tough no matter what, her knees failed to hold her.
BY THE TIME Maggy walked into the gaspingly precious and markedly high-class resort and spa, set in all its grand timber and soaring glass splendor some miles outside of Deanville at the foot of the local mountains, she’d done a great deal more research.
She’d gone home after locking up the coffee shop and she’d crouched there on her single bed in her narrow little room with her phone to her face, taking an internet crash course on the life and times of the Santa Domini royal family. And everything she’d discovered had made her...a little bit dizzy.
Could this be real? Could she have a history after all these years of being nothing but a blank slate? Would she finally discover how and why she’d been left by the side of that road twenty years ago? Was it possible that the answer really, truly was something like one of the many silly and fanciful stories she’d made up when she was a girl to explain it away?
She’d spent a lot of time and energy back then trying to explain to herself how and why she’d ended up the way she had. The possibility that she’d been a kidnapped princess had featured heavily in the rotation of the tales she’d told herself when she’d still had a little foolish hope left. After all, it was a much better story than the more likely one—that whatever adults had been responsible for her had abandoned her because they couldn’t care for her or didn’t want that kind of commitment any longer. For whatever depressing reasons adults would have to make such decisions. A few came to mind as more likely than finding out she was a misplaced princess. Substance abuse, for example. Mental illness. Poverty. She could take her pick and they all ended the same way: a sad eight-year-old girl on the side of a road with no memory of how she’d gotten there.
But that wasn’t the sort of story Maggy had wanted to tell herself back then. Princesses won hands down every time.
“Don’t get your hopes up,” she’d snapped at herself, there in her rented room in an old, converted Victorian that had likely seen its better days when Vermont was still more or less one big farm.
She’d scrolled through pictures of the queen, the king. She’d taken great care not to think the word parents. Or the other, more personal words that indicated the kind of close relationships she’d never had with anyone. Mother. Father. And she’d sucked up her courage and taken a long, close look at the princess who had supposedly died in that car accident twenty years ago. She’d stared at that little girl’s face, not sure what she saw when she looked at it. Or what, if anything, she should see. There was no sense of recognition. There was...nothing inside of her. No spark, no reaction. There was simply the picture of a little girl lost years ago.
And then she’d studied the many, many pictures of and corresponding articles about Cairo Santa Domini. He was once the most scandal-prone royal in all of Europe. Now he was the beloved king of the country he’d taken back from the military everyone seemed to assume had not only wrested control of his kingdom thirty years ago, but ten years after that had engineered that car accident in Montenegro to take out the exiled king. And in so doing, had killed everyone in the Santa Domini royal family save King Cairo himself, who had been in boarding school in the United States at the time.
He was potentially her only living family member.
It was possible, after all this time and a life lived entirely on her own in every conceivable way, that she actually had a living family member.
Maggy had felt as if she might be sick.
She’d thought a lot about simply getting into her junky old car and driving absolutely anywhere Reza—who it seemed really was the king he’d claimed he was no matter how little she wanted that to be true—was not.
But in the end, she hadn’t done it. She’d thrown on the only dress she owned that was even slightly nice and she hadn’t gone to too much trouble with the rest because he’d made his feelings about her appearance pretty clear. And then she’d driven herself over to the upscale resort instead of out west toward California. And yes, she had to sit in her car in the frigid parking lot until her hands stopped shaking, but that was between her and her steering wheel and the close, hard dark all around.
Maggy prided herself on the toughness she’d earned every day of the past twenty years, having had no one to depend on but herself. Ever. That meant that no matter how she felt—in this case, about as far from tough as it was possible to get without actually dissolving into a sea of tears, which she never allowed herself and certainly not in public places—she’d pulled herself together and climbed out of that car, her shaking hands be damned. She’d wanted answers to questions she’d stopped asking years ago. It was a little bit surprising how very much she wanted them, so long after she’d decided wondering about such things only made her weak. And how, with only the slightest provocation—if that was what she could call the appearance of an actual king in The Coffee Queen on Main Street—all those same old questions flooded her.
Making her realize she’d never really gotten over wondering who she was or where she’d come from the way she’d assured herself she had. She’d simply stuffed her urge to ask those things way down deep inside, where none of that could leak out into her daily life any longer. The way it had when she’d been much younger and much, much angrier about her lot in life.
When she started across the chilly, icy parking lot, well salted to make certain the wealthy people who could afford to stay here didn’t slip, break their heads open, and then fail to pay their astronomical bills, she was caught for a moment in the dark grip of the cold night. It seemed to tumble down around her and she took as deep a breath as she could stand of the sharp winter air, tipping her head back so she could see all the far-off stars gleaming there above her.
Always watching. Always quiet, always calm. No matter what darkness was engulfing her, the stars shone through.
By the time Maggy made it to the front door of the resort, that great, raw thing inside of her that felt like the sort of sob that she’d rather die than let free had subsided a bit. Just a bit. But it was enough to keep her hands from shaking.
A hotel employee with a clipboard and a walkie-talkie waited for her in the slick, self-consciously rustic lobby of the hotel, a serene smile on her face, as if she and Maggy had already met a thousand times before. Maggy was certain they had not.
“If you’ll follow me, Ms. Strafford,” the woman said warmly. Maybe too warmly, Maggy thought, when greeting a complete stranger. “I’ll take you where you need to go. Mr. Argos—” and there was specific emphasis on that name “—is waiting.”
On any other night Maggy would have asked a few follow-up questions. Demanded to know how this woman knew who she was at a glance, for a start. But something told her she didn’t want to know the answer to that question. That it would involve the word appalling again. And while Maggy felt her self-esteem was strong enough to withstand the snotty comments of an uninvited king in her coffee shop, there was no point testing that theory here, in the sort of five-star hotel broke girls like herself normally gave a wide berth.
Instead, she let the woman lead her back outside and into a waiting hotel shuttle, clearly set aside for her use. She didn’t ask any questions then, either. She only settled into the seat she was offered in the otherwise empty vehicle and stared out the window, trying to keep her eyes on the stars as the shuttle wound its way out into the depths of the property, deep into the woods and halfway up the mountain. It stopped there. Maggy glanced out to see a guardhouse and gates, and heard many short bursts of noise on multiple walkie-talkies before the shuttle started to move again.
“It’s
