Page 41 of Forbidden Royal Vows

He couldn’t even work himself into a temper about a comment like that. He’d brought it upon himself. He had lived down to the version of him that people wanted to see for so long that it was now all they saw.

And Caius knew perfectly well that the longer he inhabited that character, the harder it would become to tell the difference between the character and the man he really was, deep inside. He would forget it was possible. He would erase himself, one laconic bit of wit at a time, and this time, he wanted that.

The quicker he could disappear into everyone’s favorite guest—the kind who never stayed too long in any one place, could be depended upon to provide the entertainment wherever he went, and never demanded anything of anyone—the better. He had let one person see that there was more to him and it didn’t matter. She didn’t care—

But he tried to stop himself when he thought things like that. There was no need to be unfair to Mila. Caius knew full well that she cared. The fact that she’d recognized the ring he wore around his neck and still had her ring too ate at him, with sharp little teeth and the occasional claw...but it hadn’t mattered.

She could care about him enough to spend a month with him the way she had and it still didn’t matter.

He needed to stop letting it matter, too.

He would. He was sure of it.

Any day now.

Caius had been prepared for the flashbulbs when he stepped out of the theater tonight. He was an old hand at paparazzi scrums and usually engaged them in conversation, got them all laughing, and generally did not behave the way some famous people did, as if this necessary evil that kept them a household name was a personal attack upon them.

As an old hand at fending off personal attacks, Caius knew the difference.

It was his habit to laugh off or ignore the suggestive things that paparazzi yelled at him, looking for that reaction shot. Sometimes he planted new stories while refuting the old, simply to entertain himself—because there was only one woman alive, as far as he knew, who did not want her name linked to his.

Tonight, that was the name they were yelling.

He shouldn’t have stopped, but he couldn’t credit what he was hearing. It took him a few moments of looking around to see if there was another Mila about to accept that this was really happening.

But how?

No one had seen him go in or out of those tunnels. He’d been scrupulously and excessively careful. He was not going to be the cause of any of her problems, whether he agreed that they were problems or not.

He did have some pride.

But only where she was concerned.

“How long have you been sleeping with the Queen?” screamed one fool who clearly did not value his life and would never know how close he came to a swift end, there on a street in New York City.

But Caius knew better than to react the way everything in him demanded he react. With prejudice. Because he could not protect Mila without making this worse, whatever this was.

So he laughed, the way he always did. He smirked and posed for pictures with actors and directors and the people like him, who usually preferred to stay behind the scenes but could always smile for a camera.

Still, they kept at him with The Queen, Queen Emilia, weren’t you there all summer and the like.

“Come on, Caius,” a paparazzo he’d known for years complained as his car pulled up. “You need to tell us what’s up between you and your queen.”

“I would describe every woman I’ve ever laid eyes on as a queen,” he replied smoothly, and with a grin. “You’ll have to be more specific.”

And he kept that grin on his face as the car pulled away, out of the pack of them, pounding on windows and shouting his name. He kept it there until it was clear that there were no paparazzi on motorcycles following them, as sometimes happened.

Then, when he was certain no one was looking at him, he let his face...do what it liked. Whatever it liked. He didn’t even look at his reflection in the window to see what that was. Instead, there in the safety of his car on the way to a private airfield outside New York City, he pulled out his mobile and stared at it in frustration.

Because the sad truth was that he couldn’t do the thing that every cell and atom in his body wanted him to do. Reality reasserted itself like a slap upside the head.

He could not simply call Mila.

There was no reaching the Queen of Las Sosegadas on a whim—that was why he’d gone to all of that trouble to find his way into her palace by other means.

The mobile phone she’d used in America had long since been disconnected and redistributed. He had checked. Years ago.

Though he checked again now, just to be sure, and hung up when he got the voicemail of a surly-sounding American man with an accent he couldn’t quite place.

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