His Two Royal Secrets
CAITLIN CREWS
From heiress in the shadows …to his pregnant princess! For one passionate night, in a strangers’ arms, Pia had felt beautiful and free…free of being the lonely, overlooked heiress to her family’s millions. Then Pia learns she’s carrying the Crown Prince of Atilia’s twins! Ruthless Ares is determined to claim his secret heirs, but he won’t – can’t – promise Pia more. And Pia’s true royal secret? She’s falling inescapably in love with her dark-hearted Prince…
From heiress in the shadows
...to his pregnant princess!
For one passionate night, in a stranger’s arms, Pia had felt beautiful and free...free of being the lonely, overlooked heiress to her family’s millions. Then Pia learns she’s carrying the Crown Prince of Atilia’s twins! Ruthless Ares is determined to claim his secret heirs, but he won’t—can’t—promise Pia more. And Pia’s true royal secret? She’s falling inescapably in love with her dark-hearted prince...
Discover this seductive royal romance—with a pregnancy twist!
USA TODAY bestselling and RITA® Award–nominated author CAITLIN CREWS loves writing romance. She teaches her favorite romance novels in creative writing classes at places like UCLA Extension’s prestigious Writers’ Program, where she finally gets to utilise the MA and PhD in English Literature she received from the University of York in England. She currently lives in the Pacific Northwest, with her very own hero and too many pets. Visit her at caitlincrews.com (http://www.caitlincrews.com).
Also by Caitlin Crews (#u2d368a62-47e2-5ef8-be79-11bc7472b02e)
Bride by Royal Decree
Undone by the Billionaire Duke
A Baby to Bind His Bride
Imprisoned by the Greek’s Ring
My Bought Virgin Wife
Bound to the Desert King collection
Sheikh’s Secret Love-Child
Scandalous Royal Brides miniseries
The Prince’s Nine-Month Scandal
The Billionaire’s Secret Princess
Stolen Brides collection
The Bride’s Baby of Shame
The Combe Family Scandals miniseries
The Italian’s Twin Consequences
Untamed Billionaire’s Innocent Bride
Discover more at millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk).
His Two Royal Secrets
Caitlin Crews
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
ISBN: 978-1-474-08793-3
HIS TWO ROYAL SECRETS
© 2019 Caitlin Crews
Published in Great Britain 2019
by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.
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Note to Readers (#u2d368a62-47e2-5ef8-be79-11bc7472b02e)
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For Flo, my favorite twin.
Contents
Cover (#ua2f22cbc-6aaa-50c2-b868-f976d840d9fa)
Back Cover Text (#u96cdf8ce-9f36-55cd-bd50-ad801c0b0fe9)
About the Author (#ua8ea043b-1e32-5d85-b732-20ac7d775c84)
Booklist (#uaa591f0e-0a14-5b13-97a0-7119684f8d25)
Title Page (#ua482c314-de5f-5121-a813-e0c8af2338f2)
Copyright (#u62888bce-c7da-5ef1-9fa8-ae2770dc3041)
Note to Readers
Dedication (#u270f6c05-478a-566f-8e0a-821c42991d30)
CHAPTER ONE (#u61a4c7c1-64c6-5fe0-aed8-0f2531ebcad0)
CHAPTER TWO (#ua4a9b753-a24d-5681-a1ed-c5d374209286)
CHAPTER THREE (#u88e9de54-6437-5ebe-b6b1-5a4824b34345)
CHAPTER FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE (#u2d368a62-47e2-5ef8-be79-11bc7472b02e)
“THE ONLY THING that matters is the line,” Crown Prince Ares’s dark and intimidating father told him when he was little more than five.
At that age, Ares had no idea what his father meant. He didn’t know what line his father was referring to or what bearing it could possibly have on him anyway. At five, Ares had been primarily concerned with how many hours a day he could spend roaring about the palace grounds, out of sight of his nanny, who was forever trying to make him “act like a gentleman.”
But he had learned, already and painfully, never to question his father.
The king was always right. If the king was wrong, you were mistaken.
By the time he was ten, Prince Ares knew exactly what line his father was referring to, and was already sick to death of hearing about his own blood.
It was only blood. No one cared if he skinned his knee, but it was clearly very important that he listen to lectures about the purpose of that blood. Its dignity. Its import.
When it was still the same blood that welled up in any scrape Ares might get while doing things he shouldn’t around the palace. Things his old nanny liked to tell him were responsible for her gray hair.
“You do not matter,” his father would rant during Ares’s scheduled appointments with him. “You are merely a link in a noble chain, nothing more!”
The king was forever flinging brandy and various decanters this way and that in his private compartments as he worked his temper into a lather. Ares did not enjoy these appointments, not that anyone had asked him.
And Ares had been schooled repeatedly not to move when his father raged. To sit straight, keep his eyes averted, and refrain from any fidgeting or reacting. At ten, he found this to be a kind of torture.
“He likes a moving target, child,” his mother would tell him, her voice cracking as she sat with him, her hands cool against his face and her eyes kind. “You must work on keeping your posture perfect, and never betray your emotions by so much as a flick of an eyelash.”
“What would happen if I threw something at the wall?”
The queen’s smile was always so sad. “Don’t do that, Ares. Please.”
Ares came to think of it as something of a game. He pretended to be a statue, like the ones that would be made of him someday to grace the King’s Gallery that had stood in the Grand Hall of the Northern Palace since—or so the story went—the islands that made up the kingdom of Atilia rose up from the sea. Marble and gold, with a fancy plaque listing his accomplishments.
“Our line has held the crown of Atilia for centuries,” his father would thunder, while Ares would think, I am stone. “And now it rests entirely in your hands. You, a weakling, who I can hardly credit sprung from my own loins.”
Stone straight through, Ares would tell himself, his eyes on the windows and the sea outside.
By the time Ares was a teenager, he had perfected the art of sitting deathly still in his father’s presence. Perfected it and also complicated it, because he was an adolescent and more certain by the day that he had not one drop of the old king’s blood in him—because he hated him too much to be related to him.
“You must never, ever say such things out loud,” his mother told him, her voice as exhausted as her gaze was serious. “You must never give anyone in your father’s court leave to doubt your parentage, Ares. Promise me.”
He had promised, of course. Ares would have promised his mother anything.
Still, sometimes the crown prince was not in a mood to play statues. Sometimes he preferred to stare back at his father with as much insolence as he could muster, wordlessly daring the increasingly old and stooped king to throw something at him. Instead of at the stone walls of the palace, as he usually did.
“You are nothing but a disappointment to me,” the king thundered at every appointment—which, thankfully, occurred only a handful of times a year now that Ares was dispatched to boarding schools all over Europe. “Why should I be cursed with such a weak and insolent heir?”
Which, naturally, only encouraged Ares to live down to the worst expectations his father had of him.
Ares accordingly...enjoyed himself. Recklessly, heedlessly, and thoroughly.
Europe was an ample playground, and he made friends in all the desperately pedigreed boarding schools he was eventually kicked out of. Together he and his bored, wealthy friends would traipse about the Continent, from the Alps to the beaches, and back again. From underground clubs in Berlin to parties on superyachts somewhere out there in all that Mediterranean splendor.
“You are a man now,” his father told him bitterly when he turned twenty-one. “Chronologically.”
By the law of their island kingdom, twenty-one was the age at which the heir to the throne was formally acknowledged as the Crown Prince and Heir Apparent to the Kingdom. Ares’s investiture cemented his place in the line of succession, and further, that of his own heirs.
It was more of the same bloodline nonsense. Ares cared even less about it now than he had when he was five. These days, Ares was far more interested in his social life. And what antics he could engage in now he had access to his own vast fortune.
“Never fear, Father,” he replied after the ceremony. “I have no plans to appall you any less now I am officially and for all time your heir apparent.”
“You’ve sown enough wild oats to blanket the planet twice over,” the king growled at him.
Ares did not bother to contradict him. First, because it would be a lie. He had indeed. And second, because the hypocrisy might choke him. King Damascus was well-known for his own years of sowing, such as it were. And unlike Ares, his father had been betrothed to his mother since the day of her birth.
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.
Pia had always considered herself close to her brother. It was only the two of them, after all, caught up some ten years apart in the middle of their parents’ famously tempestuous, always dramatic love story. Eddie Combe had been known as much for his tendency to take a swing at his business competitors as for his business itself, Combe Industries, that was the direct result of those tough Combes who’d climbed out of the mills.
Meanwhile, Alexandrina San Giacomo had been the most beautiful woman in the world. That was what they’d called her since she’d been all of eighteen. At her funeral, pop stars had sung elegies, the world had watched the televised version to weep along and post pictures of their black armbands, and rarely a day had passed since without Pia encountering some or other remembrance of Alexandrina that called her La Bellissima, the angel of our time.
And that was the more restrained lot.
Their parents’ love story had transfixed a generation. Pia had always been transported by it herself, especially as her experience of their love came with the shouting matches, the broken crockery followed by Those Noises behind locked doors, and their utter and complete fixation on each other at all times. No matter who else was in the room.
Matteo, darkly handsome, broodingly intense, and excruciatingly dedicated to his role as the last San Giacomo heir as well as his father’s successor in the family business, was precisely the sort of child one might expect to come from such a union.
Pia, by contrast, had been hidden away for most of her life, which she had always assumed was a direct consequence of her chipmunk cheeks. She’d been packed off to a convent, then a finishing school, while everyone in the family had gone to extreme and excessive links to keep her out of the public eye.
They all claimed it was to protect her, but she knew better. She was too awkward. Too chunky. The most beautiful woman in the world could not have an embarrassing, tragic daughter, could she? Alexandrina had been a swan by any measure. Pia was, sadly, still very much the ugly duckling in comparison, and she’d resigned herself to that.
Or she’d tried, very hard, to resign herself to that.
“Did you...ask me how it happened?” She stared at her brother now, feeling the wholly inappropriate urge to let out a laugh. Only her brother’s likely reaction to such a thing kept her from it. “Not that you fling it about, or anything, but I was fairly certain you...already knew.”
“Thank you for making light of the situation, Pia,” Matteo snapped, that glass in his mouth getting the better of him. “I’m glad this is all a joke to you. Our father’s funeral starts within the hour. You don’t think you could have given me some advance warning about—” his gaze raked over her, and made her cheeks heat with shame “—this?”
“I thought I should do it in person,” Pia said. That was true. What was also true was that she really hadn’t wanted to do it at all. “And you’ve been down in London since—” But she didn’t want to discuss their mother’s death. “And I knew you would be coming up here for the funeral anyway, so I thought, why not wait until I saw you.”
And Pia was nearly twenty-three years old. She might have been protected to the point of smothering her whole life, but she was still a woman grown. So why did she find herself acting like a stammering child when her older brother glared at her?
“This is a disaster,” he growled, as if she’d missed that. “This is not a game.”
“You’re not the one who can’t wear most of the clothes in your wardrobe, Matteo,” she replied. Airily, because what else could she do? “I don’t think you need to tell me how real this is.”
He stared at her, shaking his head. And Pia had tried so hard to put a brave face on all this. But the truth was, she was ashamed. She could feel that heat in her cheeks, and everywhere else, too.
And the way Matteo looked at her then, as if he was so disappointed in her it hurt, Pia was very much afraid that she would stay ashamed forever more.
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly.
“Who is the father?”
But that only made that sickening shame inside her worse.
“Dad asked me that, too,” she said, instead of answering the question.
Because the answer was so...squalid. Humiliating, really. Oh, she’d thought it was so delightful before. She finally had a secret! She was a modern woman at last, like everyone else she knew! She’d stepped smartly into her own future, seized the day—or the night, to be more precise—and had stopped keeping herself like some kind of vestal virgin, forever on the shelf, because for some reason her scandal-ridden family seemed united in their desire to keep her from making the mistakes they had.
Everything was fun and games until the morning sickness hit, she had discovered.
Matteo’s glare darkened, which should have been impossible. “Dad knew about this?”
“Both Mum and Dad knew about it,” Pia said, her voice small.
Of all the things she couldn’t believe, what newly lived inside of her was really the least of it. She didn’t understand how the world could continue turning without her parents in it. Her mother had been like the sky above, even in the quiet of her own sitting room. That vast and given to sudden storms. Her father had been like a volcano. Big and imposing, and always this close to eruption.
How could they both be gone?
And how could she live with the sure knowledge that she was what had killed them, one way or another?
Her hand crept over her belly, then froze when she saw Matteo’s dark gaze follow the movement. A new wave of shame swept over her.
“What...” Matteo shook his head as if he couldn’t take all the information in. As if he could make it go away by scowling at it. Or her. “What on earth did they say?”
“About what you’d expect.” Pia tried to straighten her shoulders and stand taller, because Alexandrina had always told her it made a girl look a size smaller. “Mum wanted to make sure I knew that it was better to have a boy, as girls will steal your beauty.” She opted not to mention the awkward moment that had followed that pronouncement, as Pia and her mother had stared at each other, neither one of them pointing out the obvious. That Pia had clearly done nothing of the kind. Her brother blinked, and she pushed on. “While Dad said, and I quote, ‘I should have known you’d turn out to be nothing more than a common tart.’”
She even approximated their father’s growl of a voice, with that broad hint of Yorkshire he’d played up, the better to discomfit those who thought they were his betters.
For a moment, Pia and Matteo stared at each other.
Pia felt her stomach turn over, and not with leftover morning sickness. But with disloyalty. Her parents had always had it in them to be awful. Temper tantrums were one of their primary forms of communication. They had always been capable of saying terrible things, usually did, and then went to great lengths to make up for it—usually not by saying anything directly, but with whirlwind trips to far-flung places. Or sudden bouts of affection and sweetness.
They had been disappointed in her. Pia knew that. But if they’d lived, the temper would have given way to something kinder, no matter what they’d said to her in the heat of their initial reactions. She should have said that, too. She should have made it clear she knew they would both have softened.
But it felt too late. For them, certainly.
And for her, the child who had always disappointed them.
Pia could hear the sound of movement in the house outside the library. The staff was getting ready for the gathering that would happen after the service and burial. When all their father’s captain-of-industry contemporaries and associates—as Eddie Combe hadn’t trafficked in friends—would clutter up the house, pretending they missed him. And all of Europe’s heads of state would send their emissaries, because Eddie Combe might have come from the dark mills of Yorkshire, but he had married a San Giacomo. San Giacomos had been Venetian royalty in their time. At least one of their ancestors had been a prince. And that meant that the crème de la crème of Europe was bound to pay their respects today, no matter how little they had cared for Eddie personally.
Pia wanted no part of any of this. And not only because she was terribly afraid that she would cause a commotion simply by appearing in her...state. But because she still couldn’t believe her parents were gone. Not when she hadn’t had enough time to watch them come round. Not when she’d never know if this time, she’d disappointed them too much or if they’d soften the way they usually did. It seemed premature to mourn them.
And deeply unfair that she was expected to do it in public, as if she was part of a show for others to watch and judge.
“Do you not know who was responsible for getting you in this condition?” Matteo asked. Icily. “Or are you simply choosing not to name him?”
And maybe Pia was a little more emotionally fragile than she realized. Because that rubbed her the wrong way.
“I think you’ll find that I’m responsible for getting myself into this condition,” she replied. “I wasn’t attacked, if that’s what you mean. Nothing was done to me that I didn’t enthusiastically participate in. I’m not a damsel in distress, Matteo.”
There was a part of her that might have liked the fact she was pregnant—had it not horrified everyone who knew her. Pia had always wanted a family. Not the one she had, but a real family. The sort that she imagined everyone else had.
Matteo was studying her, and she could almost see the machinery working in his head. “That trip you took to New York. That was it, wasn’t it?”
“If you mean the graduation trip I took to celebrate finally completing college, then yes.” And oh, how she’d fought for that. It had been Matteo who had finally stepped forward and bluntly told their parents that Pia deserved as much of a chance as anyone to live her own adult life. Her cheeks burned all the brighter. Because she was imagining what he must be thinking of her now. “We had a lovely week in New York. It turns out, I happened to come back home with a little bit extra—”
“I don’t understand. You...?”
There was the sound of footsteps beyond the door, and darker clouds began to pull together over the hills in the distance. And Pia stared back at her brother, her cheeks so hot they hurt.
“You don’t understand?” she asked him. “Really? I’ve certainly seen your face and photographs with different women in the tabloids, yet you remain unmarried. How can this be?”
“Pia.”
“If you’re going to act like we’re Victorian, Matteo, I should have every right to ask about the state of your virtue. Shouldn’t I?”
“I beg your pardon. I am not in the habit of having intimate relations with women that I do not know.”
“Well. Okay, then.” She drew herself up even straighter. “I guess I’m just a whore.”
“I doubt that very much,” Matteo growled.
But the word stayed in her head, pounding like a drum, because the doors to the library were tossed open then. The staff that Matteo had kept at bay came flooding in, his erstwhile assistant was there to whisper in his ear, and it was time to do their sad duty.
And she knew their father had thought exactly that of her, at least for that moment. He’d looked at her—really looked at her, for a change, because Eddie Combe had usually preferred to keep his attention on himself—only three days before his heart attack. And called her a common tart to her face.
She kept telling herself that wasn’t cause and effect. That the heart attack hadn’t had anything to do with her condition. And that, if he’d had more time, he would have found her in the next days or weeks and gruffly offer some sort of olive branch.
Yet as she rode down in her brother’s car, tucked there in the back with him while he tended to the business of running the family company and his assistant Lauren handled calls for him, she accepted that she couldn’t know for sure. How could she?
The last thing Pia knew Eddie had thought about her was that she was a whore. He’d said so. And then in a matter of days, he was dead.
Her mother had called her fat, which wasn’t anything new. Then again, that was the worst thing Alexandrina could think to call another woman, and she hadn’t yet cycled through to the usual affection before she’d passed.
Either way, Matteo and Pia were orphans now.
And Pia was still terribly afraid it was her fault.
But she snuck her hand over her belly because whether it was or wasn’t her fault, that didn’t extend to the next generation. She wouldn’t allow it.
The funeral service was simple and surprisingly touching. It made Eddie seem far more approachable than he had in life, and Pia wondered if she would understand the man more as time went on. If her memories would mellow him into more of a father figure, lingering on his gruff affection. Or if he would always be that volcanic presence in her mind. The one that had thought his only daughter was a trollop right before he’d died.
The ride back up the hill toward the Combe estate was somber, and Pia was glad, in a fierce sort of way, that it was a moody day. The dark clouds threatened, though the rain held off, and they stood in a bit of a brisk, unpleasant wind as Eddie’s casket was lowered into the ground in the family plot.
The vicar, who Eddie had hated in life, though had requested in his will in some attempt to torture the holy man from beyond, murmured a prayer. Pia kept her eyes on the casket that was all that remained of her father—of her childhood—until she could no longer see it.
And somehow kept her tears at bay. Because there were too many cameras. And how many times had Alexandrina lectured her about red eyes and a puffy face?
It hit her again. That Alexandrina was gone. That Eddie was gone. That nothing was ever going to be the same.
Then Matteo’s hand was on her back and they moved away from the grave site to form the necessary receiving line for those who might or might not make it back to the small reception at the house. It was times like these that her years in finishing school came in handy. Pia was infinitely capable of shaking hands and making meaningful eye contact with every royal in Europe without noticing them at all.
“May I offer my condolences on the part of the Kingdom of Atilia and His Majesty King Damascus, my father?”
Something about that voice kicked at her.
Pia’s hand was already extended. And even as she focused on the man standing before her, his hand enveloped hers.
And she knew that sudden burst of flame. She knew the shiver that worked its way from the nape of her neck down to pool at the base of her spine.
Her eyes jerked up and met his.
As expected, his gaze was green, shot through with gold. And as shocked as hers.
Pia panicked. How could this be happening? The last time she’d seen this man, he had been sprawled out, asleep, in a penthouse suite high above Manhattan. She had gathered her things, feeling powerful and shaken at once by her daring and all the things he’d taught her, and had tiptoed away.
She’d never imagined she would see him again.
“You,” he said, almost wonderingly. “New York.”
And part of her was warming, in instant response to the way his mouth curved in one corner. As if Pia was a good memory, as he had been for her. At least at first.
Before the morning sickness had sent her to the doctor to discuss the flu she couldn’t kick.
But Pia couldn’t indulge in memories, good or bad, because she was standing next to her brother. And he was focusing that dark scowl of his on the man still holding Pia’s hand.
“New York?” Matteo asked. Demanded, more like. “Did you say you know my sister from New York?”
“Matteo. Stop.”
But the man, still smiling slightly, seemed unaware of the danger he was in. “I met your sister in Manhattan some months ago,” he said, amiably enough. He smiled at Pia. “Do you go there often?”
“Miss Combe, my younger sister, has been there once,” Matteo growled. “And guess what? She picked up a souvenir.”
“I beg your pardon?”
The man frowned. But in that way very important men did, as if inviting everyone around them to apologize for opportuning them.
“My sister is six months pregnant,” Matteo bit out.
Pia had the sense that she was in some kind of slow-motion car accident. The sort she’d seen in movies a thousand times. She could almost hear the scraping of the metal, the screech of the tires. Yet everything before her seemed to move in tiny, sticky increments. She watched her brother ball up his fists and step closer to the man. The man—who had told her his name was Eric, though she doubted that was real—did not back up.
And they both turned and stared at Pia as if she was some kind of roadside curiosity.
“If your sister is or isn’t pregnant, that is no concern of mine,” the man said.
Far less amiably.
Just in case Pia had wondered if it was possible to feel worse about all of this. Look at that! It was. She rubbed at her chest as if that could make her heart stop pounding the way it was. Or at least, ache less.
“Pia,” Matteo said, dark and furious. “Is this the man?”
“Have you forgotten where we are?” she managed to ask, though she was barely able to breathe.
“It’s a simple question,” her brother bit off.
“Once again, the state of your sister’s womb has nothing to do with me,” the man said.
And he wasn’t just a man.
If Pia had been going to throw away a lifetime of doing the right thing and making the correct choice over any old man, she would have done it years ago. This man was beautiful. Those gorgeous eyes and silky dark hair, a jawline to inspire the unwary into song and poetry, and shoulders to make a girl cry. This man had walked into the party where Pia had already been feeling awkward and out of place, and it was as if a light shone upon him. It was as if his bones were like other people’s, but sat in him differently. Making him languid. Easy.
His smile had been all of that, plus heat, when he’d aimed it at her, there beneath some modern art installation that looked to Pia’s eye like an exclamation point. In bronze.
But best of all, this man hadn’t had any idea who she was.
She could always tell. It was the way they said her name. It was a certain gleam in their eyes. But he’d had none of it.
He’d liked her. Just her.
Just Pia.
She’d planned to hold on to that. She’d wanted to hold on to that. But it seemed that would be one more thing she didn’t get to have.
“Thank you so much for asking about my private life, Matteo,” she said to her brother now. In a decent impression of her mother’s iciest tone, which came more naturally than she’d expected. “But as a matter of fact, I have only ever had sex with one person.”
Then she looked at the man before her, and her memories wouldn’t do her any good, so she cast them aside. No matter how beautiful he was. “And I regret to inform you, but that one person was you.”
But that didn’t have the effect she expected it to have.
Because all the beautiful man before her did was laugh.
At her, if she wasn’t mistaken.
“Like hell,” he said.
And that was when Matteo punched him.
Right in the face.
CHAPTER THREE (#u2d368a62-47e2-5ef8-be79-11bc7472b02e)
ONE MOMENT ARES was standing straight up, looking one of his past indulgences in the face.
He’d laughed, of course. What could he do but laugh?
Because the truth was, Ares hadn’t forgotten her. He hadn’t forgotten the way her gray eyes had lit up when she’d looked at him. He hadn’t forgotten her smile, shy and delighted in turn. And he certainly hadn’t forgotten her taste.
He might even have toyed with the notion of what it would be like to seek her out for another taste, now and again over the past few months—
The next moment he was on the ground, and it took him a moment to understand that the Combe heir had punched him.
Hard.
Not only that, he’d chosen to do so in full view of the paparazzi, all of whom swooped in closer like the locusts they were at the sight. They took picture after picture and held up cameras to record every last detail of the Crown Prince of Atilia’s inelegant sprawl across the wet grass in the middle of a funeral.
Ares glared up at the man who had laid him out. He wanted—badly—to respond in kind, but restrained himself. Because he might not want to be king, but he was still a prince, whether he liked it or not. And princes did not swing on bereaved commoners, no matter the provocation. Moreover, he preferred to control the stories that appeared about him, especially when the press on his father was so dire these days.
He couldn’t change the fact this man had hit him. But he could opt not to react in a manner that would only make it all worse.
He climbed back to his feet far more gracefully than he’d gone down. He brushed himself off, his gaze on the man scowling at him in case he started swinging again, then put his hand to his lip. When he drew it away, he noted darkly that there was blood.
Because of course there was blood.
Because everything was about his damned blood. Hadn’t his father told him so a thousand times before Ares had turned seven?
Ares noticed movement in his periphery and held up his hand before his security detail handled the situation in a manner that would only make it worse. He glared at the Combe heir, whose name he hadn’t bothered to learn as he’d run over his notes on his way here today.
That seemed like a significant oversight, in retrospect.
“You understand that I am the Crown Prince of Atilia, do you not?” he asked coolly instead. “Attacking me is considered an act of war.”
“That doesn’t frighten me,” the other man retorted.
“What should frighten both of you is that this entire conversation is being recorded,” Pia hissed at the pair of them.
And that was the thing. He could remember her name. Pia.
Such a little name when she had hit him with a good deal more force than her brother had just now.
And the hits kept coming today.
A closer look showed Ares what he should have noticed from the start. That she’d thickened around the middle. And she was a tiny thing—easy enough, if a man had a decent imagination and the necessary strength, to pick up and move around as he liked, and Ares certainly had liked—and her bump was clearly noticeable. Huge, in fact.
It was very clearly...exactly what it was.
But what it could not be was his.
“I have never in my life had unprotected sex,” Ares said with as much regal hauteur as he could manage.
The Combe heir looked enraged. Pia only shook her head, her gaze darting around to their audience before returning to her brother.
“If you two want to roll about in the dirt, flinging your toxic masculinity about like bad cologne, I cannot stop you,” she said, half under her breath. “But I refuse to become fodder for the tabloids for the first time in my life because of your bad decisions.”
And she turned around and marched off, as if it wasn’t already too late.
When Ares looked around he could see the speculation on every face within view. Because there had been a punch, and now Pia was leaving, and it didn’t take a mathematician to put her belly and him together.
But it was impossible.
“I suggest you follow my sister up to the house,” her brother growled at him.
“Or you will do what?” Ares asked, every inch of him the product of at least a millennia of royal breeding. “Punch something again? You do not tell me where I go or do not, Mr. Combe.”
“Watch me.”
Ares laughed again, more for the benefit of their audience than because he found any of this funny. Or even tolerable.
And then, because he couldn’t see another option, he turned and made his way up the long drive that led from the family plot toward the big, hulking house that sat there at the top of the hill. But he took his time, chatting merrily with other guests, as if he was at a party instead of a funeral. As if he didn’t have what he suspected was the beginnings of a fat lip.
And as if he hadn’t been accused of impregnating a woman by her overprotective older brother, in full view of too many cameras.
He could leave, he knew. No one would keep him here, no matter what Pia’s brother imagined. His security detail would whisk him away at a moment’s notice.
But Pia’s condition was not his doing—could not be his doing—and he felt compelled to make that clear.
He walked inside the manor house, wondering, not for the first time, how it was these northern Europeans could tolerate their stuffy, dark houses. The palaces of Atilia were built to celebrate the islands they graced. The sea was all around, and invited in, so it murmured through every archway. It was there, shimmering, just around every corner.
He asked after Pia in the grand entryway and was shown into the sort of library that made him think of all the headmasters’ offices he’d found himself in during his school days. Usually en route to his latest expulsion.
She was standing at the window, staring out at the miserable British countryside, wet and cold. But what he noticed was her back was too straight.
And he didn’t know why she would claim that he was the one who’d impregnated her, but it was hard to remember that as he looked at her from behind.
Because he remembered that night.
It had been their second round, or perhaps their third. He had woken to find her standing by the window, wrapped in a sheet from the thoroughly destroyed bed, her fingers against the glass. Manhattan had gleamed and glittered all around. Ares had gone to her as if drawn there by some kind of magnet. He’d brushed aside the weight of her dark, silken hair and put his mouth to the nape of her neck.
He could still remember the heated, broken sound she’d made. Just as he could remember the chill of the glass beneath his palm when he’d braced himself there and taken her from behind—
He shook himself out of that now. Especially when his body responded with as much enthusiasm as he remembered from that night.
“I’m not the father of your baby,” he said, his voice grittier than it should have been when he knew he hadn’t done this.
“When I realized I was pregnant, I tried to find you, of course.” Pia didn’t turn around. She stayed where she was, her back to him and her arms crossed above her swollen belly. He couldn’t stop staring at it, as if he’d never seen a pregnant woman before. “It’s a decent thing to do, after all. But no matter who I asked, which was its own embarrassment, no one could remember any ‘Eric’ at that party.”
“And because I lied about my name, you think it appropriate to lie yourself? About something far more serious?”
She let out a small sound, like a sigh, but she still didn’t turn to face him.
“When I couldn’t find anyone by the name of Eric, I thought that was fair enough. Not ideal, but fine. I would do it by myself. As women have been doing since the dawn of time. But that’s easier to make yourself believe when no one knows. When you haven’t yet told your whole family that yes, you had a one-night stand in New York City. And you don’t know the name of the man you had that one-night stand with. But guess what? You’re pregnant by him anyway.”
“It is not my baby.”
“But I withstood the shame,” she said, her shoulders shifting. Straightening. “I’m figuring out how to withstand it, anyway. I never expected to see you again.”
“Clearly not.” Ares could hear the darkness in his voice. The fury. “Or you would not dare tell such a lie.”
She turned then, and her face was calm. Serene, even. That was like a slap.
Until he noticed the way her gray eyes burned.
“And the funny thing about shame is that I keep thinking there must be a maximum amount any one person can bear,” she told him. “I keep thinking I must be full up. But no. I never am.”
Something twisted in him at that, but Ares ignored it.
“You cannot wander around telling people that you’re having my child,” he thundered at her. “This doesn’t seem to be penetrating. It’s morally questionable at best, no matter who the man is. But if you claim you carry my child, what you are announcing is that you are, in fact, carrying the heir to the Atilian throne. Do you realize what that means?”
Pia looked pale. “Why would I realize that—or anything about you? I didn’t know who you were until fifteen minutes ago. Much less that you were a prince. Are a prince. A prince, for God’s sake.”
A man who had renounced his claim to a throne should not have found the way she said that so...confronting.
Ares pushed on. “Now you know. You need to retract your claim. Immediately.”
“Are you denying that we slept together?” she asked, her voice shaky.
“We did very little sleeping, as I recall. But I don’t see what that has to do with anything.”
“I’ve only ever slept with one man,” she threw out there. “You.”
Or so it seemed to Ares as it sat there, bristling in the center of the library floor.
The implications of that statement roared in him.
But Pia was still talking. “If you are not the father, we have a far larger problem on our hands.” She even smiled, which made the roaring in him worse. “Shall I contact the Vatican to notify them of the second immaculate conception? Or will you?”
Ares stared back at her as that scathing question hung in the air between them, too, joining in with all the rest of the noise. The roar of it. And it wasn’t until that moment that he realized that for all he liked to think of himself as an independent creature, in no way beholden to crown or kingdom unless he wanted to be, he really was a prince straight through.
Because he was wholly unaccustomed to being addressed in such a manner.
It had never occurred to him before this moment how very few people in his life dared address him with anything but the utmost respect. Yet today he had been punched in the face. And was now being spoken to in a manner he could only call flippant.
Pia swallowed as he stared at her, and then wrung her hands in a manner that suggested she was not, perhaps, as sanguine as she appeared.
Ares didn’t much like what it said about him that he found that...almost comforting.
“Happily,” she said in a low voice, “it doesn’t matter whether you believe me or not. There is a selection of tests to choose from to determine paternity, both before and after birth.”
“It is not a question of whether or not I believe you.”
“I’m not sure I blame you,” she said, as if he hadn’t spoken. Another new experience for Ares. Especially as she sounded as if she was attempting to be generous. “I can see how such a thing would be difficult to believe if I was...like you.”
Ares’s brow rose and he suspected he looked like all those pictures of his lofty, patrician, infinitely regal ancestors. “Like me?”
“I doubt you remember the particulars of our night. Or me. And why would you? You must have such adventures all the time.”
He might have been caught on the back foot since he’d arrived in Yorkshire this afternoon, but he wasn’t foolish enough to answer that question.
“Here is what I don’t understand,” he said instead, as a sort of low, heated pounding started up in his chest, then arrowed out into his limbs. His sex. “You claim you were innocent before that night. Why? You’re not a child.”
“Do children prize chastity? Or is it their natural state?”
“I could not say if they prize it or do not,” he growled. “I know I never did. I shrugged it off at the first opportunity. I was under the impression that was the entire purpose of the boarding schools I attended.” He prowled toward her, keeping his eyes fast on hers. “Were you locked away in a convent, Pia?”
Something like humor flashed across her face. “Yes.”
That startled him. He came to a stop before her. “An actual convent? Complete with nuns?”
“Of course with nuns. It couldn’t very well be a convent without nuns, could it?”
“What on earth were you doing in a convent?”
She looked wry. “Protecting and defending my honor and holding fast to my chastity, of course. What else?”
“And what? The moment you walked through the convent doors into the big, bad world, you decided the time was ripe to rid yourself of that pesky hymen? With the first man you laid eyes upon?”
He ignored the other thing in him, dark and male, that didn’t like that idea. Because Ares was not accustomed to being any man, indistinguishable from the rest. Notable only because he was male.
“First I went to finishing school,” Pia said, and for all that her eyes were too big, and her face was pale, Ares noticed that she didn’t back down. “There I learned excruciatingly important things. A bit of political science and economics to pepper my banquet conversation, and how best to talk about books to make myself seem important and intellectual, yet approachable. I learned how to dance graciously, as befits a hostess and guest at any gathering. I learned the various degrees of curtsies, and when to employ them. I was meant to be a kind of weapon, you understand.”
“I do not understand.” But he was too close to her now. He couldn’t seem to pull his eyes away from her. There was not one part of him that wanted to, for that matter, and he remembered that magnetic pull, that night. How could it still affect him? “But I’m feeling the effects of your bombshell, nonetheless.”
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