Page 31 of Forbidden Royal Vows

“She wants me to attend, of course. My sister—”

“Lavinia,” Mila said, warmly enough that it made something in him squeeze tight.

He nodded. “She keeps calling to tell me how important it is to the Countess that I be there. How devastated she will be if I don’t turn up.”

“Will you go?”

Caius set the knife down on the cutting board. “It’s not that my mother wants my emotional support or has tender feelings about gathering the family together. That’s not her style. I’m not entirely certain she’s capable of tender feelings. She wants my presence to raise her profile. She wants to make sure that the paparazzi, who must be as tired of tracking her marital status as anyone else, will be there to cover it. Because nothing makes my mother feel alive like seeing herself in newspapers.”

“I thought that’s what you liked.” Mila glanced back over her shoulder at him, and there was nothing accusing in her expression. If anything, she looked...concerned. For him. He didn’t like how that sat heavy on him, then pressed down hard. “You used to talk extensively about what it was like to be seen as a kind of conduit for people.” She put the big wooden spoon to the side of the pot, and then drifted over from the range so that she faced him directly across the center island. “To be perfectly honest, I think I drew on that quite a bit in my first days as queen. You once told me that the most important skill you’d ever mastered was being the kind of mirror that anyone who looked into believed was bespoke.” She shrugged, giving him a small smile. “See? I’ve never forgotten it.”

He was stunned by that. If she had picked up that pot simmering away behind her and whacked him with it, he could not have been more stunned—but there was an urgency in him, now. There was something winding its way through him, past the heaviness of her concern for him and the conclusive proof she’d just given him now, that she had not forgotten him. That she had held on to things he’d told her.

That it had mattered, those stolen weeks in California too long ago now to bear.

There were a great many reasons to keep his counsel in this moment, Caius knew, but he didn’t. He couldn’t.

“I have never been more surprised in my life,” he said quietly, “then when I learned that what I considered my superpower—the ability to read any room I went into—was a product of being raised by the kind of terrible people who would, years later, hound the child they’d neglected for clout.” But he didn’t want to talk about his mother. He was studying Mila’s face. “I’ve never asked you how hard it was. It must have been nothing short of terrible for you, to have no time to prepare.”

He remembered that day in the sort of detail he would have thought usually reserved for, say, terrible accidents. He’d walked into the shower a married man, not unaware of the challenges ahead of them due to their different stations, but secure in what they were to and for each other.

He’d walked out to meet the Queen.

“You prepare for the ceremony,” she told him in a hushed voice. “For the steps that you’ll take and the way that you’ll present yourself. You don’t do it alone. My father planned it with me. His team and mine talked all the time about the plans. Always the plans. Always making it sound like a great festival of some kind.” She gave him a wry little smile, then, that broke his heart. “But you never talk about how much it hurts.”

One of her hands drifted to her chest, directly over her heart, in a gesture that he knew, somehow, was unconscious. It made his own heart ache even more.

“It would be unseemly to talk about how it feels. And so you rely on all of that planning, and all of the pomp and circumstance. You’re busy thinking about how it looks, and what message you’re sending, and how the people are perceiving you... And it turns out that it’s a crutch.” Mila looked almost lost, for a moment, but then her gray gaze found his again. So at least he could be lost with her. “It’s much easier to think about how to become a queen than it is to mourn the death of your father. To be honest with you, I’m not sure I ever have.”

“And one day, if you do your duty, your child will have to do the same thing.”

He realized after he said it how she could take that. How she might see it as a jab, but she didn’t. If anything, her smile grew deeper.

More wry, if that was possible. “I don’t think that’s the privilege of royalty. I am fairly sure that’s just life. We will all of us mourn our parents, if we are lucky.”

“You consider that lucky?”

“The alternative is that they would have to mourn us,” she said quietly.

“Mila.” He said her name so urgently. There could be no mistaking that. He saw the way her eyes widened. But then again, if he wasn’t mistaken, she was holding her breath. “Mila, why did you leave me?”

“You know the answer to that. We are discussing the answer to that right now.”

“That’s not what I mean. You know it’s not.”

He thought she would default to an instant denial, but she didn’t. Instead, she looked away for a moment, out toward the windows, where the night was already dark and seemed to press against the glass. She looked...softer than usual.

Caius realized that it was surprising to think of her as fragile. He never had. She was so good at exuding all that regal energy. She was so good at making it seem as if she was far too iconic to be human at all.

He was going to have to think about the fact he’d let himself believe that, when he knew better.

“Putting aside all the many heart attacks the palace would have over your presence in the tabloids,” Mila began.

“Because the tabloids are bastions of truth, of course. Everyone knows that.”

He couldn’t seem to help himself.

Mila only held his gaze. “Whether the stories are true or not isn’t the issue. The issue is the regularity of your appearances and the kinds of places and people you have frequented over the years.” Her eyes were so gray. So grave. “This isn’t a lecture. It’s an explanation. But that’s an excuse, I think.”

---