Page 25 of His Hidden Royal Heirs

He managed, just barely, not to laugh. “My parents loved each other very much. My father’s parents are the same.”

“My guess is they did not meet in a bar and have a one-night stand that ended with twins.”

“Perhaps not, but my parents met at a party and, by all accounts, were inseparable from that moment. My father’s parents were far more scandalous. She was dating his best friend when they met at a church function, and she ditched one man for another.” He shook his head.

She tried not to smile. He watched her fight it. But slowly the edges of her mouth curved.

“You love them very much.”

He did not care for her having that insight, but it was only the truth. “They are good people. They never cared about titles or money. Their lives are simple—they complain when I try to make it simpler. Because they love their family, not what a person in it might offer them.”

She sighed and settled deeper into her chair, studying a piece of fruit before setting it aside. “I love my sister. I’ve put her in an impossible situation with this, and...” She shook her head and spoke no more on it. Clearly it bothered her deeply.

But clearly she had still put herself over her sister’s needs. A pattern for the princess.

He couldn’t let his disdain for that show. Disdain did not grow love. Nor did suspicion, and she was clearly still suspicious of him. How did he combat that? It frustrated him that it would take time. Trust did not blossom overnight even in the easiest of situations.

“You say your parents loved each other,” she said, picking at the hem on the sweater she wore. “But you were so young when they died.” She chewed on her generous bottom lip for a moment before raising her gaze to meet his. “So how do you know they did?”

There was something vulnerable in the question, in her eyes, and it twisted something inside him, a strange need to protect that flash of something soft underneath all her strength and determination.

All her selfishness, he reminded himself. Because that was the issue with her, and he would not let her beauty, or even the odd flash of vulnerability, distract him from that.

He focused on her question and whether he would offer an answer. He did not often speak of his parents with anyoneoutside of his grandparents. It had been a topic he refused to engage with when it came to his mother’s family, when it came to the odd reporter who still thought his life might make a story, or the random person he encountered who had known his parents.

Zia fit into none of those categories. He could make up a few lies, but trust was not built on outright lies, and worse, he never could quite bring himself tolieabout his parents. It felt like betrayal.

“It was told to me, of course, how much they loved each other, as I grew up. Both as a positive from my father’s parents, and a negative from my mother’s family. But...children pick up more than adults think, I believe. Perhaps I did not have the maturity for the words yet, but there were things I witnessed that, looking back, could only have been love.”

“Like what?” She looked truly intrigued, and he supposed there was no harm in this. It led her exactly where he wanted her, didn’t it? Thinking about love, believing it could happen. And if he sharedhisdefinition of love, and tried to embody it, she would at least think him in love with her.

“I recall my father turning down roles that did not fit into her royal schedule. He would always laugh it off when the movies he turned down did well. He never made it seem...like a bad thing. It was always clear his family was the most important. Being withherwas his goal. Movie stardom was almost more like...a hobby.”

Cristhian frowned at his own words, and the feelings they dredged up. He had not thought of that in some time. The simple and easy ways his father had made Cristhian and his mother feel like the center of his world. He hadn’t fully understood it as a child. But now, a man with a career and adult responsibilities, and the prospect of two children greeting him in a short period of time... It felt all that much more important.

Rare.

He dared not look at Zia with these strange feelings rioting around inside him. That would no doubt confuse things when his goals were clear. Even if the methods were murky.

“To my mother, he and I were the center of her world. Everything else a distraction. She struggled more with the lines there, what with the royal responsibilities her family wanted from her and how much her family disliked my father. But she made it clear time with my father was her goal as well.”

So, in the here and now, Cristhian would make sure he made time for Zia. For the upcoming children. She would now take this as a sign of love, or potential love, and he would come out on top.

“I know my father does not love my mother,” Zia said, very, very quietly. “I highly doubt he ever did. She was a means to an end. His parents died when he was quite young, and he ascended. He needed a wife. A wife with the right pedigree to become a queen.”

“This is often the way of royalty.”

“Yes,” she agreed. She sighed heavily. “But sometimes, I think she must love him to behave the way she does. Even if he does not love her, though I cannot fathom why he doesn’t when she is everything he asks her to be.”

“What way does she behave?” Cristhian asked before he thought better of it. Before he weighed what the answer would mean for his goals of getting Zia to fall in love with him.

“Afraid, I think. Oftentimes she will express agreement with me or my sister. She will act as though she will support us in the face of opposition—my father, his advisers and aides, and then the time comes and she...doesn’t. She cowers.”

Cristhian had seen an array of royal marriages in his adolescence, but he hadn’t seen one like that. He supposed hisuncle, the prince to his aunt’s queen, had a kind of...cowering air about him. But it had never struck Cristhian asfearful.

But he understood that fear better than he liked. Because his mother’s family had spent those first few years without his parents making things as scary as possible for a young boy. No stability. No support. He had been made to be afraid by people who only knew how to wield their power that way.

He felt an old anger simmer deep in his gut. There would not befearin his children’s lives. “Are you afraid of your father?” he asked Zia, trying to keep the old anger out of his tone.

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