Page 10 of His Hidden Royal Heirs

Zia inclined a royal nod. “Ah, yes. So you are here to drag me back to my father.” She shook her head. “He doesn’t know.” She rested her hands over her stomach as if to protect the life inside it. She kept her gaze calm and on his. “It’s best if he doesn’t.”

“Does the father know?” he asked, once again gesturing toward her belly. And maybe he knew what her answer would be. Maybe he knew all too well what he’d just walked into.

But he wanted her to say it. In no uncertain terms.

“Cristhian.” Her voice was scolding, slightly disdainful. “Youare the father.”

And that complicatedeverything.

Zia still couldn’t quite believe this was happening. A name for the man she’d spent the past six months dreaming about. Whathad brought him here.Her father. His job. She knewofhim, even if she didn’t know him, and that she hadn’t expected at all.

And still, she found herself wanting to throw her arms around him. He washere, and it felt as if...it meant something. Because now he could know, and didn’t that change everything?

But she could tell from the look on his face that it meant and changednothing.

“So, you were never planning on telling me,” he said, a harsh statement. An indictment, not a question.

She blinked at him. He had been there and knew just how little they knew of each other, so the indictment felt patently unfair. “I did not even know yourname, where you came from. How was I supposed to tell you?” Of course, he’d found her, but that had been with her father’s help. It had been byaccident.

“You have ample resources, Zia.” Her name rolled off his tongue, and in his unique, piecemeal accent of too many different places to count, her whole body lit up in reaction.

She could not allow that to distract her from the important thing here. Protecting her children. Protectingherself. Her father had sent him, and she did not consider her father an evil man, exactly.

She just knew that what was best for the kingdom was his only priority, and nothing else ranked against that. Not her well-being, not Beau’s. Not their mother’s. The kingdom and only the kingdom. She couldn’t even blame him for that—he’d been bred from the cradle to think and feel and act that way.

She did not know why she couldn’t have absorbed his blind faith in the crown above all else, but she had not been able to. Perhaps only men could be that foolish.

And now this man was here, father of her children or not, as an arm of that crown. And she could not forget that. The crown had never cared abouther. Only what she kind of tool she could be used as.

“The hotel would have had my name,” Cristhian continued. “Someone at the bar, the dancing club. So many avenues would have led you to my name andmeif you had only tried.”

She supposed all of that was true, but it never would have occurred to her, which felt like an insult to her intelligence, she supposed. Or maybe how sheltered she was, no matter how hard she tried to be otherwise. But there was no point in lying, in trying to save face.

If her father had hired him, he knew every unsavory detail of her already.

“None of that ever occurred to me, Cristhian.Iam not a finder of lost things. I am simply a princess. Not even that anymore. I have left that life behind.”

“Unfortunately, you are wrong. You are just another runaway princess who would do best if she were returned to the responsible people in her life. We will leave at once.”

She sighed heavily. It had been much nicer when he’d only been a fantasy. When she could make him into the man she wanted. Now he’d ruined it, by being like every other man in her acquaintance. Sure he—or the king who’d supplied him the information—knew everything.

When Cristhian clearly knew nothing. He was being paid by the king. And he hadn’t taken this new piece of information into consideration. Because his involvement in her pregnancy changed everything.

“Do you honestly think you can return me to the palace likethisand escape unscathed? I can only imagine what my father will do now. You’re not a commoner, are you? Your mother was...some kind of royalty in her own right, was she not?”

He did not respond immediately to that. Instead looked fully impassive, so she cast back trying to remember the story of him. The finder of royal pedigree. His father had been American. Amovie star? Something like that. But his mother... “They call you a prince.”

“I amnota prince.”

“Your mother was a princess.” She didn’t remember all the details, but after Lina’s return, there was muchtalk about the handsome young man who’d saved her. He had indeed been called a finder. Over the years, she thought perhaps she’d heard other stories, though she’d never paid much attention to them. But he was known, and hewasroyal.

Which was actually a worst-case scenario for the both of them.

“My mother was the youngest of seven princes and princesses of a very,verysmall country,” he said, and she could read the reluctance in every word.

But each word was pertinent. “Regardless of her place in line, you would be an heir of something. You must have a title yourself. Aroyaltitle.”

“I have rejected it,” he returned, looking so stormy and disdainful, and yet... She knew royalty well enough, knew his story somewhat. That would have caused a ripple, and she remembered no ripples.

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