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He should not have found that charming. If it had been anyone else, he knew he would not have. He would have been far more focused on the disrespect. “I think you will find, little one, that soon enough I will be your everything.”
She didn’t like that. She sat straighter and she glared at him—but then again, her cheeks warmed.
“That is delusional.” She even pointed a finger at him, and it took him a moment to recognize that she wasadmonishinghim. “I came here because this is an adventure for me, whatever it might be for you. And I decided it might make sense to meet the people I’m actually related to.”
“Yet you have not so much as asked after them.”
“I’m hardly going to askyouabout them.” Her chin rose. “You are their sworn enemy, by all accounts, including yours.”
“I had no idea genealogy intrigued you so.” He fought to keep the smile from his face and did not think too hard about how unusual an occurrence it was that he should wish to smile at all. “You seemed uninterested in it back in Kansas. Your blood was of no matter to you. I am sure you said as much.”
“People who can trace their ancestors back several centuries shouldn’t comment on those of us who learned we were an entirely different person only days ago,” Delaney retorted. “Of course I want to meet my...the woman who actually gave birth to me. Eventually.”
He did not miss the way she looked away when she said that. As if she was in no rush to meet Queen Esme, and not for the usual reasons. He suspected that if she thought too much about the Queen, this might become real to her.
Clearly, she didn’t want that.
“I was under the impression you came here because your mother told you to,” he said. “No more and no less.”
“Thanks to you, I now have to grapple with the fact that—biologically speaking—she’s not my mother.”
And she said that tartly enough, but there was something about the way she held herself that made him regret... Well, he couldn’t regret what he had done. He could never regret something that would shortly put him on the path to finally right such an ancient wrong. But he regretted, more than he would have thought possible before this very moment, that finding her and telling her who she was had hurt her.
It changed nothing.
But still, he felt it.
And he did not like such things.Feelings.He had been avoiding them for most of his life. Feeling anything at all made him certain he was on a collision course with the fate that had met his parents. Death. Dishonor.
He refused.
“I think you’re laboring under a misconception,” he said, in a more repressive tone than he might have used had she not inspired him toemote. “I did not ask you for your hand in marriage and then wait, filled with a trembling hope, for your answer. I informed you that our wedding would take place. I imagine you think that a display of arrogance.”
“Extreme arrogance,” Delaney agreed too swiftly, color high. “Appalling, rude, delusional arrogance.”
“Little one, that is merely me,” Cayetano replied, and lifted an unconcerned shoulder. “What you should concern yourself with are the ancient laws of this island, in which I very much doubt you are conversant no matter how many internet articles you read.”
She had gaped a bit at thethat is merely mebit. Now she snapped her mouth shut and glared at him. “Let me guess. You can lock a girl in a tower and everyone shrugs and says,Oh, well, I guess you get to keep her.Like women are nothing more than fireflies you can collect in a jar.”
Cayetano could not remember the last time he had stopped to appreciate the fireflies that heralded the summers here. When as a small child, he had delighted in them. He could recall running, barefoot, through the fields while his parents walked behind, trying to catch the little bursts of light that popped in the air all around them—
The memory fell like ice water through him, horrifying him. He was not a man given to nostalgia. It smacked of those emotions he abhorred.
“This is not a jar,” he replied with what he thought was admirable patience. “It is Arcieri Castle, built with painstaking care across the ages. First hidden, its residents and servants risking death if they were discovered here. Sometimes its own kind of cell, because my ancestors weathered many a siege within these walls. Now open to celebrate the peace. But never a mere jar.”
Naturally, his farm girl did not look impressed by anything he said. He had never encountered another human so devoutly unimpressed, in fact. She sat there on a priceless settee in jeans and a T-shirt, in an ancient castle renowned for its beauty, and dared to glare at him as if he was the offending party here.
“None of that makes it any less of a cell,” she told him, in a tone he could only callmulish.“Whether it was built in two days or two millennia, and no matter what it means to you and your people, it amounts to the same thing.”
Cayetano sighed. “There is no need for cells. Still, as I said, there are old ways. This is a very old place.”
“I may be American, but I’m capable of understanding dates. And history.”
He found her tone excessively dry. But once again, the problem with his lost princess was that he found himself fascinated by her total lack of awe in his presence. He had seen a hint of it in that dusty yard in Kansas, but it had faded. Quickly.
It was the novelty, nothing more, he told himself. Any moment now, he would stop thinking about her as a woman, as an individual, ashis.And get back to thinking about her role here and how best to deploy her upon the unsuspecting House of Montaigne.
Before he’d gone to Kansas, that deployment had been his fondest fantasy.
