Ares had never felt the weight of the Atilian crown more than he did in the moment she dismissed it, and so easily.
“Here’s the problem, Pia,” he said, feeling as growly and uneven as he sounded. “I cannot decide what to do with you.”
“I don’t recall signing myself over into your care. You don’t decide what happens to me. I do.”
“You are a quandary,” he told her, and the things that roared inside him were loud again. They competed with each other. They were made of furor and fang, and over and over again, they drew blood. That damned blood of his. “I have to decide how to proceed.”
“Terrific. You go ahead and think on that to your heart’s content. Meanwhile, I’ll fly straight back to England and carry on with my life, shall I?”
“That’s not going to happen.” When she scowled at him, he laughed. Because what was there to do but laugh at the very notion that either one of them could wander back to their normal lives now? Or ever? “I think perhaps, cara, it is not I who am being unreasonable.”
“Says the man who kidnapped me.”
“You say you wish to go back to England. Where would you go?”
Pia’s frown deepened. “Home. Obviously.”
“The paparazzi already have their teeth in this story. Your brother is fielding calls for his resignation after his display of violence and I’m certain that the palace will already have received a thousand queries about whether or not his pregnant sister is the reason he belted me. Do you think they’ll magically leave you alone?”
“They always have before,” she said, and for the first time, he understood how very sheltered she’d been. It should have appalled him, surely. But instead, he had the strangest urge to shelter her.
“Convents and finishing schools do not capture the public’s imagination the way a scandal does,” he told her. “Or the world would be a very different place.”
“We can still deny it.” She sounded almost...desperate. “Matteo is a Combe. Combes are always punching people. What’s a prince in the mix?”
“I think you know better.”
“I don’t see why anyone has to know about this if we don’t tell them,” she argued. “It’s always seemed to me that the people the tabloids hound the most are the ones who court the attention. If we don’t court it, surely they’ll move on to something else.”
“Pia. Remember, please, that I am not some debutante’s gelded date, on hand to waltz on command at her coming-out ball. I am the Crown Prince of this kingdom, for my sins. The very hint that any woman’s baby could be mine will send my people into a frenzy.”
She shook her head, her face pale again. “What does that matter? You told me that you don’t want children and don’t want a wife. Frenzy or not.”
“I don’t.”
“So there’s no point to any of these conversations, is there?”
“What I want and what I plan to do with what has happened are two different things, I think,” he said.
He wasn’t sure why her reluctance made his temper kick at him. Only that it did.
And he stared her down until she lowered her eyes, there in the palace his ancestors had built while the blue blood he hated—and yet shared with all those who had stood here before him—stormed in his veins.
It made him feel alive, like it or not. It made him want.
It made him wonder how this was going to end.
“If I were you,” Ares told her, all princely command, “I would resign myself to it.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
PIA HAD NO intention of resigning herself to anything, thank you, and especially not her own kidnapping.
Sure, she’d gotten into his car and onto his plane of her own free will. It had seemed vastly preferable to the baying press outside Combe Manor. But she hadn’t expected to come here. That had to count against him. She was determined it did.
She broke away from that room where she’d felt as if Ares was holding her in his grip, where her mouth still throbbed from his kisses—God help her, that man could kiss—and hurtled herself out into the palace corridors. It took her longer than it should have to find her way back to her suite, and by the time she made it she was tired, emotional, and shaking.
Pia told herself she was peckish, that was all. Because once the morning sickness had stopped, she’d become ravenous. And hadn’t stopped.
Her aide met her inside her rooms and quickly produced a lavish spread for Pia to choose from. And she wanted so desperately to be the sort of unwilling captive who could turn up her nose at anything she was offered. Not to mention, weren’t there too many tales about unwary virgins who were lured into treacherous places they could have left—if only they hadn’t eaten there?