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She kind of liked it.
Obviously she was not well.
But still, she couldn’t seem to move.
“For centuries, my people have waited to claim what is theirs,” Cayetano told her, and his voice was low now. Almost quiet. And yet it was as if all the fields in all directions went still. As if the sky paused, the better to listen. Towait. “For an opportunity. A chance. My grandfather negotiated our current peace, which has held far longer than anyone thought might. Yet still we believed that any chance we might get to reclaim what is ours could only come with bloodshed.”
Bloodshed.
And...there it was at last. That alarm that Delaney should have been feeling from the start. It washed through her in a torrent then, so electric she was sure she could feel every hair on her body stand on end.
“I’d like to come down firmly against bloodshed, if that’s an option,” she said, as carefully as a person could when talking about...whatever it was they were talking about here. This very serious nonsense the man with the burnt gold eyes seemed so intent on sharing with her.
“I am a warlord,” the forbidding man before her told her. “I earned my place in blood and fire.”
“Metaphorically?” Delaney asked with a nervous little laugh.
No one echoed that laugh.
The men arrayed behind him were stone-faced. Cayetano himself appeared to be fashionedfromstone.
“I have found a far better way to reclaim my ancestral lands than any war,” he told her, his gaze never wavering. “A foolproof plan, at last.”
“Oh, good.” Delaney was beginning to feel something like lightheaded. Or maybe it was more of that dizziness. “That sounds much nicer than bloodshed.”
The look on his face changed, then. And if she hadn’t been so overwhelmed she might have thought that, really, it looked a lot like amusement.
Assuming a man like this was capable of being amused.
“That depends on how you look at it,” Cayetano said. Distantly, Delaney registered the laughter of his minions, indicating that they were capable of it. “You and I are to marry.”
Had he said that he planned to ride a dinosaur down to Independence and back, or perhaps catapult himself high enough into the air to swat down the sun, that would not have been any more astonishing.
“I...what?”
“You are the key,” Cayetano Arcieri, self-styledwarlordof a country she’d never heard of, who had earned his place inblood and fire, assured her.
Delaney’s throat was upsettingly dry. “I feel pretty sure I’m not.”
“You are the lost heiress to the crown of Ile d’Montagne, little one,” Cayetano informed her. “And I have come to take you home.”
He said that the way something as over the top as that should be said, really, all ringing tones andcertaintyand that blaze in his burnt gold eyes. Delaney thought the corn bowed down a little, that was how impressive he sounded.
But all she could do was laugh.
CHAPTER TWO
THISWASNOTthe response Cayetano had expected.
An offer of marriage from him should result in exultation and gratitude, not laughter. He could think of any number of women who would have fallen to their knees and praised the heavens had he indicated he wanted a second night, much less a lifetime.
This woman was baffling.
More to the point, she was not what he’d expected, either, and he had pored over all the photographs his spies had gathered for him. He had looked for every possible clue to determine that she was, in fact, who he hoped she was. She should not have been a surprise in any way. On balance, she was not—the pictures his men had obtained of her were accurate.
But that was all they were. A picture could only show her features. It could not capture the warmth of her. The way she drew the eye without seeming to try. The brightness that seemed to light her from within—when he had long since accepted that the Montaignes were a clan of darkness and bitter cold, every last one of them.
Not this lost one, it seemed, with all this American sun in her hair.
