Page 34 of Forbidden Royal Vows

He punched the button again to ring his sister.

“She’s already on the other line,” Lavinia said crossly, in lieu of any greeting. “What did you expect would happen, having a go at her like that? I’m not sure I’ll ever talk her down.”

“Then don’t,” Caius replied shortly.

His sister was quiet. He heard her mutter something, as if excusing herself, and then the sounds around her changed. He heard a door shut and imagined her walking from one room to the next, leaving whatever social situation she was in. Taking his call the way he would if taking her call in similar situations. A roll of the eye. A few choice words, mouthed to her friends.

All of these performances.

“I have a novel idea,” he said into her ear. “What if you don’t try to talk her down? What if we ignore her?”

“I didn’t realize that was an option available to us,” Lavinia said dryly. “Ignoring her and hoping she’d go away never bore any fruit that I can recall.”

“All I did was tell her that I didn’t want my picture in the paper if I went to her wedding,” Caius said.

His sister sighed. “Why on earth would you tell her that?”

“Because I don’t want my picture used as currency to buy things I don’t value,” he bit out, and there was a different sort of silence then.

And he knew why. He hadn’t laughed. He hadn’t sounded lazy, or amused, or deeply jaded.

If anything, he had sounded stern and that was something he never did. Not with Lavinia. Not with anyone, really. Not even with himself, if he could avoid it.

“Are you...?” He heard Lavinia blow out a breath. “Are you all right, Caius?”

“I would like to see what my life looks like if it is not a performance,” Caius told her, the words welling up from within as if he had prepared them. Or as if they had been trying to come out for a long, long time. “If I am not the poster boy for the bad behavior of every single person I am related to, through no fault of my own. It occurred to me to wonder what it must be like not to have pictures of myself staring back at me from every newsstand, no matter where I go.”

“You’ve done this before. The last time, you wandered off into the wilderness, as I recall. Did you learn something then? Because my memory is that you wandered back out of the mountains and became a tabloid darling all over again, overnight.”

His sister sounded exasperated, but Caius looked up. Maybe he’d sensed something. Maybe she’d made a faint noise.

But either way, Mila was there. She was standing in the doorway, watching him.

And her face was caught somewhere between the Mila he had been with all these weeks and the Queen. He wanted to ask her which one was real, but she wasn’t like him. She hadn’t created her role in response to a mother like the Countess. She had been born to be the Queen.

She was both Mila and the Queen.

He’d gotten that wrong, last time.

Because last time he’d been so sure that he knew himself that well, too. He’d been wrong about a lot of things.

“I will tell you what I learned,” he said into his mobile, his eyes on Mila. “Wandering around this planet with only my own two feet to guide me from one place to another made it clear that I have more to offer than a photo op. The Countess is under the impression that all I have to bring to the table is a smile. In which case, I suggest she find a cardboard cutout of me. She can use that at her wedding, with my compliments. Because what I learned all of those years ago, hiking around in places where nobody recognized me at all, was that anonymity is a gift.”

“Oh, Caius,” Lavinia said, laughing now. “You only think that because it was a choice. You’ve never seen a stage you didn’t climb up on, then position yourself dead center. Why pretend otherwise?”

“Lavinia,” he said, almost gently. “I’m not going to her wedding. Or any future weddings. Ever.”

Then he hung up on her, too.

“That seemed intense,” Mila said after a moment, when all they did was look at each other across the expanse of the long room. “Families always are, I know.”

He wanted to tell her all the things that were swirling around inside of him, all of the odd thoughts and new understandings that he wasn’t sure he really wanted. He wanted to tell her that he wasn’t temporary, that he didn’t want to be temporary.

That just because he was good at center stage didn’t mean he liked it.

“Do you know why I like producing?” he asked instead. And he must have looked as rough as he felt, because all she did was shake her head, no.

And the tiniest little frown appeared between her eyes.

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