Lily gasped. “Is this a joke?”
She stared at her reflection—their reflection. The darkness of his fingers against her skin, her hair wild and tumbling around her shoulders in a silky mess. Her pink cotton shirt was stained over her left shoulder, and her eyes, though tired, gleamed with fury. Nico, in contrast, was cool and unruffled. If not for his quickened heartbeat against her, she’d almost think him bored.
But no, there it was, that flash of something in his eyes, in the set of his jaw, that spoke volumes without a sound being uttered.
“No joke, Liliana. I have broken a long sought-after treaty between my country and Monteverde, not to mention embarrassed my father and our allies, so that I can do what should have been done the instant you conceived my child.”
“I-I don’t understand,” she whispered, searching his face in the mirror, her heart slamming into her ribs.
“Of course you do,” he replied, dipping his head until his lips almost grazed the shell of her ear. Almost, but not quite.
“You, Miss Lily Morgan, are about to become the Crown Princess, my consort, and the mother of my children.”
Chapter Four
She looked utterly stunned. Not that he blamed her. Nico was still somewhat stunned himself. He had a son with this woman, a fact that had the power to punch him in the solar plexus and leave him gasping for breath every time he thought of it.
A son she’d kept secret from him. The electric current zapping through him as he pressed against her this time was most certainly rage, nothing more.
“You can’t be serious,” she finally squeaked out. Her green eyes were huge as she blinked at him in disbelief. The platinum color of her hair made her almost ethereal. Surely, this is what had attracted him to her in the first place. That and the fact she’d been blissfully unaware of his identity. The experience had been so novel that he’d quite possibly been more attracted to her than he would have otherwise been. She’d treated him like an ordinary person, and he’d found it refreshing.
Everywhere he went, he was fawned over. Women threw themselves at him. Men too sometimes, though he didn’t swing in that direction. People always wanted something, and he’d grown weary of it. The only ones who didn’t were his closest friends, but he’d been far from them in New Orleans two years ago. He’d slipped from his hotel, intent on being anonymous for at least a little bit. It had worked far better than he’d expected when he’d met Lily Morgan.
For three days, he’d gotten to be Nico instead of Prince Nico. He’d avoided all the places where he might be recognized, and he’d spent hours with Lily—talking, laughing, and walking through the streets of New Orleans like a normal person.
It had been the most fun he’d had. And then it had ended abruptly, and he’d never seen her again, though he’d tried to find her. That she was here now, under these circumstances, was almost as much a shock to him as it was to her.
“I am indeed serious, Liliana.”
He’d gotten his answer to the question of who her child belonged to in the moments before he’d left his quarters to attend tonight’s State dinner. His investigators worked remarkably fast, and what they’d turned up was evidence he could not ignore. She’d given birth almost nine months to the day from the night he’d taken her virginity. She could have found another lover right away, true, but the child’s resemblance to him was too strong to discount. It was not a Photoshop trick, as his IT people had confirmed. Nico would of course take the official step of verifying the child’s parentage, but it was merely a formality at this point.
When he considered how he’d missed the first seventeen months of his boy’s life, how this woman had kept his son from him, he wanted to shake her and demand to know how she could do such a thing. Indeed, Lily Morgan was not so sweet as she’d once seemed. He let her go before the urge overwhelmed him and took a step away.
He would marry her because his personal code of honor would permit nothing less. It was his duty.
But he didn’t have to like it. Or her. Whatever he’d thought about her in New Orleans, it wasn’t true. She wasn’t different after all.
She spun around to face him. “B-but I’m not a princess, I don’t know how to be a prin—”
“You will learn,” he said harshly. She wasn’t the ideal bride for him, but she could be trained. She was attractive enough, and she’d already proven she had the moxie required to stand up beneath the pressure. When she was coiffed and dressed appropriately, she would no longer appear so common. She was not as beautiful as Antonella, but she was quite lovely in a natural way. Antonella didn’t affect him one way or the other. He could take or leave the Monteverdian princess.
But Lily—
Nico crossed to the bar and poured another cognac. This time he downed the liquid himself, welcomed the burn of fine Montebiancan brandy. Per Dio, it’d been a hell of a night thus far. And he wasn’t finished fighting with himself.
Part of him, a mad and primal part of him, was so completely aware of the woman across the room that he wanted to haul her to his bed and strip her slowly before burying himself inside her for the rest of the night.
Madness. Sheer madness. The urge filled him with both hunger and rage, and he worked to force it down deep and put a lid on it.
In the two months since Gaetano had died, he’d mostly ignored the sensual side of his nature as he’d worked to further Montebiancan interests and be the kind of heir to the throne that his people deserved. He was sorely regretting the lack at the moment. It made Lily Morgan seem far more irresistible to him than she should be in truth.
“Surely we can work this out another way,” she said, her voice small and hesitant. “You can have visitation and—”
“Visitation,” he exclaimed, slicing her words off before she could finish. He shrugged out of the sash and tossed it aside, then worked the buttons of his uniform jacket with one hand, throwing it open with an angry gesture to let the air from the terrace door he’d left ajar cool his body. This night had thrown him so far out of balance that he half wondered if he would ever recover his equilibrium. “You are quite lucky this is no longer the Middle Ages, Liliana. As it is, you are getting far more from me than you deserve.”
If he thought she would be chastened by his words, he was in for a surprise. She lit up like a firecracker.
Dio, she was lovely. And she’d just cost him five million dollars, a trade treaty with a neighboring kingdom, and every last shred of credibility he’d built since becoming the Crown Prince. Being illegitimate, and having the playboy reputation he’d had before his brother’s death, he’d had to work doubly hard to prove himself.
Now all his effort lay in tatters around him. The thought fueled the anger roiling in his gut.
“More than I deserve?” she said, her voice not small any longer but large and strong. “How dare you! I’ve been on my own for these two years, enduring what you could not begin to imagine in your ivory tower, taking care of a baby and—”
“Silence!” There was no way on this earth he would listen to her berate him for what had been essentially her decision to keep him in the dark about their child. She would pay for what she’d done. He was far too angry, far too close to losing the last shred of his control. “If you are aware of what is good for you, cara, you will not speak of this any further tonight.”