LITMIR.BIZ

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“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

      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

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