Bride By Royal Decree

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.

CHAPTER THREE

BY THE TIME Maggy walked into the gaspingly precious and markedly high-class resort and spa, set in all its grand timber and soaring glass splendor some miles outside of Deanville at the foot of the local mountains, she’d done a great deal more research.

She’d gone home after locking up the coffee shop and she’d crouched there on her single bed in her narrow little room with her phone to her face, taking an internet crash course on the life and times of the Santa Domini royal family. And everything she’d discovered had made her...a little bit dizzy.

Could this be real? Could she have a history after all these years of being nothing but a blank slate? Would she finally discover how and why she’d been left by the side of that road twenty years ago? Was it possible that the answer really, truly was something like one of the many silly and fanciful stories she’d made up when she was a girl to explain it away?

She’d spent a lot of time and energy back then trying to explain to herself how and why she’d ended up the way she had. The possibility that she’d been a kidnapped princess had featured heavily in the rotation of the tales she’d told herself when she’d still had a little foolish hope left. After all, it was a much better story than the more likely one—that whatever adults had been responsible for her had abandoned her because they couldn’t care for her or didn’t want that kind of commitment any longer. For whatever depressing reasons adults would have to make such decisions. A few came to mind as more likely than finding out she was a misplaced princess. Substance abuse, for example. Mental illness. Poverty. She could take her pick and they all ended the same way: a sad eight-year-old girl on the side of a road with no memory of how she’d gotten there.

But that wasn’t the sort of story Maggy had wanted to tell herself back then. Princesses won hands down every time.

“Don’t get your hopes up,” she’d snapped at herself, there in her rented room in an old, converted Victorian that had likely seen its better days when Vermont was still more or less one big farm.

She’d scrolled through pictures of the queen, the king. She’d taken great care not to think the word parents. Or the other, more personal words that indicated the kind of close relationships she’d never had with anyone. Mother. Father. And she’d sucked up her courage and taken a long, close look at the princess who had supposedly died in that car accident twenty years ago. She’d stared at that little girl’s face, not sure what she saw when she looked at it. Or what, if anything, she should see. There was no sense of recognition. There was...nothing inside of her. No spark, no reaction. There was simply the picture of a little girl lost years ago.

And then she’d studied the many, many pictures of and corresponding articles about Cairo Santa Domini. He was once the most scandal-prone royal in all of Europe. Now he was the beloved king of the country he’d taken back from the military everyone seemed to assume had not only wrested control of his kingdom thirty years ago, but ten years after that had engineered that car accident in Montenegro to take out the exiled king. And in so doing, had killed everyone in the Santa Domini royal family save King Cairo himself, who had been in boarding school in the United States at the time.

He was potentially her only living family member.

It was possible, after all this time and a life lived entirely on her own in every conceivable way, that she actually had a living family member.

Maggy had felt as if she might be sick.

She’d thought a lot about simply getting into her junky old car and driving absolutely anywhere Reza—who it seemed really was the king he’d claimed he was no matter how little she wanted that to be true—was not.

But in the end, she hadn’t done it. She’d thrown on the only dress she owned that was even slightly nice and she hadn’t gone to too much trouble with the rest because he’d made his feelings about her appearance pretty clear. And then she’d driven herself over to the upscale resort instead of out west toward California. And yes, she had to sit in her car in the frigid parking lot until her hands stopped shaking, but that was between her and her steering wheel and the close, hard dark all around.

Maggy prided herself on the toughness she’d earned every day of the past twenty years, having had no one to depend on but herself. Ever. That meant that no matter how she felt—in this case, about as far from tough as it was possible to get without actually dissolving into a sea of tears, which she never allowed herself and certainly not in public places—she’d pulled herself together and climbed out of that car, her shaking hands be damned. She’d wanted answers to questions she’d stopped asking years ago. It was a little bit surprising how very much she wanted them, so long after she’d decided wondering about such things only made her weak. And how, with only the slightest provocation—if that was what she could call the appearance of an actual king in The Coffee Queen on Main Street—all those same old questions flooded her.

Making her realize she’d never really gotten over wondering who she was or where she’d come from the way she’d assured herself she had. She’d simply stuffed her urge to ask those things way down deep inside, where none of that could leak out into her daily life any longer. The way it had when she’d been much younger and much, much angrier about her lot in life.

When she started across the chilly, icy parking lot, well salted to make certain the wealthy people who could afford to stay here didn’t slip, break their heads open, and then fail to pay their astronomical bills, she was caught for a moment in the dark grip of the cold night. It seemed to tumble down around her and she took as deep a breath as she could stand of the sharp winter air, tipping her head back so she could see all the far-off stars gleaming there above her.

Always watching. Always quiet, always calm. No matter what darkness was engulfing her, the stars shone through.

By the time Maggy made it to the front door of the resort, that great, raw thing inside of her that felt like the sort of sob that she’d rather die than let free had subsided a bit. Just a bit. But it was enough to keep her hands from shaking.

A hotel employee with a clipboard and a walkie-talkie waited for her in the slick, self-consciously rustic lobby of the hotel, a serene smile on her face, as if she and Maggy had already met a thousand times before. Maggy was certain they had not.

“If you’ll follow me, Ms. Strafford,” the woman said warmly. Maybe too warmly, Maggy thought, when greeting a complete stranger. “I’ll take you where you need to go. Mr. Argos—” and there was specific emphasis on that name “—is waiting.”

On any other night Maggy would have asked a few follow-up questions. Demanded to know how this woman knew who she was at a glance, for a start. But something told her she didn’t want to know the answer to that question. That it would involve the word appalling again. And while Maggy felt her self-esteem was strong enough to withstand the snotty comments of an uninvited king in her coffee shop, there was no point testing that theory here, in the sort of five-star hotel broke girls like herself normally gave a wide berth.

Instead, she let the woman lead her back outside and into a waiting hotel shuttle, clearly set aside for her use. She didn’t ask any questions then, either. She only settled into the seat she was offered in the otherwise empty vehicle and stared out the window, trying to keep her eyes on the stars as the shuttle wound its way out into the depths of the property, deep into the woods and halfway up the mountain. It stopped there. Maggy glanced out to see a guardhouse and gates, and heard many short bursts of noise on multiple walkie-talkies before the shuttle started to move again.

“It’s only a few moments more,” the woman from the hotel told her, still smiling so happily.

Maggy practiced smiling like a normal person. It was a skill she’d never mastered, given how little cause she’d had to go around smiling at random people. Or at all. In her experience, anyone who wanted her to act friendly and who wasn’t paying her to do so was best avoided altogether. It felt awkward and wrong, as if she was doing something to her cheeks. She was relieved when the woman looked back to the shuttle driver instead.

Gradually, Maggy realized they were on a long driveway. It climbed farther up the steep incline in a corridor of evergreens and ghostly birch trees, then stopped beneath a towering palace of a house done in more timber and even more dramatic glass. It sprawled over the mountainside as if it had been placed there by divine intervention instead of the resort’s developers.

She wasn’t the least bit surprised that this was where Reza was staying.

And when she walked inside the soaring entry hall that must have commanded views over most of New England in the sunlight, she was equally unsurprised to find a battalion of servants waiting for her as if she’d strolled into Buckingham Palace.

Not that she’d ever been anywhere near Buckingham Palace. But she’d seen as many pictures of the British palace in the supermarket tabloids over the years as she had of Cairo Santa Domini and his exploits.

After her coat was taken and she’d been greeted approximately nine hundred times by uniformed staff members who pledged to attend to her every need, whatever those might be, Maggy was led off into the house. Each room she walked through was more impressive than the last. Here a library of floor-to-ceiling books and dark leather armchairs pulled close to a crackling fire. There what appeared to be a games room, with a pool table and a chess table and stout cupboards likely filled with every board game imaginable, if she’d had to guess. A large living area, ripe with comfortable couches and deep, thick rugs set out before the glass windows and an outside deck with views over the valley. A closer, more intimate den, with wide armchairs and enveloping sofas and the sort of wall of closed wood cupboards she figured hid television equipment.

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