AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The thought whispered in the back of her mind, but she ignored it. Everything felt too precarious right now and at least the role of the Crown Princess was one she was familiar with. That, she could do.
‘I don’t know,’ she said more carefully. ‘It’s a moot point now, anyway.’
Rafael’s harsh features betrayed nothing, but she could feel the fury radiating from him all the same. A cold fury, though. So cold she was almost surprised it wasn’t actually snowing inside the car.
‘My turn then.’ Ice threaded through his tone, his anger frozen over. ‘I always knew it was you. Right from the moment you woke me.’
Lia swallowed, her throat closing. She’d kept herself rigidly locked down for the past three months, refusing to think about him or that night. Trying not to give in to her own fear and shame. But sometimes she’d find her thoughts straying to him, wondering what that night had meant to him. Whether he’d been as changed by it as she had or whether he viewed it as just another night.
Whether she’d been just another woman.
Her heart clenched tight. ‘Rafael...’
‘I should have stopped. I should have resisted. But you said “I need you”. And then you kissed me as though you were drowning and I had all your air.’
She shut her eyes, the memory of that kiss burning in her mind like a brand. The moment his lips had touched hers, she’d gone up in flames.
‘I didn’t—’
‘I thought you’d come to findme,Lia. I thought it was me you wanted.’
There was so much fury in his voice. It hurt. ‘I told you, I was trying to forget you—’
‘The next day,’ he went on as if she hadn’t spoken, ‘you became officially engaged to my brother. And at that ball, you looked at me as if I was some dirt you found underneath your pretty little shoe.’
Oh, god. Was that what he’d thought?
Rafael was a tall, imposing figure in his black evening clothes, his only adornment the heavy gold ring of state—he’d drawn every eye in the ballroom. He was the still point about which the world turned and she hated it that, despite the intensity of the night before, her world still revolved around him.
She’d thought the night before, experiencing all that physical passion, would have changed things, would have made her want him less, but it hadn’t. If anything, it had made her want him more.
Now she knew what she’d been missing, now she knew what they could have had together. So much pleasure that could have been hers if he hadn’t been who he was and if she hadn’t been engaged to his brother.
Being in his presence was difficult, yet she didn’t have a choice. She couldn’t not attend the ball thrown in her and Matias’s honour, just as Rafael had to be there to give his blessing.
Normally his acknowledgement of her was cool and casual, but not tonight. Tonight, he stared at her, with so much intensity it nearly flattened her.
She’d been so terrified of giving herself away it was all she could do to curtsy and murmur, ‘Your Excellency...’ before excusing herself and fleeing.
Lia’s heart twisted. ‘I didn’t—’
‘I knew then it was for the best,’ he interrupted once more, still coldly furious. ‘To keep the night we’d shared as just a night. And it would never be spoken of again. So, I put it from my mind. But a few weeks later I remembered that I hadn’t used a condom. You hadn’t contacted me, though, so I assumed it wasn’t a problem.’ He said it casually, as if none of this meant anything at all to him. ‘Then I had reports you weren’t well. That you were attending social engagements, but were pale and obviously hadn’t been sleeping.’
She hadn’t been. The morning sickness had been brutal and it had taken everything she had just to function normally. Her mother had been worried about her getting sick so close to the wedding, but she’d told her it was merely a stomach bug.
‘So I made some enquiries.’ Rafael’s accent, lilting and melodic, had haunted her dreams for the past two years, but it did nothing to soften the hard edge in his voice. ‘It seems you’d gone to a different doctor, not the one your family normally uses. That made me suspicious. From there it was relatively easy to discover the reason for it.’
The cold began creeping up her arms and up her legs. ‘She wouldn’t have told you.’
His expression was as unyielding as granite. ‘She would. She did. Everyone has a price. Even doctors.’
‘I don’t—’
‘It was simple to get a strand of your hair for DNA purposes. The paternity test was a match.’
‘Rafael.’
‘I found out today that I was going to be a father.’ The words were heavy as iron, cutting her off cold. ‘Only hours before you were going to marry my brother.’
