Page 30 of Forbidden Royal Vows

The kind of spell Caius had wished he’d known as a child, forever languishing in hotel rooms and dreaming of exactly this kind of life. Of becoming the kind of person who was capable of this kind of life. This ease and sweetness instead of his mother’s chaotic rages. This pervasive wave of something he thought might be happiness, instead of the battle to assess his mother’s condition in any moment and figure out how to pretend to be whatever version of her son she might have decided he was that hour.

It was easy, here, to pretend they were other people. People who did not play vicious games with one another and call it family. People who did not fight nasty little wars for supremacy, imagining that somehow they might escape the Countess’s notice—that too-sharp focus that always boded ill.

Here in the September House, they did none of those things.

Here they were different people entirely. People who prepared food because it was good and put out table settings because they were pretty, and then enjoyed each other’s company when they sat down. People who talked of the weather, not because they had nothing else to say, but because even the most innocuous conversations were layered and textured with all the ways they took each other apart and put each other back together when they were naked.

As if it was all the same thing, in one form or another.

Mila did not cook in the classic sense. But she was a deft hand at putting together ingredients that were preprepared for her. He discovered that she was a big fan of a hearty soup or a stew, accompanied by freshly baked bread with a liberal application of butter. That she would eat it night and day, if possible.

Caius contributed his own skills, which were not inconsiderable—because he had developed a deep loathing of delivered food when he was young, so had taught himself to cook—to add a bit of variety to the menu.

And this was how they sank in deep to this long September dream of the kind of domestic bliss neither one of them was likely to have, and certainly not with each other. They prepared all their meals together and ate them slowly while having wide-ranging conversations on every topic under the sun. They fought, not always amicably, over the books they’d both read. They avoided the news and laughed at each other’s stories. They took long walks around the property, taking in the mountain air. They even did a bit of hiking the way they had all those years ago.

And they feasted on each other, at every opportunity, as if they could never get enough.

Because, he supposed, they both knew the inevitable end was coming. They both knew there was no future. Caius had to make sure that every moment of this month was memorable enough to last them both a lifetime.

He took that calling very, very seriously.

And so they indulged themselves in every scrap of sensuality they could find. The stately old hunting lodge offered an endless array of places to explore. From the hot springs that some enterprising member of the royal family had erected an entire bathhouse around in centuries past to a wide selection of beds and showers, including his favorite of those—the outdoor shower that let the stars shine in.

Yet she wanted to know if, through all of this, this banquet of the senses in all its forms, he was plotting revenge.

“You really do have a dim view of me, don’t you,” he said.

She was stirring the night’s big meal, a crock of lamb stew that filled the kitchen with its rich scent. She turned, looking around at him in surprise, the steam from the simmering pot making her cheeks red.

And Mila was always beautiful. There was no denying that. Queen Mila was a study in contemporary elegance. Every outfit he’d seen her photographed in reached new heights of sophistication, as if she challenged herself daily to redefine chic for the modern world.

But her ability to casually, offhandedly achieve the same result without a cadre of attendants amazed him daily. She was a wonder. Today she was wearing her hair in two braids, each one wound into its own bun on the back of her head. He had watched her fix them that way herself. She was still wearing the sleek leggings she’d worn out on their walk, with colorful knit socks pulled halfway up her shins. And an oversized sweater in a fine, lush wool that managed to make all of that look not like a lumberjack or even all that casual, but like royalty.

He acknowledged the possibility that this was just...her.

“A dim view of you?” she repeated. She shook her head as if he wasn’t making sense. “I...don’t?”

“You do.” Caius had been slicing one of the fresh baguettes that turned up at the kitchen door like clockwork and needed only to be baked through. He set the knife down, then propped himself up on his hands against the great butcher block on the island in the center of the sprawling kitchen. “You do, Mila. That’s not an indictment. I’ve spent my entire life making certain that I’m underestimated at every turn. I can’t get angry when my efforts are successful, can I?”

She studied him with those solemn, clever gray eyes. “Yet you seem angry.”

“What I am,” he said, and it was a challenge to keep his voice calm when he knew it should not have been, “is viewing everything that happened between us with new eyes.”

They had danced around this topic since he’d gotten here, after trekking miles through underground, clearly little-used tunnels, hoping that she hadn’t sent him off to march his way into the dungeons she’d mentioned. But this was different. She didn’t cross her arms. She didn’t straighten her shoulders and tip her head in that regal way of hers—to let him know the Queen was in the room.

She only waited, studying him, as if she didn’t know what he was going to say.

It was strange how cheering that notion was.

But he didn’t speak. And the silence stretched out between them. Eventually, she swallowed. “Are you going to say something?”

“There is nothing to say.” He shrugged. “I have said it.”

“How ominous,” Mila murmured.

Caius pushed back from the butcher block and returned his attention to the bread. “My mother is getting married.”

He sensed Mila’s confusion at that change of subject but when he glanced at her, she had already turned back to the stew bubbling on the range, stirring it again. “I don’t know whether to offer you congratulations or condolences.”

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