would be one thing if she were dressed like her mother had been in that picture. If she looked like the princess she obviously was instead of a castoff from Les Misérables. What was the matter with him? “Ten days ago my aide returned from a brief location scouting expedition in the area.”
“A location scouting expedition.” She echoed his own words in much the same way she’d said the word douche earlier, and he liked it about as much now as he had then. “Is that fancy talk for a trip?”
Reza could not recall the last time any person had managed to get under his skin. Much less a woman. In his experience, women tended to fling themselves into his path with great enthusiasm, if impeccable manners befitting his status, and if they found themselves on their knees, it was for entirely different reasons. He opted not to share that with her. Just as he opted not to share that he’d been planning an engagement trip to ask Louisa to become his queen in appropriately photogenic surroundings. He had not been at all interested in America for this purpose, but his enterprising aide had made a case for the enduring appeal of the New England countryside in winter and the smallish hills they called mountains here.
“I saw you in the background of these pictures.” He eyed her brash, blond hair, looking even less attractive in the overhead lights the more she tipped her head back to glare unbecomingly at him. In the pictures her hair had swirled around her shoulders, feminine and enticing, the dark chestnut color suiting her far more. It had also made it abundantly clear whose child she was. “The resemblance to Queen Serena was uncanny. It took only a phone call or two to determine that your name matched that of the lost princess and that your mysterious past dovetailed with the time of the accident. Perfectly. It seems too great a coincidence.”
Again, her chin tilted up, and there was no reason at all Reza should feel that as if her hands were on his sex. He was appalled that he did. Until tonight, his desires had always remained firmly under his control. Passion had been his father’s weakness. It would not be his.
“I don’t have a mysterious past,” she told him. Her caramel-colored eyes glittered. “The world is filled with bad parents and disposable kids. I’m just one more.”
“You are nothing of the kind.”
She folded her arms over her chest in a show of belligerence that made him blink.
“I’ll return to my original question,” she said. Not politely. “Who the hell are you and why do you care if some barista in a photograph looks like an old, dead queen?”
Reza drew himself up to his full height. He looked down at her with all the authority and consequence that had been pounded into every inch of him, all his life, even when his own father had failed to live up to the crown he now wore himself.
“I am Leopoldo Maximillian Otto, King of the Constantines,” he informed her. “But you may call me by my private family nickname, Reza.”
She let out a sharp, hard sound that was not quite a laugh and thrust his mobile back at him. “I don’t want to call you anything.”
“That will be awkward, then.”
Reza took possession of his mobile, studying the way she deliberately kept her fingers from so much as brushing his, as if he was poisonous. When he was a king, not a snake. How this creature dared to treat him—him—with such disrespect baffled him, but did nothing to assuage that damnable need that still worked inside him. She confounded him, and he didn’t like it.
But that didn’t change the facts. Much less what would be gained by presenting his people with the lost Santa Domini princess as his bride.
He met her gaze then. And held it. “Because one way or another, you are to be my wife.”
“I GET IT,” Maggy said after a moment. The word wife seemed to pound through her like an instant hangover, making her head feel too big and her belly a bit iffy, and if there were other, stranger reactions to him moving around inside her...she pretended she didn’t notice. “Someone must have put you up to this. Is this some new reality show? The Cinderella Games?”
Reza—as the other six hundred names he’d rattled off, to say nothing of the title he’d claimed, were apparently not fit for daily use—blinked in obvious affront.
“Allow me to assure you that I have not, nor will I ever, participate in a show of any kind.” He managed to bite out his words as if they offended him. As if the very taste of them in his mouth was an assault. Then he adjusted the cuffs of his coat in short jerks of indignant punctuation. “I am a king, not a circus animal.”
Maggy found that despite never having seen a king in all her life, and having entertained about as many thoughts about the behavior of monarchs as she did about that of unicorns and/or dragons, she had no trouble whatsoever believing this man of stone and consequence was one.
“I’ll make a note that you’re not a sad, dancing elephant.” Somehow, she kept from rolling her eyes in the back of her head. “Good to know.”
“I suggest you look it up,” he said, very much as if she hadn’t spoken. Maybe for him, she really hadn’t. It was entirely possible that a king simply wasn’t aware that anyone else spoke at all. He nodded toward her hip, and the phone she’d stashed in her back pocket. “Pull up an image of the king of the Constantines on your mobile. See what appears. I think you’ll find that he resembles me rather closely.”
And Maggy opted not to explore why the certainty in his voice shivered through her, kicking up a commotion in its wake.
“It doesn’t matter what comes up,” she told him, careful to keep that shivering thing out of her voice. “I don’t care if you’re the king of the world. I still need to clean this floor and lock up the shop, and that means you and all your muscly clowns need to go.” When he only stared at her in cool outrage, she might have smirked a little. Just a little. “You’re the one who mentioned a circus. I’m only adding to the visual.”
“What an extraordinary reaction.” His gray eyes were fathomless, yet still kicked up entirely too many tornadoes inside of her. And his voice did strange things to her, too. It seemed to echo around inside of her. As if he was inside of her—something she was better off not imagining, thank you. “I have told you that it is highly probable you are a member of one of Europe’s grand, historic royal families. That you are very likely a princess and will one day become a queen. My queen, no less. And your concern is the floor of a coffee shop?”
“My concern is the lunatic in the coffee shop with me, actually,” she managed to say, fighting to keep her voice even. Because she knew, somehow, that if she allowed herself to feel the reaction swelling inside of her, it might take her right back down to her knees. And not by choice this time. “I want you to go.”
He studied her for what seemed like a very long time. So long she had to rail at herself to keep from fidgeting. From showing him any weakness whatsoever—or any hint that she was taking him seriously when she wasn’t. She couldn’t. Princesses? Queens? That was nothing but little girl dreams and wishful thinking.
If there was one thing Maggy knew entirely too much about, it was reality. Cold, hard, grim, and often heartbreaking reality. There was no point whining about it, as she knew very well. It was what it was.
“Very well,” he said after what seemed like a thousand years, and was that...disappointment that washed through her? Had she
