Page 14 of Forbidden Royal Vows

Now, once again, she felt all the same things that had charged around inside of her earlier. That wildfire passion. That intense, impossible connection.

The coiled, golden dragon of the way she longed for him and all the grief and hope and loss that went with it.

There were other things that she could do to handle this situation. She knew that. There was a team in the palace whose job it was to anticipate bad press, or any kind of scandal, and get out ahead of it. She should have been on the phone to them right now.

But Mila didn’t pick up her extension.

She stayed where she was, sitting cross-legged on her bed.

She thought of that kiss, that glorious kiss she should not have allowed, and eventually she picked up the gold chain and let the ring dance there on the end of it in the soft light of her bedroom.

Here, only here, where no one would see her and no one would know, she slipped that ring on her finger the way she had years ago.

And for the first time in a long, long while, let the memories wash over as they would, until her mouth tasted of salt and there were no tears left to cry for the man she couldn’t have.

The man she shouldn’t want.

The man she would have to make herself forget all over again, come morning.

CHAPTER FOUR

A FEW WEEKS later Caius helped himself to a drink at the latest party he had been invited to personally and not as an escort to someone else, looked around yet another crowded ballroom, and congratulated himself on a campaign waged well.

He had single-handedly made Las Sosegadas a premier destination for the very rich and very, very bored set, who were always listlessly trailing from yacht to beach, complaining that the dog days of August were tedious in the extreme.

Now they were all cavorting about this pretty little jewel of a mountain kingdom instead, swanning up and down the boulevards and talking in their disaffected drawls as if they’d spent their whole lives holidaying in the kingdom.

“Why broil on the beach when we can be in the mountains instead?” brayed one pouting, supposedly fashionable heiress with a breathlessness she considered her trademark. She waved her cocktail in a manner designed to draw the eyes of her rivals and friends, clustered near the looming pillar. It drew Caius’s gaze too, though not for the same reasons. “Besides, I prefer my skin to look like porcelain, not leather.”

Hotels were suddenly overbooked all over the kingdom. Housing prices skyrocketed as the sorts of people who liked a fashionable pied-à-terre wherever they might find themselves found their way here.

And all Caius had to do was the same thing he always did: wander about these same parties with a smirk on his face. Very much as if he knew something everyone else didn’t, the better to drive them all mad.

Because without exception, they all threw themselves into a frenetic competition to pretend they knew exactly what it was that Caius Candriano knew. Whatever it happened to be.

It worked like a charm every time.

That was the power of the mask he’d learned to wear.

It had taken very little time to ingratiate himself with the grand hostesses of the realm, who, naturally, quickly found him indispensable. Was it even a party, they queried each other both in public and private, if Caius was not in attendance?

But he was always in attendance. And he had merited his own invitation shortly after that first party at the palace, followed by every invitation. To everything. It was child’s play to make certain that he turned up wherever the Queen was expected.

Sometimes he even got to talk to her, though he made no effort to do so.

Because he knew she expected him to do just that. To push. To encroach. And the more she expected him to do it, the less he tried.

The glorious result of that was that every night he went out to an event where the Queen was expected, he could feel her temper rise as if she was holding the flame of it to his own skin.

A flame that grew higher and higher each evening he wandered through rooms she was in, pretending he was unaware of her presence. Or better yet, uninterested.

Tonight it was nearing inferno levels, that temper of hers he could feel from clear across the ballroom.

It was possible that he enjoyed it a little too much. Particularly because he knew that he was the only one who could see it. To everyone else, she might as well have been a portrait of herself, stood in her usual place so they could gaze at her from afar.

There was something about that notion that got under his skin, worrying its way deep.

“You should make me your one-man tourism board,” he told her later that night when they ended up seated next to each other at the long, sumptuous banquet table.

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