CHAPTER TEN
“WHATEXACTLYIS going on?”
Maximus was the unhappy recipient the next morning of a group video call from both of his sisters, and his friend Dante, who was also now his brother-in-law.
He was rocked by the previous night. By his encounter with Annick, and even more so by the conversation after.
I will let you play the part of gentleman tonight. But only because you need to.
He was a man who lived a life in the shadows, and Annick seemed to have the ability to drag him into the light.
If you need to feel redeemed for what you have done to me...
Oh, Annick. If only she knew, there was no redemption, not for a man like him.
“Obviously my engagement has been announced?” he said, shutting his thoughts down and grinning into the screen, as was expected of him.
“Your engagement. To the Princess of a principality that until very recently was run by a crazed despot,” his friend Dante said.
“Yes. The very one.”
“How did that...?” It was Violet who asked that question, though she wasn’t able to finish it. She was staring into the camera, looking comically confused.
“How these things normally work, Violet,” he said, as if his sister was terribly slow. “Kidnap.”
“Kidnap,”she said. “You’re not telling me that tiny little creature kidnapped you. That’s embarrassing. At least I was kidnapped by a very large man.”
She reclined in her chair, round with her pregnancy and looking amusingly embarrassed on his behalf.
“Don’t underestimate a small woman with a large amount of determination, Violet,” he said. “I’ve decided to go ahead and allow the kidnap. Just as I decided to go ahead and pursue an engagement with my beautiful captor. Why wouldn’t I?” He affected the most charming smile he could. “Think of all the things I’ve done. There isn’t a very long list of things I haven’t. Virgin Princesses? Well, that was a stone left unturned. And the opportunity to be King? She’s being crowned Queen today. And in Aillette that makes me King.”
“Seems unearned,” Violet said.
“And strange,” Dante added.
“But you should at least admire her industriousness in procuring herself the husband she wanted. She chloroformed me.”
“Did she?” Minerva looked positively delighted by this news.
“Of course you would like it,” Dante said. “Given you ended up engaged to me because of a rather grand lie you told on TV. It was very nearly kidnap.”
“I did do that,” Minerva said. “I really do admire women who go after what they want. If I would’ve thought of chloroform, I would’ve used that.”
“And to think,” Dante said, addressing Maximus. “You worried about your sister when I married her. You should’ve been worried for me.”
“Don’t worry about me,” Maximus said. “Everything is well in hand. You can tell Dad and Mom that they can come visit the palace sometime.”
“Well, Mom will like that,” Violet said. “Two children married into royalty. And you only married a billionaire, Minerva. You look like the slouch out of the group.”
Minerva did look angry about that, since she historically felt left behind. “But I gave them their first grandchild,” she said.
Regret kicked against his stomach. Because he had not used birth control with Annick last night. And though children between them was somewhat inevitable, she was young and it did not have to be now. He did his best to push the thought aside. What was done was done. He had a feeling there would be no asking Annick to procure any sort of emergency contraceptives. He could only imagine the scathing that would earn him. She would do precisely what she pleased and nothing else. That much he knew.
“You will all be invited to the wedding, of course.” To do anything else would be strange. He was almost troubled by how easily he lied to his family. But he’d been doing it for so many years that it was second nature. Second nature to smile like this, to make jokes about how he was doing this simply to enrich the portfolio of all that he’d done. Yes, this kind of subterfuge was easy. He didn’t even feel guilty about it.
No, what he felt guilty about was taking Annick’s virginity. A novelty within a novelty. He had been...rough. He should not have taken her on a stone bench without a care for the pain she might’ve experienced. But he had.
He thought back to what she’d said.