His Two Royal Secrets

CHAPTER NINE

ONE THING PIA’S childhood had taught her, like it or not, was that a person could get used to anything.

No matter how outrageous or absurd things seemed, and no matter how certain she was that they might, in fact, kill her—they never did.

She had gotten used to her parents’ excesses. The further removed she got from the operatic marriage of Eddie Combe and Alexandrina San Giacomo, the more she started to think of them as eccentrics, somehow unable to behave in any way other than the way they had. In a decade or so, she was sure, she would find herself nostalgic for her parents, their tempestuous relationship, and all those endless, theatrical fights she’d found so difficult to live through while growing up with them.

So, too, was Pia becoming used to her life in her very own prison of a palace.

She felt like Rapunzel, locked away in her little tower, visited by nothing and no one—save the man who came to her, mostly at night, and made her head spin around and around without laying so much as a finger on her.

Pia spent her days writing columns about fussy manners as stand-ins for deeper emotions, reading revolting things about herself in the tabloids—then vowing to stop reading revolting things about herself in the tabloids—and repeating the same thing over and over.

Her nights were punctuated by unpredictable glimpses of Ares.

Would he appear in the doorway as the shadows grew long, not there one moment and then a great, brooding presence in her peripheral vision the next? Would he ask her to join him for a drink with a guarded look in his green eyes and the suggestion of a banked fire in the way he held his big body? Would she agree, then sip at fizzy water as he swirled stronger spirits in a tumbler, the silence thick and layered between them? Or would they go a few rounds of conversation that always seemed so...fraught?

Pia never knew. She only knew that she looked forward to Ares’s appearances with an unseemly amount of anticipation. And missed him when his duties kept him away.

She could admit to herself, when she wasn’t making arch remarks about her prison tower, that she had always been a person better suited to life outside the glare of media attention and tabloid speculation. That night in New York had been the one and only time she’d tried to...be someone else.

Maybe, she told herself dourly in a voice that sounded a bit too much like one of Alexandrina’s mild rebukes, the reason Ares cannot bear to spend more than a few moments in your company, and no matter that you are carrying his children, is because he sees only that terrible lie when he looks at you.

She didn’t like to think about that. But how could she not? Pia was not beautiful. She was nothing like her mother. A man like Ares could have anyone, and had. Why would he want to be tethered for the rest of his life to her?

Pia had thought she’d come to terms with her looks—or lack thereof—a long time ago. It was a natural consequence of being Alexandrina San Giacomo’s only daughter. She had been destined to be a disappointment from the day she was born.

But she hadn’t marinated on that sad fact in a long time. Apparently, being hugely pregnant and mostly alone, locked up in a castle like an embarrassment that needed to be hidden away from the light, got into a girl’s head. And stayed there, hunkering down and breathing fire, whether she liked it or not.

“I will make sure that our branch of the family is better,” she promised her babies every day, shifting around on her favorite chaise as the boys kicked at her. With more and more vigor as the days rolled by and they grew inside her. “I promise.”

Pia was well into her seventh month of pregnancy when she discovered that her family had more branches than she knew.

Because it turned out that she and Matteo had another brother.

A half brother, Dominik, that their mother had given away when she was a teenager, long before she’d become an icon.

A scandalous little fact about her mother—her family—that Pia discovered by reading a tabloid.

“Did you know about this?” Pia asked Matteo in disbelief, reaching him on some business trip somewhere. When she knew he did, as the papers seemed to suggest that the new brother was dating Matteo’s personal assistant—who had always returned Pia’s calls before, yet was failing to do so at present. “How long have you known we have another relative and not told me?”

“It’s not as if you’ve been available, Pia,” Matteo said, and she would have said it was impossible for him to sound any colder than he already did. But he proved her wrong.

“I think by ‘available’ you mean, ‘sitting in a room you might accidentally enter,’” Pia said, with a little more asperity than she normally showed her brother. Or anyone. “When the common definition also includes this device I’m calling you on right now. It’s very handy for the sharing of important news, like brand-new family members appearing full grown. Or even to say hello.”