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It was yet one more reason to hate the man.
“You say that as if it is a bad thing,” he said instead, no longer playing games of statues in his father’s private rooms.
He was a man grown now, or so everybody told him. He was heir to the kingdom and now would be expected to carry out duties in the name of the crown he would wear one day. He stood by the windows in his father’s compartments and looked out over the sloping hills and crystal blue sea.
This would always be Atilia to him. The murmur of the ocean waves. The soft, sweet scent of flowers on the breeze. The Ionian Sea spread out before him.
Not the king and his penchant for smashing things and causing as much distress as he could at the slightest provocation.
“It is time for you to marry,” his father intoned.
Ares turned, laughing, and then laughed harder when he saw his father was serious. “You cannot imagine I will be amenable to such a thing. Can you?”
“I have no interest in suffering through the sort of twenties you will inflict upon me. And upon this kingdom.”
“And yet suffer you must,” Ares replied with a soft menace that was as close as he’d ever come to taking a swing at his father or his king. “I have no intention of marrying.”
His father broke a decanter that day that had been in the family since the 1700s. It burst to pieces slightly to the left of Ares, though he hadn’t moved a muscle. He’d only stared back at the old man.
But it had broken something in Ares nonetheless.
It wasn’t the shards of priceless crystal raining down on his traditional regalia. It wasn’t his father’s temper, which Ares found little more than tedious at this point.
It was the whole...show. The titles, the land, the bloodline. It all meant more to his father than he ever had. He hadn’t been raised by his parents, he’d been monitored by a succession of servants and paraded in front of his father only every now and again. And only when everyone could be certain his behavior was perfect.
Or tolerable, at any rate.
He couldn’t help thinking that really, he would prefer not to be a prince at all. And if he had no choice in that, well, there was no need to participate in passing the mantle of blood and nonsense on to the next generation. Ares had no intention of marrying. No interest in it.
But he was adamantly opposed to having children.
He couldn’t help but think it was the bloodline itself that had made his father a monster, coupled with the crown. And he was a monster primarily to his son. He was cold to Ares’s mother, but it was Ares who got splintered decanters and rage.
Ares had no intention of passing that rage along to his own children. Ever.
“You should not rile your father so,” his mother said years later, after Ares had indulged in yet another conversation with the king about his marital prospects. He was twenty-six. “We shall have to start importing decanters from the Southern Palace.”
Atilia was an ancient island kingdom in the Ionian Sea. The Northern Island was the most geographically north of the islands that made up the kingdom and was where the business of the country took place. The Northern Palace was accordingly the more stately residence of the royal family. The Southern Palace, on the most southern edge of the most southern island in the kingdom, was about relaxation, not matters of state. Beaches and ease and what breathing room a man could have when the weight of the kingdom sat on his shoulders.
Not that Ares intended to hoist up that weight himself, but still, he preferred the south. It was where he’d been enjoying a few weeks of recuperation after a long goodwill tour before his father had issued his summons. Because clearly too much time had passed between unpleasant conversations about Ares and the bloodline.
“I can’t control what riles the man,” Ares replied, dryly. “If I could, the last twenty-six years would have been markedly different. And there would be a great many more breakable objects left unattended about the palace, I imagine.”
His mother had smiled at him the way she did, soft and sad. Ares always assumed it was because she couldn’t save him from his father. She couldn’t make the king treat the prince the way he treated her—with icy disinterest. “It is not the worst thing in the world to start turning your thoughts toward the next generation.”
“I don’t have it in me,” Ares told her then. The conviction had been growing in him for years, by then. He studied his mother, and her drawn, dear face. “If you are an advertisement for the institution of marriage, or what one must bear to become queen of these islands, I cannot say that I am greatly inspired to foist this dubious pleasure on anyone.”
That was true, but what was more true was that Ares enjoyed his life. He kept a home of sorts in Saracen House, a separate, palatial estate that was part of the palace complex on the Northern Island. But he was never there. He preferred the energy of Berlin. The hustle and rush of London. The mad, thrumming energy of New York City.
Or, really, any place his father was not.
And besides, Ares had yet to meet a woman he wanted for more than a night or two. Much less a lifetime of bloodlines and pomp, tradition and circumstance. He very much doubted the woman who could make him reconsider existed.
Nor was he particularly upset about this lack.
“I see how you are looking at me,” his mother chided him. She sat as she always did, upright and elegant, on the chaise in her favorite room of the palace where the sunlight stood in for happiness. Or so it had always seemed to Ares. “And I’m not so old, thank you, that I cannot remember the excitement of youth and the certainty that I could predict the twists and turns of my own life.”
“I hope you’re not planning to give me any details of the excitement of your youth,” Ares said. “Particularly as I was under the impression you spent most of it in a convent.”
The queen’s smile hinted at secrets, and made Ares glad. He liked to think his mother had more to reflect on in her life than his father and the glacial coldness he knew their marriage contained.
“You must find a wife of similar background,” his mother told him quietly. “You are to be the king, Ares. Whatever your marriage is like, whatever bargains you and your spouse make with each other, she must be a queen without stain. So, too, must your issue be without blemish. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”
He did. But understanding did not equal obedience.
“That I should put off marrying as long as possible,” Ares said, and grinned at her. “I am more than happy to oblige.”
Ares was halfway through his thirties when his mother died suddenly, lost to a quick-moving cancer she’d thought was a bout of the flu. And Ares was still reeling, still mourning when his father called him back to the Northern Palace some months after the funeral.
“You must know that it was your mother’s dearest wish that you married,” the king growled, his hand clenched around a crystal glass like it was a weapon. “The bloodline is your most sacred duty, Ares. The time for games is past.”
But as it happened, Ares was even less a fan of his bloodline than he had been before. Something he would have thought impossible.
His mother had left him all her papers, which included the journals she had kept since she was a girl. Ares, missing her in the bleak months after her passing, had lost himself in those journals. He wanted to hoard every memory he had of her. He wanted to feel close to her again.
Instead, he learned the truth about his parents. Or about his father, rather, and the royal marriage. Once Ares had been born, they had tried for a spare until the doctors had made it clear that the queen could likely not have any more children. The king hadn’t missed a beat. He’d openly flaunted his mistresses.
All those ladies of the court who had cooed at Ares when he was young. All those noblewomen he’d been instructed never to speak with in private. How had he missed their true role?
His father had broken his mother’s heart.
Over and over again, every time he took a new woman to his bed.
And Ares had never been overly fond of the king. But this made it worse. This made him hate his father, deeply and irrevocably.
“You betrayed my mother casually and constantly,” he said now, his own hands in fists because he did not require a weapon. And wanted only an excuse. “Yet you imagine you can speak to her dearest wishes now she has passed? Do you dare?”
The king rolled his eyes. “I grow weary of coddling you and your refusal to do what is required of you.”
“If you’re so interested in your bloodline,” Ares told him now, “I suggest you expand it on your own, as you seem so predisposed to do. You do not need me to do your dirty work for you. And let me be perfectly clear on this. I will not do it.”
His father sneered. “Why am I not surprised? Once a weakling, always a weakling. You would even give away your throne.”
But Ares didn’t think of it as giving away a throne—and one he’d never wanted anyway. He was ensuring not only his freedom, but the freedom of any potential children he might have had. He was making certain no child of his would be raised in that cold palace of lies.
And he refused to treat a woman the way his father had treated his mother.
Ever.
His father married again, quickly, to a woman younger than Ares. Ares caused a scandal by refusing to attend the wedding.
The kingdom was in turmoil. The royal advisors were beside themselves.
“The throne has a stain upon it,” cried the most senior advisor, Sir Bartholomew. He’d come all the way to New York City to plead his case before Ares, who had refused to grace a room that also contained the king since that last, dark conversation with his father. “The kingdom is reeling. Your father has installed his mistress and dares to call her his queen. And he has claimed that any issue he gets upon her will supersede you to the throne. You cannot allow this, Highness!”
“How can I prevent it?” Ares asked.
He lived halfway across the planet. He spent his time carrying out his royal duties and running the charity he’d started in his mother’s name and still enjoying his life as best he could. The tabloids loved him. The more they hated his father, the more they adored what they’d called his flaws as a younger man.
Ares had no intention of submitting himself to his father’s court. He had no interest whatsoever in playing the royal game.
“You must return to Atilia,” Sir Bartholomew cried, there in the penthouse suite of the hotel Ares called home in Manhattan. “You must marry and begin your own family at once. It is only because your father continues to refer to you as the Playboy Prince that the people feel stuck with his terrible choices. If only you would return and show the people a better way forward—”
“I’m not the king you seek,” Ares told him quietly. Distinctly. And the older man paled. “I will never be that king. I have no intention of carrying on this twisted, polluted bloodline beyond my own lifetime. If my father would like to inflict it on more unwary children, I can do nothing but offer them my condolences as they come of age.”
Ares thought of his mother after his advisors left, as he often did. What he would not give for another moment or two of her counsel. That sad smile of hers, her gentle touch.
Her quiet humor that he knew, now, only he had ever witnessed.
You must marry, he could hear her voice say, as if she still sat before him, elegant and kind.
And he missed his mother. Ares understood he always would.
But he had no intention of following the same path his parents had.
He would die first.
His phone was buzzing in his pocket, and he knew it was more invitations to more of the parties he liked to attend and act as if he was a normal man, not the heir to all this pain and hurt and poison. He eyed the face in his mirror that he hated to admit resembled the King’s, not hers.
Ares straightened his shoulders until his posture was as perfect as she would have liked it, on the off chance she could still see him, somehow. He liked to imagine she could still see him.
And then he strode off to lose himself in the Manhattan night.
CHAPTER TWO (#u2d368a62-47e2-5ef8-be79-11bc7472b02e)
Five months later
“PREGNANT?”
Pia Alexandrina San Giacomo Combe gazed back at her older brother, Matteo, with as much equanimity as she could muster.
She’d practiced this look in the mirror. For a good month or two already, and she still wasn’t sure she’d gotten it right.
“That’s what I said, Matteo,” she forced herself to say, in a very calm, composed, matter-of-fact sort of way.
She’d practiced that, too.
“You cannot be serious,” her brother blustered, a look of sheer horror on his face.
But Pia was standing before the wide desk in the library of the ancient manor house that had been in her father’s side of the family since that early, hardy Combe ancestor had clawed his way out of the textile mills and built it. Or she thought that was how the story went, having always preferred to tune out most of the lectures about the grand history of both sides of her family. Because her parents had so dearly loved to lecture at each other, as if their histories were engaged in a twisted battle for supremacy.
And because she was standing there before her brother, wearing a dress that fit her more tightly than she might have liked—in all that unrelenting funereal black that Pia had been draped in for the past six weeks since their mother had died—she could feel it when Matteo’s disbelieving stare landed on her belly.
Her belly, which, despite Pia’s best attempt to pretend none of this was happening, was protruding. Sticking right out, whether she liked it or not.
There was no way around it.
Her mother, of course, had noticed that Pia was getting “chunky” in the week or so before she’d died. And Pia had learned a long, long time ago exactly what weight she needed to maintain to avoid the acid side of her mother’s tongue. Her mother had seen the instant Pia had exceeded that weight, the way she had when Pia had been a rather moonfaced and shy young girl. To the ounce.
Puppy fat is for poor girls with no prospects, the legendary Alexandrina San Giacomo had said to her woebegone twelve-year-old daughter, her magnificent face calm—which made it worse. You are a San Giacomo. San Giacomos do not have chipmunk cheeks. I suggest you step away from the sweets.
After that Pia had been so determined to, if not live up to her mother’s impossible standard of effortless grace and beauty, at least escape her scathing put-downs. She’d dieted religiously throughout her teens, yet her cheeks had steadfastly refused to slim down, until one morning she’d woken up, aged twenty-two, and they’d gone.
Sadly, she’d taken her fateful trip to New York City shortly thereafter.
And Pia couldn’t say why her mother had done what she had done. She couldn’t definitively state that it was because she’d discovered her unmarried daughter was pregnant, and on the verge of causing the kind of scandal that was usually her mother’s province. Hadn’t Alexandrina spent the bulk of Pia’s childhood beating it into her—not literally, thankfully, though Alexandrina’s tongue was its own mallet—that Pia was to walk the straight and narrow? That Pia was to make certain she remained peerless and without blemish? That Pia needed to be, above all things, Snow White—pure as the driven snow or Alexandrina would know the reason why.
The truth was, Alexandrina hadn’t much liked the reason why.
Pia couldn’t say that the news that she was not only not at all innocent any longer, but pregnant by a stranger whose name she didn’t know, had made her mother decide to overindulge more than usual, as she had. And with such tragic results.
But she couldn’t say that wasn’t the reason, either.
And now it was six weeks later. Alexandrina had died and left their little family—and her planetful of admirers—in a state of despair. And then her father—brash and larger-than-life Eddie Combe, who Pia had thought was surely immortal—had collapsed with a heart attack three days ago and died that same night. And Pia was certain, now.
This was all her fault.
“You are serious,” Matteo said, darkly.
She tried to keep her face calm and expressionless, as her mother always had, particularly when she was at her most awful. “I’m afraid so.”
Matteo looked as if he had glass in his mouth. “You are aware, I feel certain, that we are moments away from our father’s funeral?”
Pia decided that wasn’t a real question. She waited instead of answering it, her hands folded in front of her as if she could stand there all day. She gazed past her brother and out at the Yorkshire countryside arrayed outside the windows, green hills beneath the gunmetal sky. Matteo, his gray eyes more dark and brooding than the stormy sky behind him, glared at her.
But when he spoke again, she had the impression he was trying his best to be kind.
“You look pregnant, Pia.”
As if she might have missed that. “I do.”
“There will be press at this funeral service. Paparazzi everywhere we turn. There was no avoiding them six weeks ago and it will be even more intense today. You must know what kind of commotion a visible pregnancy will cause.”
To his credit, he sounded as if he was trying to talk without clenching his jaw like that.
“What do you suggest I do?” Pia asked the question quietly, as if it hadn’t kept her up since the night her father had died. If she didn’t attend the funeral, would that be worse than if she did?
“How the hell did this happen?” Matteo growled.
