Page 50 of Forbidden Royal Vows

He had used it well.

And now it was time to see if he could fashion a different role altogether.

Because he didn’t need to return to this hotel room to remember all the things that Mila had said to him here on that last day. In their last hour. How she had laid out the gulf between them calmly, quietly, and had explained that the palace would never stand for it.

I am so young, she had said, though she had not seemed the least bit young then. Her gaze had been old and wise and sad. They will question my judgment, and once they start down that road, there’s little hope of coming back. I owe my father’s legacy more than that.

We all owe our parents’ legacies something, he had thrown back at her, reeling from the shock of what was happening. The impossibility that he had found her, the own person in the whole world who looked at him and saw all him. And the agony that he could not keep her. Most of us discuss these issues in therapy, Mila.

Her face had changed then. It had grown sadder. Kinder.

Everything is a game to you, she had said, and it had devastated him. That is what you know of the world, and you play these games well. But what I do can never be seen as a game, because that would make me nothing but a toy. And should that happen, how can I rule?

Nothing that has happened between us is a game, he had gritted out.

But she had only gazed back at him in that same earnest, sorrowful way. Caius. I am a pr—Her voice had caught then, but she’d gone on anyway, with a certain resoluteness that he had thought might kill him. I am a queen. It’s time we stopped playing games of hide-and-seek, don’t you think?

“I do think,” he said now, to the bathroom mirror.

He had not thought so then. There had been a part of him that insisted, always, that he had dispensed entirely with games and that she had treated him cruelly.

Now, all he could think of was the fact she had waited for him to come out of the shower when she could easily have left without a word. She could have had one of her staff deliver the news. She had not had to stand there and talk it through, no matter how upset they both got.

He couldn’t understand how he’d been too busy thinking of his own bruised heart, because she was walking away from him. When her father had just died. And she was going home not just to bury a man she’d loved and admired, but to take his place.

“You,” he told his reflection, “did not deserve her kindness.”

In fact, he had not forgiven her for it. Until now.

When he had set himself to rights, he crashed out on the hotel room bed, thinking that he would get a good night’s sleep in an actual bed. Tomorrow was soon enough to set his various plans in motion. Tomorrow was the earliest he would even consider dipping a toe back into the life he’d walked away from again.

Another thing that sat heavy on him was how easy it was to do that. To simply walk away. This was the second time he’d done it so completely, but then, he’d been doing it all his life. Whenever something got too bothersome or too intense, the Countess had moved them on. He’d adopted the same habits, though he’d told himself it’d been for different reasons.

He couldn’t settle. He was easily bored. He was always looking for the next great thing, and that meant a lot of moving...

At a certain point, a man had to face himself. He had to stop running away and decide, at last, who he was going to be. The geographic cure was a lie.

He clicked on the television, flipping absently through the channels, though it was almost offensive to try to focus on flashing lights and gaudy colors after the serene stillness of the outdoors.

Though when he saw her face, on the screen and not only in his head, he stopped.

And then sat up, because it turned out that Queen Emilia had decided to make a speech.

He had plugged in his long-dead mobile when he’d entered the room, and he switched it on as the news desk of the channel he’d landed on talked about the possible reasons for the Queen to speak.

He found an avalanche of messages forwarded on by his assistant, but none from her.

Still, something in him felt called to attention as the screen changed.

And she was there.

Right there.

“It is not the habit of this palace to comment on the scandals of the day,” Mila said in her calm, serene way, looking directly into the camera. She was sitting quite smartly in a chair in what was clearly the palace, that made her look as if she was seated on a throne without actually reverting to the Las Sosegadan throne itself. The light that fell upon her was splendid, but then again, so was she. Her dark hair gleamed, pulled back into an intricately braided bun at the nape of her neck. She was dressed, as ever, to perfection. He wondered if he was the only man alive who could see the passion that glittered in her gray gaze. He wondered if she knew that he could still see her. “But I find that I cannot remain quiet.”

Halfway across the planet, Caius sat up straighter.

“I have been made aware of the photograph that so many have taken such liberties in dissecting,” said the Queen, with more than a hint of frost to her tone. “I quite understand that there’s an extreme level of interest in me and great speculation about my life, and I accept that. My personal wishes must always be held up against the best interests of the kingdom, and I can only hope that these things align. And that I always act with the country foremost in my thoughts.”

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