Page 4 of Forbidden Royal Vows

It was the fact that he could be so incisive. That he was so intelligent when there should have been nothing but air and smugness between his temples.

It was the formidable way he could gaze at a person and make them forget who they were without even seeming to try—

Mila had to remind herself to maintain her composure. She had to order herself not to lose her cool, right here in the middle of a gala.

Something she had not had to do since she was a child of eight who had accidentally indulged in too much sugar one Christmas.

But he was a whole lot worse than too many sweets at a holiday party.

He was a catastrophe.

He was Caius Candriano.

Mila’s one and only mistake.

And he was also, though no one knew this but the two of them nor ever would as long as she drew breath, still—legally—her husband.

CHAPTER TWO

CAIUS CANDRIANO HAD waited for this day for a long, long time.

Five years, to be exact.

Five whole years, and there was some part of him that expected to find her...different, perhaps. Changed entirely by what she’d gone through and who she’d become these last few years—perhaps because that, at least, would be some kind of explanation.

However little he wished to accept that explanation, at least it would exist.

After all, she was a queen now. The Queen. Not merely the Princess he had met with the whole of her weighty future yet before her. Not that young woman with too much maturity and luminous eyes, and a deathly ill father who had ordered her to in that sense that she was only marking time before her whole world changed.

But Mila looked entirely unchanged.

Maybe that was not entirely true, he thought as he swept a gaze over the whole of her magnificence, when the woman he’d known had been dressed as casually as he had been on that long-ago climb up a remote stretch of California coast where there had been no one at all but the two of them. Though the drama of the gown she wore would have been epic even if he wasn’t comparing her to his memories.

Caius should not have been surprised. He was fully aware that designers from all over the fashionable world clamored for the opportunity to dress the young, beloved Queen of Las Sosegadas.

It was his own curse that he knew too well that, left to her own devices, she preferred simpler, less theatrical fare.

Not that anyone could have guessed that by looking at her.

She gleamed with her own consequence. The palace arranged around her, complete with the throne placed just so behind her, only made her glory more apparent. He might miss the days he’d known her out of time and place, but there was no denying that gown suited this version of Mila. Her team had clearly chosen it to make her seem to glow as if by virtue of her own sovereign power.

The Queen had been the only thing anyone had looked at when she appeared. The Queen had been gazed at in varying degrees of awe and adoration from all corners as she’d made her way across the floor of the long ballroom, the traditional signal that the festivities were to begin.

The gown helped, though Caius found himself simmering with what he decided could only be the same old pent-up fury that really, she could have sloped across the ballroom floor in jeans and trainers and had much the same effect.

He focused on the gown, because that was smarter than looking straight at her when he could not be entirely sure that he had his face in proper order. When he had been born the chameleon he was today, a necessity in his family, chock full of narcissists and pathological liars—and that was just the people he was related to that he liked.

Caius took in the sophistication and elegance of the damned dress. He focused on the full skirt and fitted bodice that should have made the dress too undignified for a queen, but was saved by its deep, dark shade of purple. It suited her. Something about the conversation between the dress’s serious color and merrier shape made Mila’s regrettably perfect beauty all the brighter.

He wished it did not still light him up from within, damn her.

Though that was not the point of this.

This, he reminded himself, was about a reckoning, nothing more.

Because Queen Emilia was suitably untouchable and all the more breathtaking for it. But Mila was the kind of woman a man looked at once and found himself intoxicated evermore. She was like a flickering flame. Once a man singed himself on the edge of that fire, he could never come back.

He had never come back. And she had never looked back.

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