Chapter Three
You’re not supposed to be here.
The accusation roiled through Gustav again as they followed the royal guard down the marble staircase of her apartment building. Each word was an arrow that found its way through the carefully guarded armor of his heart.
How many times had he heard some version of this sentiment?
As if he, as a person—his very existence as the illegitimate son of the king—was unacceptable.
Now Livia had attached herself to the legitimate heir, and she wasn’t happy when the bastard had shown up. The insult was far too obvious to miss.
Gustav had no idea what he had been expecting when he finally saw her again, but it wasn’t this self-contained, polished version of Livia who walked through the ornate halls of the building in a dress and makeup, neither of which she used to wear.
He had had a few moments to pull himself together when she’d disappeared into her room to change into something “more appropriate for the king,” as she had put it, enunciating the last two words with a sharp edge.
But now she was a step ahead of him, and his hands curled into fists.
At first, there had been only whispers of her connection to Edvin.
He had assumed that it was all a mistake, the way so much online was not quite real.
He had dreamed of her over the years, often and vividly, and even though these dreams involved extensive, detailed scenes of the…
repentance she would offer for her past sins, he’d still imagined that the real version of Livia was as messy and rebellious and free as the seventeen-year-old he had known.
She had been irreverent and wild, prone to wandering alone in the moonlit forest after midnight.
Everything that a future queen was not supposed to be.
But then Gustav had seen the photos of Livia and Edvin as they were “caught” dancing together at a splashy palace event for Nordic dignitaries, and whispers of an impending engagement grew louder.
Over his dead body.
Gustav had confronted Edvin and given his brother a chance to take a different road.
Not Livia, he had said, hating the plea in his voice. Anyone but her.
Edvin had scowled. You’re in no position to make demands.
The argument that had followed had been neither satisfying nor particularly dignified, and it hadn’t made a dent in the seething jealousy that plagued him every time he thought of those photos.
Livia seemed to have completely reinvented herself in the eight years since they had seen each other.
The woman walking next to him in the quiet hallway looked the opposite of free.
What had happened to change her? Gustav frowned at his uncharacteristically sentimental thoughts.
It didn’t matter. In the end, her rejection of all things royal had been at best a passing phase, at worst a lie, because now she had embraced the very thing she had claimed to disdain. The facts spoke for themselves.
The romance between Livia and Edvin had been well documented for the entire kingdom of Isrikesland, even on the remote island off the coast where Gustav was building a windfarm.
Photos from a state dinner, the beginning of their “head-over-heels” romance, had covered the front pages of the news.
The night the first photos of them together had dropped, he hadn’t been in his right mind.
In his younger years, when he had come to understand the stark differences between his life and Edvin’s—first and foremost, respect—he had spent a period mired in jealousy and resentment.
But it was nothing like this seething, vengeful monster that had stirred inside him.
Livia should have been off-limits. Yes, he had lied to her about his identity for a list of selfish reasons his seventeen-year-old self had clung to.
That night, he had naively thought that the reality of his upbringing on the fringes of the royal family, attacked from all sides, would garner at least a little understanding, but the betrayal of her response made it clear she wasn’t interested in listening.
She’d assumed the worst and turned her back on him.
Still, Gustav had spent the past eight years sure they had unfinished business.
Business he had planned to finish when his name had been redeemed.
When the press could no longer ignore the work he was doing to keep the country financially afloat.
Then he would have settled things with Livia.
He would have left her in the past, the way he should have long ago.
But her involvement with Edvin changed everything.
Years ago, when her father was a groundskeeper, his half brother would never have looked twice at her, but Livia was now fit to be the future queen, just because her father had somehow garnered endless wealth?
It felt as though Livia and Edvin had conspired to push a knife through his back—and then twist it.
The only thing that had brought him back from the brink of the kind of scorch-the-earth disaster he had created back at the Alpine Institute for Boys before he was expelled was the very likely possibility that this relationship was a PR sham and simply a distraction to cover up the fact that their father had fallen into a keeping-up-with-the-Windsors spending pattern that had implications for the country’s economy.
Which Livia’s father’s money would, of course, remediate.
But even this cold, transactional relationship would require an heir at some point.
The idea of Livia carrying his brother’s baby was unthinkable, and the moment the image came to him, he vowed to do everything in his power to never let it happen.
Gustav watched her closely as they descended into the lobby of the apartment building, resisting the urge to let his gaze travel lower, to her rear.
He held on to his anger, letting it fill his body, pushing out the other, murkier reactions to being this close to her again.
He needed to cling to his anger and ignore the whisper of her voice that still echoed inside him.
He needed to shut out the longing that he had seen in her eyes when he’d stepped into her apartment.
“The press assumes you are Edvin,” she said, keeping her gaze trained forward.
His body tensed at the sound of his half brother’s name. “They do.”
She turned and narrowed her eyes at him, and he found that he loved to see this break in her polished facade. “You knew the press would assume you were Edvin. You even wore royal cufflinks.”
“I’m not in control of anyone’s assumptions,” he said with a careless shrug, but he couldn’t resist adding, “You certainly were paying attention.”
Livia gave him a huff of what sounded like exasperation, but her cheeks flushed. “Should we clarify the mistake?”
“I’ll defer to you,” he said with a hint of a smile, as if he hadn’t orchestrated this entire day.
She studied him with those eyes he remembered so well, endless seas of shifting grays and greens. “I want to talk to the king first.”
His smile deepened. This time it wasn’t the king that she needed to be wary of. Gustav held all the cards, and he reveled in the fact that she still didn’t see it. Yet.
Their shoes clicked on the marble floor of the lobby, and the royal guard held open the front doors as they walked into the blinding summer sunlight.
Gustav blinked, his eyes adjusting. As he started down the stone staircase, he spotted a few curious onlookers lingering on the narrow sidewalk, just past the motorcade.
Royal watchers. Perfect. His beard blurred so many of the differences between himself and his half brother.
Anyone who cared to look closer could find photos of the handful of times he had been asked by the royal guard to take his brother’s place so Edvin could spend a few days in a manner the palace found unsuitable for a crown prince.
Gustav had agreed, quietly gathering ammunition to use against his father and brother in the future.
Much to his father’s dismay, he and Edvin had grown to have an uncanny resemblance.
If they hadn’t, the king would likely have attempted to hide Gustav, the way he had tried to hide him when the palace sent Gustav to a remote boarding school in the Alps with no internet to speak of.
In his younger years, Gustav hadn’t fully processed that his father’s faraway choice of schools was part of a larger out-of-sight, out-of-mind approach to his illegitimate son.
He had simply been told to keep his paternity a secret, for safety reasons.
But as he grew older, the similarities to the crown prince were too great to ignore, and the tiny archipelago country was too small.
So instead, the palace had changed tactics and acknowledged Gustav as a prince in name, however reluctantly, though he had still been relegated to the background.
The official acknowledgment of the king’s paternity had been his mother’s ultimate dream, and she had spent a good deal of the rest of her life celebrating.
Even when the occasion didn’t call for it.
For too long, she had allowed herself to be strung along by the king with hints of a glittering future as the next queen consort.
But five years after Queen Eleanor suffered an untimely passing from breast cancer and nothing had changed, Gustav’s mother had shifted all of her ambitions onto Gustav.
Then the glory of having a prince as a son—even a bastard one—was short lived.
That unfortunate incident when you were expelled from school is a liability, his father had explained with the haughtiness Gustav had come to expect.