Forbidden Royal Vows

Chapter Two

CHAPTER TWO

C AIUS C ANDRIANO HAD waited for this day for a long, long time.

Five years, to be exact.

Five whole years, and there was some part of him that expected to find her...different, perhaps. Changed entirely by what she’d gone through and who she’d become these last few years—perhaps because that, at least, would be some kind of explanation.

However little he wished to accept that explanation, at least it would exist.

After all, she was a queen now. The Queen. Not merely the Princess he had met with the whole of her weighty future yet before her. Not that young woman with too much maturity and luminous eyes, and a deathly ill father who had ordered her to in that sense that she was only marking time before her whole world changed.

But Mila looked entirely unchanged.

Maybe that was not entirely true, he thought as he swept a gaze over the whole of her magnificence, when the woman he’d known had been dressed as casually as he had been on that long-ago climb up a remote stretch of California coast where there had been no one at all but the two of them. Though the drama of the gown she wore would have been epic even if he wasn’t comparing her to his memories.

Caius should not have been surprised. He was fully aware that designers from all over the fashionable world clamored for the opportunity to dress the young, beloved Queen of Las Sosegadas.

It was his own curse that he knew too well that, left to her own devices, she preferred simpler, less theatrical fare.

Not that anyone could have guessed that by looking at her.

She gleamed with her own consequence. The palace arranged around her, complete with the throne placed just so behind her, only made her glory more apparent. He might miss the days he’d known her out of time and place, but there was no denying that gown suited this version of Mila. Her team had clearly chosen it to make her seem to glow as if by virtue of her own sovereign power.

The Queen had been the only thing anyone had looked at when she appeared. The Queen had been gazed at in varying degrees of awe and adoration from all corners as she’d made her way across the floor of the long ballroom, the traditional signal that the festivities were to begin.

The gown helped, though Caius found himself simmering with what he decided could only be the same old pent-up fury that really, she could have sloped across the ballroom floor in jeans and trainers and had much the same effect.

He focused on the gown, because that was smarter than looking straight at her when he could not be entirely sure that he had his face in proper order. When he had been born the chameleon he was today, a necessity in his family, chock full of narcissists and pathological liars—and that was just the people he was related to that he liked.

Caius took in the sophistication and elegance of the damned dress. He focused on the full skirt and fitted bodice that should have made the dress too undignified for a queen, but was saved by its deep, dark shade of purple. It suited her. Something about the conversation between the dress’s serious color and merrier shape made Mila’s regrettably perfect beauty all the brighter.

He wished it did not still light him up from within, damn her.

Though that was not the point of this.

This, he reminded himself, was about a reckoning , nothing more.

Because Queen Emilia was suitably untouchable and all the more breathtaking for it. But Mila was the kind of woman a man looked at once and found himself intoxicated evermore. She was like a flickering flame. Once a man singed himself on the edge of that fire, he could never come back.

He had never come back. And she had never looked back.

So Caius had come to her little palace in the mountains instead.

She wore a tiara tonight, in case the throne behind her did not give away her status. The bejeweled concoction sat on her smooth, glossy dark hair that looked like ink tamed into a sophisticated twist and dared any man brave enough to reach out and try to touch her.

Though he did not. And not because he was lacking in bravery. On the contrary, he had only recently taken a step back from his more high-octane activities, all of them death-defying, and only because he had done them all.

Even adrenaline got boring if you had too much of it.

But he had chosen this battle specifically, and there was no point getting ahead of himself now when he’d gone to all the trouble to ingratiate himself with half the aristocracy in this tiny country. Something that had involved him deigning to notice them, since he was, being himself, far more famous and sought after than a host of interchangeable blue bloods.

That was not arrogance on his part. It was a simple truth.

He had often been called the most beloved guest in modern Europe. That was partly because he was a great delight, if he said so himself. But it was also because his attendance at any given party made it the party.

That, too, was simply a fact.

Really, the monarchy of Las Sosegadas should thank him for deigning to attend at all.

Caius lifted his gaze to hers at last, taking no small amount of pleasure in how stunned Mila looked. There was no trace of anything he would call thankful on that gaze of hers, a perfect oval saved from any insipid sameness by that strong, Roman nose that made her something else than simply pretty. That and her mouth, a wide, sensual feast that she mostly kept pressed into a dutiful line.

Though not now, he was pleased to see.

And there was something in the gray depths of her gaze, rimmed in a darker steel, that he recognized. It shot through him like more of that inescapable flame, though he doubted she would appreciate it if he reminded her where and when he’d seen a look like that before.

That made him want to tell her even more.

Because none of this was about what she appreciated.

If she had wanted him to consider such things, she would have handled the past five years much, much differently.

On the other hand, he did have a plan. Such as it was.

So he only held her gaze, which was not exactly good etiquette. Not so directly. Not for so long. But more tellingly, she continued to stare back.

And Caius had watched enough videos of Queen Emilia’s much-swooned-over perfect manners to know that this was unusual.

As it damn well should be , he thought then.

Next to the Queen, her mother, once Queen Alondra and now the Queen Mother, clearly noted that something was amiss. She drew herself up with a sideways glance at her daughter for only the briefest, nearly imperceptible instant before stepping forward and claiming Lady Paula’s attention.

“I trust your parents are well?” the older woman asked, with a bite behind her words that even he could hear. Clearly Paula could as well, because she let out that high-spirited laugh of hers again, infectious enough to make Caius almost wish that he had it in him to move on.

But he could not seem to break his stare. He could not look away from Mila.

And as he watched, he saw the Mila he had known five years ago first bloom in her expression, then disappear again.

Until the Queen took her place.

She made the transition very clear and unmistakable. It was something about her posture. Something about the tilt of her head, or perhaps the elongation of her neck. One perfect dark brow rose, just slightly.

Yet still elegantly.

“I forget myself, Your Majesty,” Caius said, and he could see that his voice affected her. He saw the faint hint of color on her cheeks. That glimmer in her gray gaze.

He still got to her. That was good.

Caius had not exactly planned what he might do if she looked at him as if he was a stranger. He had not allowed it as a possibility.

Instead of interrogating himself on that topic he executed a bow so deep and so perfect that it bordered on parody. That was the point. She had once accused him of using his grasp of excruciatingly proper and gloriously correct manners as a weapon. So efficiently and so ruthlessly that he was already bludgeoning the haughty and the arrogant before they even realized there was a weapon in the room.

Guilty as charged , he had said.

And it felt like a bit of poetic justice that he was now using those weapons on her.

He could see that she remembered that same conversation when he rose and met her gaze again. He could see the knowledge there, the memory. He could almost smell the sea air and feel the crackle of the fire they’d built, the flame a wild heat against his face.

He was not the only one recalling what had come after.

“Your Majesty,” said Alondra from the side, warningly, though Caius did not bother to look away from Mila, “Lady Paula has kindly come to present the Honorable Caius Candriano, late of Italy.”

Caius looked at the Queen Mother then, and bowed again more shallowly. “I am afraid I have not been to Italy in some while, ma’am. Nor can I claim to be anything like honorable.”

He lifted his head and grinned at Mila’s poor mother, who was very clearly both unamused by him...and yet amused despite herself.

That was the Caius effect.

“Your mother does not approve of me,” Paula was saying to Mila with more of that laughter, because she was a free-spirited thing and had no qualms about showing it, a rarity in these circles. She looked back at the Queen Mother. “You may wish to remove yourself from this conversation. I do not censor myself in front of my queen.”

“Or anywhere else,” said the acerbic older woman, but she did move away at that—with shoulders set to angles of pure umbrage.

Paula gave the impression of moving in close to the Queen, though she did not actually scale the dais or step up, or even encroach particularly on Mila as she stood there in all her state. Close enough to the great throne that not sitting on it seemed like more of a power move than sprawling there might have.

He had no doubt at all that it was deliberate, and more, that it was her doing.

“You’ve heard of Caius, of course,” Paula was saying happily, and did not seem to see the nearly pained look on Mila’s face. “My grandmother had a conniption fit when I announced that I would be attending with him. A proper fit of the vapors. Though I maintain that if she knows of his exploits, that must mean that she has the very lowbrow taste she claims to abhor.”

Mila made a low sort of noise that Caius supposed could be taken for assent. Paula leaned a bit closer and continued chattering on about her own reputation, and making shocking asides about Caius’s—shocking, that was, only because he had been much worse in the time period she was referencing, and had worked hard at being that notorious.

It was only when Mila still kept standing there in the same way, looking dumbstruck at Caius—though he supposed it was possible no one else understood that he was the cause of it—that Paula subsided.

“You seem a bit out of it tonight,” she said in a different tone. One that indicated, immediately, that the woman who had been nothing but laughter and fun thus far was, truly, the friend to Mila it was rumored she was. “Are you all right? Is it Carliz?”

Mila looked away from him at last, and he hated that.

But then she smiled, and the smile made him forget where he was. “Carliz is fine. More than fine. Carliz is great. ”

Caius remembered himself, despite that unexpected shine and the way it was as if all the light in the room had clung to her like that. He did not shake it off, not physically, but he stood there, calculating. Taking stock of the fact that Mila clearly favored Paula, as some had said and others had debated. She liked Paula.

And he wasn’t sure he liked the part of him that was glad of that. He remembered too well the confessions she’d made to him on that long trek they’d taken together. How little she could trust that anyone truly liked her. That the specter of the queen she would become was always there between them.

“She seems deliriously happy,” Paula was saying. “Truly happy, not simply a bit of Carliz sparkle.”

The two of them spoke for a few moments longer, and he watched her eyes light up the way they always had at the mention of her sister.

But then it was time for the best part of this entire scene he had gone to such trouble to engineer.

No one got to stand and talk to a queen for long. There were always interfering ministers about. There were always haughty people who thought it was their right to demand a moment with her. There were long lines of those who only wished to curtsey before her and see if they could get a small smile, a kind word. Like she was an art installation.

It was not a surprise when Alondra reappeared, tugging on her left earlobe in what seemed like a casual gesture. But Caius knew it was a sign to her daughter that it was time to move on.

“We must catch up properly,” Mila said. “Have you seen all of Carliz’s baby pictures?”

Paula sighed. “She keeps promising to send them.”

“Something will have to be done.” But as Mila said that, she straightened, and Caius watched with interest as she became the Queen once again. Not chilly, but remote.

Paula understood at once. She reached for Caius’s arm and stepped back, then curtsied yet again. Beside her, Caius bowed, a gesture replete with all the mockery he could manage.

And then he had the very great pleasure of walking away from Her Majesty, Queen Emilia of Las Sosegadas, and not looking back.

He didn’t have to look back.

Caius could feel her eyes on him no matter where he went in the ballroom. When he danced with Paula, or the much older ladies who he always liked to favor with his attention because they saw right through him and basked in him anyway. Even when he loitered about near the bar, making pointless conversation with interchangeable nobles.

He made certain to spend the night paying her not the slightest iota of attention.

But just as he, and everyone else, knew exactly where Queen Emilia was at all times, he knew full well that she was returning the favor where he was concerned.

Caius could feel it like her hands on him.

When the banquet was over and all the speeches had been made, and more dancing had taken place until well past midnight, he offered his date his arm as they walked out of the palace with the rest of the guests.

And he felt pure triumph kick in him when an aide stepped smartly to Paula’s side. “Lady Paula, if you’d be so kind, the staff have assembled a selection of Princess Carliz’s private photos for your perusal at the behest of the Queen. If you have a moment.”

“For Carliz, I have all the moments,” Paula proclaimed grandly. She was slightly tipsy and even more boisterous than before, and she waved Caius off as she followed the aide away. “Don’t get yourself in any trouble,” she called back over her shoulder.

Then laughed as she disappeared out of sight.

But even if Caius had been intending to get himself into trouble, he could not. Because another aide appeared at his side, then. This aide only bowed and indicated that Caius should follow him. Then, wordlessly, led him away.

It did not occur to Caius to resist.

He thrust his hands into his pockets, and sloped along after his guide. And he was not the least bit surprised to find himself taken away from the public areas of the palace and into a quieter, lusher wing.

The aide led him down the long, intricately decorated hall and stopped abruptly at a particular door. He knocked three times, then waited for a signal only he seemed to hear.

But hear it he did, for he clicked his heels, bowed his head, and pulled open the door to let Caius inside.

He found himself in a small salon that did not look as if it saw great deal of traffic. And Caius could admit that he was surprised to find himself alone—

But no. Not quite.

Across the room, there were doors that led outside. He went over, looked out, and there she was.

She was standing out on a balcony, her back to him and her gaze focused on her kingdom’s capital, arranged neatly below the palace and marching in tidy lines around the first of the many alpine lakes that were considered the beating heart of this country.

Or so he had read.

Extensively.

He stayed where he was, on his side of the glass, because everything in him was a drumbeat now. Blood too hot in his veins. Pulse pounding like he’d jumped from a plane. She was leaning forward, her elbows propped on the stone railing, and if he was a painter his hands would have itched to capture this moment. The Queen in a moment of reflection. The Queen’s quiet contemplation of the weight of her crown.

Though he knew what she was actually considering just now was the weight of him.

His body hard over hers. His mouth to hers. His—

Caius made himself pause. He made himself breathe.

And then he stepped out onto the balcony himself. And thrust his untrustworthy hands in his pockets as he moved to stand beside her.

She did not look at him. He did not look at her.

But for a long moment, there was only this. The two of them, breathing in the same air after so long.

“I can only assume that this is some kind of a threat, Caius,” she said, eventually. Softly, even.

She was still looking away from him. When he glanced at her, he could see the line of her face, the nose that defined her face and made her so stunning, the shape of her lips. But he could not read the expression in her gaze, or even if there was one.

“I’m not a man who needs to issue threats, Your Majesty. ” He even laughed a little. “I would have thought that you would know this already.”

“It’s been five years. I assumed that you’d slithered off, never to be seen again. To be clear, I hoped you had.”

She turned then, straightening from the rail and folding her arms over her chest, which he understood in an instant was as close as he would get to an outward expression of her emotional state. The Queen , obviously, did not cross her arms.

Yet he had known her as a woman first. He could see the things she hid. The sheen in her gaze that spoke of her feelings. The barest, faintest hint of a tremble in her lush lower lip.

This was likely to be all the temper she was willing to show him.

He’d take it. Because he could see the truth of it.

“Careful,” he murmured. “That is no way to speak to your husband.”

“What is it you want?” And her voice was so cool. Her gaze was frosted over. But he was close enough, outside on this clear fall night with the canopy of stars above, to see the pulse in her throat that gave her away even further.

“What is it you think I want?”

They stared at each other, and it was as if the earth and the sky switched places. As if he was standing half in each, not sure if there was solid ground above his head or stars at his feet.

“As you might imagine, the pressure to marry is intense,” she told him in that grave, measured manner that he had studied, these last few years. He’d seen it in so many news programs. In every clip of her speaking that he could locate online. “At a certain point, my protestations that I wish to stand on my own two feet will have to give way to the best interests of the kingdom. Those being, of course, that I will be required to produce my own heir.”

“Mila,” he murmured, and it was possible he moved a bit closer, too, “that sounds a great deal like your problem, not mine.”

Her gaze was dark and gray. “I understand that vows mean nothing to you. But I’m afraid I take mine rather seriously.”

“Nothing has changed since the last time we had this delightful chat,” he said in the same quiet way that tore at him, so he suspected it shredded her, too. “I invite you to divorce me, as I have done from the start.”

“You know that I can’t.”

“Then I can only repeat what I told you five years ago. If you do not wish to divorce—”

“Of course I want to divorce.” And whatever it was that flashed in her gaze, that slap of emotion, he could feel it in him, too. Low. Deep. Much too dangerous, the way it always had been between them. “But you refuse to sign the documents that I would need for that to happen.”

“I’ve already kept our marriage confidential,” he said with a shrug that, very likely, did not match the edge in his voice. “I do not see why you cannot simply trust me to keep our divorce equally private.”

“I have never understood why you insist on playing these power games.” But there was no heat behind the words. If anything, she sounded weary, and that felt like a weapon of her own, sunk deep. “What do you hope to gain? At the end of the day I will always be, until the day of my death, the Queen of the Sosegadas. And you—”

“Yes, me,” he said when she paused. “There’s nothing about me that is not indiscreet, is that not so?” He made himself a portrait of sheer indolence, standing there so languidly, and perhaps it was for the sky above. Perhaps it was for her. Perhaps it was entirely self-referential—or perhaps it was that or put his hands on her the way he deeply, darkly wanted to. “My own parents appear to be engaged in a competition to see who can collect the most spouses in one lifetime. Mine is less a family tree, and more...a collection of misbegotten sticks that someone gripped in a careless hand, then threw up into the sky, not caring at all where they might land. This must be so distressing for you.”

“Again.” And this time, her voice was resignation and steel at once. “What is it you want ?”

“Perhaps I think it is time you finally recognize me,” he said. And then he tilted his chin down so he could look at her and not the stars. So he could bask a little in that look of sheer horror on her face. “Oh, dear. Does that not fit into your plans? What would the good people of your kingdom think if they knew you had married so disastrously? If they had any idea you were swept away like a foolish girl, enslaved entirely by your body’s demands? What will they think of their spotless queen then?”

“They would assume what I have assumed ever since,” she said in that same calm voice, but he could see her eyes. He could see the way they’d gone a little hectic. “You are a master seducer, as you have proven repeatedly. I succumbed, as many do regularly, according to your rather overactive tabloid profile. Life is filled with regrets. The end.”

“I can see that you put thought into that one,” Caius said, sounding almost congratulatory. “No doubt you practiced it in the royal mirror. But the tragedy remains the same, does it not, my queen? In order to brand me a base seducer, you must cast yourself as the seduced. And who will consider you an icon above all others then? You will be but one more pathetic creature, ensnared like so many women are by men so unsavory that any association with them leaves a mark.”

Mila only raised a cool brow. “How lovely that at least one person on this planet appreciates my dilemma.”

He laughed at that, a low sound that the stars stole away. But he saw the color rise in her face, and then everything was fire.

“Poor little Majesty,” he murmured. “It appears that you remain hoist securely on your own petard.”

Her cheeks were aflame but her voice was still cool. “We will have to find a solution, Caius. You must know that.”

“I require no solutions. I am perfectly content.”

“Then why are you here?”

Caius laughed again. “When have I ever given you the impression that I’m the sort of person who would not enjoy a moment like this?” Her face looked hotter, and he could feel his own temperature rising. He told himself it was temper. Well-deserved temper. “You can’t control this, Mila. You can’t control me.”

“I have no wish to control you. The world is yours, Caius. Go be as uncontrolled as you like, with my blessing. Only let me end this marriage first.”

But he was on a roll. And he didn’t believe in her blessings anyway. “This palace is yours. All of these people, yours. Yet you and I know that where it matters, Mila, you have been and always will be mine.”

Again, he saw the way her gaze flared with temper, though there was otherwise little sign of it on her face. Maybe her jaw was more firm, but that was all. “This isn’t a game, Caius.”

“But to me, everything is.” He leaned in then, so close but he did not reach for her. And the sharp pleasure of denying himself almost gave way to the bright flame of indulgence. Almost . “Have you forgotten when you said that to me? Because I have not, Mila. I have not forgotten one word.”

“I was not trying to insult you. I was trying to explain.”

And years had passed. He believed her. She had, truly, simply been explaining her position to him, but in a way, that made it all the more insulting. Had she been trying to insult him, he would have been able to dismiss the things she’d said. Standing there so earnestly before him after the time they’d shared.

But she had been trying to be kind. He remembered that part too well. That had made it worse.

That had made it unforgivable.

“You have had the opportunity to change,” she said now, and there was a different sort of tension in the way she held herself, then. “It is impossible to avoid your exploits, and believe me, I have tried. So instead, I watched them. I watched you. I waited to see if even the slightest, faintest hint that anything I’d said to you had landed. If you’d thought for even one moment about my position, or what I need—”

“There was a time when I thought of nothing else.” And it was not perhaps the greatest strategy to say something like that so boldly, with so little finesse.

Then again, maybe it was the best strategy, because he heard her breath hitch. He watched, transfixed, as she lifted one hand and held it to her neck as if attempting to conceal the way her pulse pounded.

But he could see the way her fingers shook.

It should have made him feel small, the way that echoed in him like a new heat. Like a blessing all its own.

Luckily Caius was not that kind of man.

There was nothing small about him.

“You can’t want money,” she said after a moment, insulting him anew. “Can you?”

“Perhaps you have forgotten that I have too many fortunes to name,” he said, and this time, he forgot to keep the danger from his voice. Because she was even more maddening up close than she had been from afar all these years. He had not expected that. “Perhaps you have forgotten everything.”

“I have forgotten nothing,” she shot back.

“All the same,” he said, turning toward her at last and feeling that same electricity flood him the way it had since the moment they’d clapped eyes on each other, all those years ago and now again, too, “I think a small reminder is in order. To remind us who we are, Your Majesty. ”

And he did not wait for her raised brow, her queenly armor.

He did not wait for her response at all.

Caius simply hooked a palm around the nape of her neck, aware that she still fit him perfectly.

Then he pulled her to him and kissed her the way he’d wanted to for years.