Page 16 of Forbidden Royal Vows

Caius slipped out of his hotel before the sun’s rays fully penetrated the grand valley. He went on a long, hard run, out there beside the sparkling alpine water of the Royal Lake.

But no matter how many kilometers he ran, or how fast he ran them, he couldn’t outrun Mila.

And it was only when he was out there with his legs pumping, his heart pounding, and his breath coming hard and fast to remind him that he was alive, that he accepted the fact that seeing her like this—all the time, but never close enough to touch, not really—was perhaps backfiring.

Because the truth was that he’d expected that he would have one or two interactions with her and no longer find it necessary to even play these games. Or he had hoped. He had assumed that the girl he had known was the part she’d played, and that there would be no trace of her in the dauntingly serene Queen Emilia.

Instead, he could see the girl he’d known peering out of the Queen’s eyes sometimes. Every time her cheeks flushed, but only slightly. Every time there was that snap of temper in her gaze that no one else seemed to notice.

He could see her there, peering out. Reminding him that he hadn’t made her up. That she had existed all this time. She was just there, just out of reach.

With only the small matter of a throne and a crown between them.

He ran for hours and when he made it back to his hotel, he wasn’t surprised to find all kinds of messages on his mobile. He ignored them. And when the phone rang as he stood there, gulping down water and staring out the window at the palace that rose on the hill, he almost ignored it.

But that would only make call more.

“Caius,” said his sister when he answered, “what in the world are you doing? Since when do you hunker down in one place like this? I’ve never known you to turn your back on your vagabond ways. It’s chilling.”

“Good morning, Lavinia,” Caius replied mildly. “That’s a bit dramatic, don’t you think? It’s been a few weeks. Not years.”

“You once told me that anything more than a long weekend in a place was dangerous. Roots might spring up when you least expected it and hold you there forever.”

“That sounds like teenage poetry and I, happily, never wrote such trash.”

Though he had almost certainly said exactly that when he was an adolescent. It sounded like him.

Lavinia laughed at that, because the two of them were the only members of their sprawling, complicated, maddening family who had always gotten on. Probably because they had endured such a nomadic existence when they were young, forever being dragged from one hotel to the next, in service to their mother’s bottomless need for attention.

In those days, the Countess—as his mother preferred to be known, though her pretensions to the title were questionable at best—had in fact been homeless. But that was not a word anyone used when the person in question was of a certain social strata.

Or when she was a particular strain of attractiveness. The right width. The right way of dressing. The right friends, the right parties, the right way of manipulating events until she got what she wanted.

Another word for his mother was grifter, but it was so impolite to say such things out loud.

Along with other words like narcissist. Alcoholic.

Countess was easier.

“I know why you’re calling me,” Caius said. “I would have thought my not answering was its own clear message.”

Lavinia laughed again. “The Countess is becoming alarmingly tedious about this. She refuses to ask you herself, but she will be absolutely devastated if you don’t come to this wedding of hers.”

“I was at her last five weddings. Speaking of tedium.”

“She claims this one is different.”

“She always does,” he reminded his sister. “And why are you accepting her calls? Last I heard, you vowed not to be a party to this nonsense any longer.”

“Someone has to answer her calls,” his sister said, with the sort of defeated sigh he recognized only too well. Having made that sound himself more than he cared to recall.

He could hear some city or other in the background of wherever she was. Honking horns, spirited snatches of conversation. Whole lives that were conducted without the slightest interest in what one deranged woman they happened to be related to was or wasn’t doing.

“That is false,” he told his sister. “Someone always does answer her calls, but that doesn’t mean you need to be that person, Lavi.” He pronounced it Lovey, as he had since they were small. An unfair weapon then and now. “Besides, she has other children.”

“None of them would dare call you,” Lavinia said with a cackle. “They are far too protective of their own skins. I find it absolutely hilarious that the papers are filled with all the stories of ‘Caius Candriano, the most beloved and delightful guest at every society event,’ but anyone who knows you knows the truth. You’re a holy terror.”

“There is absolutely no difference in my behavior anywhere I go,” Caius told her with great dignity. He took another swig of his water, still glaring out at that palace. “I can’t help it if our family doesn’t like the way I tell a truth.”

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