The Night the King Claimed Her

But Felipe immediately stood, a frown gathering in his eyes as he nodded to a waiting footman. ‘Amalia, your maid is waiting for you.’ He turned to Elsie. ‘I’ll escort you to the gatehouse. You’ll return tomorrow afternoon. I’m not telling you,’ he added with a meaningful emphasis. ‘That was an invitation.’

‘You call that an invitation?’

The smallest mocking smile softened his sudden solemnity. ‘Please.’

Elsie quickly hugged Amalia and then walked with Felipe. Swift and serious, he stayed close to her side. While that was disturbing, she was also relieved because the palace was insanely huge.

‘How do you find your way around here?’ Elsie muttered, unable to contain her edginess. She was still off-kilter knowing he was going to marry some princess, and shocked by her fevered reactions to him. ‘Don’t you get lost all the time?’

‘You want a GPS tracker?’ Felipe’s drawl had both light and dark edges and that madness flared within her again.

‘I feel like you’d use it as an electronic tag on me,’ she said acidly. ‘I wouldn’t want to take a wrong turn and end up in the dungeon.’

‘That would take a little more than a wrong turn.’

‘Are the rumours true, then?’ she asked, diverted. ‘There really are dungeons in the basement?’

His smile flashed. ‘No one who sees the torture chambers lives to tell anyone about them...’

‘So prisoners really were shipped off in the middle of the night, never to be seen again?’ She parroted one of the stories spun in the tourist shops in the city centre.

‘That hasn’t happened for at least a hundred years. Though that’s not to say it still couldn’t happen now.’

She only half laughed—because the thought of being bailed up in Felipe’s dungeon? It was a shockingly fascinating idea.

The route took them through a large portrait hall, part of the public wing of the palace. Each enormous painting depicted various members of the royal family. Elsie slowed as they came to the more modern paintings and she couldn’t resist stopping at the last and studying it. ‘When?’

‘It was my investiture. A formal ceremony to recognise me as heir to the Crown after my father left,’ he explained.

She glanced back at the previous few frames. ‘There aren’t any pictures of him.’

‘He abdicated.’

‘So that means he’s not part of the family any more?’ She gazed at the previous portrait and recognised his grandfather, King Javier. ‘There are none of your mother either. Doesn’t she live here?’

‘She hasn’t set foot in the palace since my father left her for Amalia’s mother.’

Elsie was shocked. ‘Not at all?’

‘She didn’t want to shoulder the burden of my grandfather’s disappointment.’

It sounded as though his grandfather was more tyrant than king. To have banished people? For their images to have been literally scrubbed from the palace? It was punitive and surely must have marked Felipe deeply. ‘But what about you?’

‘I guess she thought I was old enough to handle it.’

She looked again at that portrait of him in a fearsomely ceremonial robe standing alone. ‘How old were you at your investiture?’

‘Seventeen.’

‘Young.’

‘Young adult,’ he amended.

‘Still young to have to take on adult concerns and responsibilities.’

‘You think?’

‘Yeah.’ She didn’t just think, she knew. ‘I was seventeen when my mother got her diagnosis.’ And as old as she’d believed she was when she was seventeen, it wasn’t old enough to handle that...and maybe not things like heavy robes and crowns and the weight of a nation either.