Bride By Royal Decree

“Cairo,” Maggy whispered. Because even she knew that name. Everybody knew that name. She’d seen his pictures all over every magazine in existence for as long as she could remember, because there was nothing else to do while standing in line in sad discount supermarkets stocking up on cheap staples but look at pretty people doing marvelous things in exotic places. “Cairo Santa Domini.”

Reza inclined his head. “The one and only. He is your brother. As someone who saw him in person not long ago and is now looking at you, I must tell you that there is absolutely no doubt that you are his blood relative.”

Maggy shook her head. She took a step back and only stopped because she had nowhere to go, with his henchmen looming back near the counter. “No.”

She didn’t know what she was denying. Which part of this madness. Only that it was crucial to her sanity—to everything that had kept her upright and grimly moving forward all her life no matter what got thrown at her—that she keep doing so.

But his dark gaze was much too knowing on hers. She was sure he could see far too much. And the fact he could—that he seemed to have no problem whatsoever seeing straight through her when no one else had ever come close—shook through her like a winter storm, treacherous and dark.

“This will not go away, Princess,” he told her, very matter-of-factly. And he didn’t shift that gaze of his from hers. “Nor will I. And you can be certain that if I recognized you, so, too, will someone else.”

“I think you’re overestimating the amount of time people in your world spend looking closely at people in mine.”

Again, a curve of those stern lips, and she wasn’t equipped to deal with that. She couldn’t process it. She could only feel the way it flushed over her, like another kick of temper when she knew full well it wasn’t that. She might not have felt anything like it in recent memory, but she knew it wasn’t anything close to temper.

“You’re decades too late,” she threw at him. She didn’t know where it came from. Or, worse, she knew exactly where it came from. That dark little hollow place she carried around inside of her that nothing ever filled. And she couldn’t seem to stop herself once she’d started. “Everyone dreams they’re secretly a princess when they’re ten. Especially in foster care. But I’m over that now. This is my life. I made it, I’m happy with it, and I’m staying in it.”

“Come to dinner with me anyway,” he ordered her, and there was something about the way he said things as if they were laws instead of requests that, oddly, made her want to obey him. She had to lock her knees to keep from moving toward him. She, who was famous for her attitude problems and inability to follow the orders of people who were paying her to listen to them. What was that? “You can consider it a date.”

Maggy assumed he was joking. Because he had to be joking, of course. No one asked her for dates, even roundabout ones like this one. She had stay the hell away from me stamped all over her face, she was pretty sure.

And the few times anyone had actually mustered up all their courage and asked that scrappy Strafford girl on a date, it had not been a king.

Not that she’d independently verified this man was who he said he was.

“I would rather die than go on a date with you,” she told him, which was melodramatic and also, in that moment, the absolute truth.

Again that slow, coolly astonished blink of his, as if he required extra time to process what she’d said to him—and not, she was quite sure, because he didn’t understand her.

“How much money can you possibly make in this place?” he asked.

“That’s rude. And it’s none of your business. Just like everything else about me is none of your business. You don’t get to know everything about another person simply because you demand it or send your little minions to dig it up.”

“By minions, am I to assume you mean my staff?”

“If you want to know things about someone, you ask. You wait to see if they answer. If they don’t, it could be because they don’t want to answer you because your question is obnoxious. Or because they think you’re a random creepy guy who showed up with his personal collection of armed men after closing time to say a whole lot of crazy things, suggesting you might be delusional. Or that you won’t go away no matter what you are. Or in my case, all of the above.”

That muscle in his jaw clenched tight. “Consider dinner with me an employment opportunity.” When she only stared back at him, that muscle clenched tighter. “An interview for a position, if you will.”

“A position as what? Your next little piece on the side? While I’m sure competition for that downward spiral is intense, I’ll pass. I prefer my lovers, you know, sane.”

She knew she’d gone too far then. Reza went very, very still. His gray eyes seemed to burn through her. Her pulse took off at a gallop and she had to order herself to keep breathing.

“Be very careful, Magdalena,” he advised her, his voice low and stern and still, it wound its way through her like a wicked heat. “I have so far tolerated your impudence because it is clear you cannot help yourself, given your circumstances. But you begin to stray too far into the sort of insults that cannot and will not be tolerated. Do you understand me?”

Maggy understood that he was far more intimidating than he should have been, and she was fairly hard to cow. She told herself it didn’t matter. That she was as numb as she wished she really was, head to toe, except for that wildness deep in her core that she wanted to deny was there.

She rolled her eyes. “You don’t have to worry about tolerating me. And I really don’t care if you do or don’t. What you do have to do is go.”

He let out a breath, but she knew, somehow, he wasn’t any less furious.

“I have already told you the only way that will happen and I am not in the habit of repeating myself. Nor am I renowned for going back on my word. Two things you would do well to keep in mind.”

And Maggy thought, to her horror, that she might explode. And worse, do it right in front of him. Something was rolling inside of her, heavy and gathering steam, and she was terrified that she might break down in front of this granite wall of a man and humiliate herself. Ruin herself.

She didn’t know him. She didn’t want to know him. But she knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that she couldn’t show any weakness in front of him or it would kill her.

“Fine,” she gritted out at him, because when there were no more defensive plays to make, offense was the only way to go. She’d learned that the hard way, too, like everything else. “I’ll have dinner with you. But only if you leave right now.”

And then she wished she could snatch the words back the moment she’d said them.

Reza didn’t smile or gloat. He didn’t let that stark, hard mouth of his soften at all. And yet there was that silver gleam in his gaze that kicked at her anyway and was worse, somehow, than the gloating of a lesser man. Or it hit her harder, anyway.

He merely inclined his head. Then he named the fanciest resort within a hundred-mile radius, waiting until she nodded.

“Yes,” she bit out, letting her sharpness take over her tone because it was much, much better than what she was afraid hid beneath it. “I know where it is.”

“I will expect you in one hour,” he told her.

Expect away, idiot, she thought darkly.

But she made herself smile. “Sure thing.”

“And if you do not appear,” Reza said quietly, because apparently he really could read her like a very simple book, “I will come and find you. I know where you live. I know where you work. I know the car you drive, if, indeed, that deathtrap can rightly be called a car at all. I have an entire security force at my beck and call, and as the sovereign of another nation, even one who is flying under the radar as I am here, I am granted vast diplomatic immunity to do as I please. I would suggest you consider these things carefully before you imagine you can plot your way out of this.”

And he turned on his heel before she could come up with a response to that. Which was good, because she didn’t have one. His men leapt to serve him, flanking him and opening the door for him, then swept him back out into the night.

The cold air rushed in again. The door slapped shut behind him, the echo of the bell still in the air.

Maggy was breathing too hard. Too loud. And she couldn’t seem to operate her limbs.

So she made herself move. She sank back down to her knees and she scrubbed that damned sticky area like her life depended on it. And only when she was finished, only when she’d mopped the rest of the floor and dealt with her bucket in the utility room in the back, did she pull out her own phone again.

She looked at it for a long moment. Maybe too long.

Then she pretended she was doing something, anything else as she opened up her browser and typed in king of the Constantines...

And there he was. Splashed all over the internet. On the covers of reputed newspapers and all over their inside pages. In image after image. She saw articles about his childhood. His education at Cambridge. His coronation following his father’s sudden heart attack and the war he’d wrenched his country back from in the months that followed. That same harsh face. That same arrogant brow. That same imperial hand waving here, there, everywhere as he gave orders and addresses and spoke of this law and that moral imperative and the role of the monarchy in the modern world.

It was him. Reza was exactly who he’d said he was.

Which meant that there was a very high probability that she was, too.

And this time, when Maggy went back down on her knees on the floor, it wasn’t because she was in a hurry to get back to cleaning it.

It was because for the first time in her entire life, when she’d learned how to be tougher than tough no matter what, her knees failed to hold her.

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