Page 40 of Forbidden Royal Vows

And that was why she was particularly unprepared for the morning papers.

They were delivered without comment with the breakfast that she always took in her private sitting room. It took her a few more moments than usual to stop staring pointlessly out the window and to unfold the paper on top.

It took longer to stare at that picture on the front page.

Without a shred of comprehension.

Because she recognized the people in that image, but she couldn’t let herself understand what she was seeing.

She was slow to put that puzzle together. Possibly because her brain rejected the possibility that she could be looking at such a thing at all.

It was a picture from the Garden Gala. She recognized the hedge towering there in the background. She stared at that hedge for a long while.

A very long while.

But she was quite certain that the only thing anyone else saw were the two people in the center of the photograph. Mila and Caius, doing absolutely nothing untoward.

That was what was almost funny about it. Of all the pictures that could have been taken, this was the most innocent.

They were simply walking side by side, coming out of the maze together.

But it was the way they were looking at each other.

She could see that immediately.

It was the way she was looking at him.

Mila had a look on her face that made three things abundantly clear:

One, that Queen Emilia of Las Sosegadas was a woman, made of flesh and blood and desire, not simply a monarch.

Two, that there was something unquestionably electric and charged and even carnal between her and Caius. The fact that the evidence was simply right there in the way they gazed at each other, even though they were fully clothed, somehow made it all the more blazingly obvious.

And three, the thing she’d been dreading since California had finally happened. The proverbial had hit the fan, with a vengeance.

She had finally caused the scandal she had vowed to her father she wouldn’t. She had finally become the very thing she had worked so hard to avoid. She had betrayed herself in every way and worse, she had betrayed everyone else, too.

And now they would all know it.

While Mila knew that it was only the tip of the iceberg.

Caius Candriano, her one and only mistake, was going to take her down after all.

CHAPTER NINE

CAIUS FIRST HEARD the news that he was having a scandalous affair with his wife, a shock to all and sundry as neither all nor sundry had the slightest idea that Mila was his wife, at an arthouse film festival in Manhattan.

He had been working overtime. Not to promote the film he’d worked on that was being shown at the festival, because he felt the film spoke for itself. What needed his fierce concentration and total commitment was returning to his expected form.

Because Caius had never felt less charming or personable in his entire life.

One of his business partners had even commented on it the night before, looking at him askance as they’d circulated a private party in Gramercy Tavern, filled with all manner of gleaming, glittering people who were not Mila.

What happened to you? he had asked.

Nothing ever happens to me, Caius had replied, aware that his smirk was a tad more cutting than necessary for the sort of party that was all about creating connections and behaving like instant intimates, the better to extend their spheres of influence. Ask anyone.

In that case, let me talk to people tonight, his partner had said. Why don’t you just let them look at you. They like that.

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