Page 28 of Forbidden Royal Vows

And then it was nothing but a soaring, sweet flight with fireworks all around, comets and shooting stars.

Until she floated back down to earth and caught herself right where she wanted to be, with her face tucked into the crook of his neck.

Just like coming home, she thought.

Or maybe she said it out loud, because there was an echoing rumble in his chest.

But there was no point worrying about that now.

She drifted off to sleep, in a way she knew she hadn’t done since Noemí had walked into that room in California and curtseyed to the new queen. She slept the way a monarch never could, because she knew that with his arms around her, he would protect her from whatever came. That she could trust him to take care of her.

And as she drifted there, half awake and half asleep, she knew too well how dangerous it was to think these things. How they had led her to marry him in the first place, which was the cause of all this trouble.

But it didn’t feel like trouble today.

It felt like lifetimes later when she stirred and found that he had disentangled them, but still lay there with her, his gaze on the ceiling. She took stock, finding tiny little remnants of sensation like undercurrents, running beneath her skin. There was the endless list of things she ought to have been worried about—but this was the September House. Unless and until there was a pressing matter of state to deal with, she did not have to worry about anything.

That was the whole point.

So she propped up her chin on her hands and looked at him, at those impossibly artistic lines of his beautiful face.

“So,” she said.

She could feel laughter move in him though the only sign of it on his face was the shift in his gaze, that dark amber lightning. “So,” he agreed.

There were too many things she wanted to ask him. But all of them were huge. Weighty and impossible when she had the feeling that this thing between them, just now, was like spun glass. It would be easy enough to hurl it to the floor and watch it shatter into shards too small to ever put back together. Too easy.

Alternatively, she could go the other way and blow the glass into shapes and colors, just to see. Just to make something different.

Or possibly because you can’t face the truth, a voice inside her scolded.

But she accepted that.

“Where did you go?” Mila asked instead. “After California?”

It was a risky proposition. She knew that before he slid a gaze her way, one brow lifted. As if to ask, Do you really dare?

But she gazed right back at him, steadily.

And he could have been the one to take that little bit of glass and throw it against the wall, but he didn’t. “I needed a project,” he said. “Something to lose myself in.”

She did him the courtesy of not asking what he meant. Because looking back, she supposed that that’s what she’d had, too. The project of becoming the Queen. Of morning her father. Of planning her coronation. Of turning herself into the sovereign.

There had been no time to think about what might have been.

Or perhaps it was more accurate to say that every time she had thought about it, she had chastised herself for losing focus.

And despite all of those other things to focus on, it had still been so hard she was sometimes surprised she’d survived it. Though she didn’t like to think about that.

“I started a production company,” he said, with a self-deprecating sort of laugh. She remembered him sitting in the firelight on that long hike, talking about his childhood and how his parents had never been there for him, but that there had always been the cinema. There had always been movies to watch and characters to depend on instead. “Such companies are thick on the ground in Hollywood and most of them fail. Usually because of the enormous ego of the person whose vanity is funding the project in the first place. I could easily have taken that route, with my rather robust ego. But I chose instead to have an ego about the projects, not me.”

“That is the only way,” Mila agreed. “Vanity is a mirror. True confidence is a path forward.”

“Indeed.” She had forgotten the way he liked to run his fingers through her hair, letting the silken strands dance over his palm. “The company still exists. We are small, but so far, have a not-unimpressive track record.” Another self-deprecating sound. “It is something to do.”

It would have been easy to laugh at that, and the way he said it encouraged that, clearly.

But Mila didn’t. She studied him instead. “You’re proud of what you’ve done. You should be. It’s not a small thing when you make a dream come true, Caius.”

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