His Two Royal Secrets

“Remind me how that happened,” he dared her, low and dark.

And it didn’t make any sense. He shouldn’t want to be anywhere near her, not when his worst nightmare was playing out before him, inside her—

But he couldn’t seem to help himself.

Ares bent and pressed his mouth to hers.

And the heat kicked through him, wild and hot. It lit him up, reminding him of that night in Manhattan while it stormed through him, new and mad.

He wasn’t satisfied with the press of lips, so he angled his head, taking the kiss deeper. Making it dangerous. Making it clear how easy it had been to go from a conversation at a party to that very long night that had resulted in...this.

He pulled her to him, sliding his hands over her shoulders, then down her back.

And she kissed him back, meeting the thrust of his tongue. She pressed against him as if she, too, wanted to get closer. Her hands came up and found his chest, and he could feel her belly between them, pushing into him, and that, surely, should have woken him up from the spell—

But instead, Ares kissed her deeper. Harder.

He slid his hands between them and felt the insistent mound of her belly himself.

Her belly. His babies.

And she was the one who wrenched her mouth from his then.

Everything was jumbled around inside of Ares. He had never put his hands on a pregnant woman’s belly before. He’d certainly never done so with the knowledge that the babes within were his.

It should have disgusted him. He’d always been so revolted at the very idea of fathering a child.

Or maybe it was his own father who had revolted him, now he considered it.

And this was Pia, with her wide eyes, and that generous mouth that drove him crazy. Her taste was in his mouth again, making him wild. Making him hard. Making him feel like someone else entirely.

Someone who put his hands on a woman’s belly, understood what he felt there were his own sons—sons—and felt a deep, possessive thrill at the notion—

What the hell was happening to him?

All of it was wrong. It was as if he’d been taken over by a different man. A stranger. And yet Ares didn’t step away. He didn’t even drop his hands. He felt that possessiveness in his chest. His sex.

“I don’t think this is the answer to the situation we’re in,” Pia said, though her voice wasn’t any steadier than he felt. “I think sex has already caused enough trouble, don’t you?”

“I don’t know that there are any answers,” Ares replied. “We might as well console ourselves with the one thing we appear to be so good at.”

“I...don’t know how to respond to that. I don’t have any context.”

“Then you’ll have to take my word for it.” He moved his hands over her bump, telling himself it meant nothing. That he was relearning her shape, that was all. That the fact his palms could not contain her belly, much less the lives within it, didn’t matter to him at all. “We are very, very good at it.”

And something shifted in him, turning over too fast. Ares found he could no longer tell what, precisely, he meant by that. He was talking about sex, surely. Wasn’t he?

But Pia was clearly not inclined to parse the nuances. She stepped back further, almost running into the settee behind her in her haste. And he couldn’t deny that there was something in him that took immense satisfaction in the fact that he affected her in this way.

Because no one else had ever touched her. Only him.

That primitive thing inside him, heretofore wholly unknown to him, stirred again.

Her lips were swollen from his kiss. Her body was swollen with not one, but two of his children.

And he might not want to accept what that meant. He might find all of this impossible and bewildering in turn, no matter what the doctor had said. But Ares couldn’t deny that the sight of her, lushly fertile and entirely his, made him...

Deeply, darkly triumphant, on a level he hadn’t known existed.

“No,” she said, very distinctly.

“No?”

“Whatever that look on your face is. Whatever it is, no. I want no part of it.”

“But all bets are off now, are they not?” He felt...ferocious. “I am a man who never planned to have children, yet you are carrying two, and they are mine. Who knows what else we think we cannot have, or do not want, that will happen here against our will?”

“I have no intention of spending the next few months trapped here,” she told him, in that same sober, serious way. “You now know that you’re the father of these babies. My babies. I’m glad. That wasn’t a secret I meant to keep from you in the first place. But now that you know, there’s no need for all these...” She looked around the room, and waved her hand as if to take it all in, and the whole of the palace besides. “All these royal shenanigans.”