. I’m not planning to set off on a bigamist excursion. That is the precise opposite of anything I would ever be tempted to do.”

Caius still did not say anything.

And Mila had spent more time that she would like to admit thinking about this man in the years since those months together. Every time she’d seen his picture in a tabloid, with the inevitably stunning women falling all over him in front of a cameras, she’d imagined what it would be like for the two of them. Against her will, she’d let the images of him and all of them into her head.

Because she knew. All of that fire. All of that lazy intent.

Mila knew what he could do. And how he did it.

He drifted farther into the small grove, seeming to both take it all in and yet never shift his gaze from her at the same time. He kept his hands thrust deep in his pockets, which made him look slouchy and disreputable, and seemed nothing more than an extension of that little curve that was always in the corner of his mouth.

“So this is where you come,” he said in that low voice of his that seemed to hum inside her on a frequency all its own. “Where you can simply be Mila.”

He might as well have taken out a stun gun and fired it at her. It seemed to hit her with the force of that kind of weapon, dialed up to the highest possible voltage. She hissed in a shocked breath.

“There is no Mila to be, simply or otherwise,” she told him, though it felt like a sacrilege, here beside the pool. For now she could see not her reflection, but theirs. Together, like a memory.

Like a warning, she tried to tell herself.

“No?” he asked, but indulgently. As if he knew better. “Not anywhere?”

“There is less and less Mila every day,” she told him quietly. “That’s a good thing. There is no room for anything else but the Queen. Anything that is not the Queen is a distraction.”

“You get to be human, you know.” And he did not sound indulgent then. It was much more intense than that. Or maybe it was the way he looked at her with that wizard’s gaze. “Because you are actually human, Mila. All the palaces and crowns and fancy dresses in the world can’t change that.”

It was so close to her usual line of thought when she was here she wanted to cry. And that made her want to throw something at him, because queens did not cry. Not in the light of day. Not where anyone could witness that sort of breakdown.

She felt her fists clench again and had to stop herself from looking down at her left hand to see if that circle of gold was there. She knew it wasn’t. She knew it wasn’t, and yet still, she glanced.

The worst part was that he did, too.

“What do you want , Caius?” she asked. Again . “If it is something I can give you, I will. But I can’t allow this to keep happening. I can’t allow myself to be fractured like this. It serves no one. Like it or not, being the Queen is my role on this earth, no matter how human I am. I’m here to serve the people of his kingdom, irrespective of any wants or needs or dreams. Much less any ill-advised adventures I might have had in a different lifetime.”

“It was this lifetime, Mila.” His voice was gravel then. His eyes were fire. “I was there.”

She shook her head. “Neither one of us was really there. It was a dream. A beautiful dream, but we should have let it stay just that. A dream .”

She thought he would argue. Instead, he bent down and found a pebble, then tossed it across the smooth surface of the water with an easy flick of his wrist. Together they counted the skips.

The pebble bounced five times, then sank.

He swallowed, then spoke without looking at her. As if the ripples on the pool were too fascinating to turn away from. “I heard that after this flower show—”

“It is the August Garden Gala,” she interjected coolly. “A great favorite of the people.”

Caius acknowledged that with the faintest crook of one brow. “After this, I am told you retreat for the month of September.”

“I do indeed.” Mila looked back over her shoulder to where the palace rose in the distance. It seemed so far away, here by the pool. “It’s a place called, creatively enough, the September House. And it is not exactly the stately affair some might imagine. It is quite wild. And very remote. The sovereign generally spends some time there at least once a season.” She tried to aim her usual public smile at him, but it felt strange on her mouth. Stiff and unwieldy. “A time for reflection, some say. My father liked to hunt. His father was a keen cross-country skier.”

“What do you do?”

She found herself turning to face him. And it was different here, where there was no one watching. When it wasn’t the middle of the night and she was still reeling from the shock of seeing him at all.

When Mila looked up at him, she knew better than to allow herself to yearn for things she couldn’t have. She found herself wishing against wish that she could be someone else.

Only for a moment. Another stolen span of time.

“I do very little,” she told him, hoping her wishes did not show on her face. “There’s a daily call with certain ministers, of course, and a government to run. Other than that, I am left to my own devices.”

When Caius only gazed back at her as if he truly wanted to know, as if he was still the man she had considered her only truly safe space on earth, if only briefly, she sighed a little. “At first I took my mother and my sister with me when I went. But I stopped that after the first time. I didn’t want to be anything while I was there. Not a queen. Not a daughter. Not even a sister, which I would say is the easiest role of the three.” She lifted a shoulder and let it drop. “I just wander about as if I’m anyone. As if I’m no one. I cook my own meals. I clean up after myself. Doesn’t that sound silly, that a grown woman could find these things transcendent? Transformative?”

“Not at all,” he said, and there was too much memory in his voice then. Too much of the Caius she’d loved so recklessly, so heedlessly, so fast. “I was there the first time you let yourself be anyone and no one. I’m glad to know you still do it.”

In the distance, she heard a swell of laughter on the breeze. It was the waning days of August now. And the summer was always stuffed full of events, so that she usually couldn’t wait to set off to the September House.

But she knew that this year would be different. Because she knew no matter when she went, she would take this aching thing inside of her along with her.

“I did hear that you planned to start looking for a husband,” he confessed, maybe to that ache. Maybe to the memories they shared. “I was incensed.”

“Let me guess. You assumed I was throwing down the gauntlet. Directly at you.”

“Something like that.” It was the way he looked at her, the way no one else ever did or ever would. As if he saw the things she worked so diligently to hide. It was the way he saw Mila first, always, and had to look for the Queen , when for everyone else she knew—including herself—it was the opposite. It was the way he seemed to have no notion of the reverence he was meant to show in her presence. All the deference he was meant to display. Not Caius. He only reached out and brushed something from her cheek as if she could just... be touched like that. Then his mouth curved, likely because he could feel the same heat that she did. “I set about plotting how best to disrupt this process immediately.”

She laughed, despite herself. And the glory was, she didn’t have to try to hide it. “How marvelous. I can’t decide if I think you would go for a big, splashy sort of disruption, for maximum scandal and rippling aftereffects. Or if you were looking for something more stealthy, for more of a seismic, earthquake effect.”

There was a flash of his teeth and that smile of his he used far more rarely than people thought. They always remembered him smiling, laughing, but in reality, it was usually that smirk. He was witty, not funny. There was a difference.

And when it came to Caius, all of it was sharpened to a point and wielded with precision.

“I haven’t decided yet,” he told her, still smiling. “It was all going to depend on what lies you told me.”

“And now?” Her hands ached with the effort of keeping them to herself. “Have you decided my fate?”

“Before I heard about your dating plans, I had intended to divorce you.” But he was still standing so close to her. He found a tendril of her hair and was wrapping it, ever so slowly, around and around one finger. “I was going to tell you that I would sign whatever papers you needed signed, so that we could dissolve the legalities as if they had never occurred in the first place.”

“I think,” she whispered, “that you don’t actually know what you want, Caius.”

He tugged the bit of hair he had wrapped around his finger and they both made the faintest noise, as if they were singing in a kind of harmony.

Mila knew that harmony. It was that ache inside of her. It was that grief.

But it was less and less like grief the longer they gazed at each other like this. It shifted. It became that long, lingering, golden heat.

She recognized it. The way it wound around and around inside of her. The way it lit her on fire and the flames seemed to reach every part of her, only to settle between her legs. The way it made her soft and needy in an instant.

Oh, yes. She remembered the song too well.

“I have always known exactly what I want, Mila,” Caius told her.

“You only want me because you know that you can never truly have me,” she replied, and she hardly knew where those words were coming from. But they felt true as she said them. And she wasn’t hurling them out. She wasn’t even upset. If anything, it was another part of that same golden heat. The part of her that grieved for having to give him up. Again. And always. No matter what she wanted. “It’s much easier to blame it all on me, isn’t it? Then we don’t have to ask ourselves what you might have done to change the landscape.” He stared back at her, something like affront in his gaze, or perhaps all that magic was laced with a kind of acknowledgment she doubted either one of them wished to face, or speak out loud. “You could have made yourself into a paragon, Caius. A saint among men.”

“What would be the point?” he returned, and he didn’t sound intense or furious, either. “Each and every strand of my bloodline is shiny in its way, but altogether? It’s a whole lot of mud. And we know you can’t have that.”

“Just remember that you get to make choices. I am bound to fulfill my duty. No one ever said it would be pleasant , I assure you.”

He let out a breath, or maybe it was a curse too soft to hear. “What’s the point of having all this power, Mila, if you only wield it to make yourself miserable?”

“What are my options?” She leaned in close, because that felt like power. Then she reached up so she could set a palm on each side of his jaw, holding that beautiful face fast between them. And that felt even better, even if it hurt. “This was always better as a dream, Caius. The more we do this, the more we tarnish it. Is that really what you want?”

She felt his hands cover hers, but all she could see was the way he looked at her. The way he had always looked at her.

As if their hearts beat in the same rhythm, even now.

“So which is it?” she asked him, keeping her gaze trained on his. “Will you expose me to all of my people, making them all question my judgment forever? Will you attempt to seduce me so you can cause a new scandal in real time? Or will you simply say goodbye, and let us both remember what this was fondly?”

Mila didn’t know how she managed to say that so calmly, when inside, she felt ravaged. She felt torn into ragged little pieces, but that didn’t matter. That had never mattered. She could rip her heart out of her chest and hurl it out of the highest window in the palace, and it still wouldn’t matter. She would still be the Queen . She would still have the same duties, the same responsibilities, the same expectations.

And the anguish she saw on his face didn’t make it any better.

“I don’t like any of those options,” he said, as if the words cost him. As if this all hurt him as much as it hurt her, and the funny thing was, she believed it did. Not that it changed anything. Not that anything could. But her foolish heart jolted all the same when he smiled again, just for her. “What if I had a better idea?”