Page 24 of His Highness's Hidden Heir

A strange, searing pain arrived at the periphery of his awareness. A recognition of a truth that was too painful to accept, one that would blind him when it was allowed in so he mentally held it off, staying safely inside a bubble of disbelief. Denial. It wasn’t real. He’d misheard.

A thousand years and less than a minute passed.

Slowly he became aware of being on the terrace in New York. The sun was on his shoulders. City sounds were far below. Vijay’s expression hadn’t changed, but an acidic burn of betrayal began to seep into his bloodstream.

“It’s mine?” he asked in a rasp.

“She didn’t say.” Vijay pushed his hands into his pockets, expression turning circumspect. “I felt you should be informed regardless, since assumptions will be made that it is. She wants everything in place two weeks before her due date. The math from the end of October calculates back to conception in January, about the time we all met in Paris.”

“Math.” You couldn’t argue with math, could you?

“Take your time. My first was unplanned. I know how it scrambles the jets.”

“It can’t be mine,” Magnus blurted.

He had used condoms. He was supposed to marry someone appropriate. Katla would have him flayed alive in the town square. He might chafe at her lectures and Ulmer’s interference, but he understood the stakes. He needed to continue Katla’s efforts to repair the royal family’s image, not prove he was his father’s son by having an illegitimate baby—

This was why he used condoms!

But he had a memory of drifting in the twilight of postorgasmic bliss, exhausted by lovemaking, then lurching awake to a strange sensation. The condom was slipping as his erection faded.

He’d hardened as he’d awakened still inside her. That damned woman seemed to keep him in a perpetual state of erection. He was twitching with arousal just thinking of her and their night of sensual debauchery.

The rush of erotic memory was countered by a cooler thought, though. Had the condom slipped enough to fail? Even if it had, that didn’t automatically mean he was the father. She could have slept with a dozen men before and after him.

Even as he had that thought, he recalled how frightened she’d been that night in Paris, after seeing her stalker. How angry she’d been when she’d said,You’re accusing me of staging this?

And he could still hear her admitting in the shadows of his bedroom,I don’t do this.

He ran his hand down his face, giving his beard a tug hard enough to hurt, grounding himself into this new reality.

“She’s keeping it.” Obviously. She was seven months along and making arrangements for the baby’s protection. “This will be a PR nightmare. But that’s the least of it, isn’t it?”

“If the baby is yours, broader decisions become necessary, yes,” Vijay said evenly. “I’m here to assist any way that I can.”

Ifthe baby was his? Magnus knew it was. That’s why she had looked so damned uncomfortable when she had told him she was going into hiding to write her memoir. That’s why his brain was exploding.

Secrets had been kept from himagain.

Lexi covered where the baby was pressing a foot against the side wall of her round belly and smiled while trying not to yearn for the baby’s father to experience it with her.

How could she want to see him when she was still so mad at him?

The prince is unavailable.

That was what Vijay had texted back the night after she’d seen Magnus in Monte Carlo five months ago.

Because he’d been on a date with Lady Annalise?

God, it had hurt to see him with someone else. It had taken her very best acting to pretend she was unbothered by the sight of them together, and to claim that she was “always happy to speak with a fan,” and that Portugal did sound like a wonderful place to hole up and write a book.

He had been horrible to her that morning in Paris and he stood there pretending nothing had ever happened between them at all while she had thought her pregnancy must be obvious to everyone. How could it not be?

As much as she had dreaded telling him, her conscience had demanded she reach out.

The arrogant jerk refused to see her.

Devastated by his fresh rejection, she hadn’t pressed it. Had that been cowardly? Sure. Mostly, she’d been embarrassed at having asked to see him at all. She had felt like one of those needy women who couldn’t take a hint that a man wasn’t interested. She had never, ever wanted to be the sort of woman who couldn’t live without a man, yet she felt like one. Or rather, she felt sometimes as though she couldn’t live without that particular man.

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