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KING’S CHRISTMAS SECRET

Caitlin Crews

Chapter One

The pounding at her front door would have startled her awake on any other night, but it was midnight on Christmas Eve, there was a blizzard pounding Chicago into submission, and Aeryn Bridgers had barely made it home from the museum’s holiday gala in one piece.

She was already wide-awake.

Not only that, she had barely had time to do more than shrug out of her parka and kick off her boots. She had left her impractical gala shoes in her office at the legendary art museum and had trudged her way up the last bit of the Magnificent Mile in the worsening snow and wind because there was no hope of getting a car. And she had been so cold when she’d made it to her front door on a quiet stretch of Elm Street not far from Lake Shore Drive that she’d gone immediately into her kitchen to put the kettle on.

Aeryn hurried back out to the foyer now, frowning at the snow coming down sideways outside and piling up high against the windows of her living room. Having grown up in the Chicago area, she knew whiteout conditions when she saw them.

Which made it even more alarming that someone was at her door.

Her mind immediately leaped to the worst-case scenario—one of the gifts she’d received with motherhood. She’d gotten a beautiful, healthy baby girl and, as a bonus prize, an endless, twenty-four-hour-a-day doomscroll of what-ifs that outdid each other in horribleness. One after the next.

The pounding continued as she hesitated in the living room, the sparkling colored lights of the tree not quite as soothing as they’d seemed when she’d staggered inside not ten minutes earlier. Now she felt adrenaline and fear flood her body.

Something must have happened to her daughter, Faith. And if something had happened to Faith, that meant something had also happened to her parents, because eighteen-month-old Faith had been staying with them for the past couple of days while Aeryn handled her museum’s gala preparations. They’d all planned to spend Christmas morning together as a family, as always, but if someone was hammering at her door that could only mean the worst.

When Aeryn threw open the locks and wrenched the heavy front door open, her heart catapulting against her ribs, her first impression was of the storm. The snow howled its way inside, the wind roaring along with it, bitterly cold and nothing short of dangerous. It was already far worse than it had been on her rather ill-advised walk home, something she’d regretted almost immediately but had carried on with because it wasn’t that far from the museum. Then it had been pretty bad. Now it sliced straight through her and took her breath.

It took a moment to understand that she wasn’t seeing what she thought she would. She’d expected flashing police lights. Or police officers themselves, in handy uniforms that identified them and those stoic looks on their faces as they delivered terrible news.

There was none of that, but it wasn’t the relief it should have been, because there was a creature in front of her. It took her a panicked moment to realize it was a man, because he was covered in snow—caked with it, really—and it looked as if there was blood on his face too.

Aeryn immediately went to close the door, because this was Chicago. And while the Gold Coast neighborhood where she lived was considered safe and tony besides, it was still in the middle of a city with all the same problems cities had everywhere.

“You.”

She froze at the sound of his voice, not simply from the blast of the cold. Because she knew that voice. She hadn’t heard it in two years and she’d never heard it in that rough, raw tone—or, perhaps, the single glass of wine she’d sipped over the course of the gala had gone to her head more than she thought.

Because there was no way she should be hearing that voice here.

And certainly not from the man on her doorstep who looked like some kind of animated abominable snowman. Except far more dangerous, because he was real and within reach and standing in her open doorway at midnight in the middle of a winter storm.

“It’s you,” he croaked out again. He reached out.

Aeryn couldn’t help herself—she shrank back and then felt foolish when all he did was grab at the doorjamb as if he was unsteady. Her gaze followed that hand and she could see that his knuckles were bloodied, but there was also the glint of a ring.

A signet ring, something inside of her whispered. A ring she had played with more times than she could count. A ring she had toyed with, turning it this way and that on his finger. A ring that had warmed against the flesh of her own body as he moved his hands over her, teaching her things about herself she often wished she didn’t still know.

Aeryn felt her mouth drop open. Like her jaw was on a broken hinge. Then her gaze swung back to him even as he wiped at his own face, dislodging the caked-on snow, and then there was no pretending any longer.

It was him.

Vesuvius.

King Vesuvius of Liandero, as he was more commonly known, who had absolutely no business being on this side of the Atlantic Ocean. Much less here, on her doorstep.

Or rather, she corrected herself cynically, his doorstep, if she wanted to be excruciatingly correct about it all.

In that split second of recognition and whirling snow blowing in all around her, she discovered that, in fact, she did not wish to be anything even remotely like correct. That was the old Aeryn, a commoner who had fallen helplessly in love with a king. This Aeryn was the woman who had survived him.

Vesuvius was the great and tragic love of her life, no matter which version of herself she was tonight. Vesuvius had given her Faith, the most profound blessing of her existence, but had never met his own daughter because the risk was too great that if he had, they would have been found out and a great scandal would have ensued.

This meant that she had last seen him when she was pregnant with Faith at the end of her first trimester. She’d had to muddle through the rest on her own.