Page 18 of Forbidden Royal Vows

Maybe he needed to accept that even though he’d vowed that he would never marry—so he could never divorce, much less as many times as his parents had—he had gone ahead and done it anyway.

And maybe he really should go to his mother’s latest wedding, where he would learn her husband’s name just in time for them to separate, because it might teach him a valuable lesson that he’d never wanted to learn.

He was exactly the same as everyone else in his tangled and embarrassing family tree. He was certainly no better than the rest of them.

It had been madness to think so.

Caius stared out at the palace where Mila was, there and yet gone the way he should have known she always was and ever would be, and let out a kind of groan that seemed to come from deep in his bones.

He would give her that divorce. He should have done it long ago.

Then he would leave this pretty kingdom of hers and he would never come back. He would never stay put anywhere, ever again, because that was what he knew. That was who he was.

Slow down and your devils can find you, his mother had liked to say when she was drunk. You’ll meet yours soon enough, my boy. You are one.

And he thought that really, he should never have imagined that he could be a different kind of man than the one the Countess had raised.

Just a pretty face, a charming smile, and the good sense to never overstay his welcome.

That night, he dressed exquisitely. Everywhere he went in the ballroom du jour women watched him, laying down palm fronds with their covetous gazes.

Caius knew he was resplendent. Just as he knew Mila would be able to see him even if he wasn’t, the moment she entered the gala.

He would simply have to take comfort in the fact that she would read about him in the tabloids forever. And that he would do the same.

It was more than some people had, but at least he could make sure she would never forget him.

“Have you heard?” one of his companions asked him. When he only looked at her and shook his head, she clapped her hands together. “The Queen is looking for a husband at last. Everyone is talking about it.”

“Is she indeed.”

And the woman beside him saw only his charm. His smile. Not the chasm that had opened wide beneath him and was filled with sharp teeth that were now sinking into him, deep.

“Maybe you should apply for the position,” the woman said, laughing shrilly. She even put her hand on his arm, as if they were friends. As if he was alive. “Wouldn’t that be a laugh? Can you imagine King Caius?”

But that was going to be a problem, he thought, his gaze on Her Majesty as she entered the room in a sweep of deep lavender and gray serenity.

Because it turned out, he could imagine King Caius.

Vividly.

CHAPTER FIVE

“COULD YOU PLEASE tell me why it is,” Mila said in an undertone to her mother, her perfect smile never wavering, “that every man on the palace grounds who does not work here appears to be looking at me?”

“You are the Queen of Las Sosegadas. Pray, where else should they look?”

“They are looking at me less like I am their beloved sovereign and more as if I am a piece of meat hanging in a marketplace,” Mila replied, bestowing her smile upon a group of women, who did not make her want to check to see if she’d accidentally walked out of her dress before exiting the palace. “And what is more, I believe you know it.”

Beside her, Alondra was gazing serenely about, with an air of satisfaction that boded ill. “Your Majesty, forgive me, but I am unaware of any time you have spent in any marketplaces. Particularly marketplaces that have raw meat hanging on display.”

Mila was far too well trained to give her mother the look that comment deserved. “If I’m not mistaken, old Lord Stefano, who I believed entirely too withered and ancient for such sport, licked his lips in my direction.”

Alondra sniffed, gazing censoriously in Lord Stefano’s general direction. “How terribly uncouth.”

They continued walking at the usual sedate pace that Mila had been told her entire life was the appropriate speed at which a queen should cover ground. Sometimes, like today, every muscle inside her body fairly hummed with the need to do something...explosive.

That didn’t mean blowing up her life, the way she would have done if she’d returned home from the far reaches of America to announce to all and sundry at her father’s funeral that she had taken the notably unsuitable Caius Candriano as her husband. Not just as her husband, but as the future king.

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