THE ENGAGEMENT PARTY came more quickly than Briar was prepared for. The moment when Felipe was going to present her for the entire world to see as his fiancée. Yes, the world at large knew, but this was different. This was the first time she was actually going to make an appearance. The first time she was going to have to contend with it.
She had been presented with two couture gowns to try on for the event. And her stylists were currently in a heated debate as to whether or not she should choose the pink or the blue.
Both were cut dramatically, designed to show off her figure, and billowed around her feet. Ultimately, she went with the blue. Because when she twirled, it moved effortlessly with her body. That, and it had a little bit more give around the hips. She had a feeling that she was going to need it. She was naturally thin, much to the chagrin of most of her friends at university, but even she felt a little bit constrained by a gown after a long evening of standing around eating. And the delicacies here at the palace really were amazing.
She supposed if one had to get kidnapped, getting kidnapped by a prince really was the way to go. Good food, good lodgings. And really amazing clothes.
As she was zipped into the beautiful blue gown, she looked down at the ring sparkling on her left hand. Right. There was that. The fact that her particular kidnapping had come with a fiancé. But also with a royal title. Of course, she supposed she had that title on her own.
Her stomach lurched a little bit when she remembered that her parents—her birth parents—had been invited to tonight’s event. Would they come? Would this be the first night she saw them since she was a little girl? And what would she do? She had a feeling that she would crumble. Break down completely, which she hadn’t done once since she had been kidnapped from her home in New York. That was strange, she realized then. That she hadn’t cried yet.
She supposed part of it came down to the fact that she was afraid if she shed even one tear she would shed endless tears, and then they might never stop.
She sucked in a deep, shuddering breath and looked at her reflection. At the woman staring back at her who was less a stranger now than she had been a week ago. With the expertly applied makeup and the beautifully styled curls.
Panic fluttered in her breast, and she had to look away.
This wasn’t the time to have a meltdown. She was going to have to save it for later. She would pencil it into her brand-new schedule. A gift from Prince Felipe. At least, she had been told. True to his word, she hadn’t seen him between that moment in the ballroom and today.
There was a very large part of herself that was grateful for that. What had happened was...confusing. The fact that he had made her feel things. The kinds of things she had felt that first moment when she had seen him standing there on the street.
And she kept turning over what he had said to her. About what it meant that she liked him even knowing he was a monster. Well, like maybe wasn’t the word for it. That she was attracted to him.
That she wanted him.
She turned away from her reflection, pressing her hand against her stomach.
“You will be fine, Princess,” the stylist said, reading her nerves incorrectly. That was fine. She didn’t care if he thought she was nervous about going to the ball. Well, she was. But it had to do with her parents. And it had to do with him. The man that she should be disgusted by. The man that she should hate.
The man that made her feel things no other man ever had.
She was herded down the hall, to an antechamber that was seemingly outside a private entrance to the ballroom. She knew that guests had already arrived. She also knew that she was going to be presented, along with the prince, in a formal way.
She understood all of that. She hadn’t grown up as traditional royalty, but growing up as she had, with her father occupying a very prominent position in high places, she had been American royalty in some regards.
Ceremony was part of that upbringing. She supposed that was helpful. Of all the things that she did have to worry about at least she didn’t have to learn this entirely new language of formality.
She didn’t know what she expected. Didn’t know who she had expected to guide her into the ballroom. But she hadn’t expected Felipe. Or maybe she had, and there was simply no way for her to prepare herself for the sight of him.
He was... Well, it simply wasn’t fair how good he looked in a suit. He really should look monstrous. Because she knew that he was one. That he was selfish. That he was willing to do anything to meet his ends, no matter who he heard. It didn’t matter. It didn’t diminish the intensity of his masculine beauty.
The perfection of those broad shoulders, the exquisitely sculpted face that was a work of art all on its own.
“You look beautiful,” he said as though he had pulled the word she was thinking right out of her head. Except, she had been thinking that he was beautiful. And she would rather die than confess that. Still, she had a feeling that he knew. It seemed evident in the glint in those dark eyes, in the slight quirk of his full mouth.
He certainly wasn’t a man who possessed humility. Why was that appealing? Why was anything about him appealing?
You’re going to marry him. You’re going to marry him and sleep with him.
Her entire body went hot. She shouldn’t be thinking about this. Not now.
Really, she was going to have to put off thinking about it for as long as possible. And then when she did, she was going to have to wait until she was alone. Until he wasn’t standing right in front of her acting like a visual reference for what was going to happen. So that she wasn’t tempted to imagine what he might look like without those layers of fabric over that masculine physique.
She should be appalled by him. If there was any justice, if there was any logic involved in hormones, she should be appalled.
She had always thought herself above this kind of ridiculousness. Apparently, she had just been waiting for the right kind of wrong man to get hot and bothered over.
“Are my parents in there?” That was the one thing she had to know.
“You’re welcome,” he said, his tone dry. And it took her a moment to remember that he had just called her beautiful. Well, she wasn’t going to thank him for that. Mostly because she wanted to keep her interactions with him anything but cordial. For now. She supposed, since she had agreed to marry the man, she had to relax that eventually.
Maybe around the time that she let herself think about being intimate with him.
Maybe.
“Are they in there or not?”
“They are,” he said. “And they have requested a private audience with you, which I will grant them after we’ve been formally introduced.”
Suddenly, she felt dizzy, but rather than reaching out to steady herself against the wall, she found herself pitching forward. She stretched her hand out, her fingertips coming into contact with his chest. Then she swayed. And he caught her around the waist, pulling her up against his body. “Are you okay?”
She looked up at him, or rather, at his Adam’s apple, at the sharp line of his jaw, and then the wicked curve of his lips. She could feel his heart raging beneath her palm. And she wondered if his heart always beat so hard, if it always beat so fast. “No,” she said, her tone hushed. “How can I be okay? I always knew that I was adopted. I always knew that I had birth parents out there somewhere. But I never expected to meet them. I certainly didn’t expect them to be a king and queen. And I didn’t expect them to have given me up reluctantly. To have given me up to protect me.”
She found herself blinking back tears and wondering if her mascara was waterproof.
And he looked... Well, for the first time since she had met him Felipe looked afraid. As if her tears terrified him.
“I’m sure it will be fine,” he said, his tone stiff suddenly.
“How can it be fine?”
“I only had one set of parents, and they were never particularly useful to me. Neither were they particularly loving. You seem to have two sets of parents who were quite fond of you. How can it not be fine?”
There was something strange about the way he said that, but then, there was something strange about the way he talked about emotion in general. The way he talked about connections with people, or the lack of them. She had noticed that the day they danced in the ballroom. It made her sad. Almost.
“I don’t know how to face this. I don’t know how to handle any of this. A week ago I was just Briar Harcourt. And now I’m... I guess I’m a long-lost princess.”
“You were found,” he said. “You are not lost anymore.”
She didn’t say, as she took hold of his arm and allowed him to lead her toward the double doors of the ballroom, that she felt more lost now than she ever had. No, she kept that observation to herself. And then the doors opened, and they walked out to the top of the stairway, where they were announced as Prince Felipe and Princess Talia. It was strange, and it felt somewhat detached, since the name still didn’t feel like her own. But as they descended the stairs the sense of fantasy faded. And she felt the moment as sharp and real as anything had ever been.
Strange, because this was something out of a movie. Strange, that it was the first moment that felt truly real in the past week. Or maybe it was just the events catching up to her. The undeniable reality of the whole thing. The fact that if it was a dream she would have woken up by now, and she could no longer pretend that she might.
Then she saw them. Well, she saw Queen Amaani. A near mirror image of herself. A beautiful, dark-skinned woman standing there holding her husband, King Behrendt’s, arm. She had a heavy golden crown on her dark hair, signifying her ranking.
The king himself had piercing blue eyes, a strong nose and neatly kept gray hair and beard. Clearly much older than his wife, he was still a handsome man, his presence announcing his status more clearly than a crown ever could.
Briar found herself clutching Felipe’s arm as though without him she would collapse completely. It was a perverse thing, that she found herself leaning on his strength in this moment. She should push him away. She should push him away and run to her parents. But she was afraid that if she let go of him she would crumble to the floor.
The people in the ballroom blurred into indistinct shapes, the men a wave of black, the women a watercolor rainbow. All she could see was her mother and father. And Felipe. She could still see him. She could feel his warmth. Could feel his strength.
She swallowed hard as she approached the king and queen.
“Let us step out onto the balcony,” Felipe said, leading the way, holding on to her as he led her through the crowd and out toward a large balcony that overlooked the gardens.
Nobody followed them, and then she realized that there were guards preventing anyone from leaving the ballroom and interrupting the reunion.
Suddenly, Briar found herself enveloped in her parents’ arms. And that was when she lost hold of everything. Of her emotions. Of her control. And she let the tears fall.
There was nothing to say. Because it transcended words. She supposed that there would be time to ask about what had happened in the years since they had seen each other. Though she gathered quickly that they knew things like what she had majored in, and that they had been sent photographs all through her growing up. She was the one with the real deficit. The one who knew nothing of her past, the one who knew nothing of her family. Of her country, of the palace that she had once called home, of her half brothers and their wives and children.
But there would be time for all of that later. Because for now, there was nothing but this. But this deep, happy, devastatingly sad reunion that she had been waiting for all her life without even realizing it.
She looked up and saw Felipe studying them as though he was looking at something he simply couldn’t understand. She shouldn’t be looking at him now. Except, he had been instrumental in this reunion. But without his father she wouldn’t have been given up in the first place. But then, she wouldn’t have known the parents that she loved so dearly, the mother and father who had raised her. Everything was mixed up in her head and she didn’t know how she felt anymore. Didn’t know if she was happy, didn’t know if she was sad. Didn’t know if she was angry at that devastatingly handsome man standing apart from them, or if she felt sorry for him.
If she wanted to run from him, or if she wanted to draw closer to him.
“Sadly,” he said finally, “we cannot stand out here all night.”
King Behrendt looked up at Felipe, his expression stern. “Haven’t you and your people robbed us of enough time already?”
“It is unfortunate,” Felipe returned. “However, in the future you will have endless time to spend together. I do not intend to keep her from you. In fact, I intend to ensure that we have brilliant relations between our two countries. This is a reunion. Not simply for our families, but for the goodwill between Verloren and Santa Milagro. I understand that you might not appreciate the tactics. But Briar has agreed to marry me. I’m sorry, Princess Talia has agreed to marry me.”
Queen Amaani looked stricken by the use of her other name. But she stepped forward. “Which name do you prefer?” she asked Briar, her voice soft.
“I don’t know that I prefer either one,” she said. “I’m just getting used to everything.”
“We’ve always known what they called you,” she said. “If that’s what you want to be called, if you want to be Briar, you can be.”
“I’ll be Talia,” she said, not sure if she meant it or not. But she didn’t want to cause these people any more pain. Not after all they had been through.
“We can find another way,” her father said, his expression hard as he looked at Felipe.
Briar shook her head, because she knew they couldn’t. It was just that her father was too proud to acknowledge anything else. “You don’t have to. I’ve been away for a long time. I haven’t had the chance to be part of this. To be part of royal life. To serve my country in any way. This is how I can do it.” She realized, as she spoke the words, that she meant them.
Her parents gave her one last lingering hug before they headed back into the ballroom, with promises to have her travel to Verloren as soon as possible, and promises to visit the palace in Santa Milagro often.
“I think,” said Felipe, walking up slowly behind her, pressing his hand against her lower back, “that I will call you Briar.”
It sent a strange, electric jolt through her. To have him touch her. To have him say that. She didn’t know why that affected her. The thought that he would call her Briar.
“You don’t have to,” she said.
“I’m going to.”
She stopped walking and turned to face him. He kept his hand planted firmly on her lower back. “And if I don’t want you to?”
“I still will.”
She frowned. “Why?”
He examined her closely, something in his dark eyes sharper, clearer than usual. It was then that she realized that lazy, indolent manner he sometimes threw over himself like a cloak was exactly that. Just something he put on.
She wondered about the real man. The one who wasn’t a monster or Prince Charming. The man beneath all of that. Then, just as quickly as she wondered about that, she wondered if he even existed anymore. Or if he had been buried underneath a rock wall that he had carefully constructed around any and all authenticity.
“Because I should think you would like it if your entire past wasn’t erased.”
“It might be less painful.” To just pretend that her childhood in New York, her family, her friends, didn’t exist anymore. To pretend that Briar didn’t exist anymore. That thought made her feel hollow.
“Life is painful,” he said. “Loss is painful.”
“You’re acknowledging that I’m experiencing loss at your hand?”
“Circumstances are what they are. It doesn’t have to be a loss. Unless... Did you have a lover back home?”
She shook her head. “If I did I never would have talked to you on the street in the first place.” Maybe she should have lied. Maybe that would have been better. To make him think that she had another man in her life. But he would find out soon enough that it wasn’t true. If he hadn’t figured it out already. If this question wasn’t just another piece of bait.
Because he seemed to know what she was feeling before she did. Seemed to understand what was happening in her body even when it mystified her.
“Because you felt it, too,” he said, his voice like a touch, skimming over her entire body. Touching her in places no one ever had before.
She wanted to deny it. Wanted to pretend she had no idea what he was talking about. And she really didn’t want to question what he meant when he said that she had felt it, too. As if he had felt something. Something other than the thrill of a hunter spotting his quarry.
She didn’t want to get drawn into this. Didn’t want to get drawn into looking at him and searching for humanity. It was much better if she only looked at the facade. If she only looked at the monster. Much better if she never tried to search behind that rock wall.
And yet she felt the pull, the tug toward him. The undeniable need to understand him. Maybe that wasn’t so bad. Maybe it wasn’t so dangerous. To try and understand the man she would supposedly spend the rest of her life with.
“What did you feel?” she asked. “When you saw me.”
“You were beautiful. I responded to that. I’m a man, after all.”
“There are a lot of beautiful women.”
“Yes. But there are very few women who represent payment for an outstanding debt owed to my country.” Something shifted in his expression. He was so difficult to read. His moods seeming to shift like sand without giving any warning. “Did you know my father had renounced marriage at the point when he announced he would claim you? He did not intend to take you as a wife. He intended to make you a mistress. On your sixteenth birthday.”
Horror pierced through her. “He did?” She blinked rapidly. “But what about your...? What about your mother?”
“At that point she was dead. And anyway he never cared about her. He had mistresses all through their marriage. He paraded them about the palace whenever he saw fit. Women who were younger, women who weren’t made weary by a lifetime of abuses and indignities. And he made sure that my mother knew they were infinitely more desirable than she would ever be. He made sure to let her know that she was a failure. For a great many reasons, though I was one of them. She never could keep me in line. Never could keep me in my place. My father demanded that one small thing from her, and she couldn’t do that, either. And so he made her life hell. In part because he enjoyed doing it. In part because of me.”
“He...he showed you that sort of thing was normal,” she said, wondering how he’d ever had a hope of developing a conscience.
“Yes. But I knew they weren’t. I knew that intending to take a woman some forty years younger than him—not a woman, a girl!—and make her his plaything was wrong. I never intended to use women that way. I never intended to use you that way. But I did recognize that you would be useful. That your symbolism could be changed.”
“How very strange. Because I have never felt like a symbol. I’ve only ever felt like a girl.”
“I’m well aware that you’re neither of those things. You are not a symbol.” He moved nearer to her, brushing the backs of his knuckles over her face. “You’re far too warm. You’re too alive. But also... You’re not a girl. You’re a woman.”
For the first time, she felt like one. With his finger slowly drifting over her skin, those dark eyes pinning her into place, she didn’t feel like a tall, awkward girl who was hopelessly different than everyone around her. Didn’t feel like a simple curiosity. Didn’t feel like a child in sophisticated clothes playing at something she was not.
No, in this moment, rooted to the spot, she felt every inch a woman. And she wanted to find out why that was. Wanted to respond to everything that was male in him and explore what it all meant. But it was all tangled up. Jumbled together with the reality of the situation. And then weighted down completely by the diamond on her finger, as if it were a millstone.
Perhaps she was simply succumbing to the insanity of the situation. Perhaps she had lost her mind completely.
Did it matter? That was the real question.
He let his fingertips drift down to the edge of her jaw then traced the line to the center of her chin. He tilted her face upward, his mouth a breath away from hers. She felt like she was being lifted off the ground. Her lungs, her body, filled completely. Expanding until she felt like she might burst with whatever feeling was taking her over. It was strange, and it was foreign. She wasn’t entirely sure she liked it. Wasn’t entirely sure she didn’t.
“Your Majesty,” a voice came from behind them.
Felipe dropped his hand and took a step back. “What is it?” he asked without ever taking his eyes off her.
“Prince Felipe. It’s your father.”
At that, Felipe turned and faced the man who had joined them on the terrace. “What is it?”
“The king is dead.”
Something went horribly blank, flat in Felipe’s eyes. She could feel ice radiating from his skin. He said nothing for a moment. And then, he tilted his face upward, his expression one of schooled arrogance, overlaid with a breathless lack of remorse.
Then he finally spoke, a strange smile curving his lips. “Long live the king.”