Page 17 of Forbidden Royal Vows

“Tell yourself whatever you need to,” Lavinia said with an audible eye roll. “The Countess is getting married again, whether we like it or not. I don’t even know what number it is, because I have chosen not to process the final tally. As it so often changes.”

“I cannot for the life of me understand why you’re engaging with this, Lavi.”

But she continued as if he hadn’t spoken. “It would be one thing if you were simply unreachable, forever here, forever there. But it seems as if you’ve settled in this place. You’re in the papers every day. How would it look if you couldn’t come to your own mother’s wedding?”

“One can only hope it will be seen as a complete lack of interest in a very boring subject, as we all know there will be another wedding to attend.” Caius rubbed his hand over his face but the palace was still there, looming, when he opened his eyes again. Mila might as well have been on the other side of the glass, staring him down with that look of hers, unknowable and imperious at once.

“Have you met him?” Lavinia asked.

“I don’t need to meet him.”

“Anyway, Caius,” she said in the resigned tone of one who is forced to soldier on despite unforeseen and obnoxious resistance, “it will hurt her feelings if you don’t make an appearance.”

“You and I both know that the Countess does not have any feelings.”

“Forgive me.” This time the sigh was aggrieved and aimed directly at him. “What I meant to say is that you are by far her most famous offspring. She will be humiliated and outraged if you don’t turn up the way she wants. You know how she gets when that happens.”

“Goodbye Lavinia,” Caius said in the same mild voice he’d been using all along, because he knew it would annoy her. “Stop doing her dirty work.”

And he could hear his laughing as he rang off.

He stayed where he was for a moment, frowning down at his mobile and wondering if he should add insult to injury and give his father a call. Just to see how badly the old man was messing up his life these days, what with his addictions to fast cars, too much gambling, and making a mockery of his family’s once good name.

It was enough to give a man a complex, if Caius was the kind of man who allowed himself such things. But that was another thing that had never been allowed when he was a child. Only his mother was permitted feelings.

And hers were operatic.

He and Lavinia were the oldest of his mother’s five children. Each of them was the product of a different father and all of those fathers also had other children elsewhere. This had led to what Caius liked to call the dark comedy of family events, not that anything was ever very funny. But because the Countess had kept Caius and Lavinia with her for the longest period of time—there being at least ten years between Caius and the next in line, which had led to all kinds of bonding between him and his older sister—the two of them had always considered themselves their own family.

As for the rest, he sometimes had to do a bit of research on his Wikipedia page to figure out all the ins and outs of who he was related to.

If asked in public, he liked to make a joke of it. There were all kinds of unflattering terms to describe a woman like his mother, who was forever jumping from one man to the next and having babies many of them as possible, so that they were forced to feel responsible for her forever. There were many ways to describe the kind of woman who made her living that way, but because the Countess came with a pedigree and had a claim to exiled royalty of one form or another, no one ever used those terms. No one would dare.

The fact that she was a cruel, vain, vicious woman seemed to trouble absolutely no one at all. She wandered from man to man, dragging her kids along as props and abandoning them to hotel staff when she bored of them, or might be asked to parent in some way. She threw them into schools then yanked them out again, without caring at all how they might feel about it—and woe betide anyone if they complained or so much as drew her attention when she was not in the mood to remember their existence.

She had left Caius on his own in a hotel room in Berlin once for bothering her. She’d sent for him ten days later, and had punished him for the inconvenience. He had been eight.

Caius had hated every moment of his childhood.

But he had made that same kind of lifestyle his entire personality as he grew older. He was a man who followed his limbs whoever they took him. He had not allowed himself to stop and attempt to fix his childhood, because if he did, that might indicate that it needed that fixing in the first place. That he did.

And he had decided at some point in his adolescence that he was perfect as he was.

There was absolutely no need to change a thing.

One significant benefit of growing up the way he had was that he could charm anyone. He’d had to do it more times than he could recall—at his mother’s command or to get out of a tricky situation—and now he chose to use that skill all the time. He could charm anyone. He could fit in anywhere. He could be anything to anyone, and he had taken pride in that.

Until Mila.

And that was the part he couldn’t forgive, not even after all this time. She had looked at him as if she could see who he really was. Not the person he pretended to be. Not the role he’d been playing all his life.

She had spent only those few months with him and she had been a revelation.

And all of it was a lie.

Maybe, he thought as he looked out the window at her palace, he shouldn’t blame her for that. Maybe it was his fault for imagining that what had happened between them could be real once they let the world back in. Because he really should have known better. He had always prided himself on being a realist.

And then one look at her and it was as if he’d never learned a thing.

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