His Two Royal Secrets

“Don’t be foolish,” she sobbed at him, her hands still over her face. “I’m hugely pregnant. You’ll give yourself a hernia.”

“Pia,” Ares said in the most regal voice she’d heard from him yet. “Please be so good as to shut up.”

She obeyed him. Or she tried, anyway, but she couldn’t keep the sobs inside. And later she would find herself appalled and humiliated that she’d so easily surrendered. To her emotions, to him. To everything. But here, now, she tipped her head forward, rested against his shoulder, and let the tears come.

Later she would regret this, she was sure of it.

But for a while, there was only the width and strength of his shoulder, holding her steady as he moved. There was the scent of him, clean and male, with a hint of something else. Soap, perhaps. Cologne, maybe. She couldn’t quite tell, but she knew that scent. She remembered it. And it soothed her.

She didn’t understand why he should be capable of calming her when no one else ever had. When her life was filled, in fact, with people and places and things that did the exact opposite of calming her. But she didn’t have it in her, just then, to fight him.

Not when he was so strong, and so warm, and when his arms wrapped around her as if she was light and sweet and beautiful. As if he could carry her forever, and would.

And when he finally set her down again, she had to bite her own tongue to keep from protesting.

She wiped at her face, then looked around, and it took her longer than it should have to recognize that she was in a bathroom. A huge, suitably palatial bathroom, that was. If she wasn’t mistaken, he had taken her back to her own rooms.

And she sat there, feeling limp and fragile with the force of her own feelings—none of which she could name—as the Crown Prince of Atilia filled her bath. She sat where he’d put her, there on the wide lip of the oversize tub. And she watched him, vaguely astonished that His Royal Highness knew how to go about such a mundane task.

The beauty of her convent education was that she and the rest of the girls from wealthy families who could afford to go there had been taught how to function like regular people. It was one of the convent’s primary missions, in fact.

“You do realize I have servants to do this, don’t you?” one of the girls in Pia’s year had thrown at Mother Superior one morning as they’d all been scrubbing the floors of their dormitory.

“My dear child,” Mother Superior had replied, in that mild voice that made them all wince, “you are being taught basic chores not for you, though you can certainly benefit from learning them, but for those servants. In the perhaps vain notion that a dose of empathy might allow you to inhabit your place in this world with more consideration for others.”

That had stuck with Pia, along with the punishment Mother Superior had levied against their entire class for the rest of the semester—that was, scrubbing the whole of the great hall. On their hands and knees.

Now she sat in a palace with a man she barely knew but would have sworn didn’t lift a single finger if someone else could do it for him. A prince who’d given her twins and spirited her away from her life—twice, now. And she wondered who’d taught him the same lesson.

And then wondered what was wrong with her that she wanted, so desperately, to believe that he was capable of something like empathy. Because that might make him into the father she knew he didn’t want to become.

Why do you want him to be a father? she asked herself, harshly enough that she could have been one of her own parents. You can raise these babies perfectly well on your own. You don’t need him.

That was true. She knew that was true. And still, Pia watched Ares sprinkle bath salts over the hot water as if this was church. Then she didn’t know what to feel when he came back to her, there on the edge of the tub set in an alcove with the sea outside.

“I think it is time you took off this shroud you are wearing, cara mia,” he said in a low voice.

Pia looked down. She knew she hadn’t changed her clothes, but she hadn’t really processed the fact that she was still wearing that same black dress, severe and solemn and not remotely comfortable, that she’d worn to her father’s funeral. And then to his grave.

She raised her gaze to Ares. “I don’t think I want to.”

Something moved over his face. He crouched down before her so he was on eye level with her. His arms were on either side of her legs, caging her there against the tub, and she thought that on some level, she should hate her heart for the way it beat so hard when he was close. She really should.

Ares shifted, moving back on his heels, but he did not rise. And his eyes were green and gold and that, too, felt like betrayal.