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The sound of his own wedding was loud inside the stone walls as the party raged on in the courtyard. And instead of feeling nothing but pride and determination as he trod up the steps that would lead him to the throne at last, he felt...a kind of hollowness.
He had no idea what to call it. No clue what it was. He had never encountered such a thing before.
Especially not when he should have been triumphant straight down to his bones.
But he encountered it a lot over the next weeks of work and strategy, worse every day until he admitted the unnerving truth.
He missed her.
Sometimes he missed her so much it neared the point of pain, but by the time he identified the problem, it was too late.
Because Cayetano had finally gotten what he wanted.
He had finally turned the Montaigne family rule on its head.
He had released news of his wedding first with the photographs of the two of them at the altar, looking, as one of his ministers liked to say, like love’s young dream incarnate. He had used every media contact he’d ever made to sell the world a love story.
And the world had responded.
Loudly.
It turned out the story of a farm girl Cinderella and a throneless king caught the fancy of well-wishers the globe over. Their wedding photos appeared on the front covers of magazines and papers in too many countries to count. Delaney was an instant icon, a title she disliked intensely—but after a particularly enterprising paparazzo dug out a photo of her in her overalls, no retailer could keep them in stock. Anywhere.
Talking heads in a slew of languages discussed hereclectic style, from comfortable overalls to her fairy-tale gown.
“They talk of your gravitas and they wonder what undergarments I wear,” Delaney said one morning as they watched some of the coverage in his office, too many ministers about for it to be anything like the private moment Cayetano craved. “I’m sorry, but how is this a ringing endorsement?”
“It’s spin,” his media guru said shortly. “We want people to look up to the warlord. We want them to imagine theyareyou.”
Delaney smiled politely back at the man and murmured her thanks.
Cayetano, for some reason, wanted to kill him.
He refrained.
And he waited until his first in-depth, televised interview, with Delaney at his side, to drop the bomb of her parentage.
“Imagine my surprise to discover that this perfect woman is also the true heir to the Ile d’ Montagne throne,” he said, as if he had happened upon Delaney on her farm and had then uncovered her parentage. He had not lied about how they met. He had simply not explained it.
Delaney laughed a bit ruefully, looking straight into the cameras. “Imagine mine,” she said dryly.
And the world’s love affair turned into sheer adoration.
While Cayetano sat back and let the debris fly where it would.
At first it was nothing short of a tempest. It blew and blew, and it was hard to tell if he was exhilarated by the intensity of the storm or if he wanted to it to die down. Maybe both.
It went on and on. Tests upon tests were demanded, laboratories were questioned, more tests were required. Emissaries from the Montaignes exchanged bitter words with the Arcieri representatives, and vice versa. But eventually, all the storming about in the world had to give way to the inescapable truth.
Especially in the glare of so much attention. And Delaney’s rising popularity.
“I have been personally summoned to Palais Montaigne,” Delaney told him one day. He had been up late the night before strategizing, and had found her in their bed, asleep. She had woken when he’d stretched out beside her and they’d come together the way they did so often these days. Wordless. Desperate.
It was never enough.
Cayetano found himself missing those weeks before the wedding, when the days had seemed to last forever and the nights twice as long. He had explored her body in every possible way, yes, but they had also had time to sit together. Sometimes he had held her in his lap, wrapped up in a blanket as they’d sat out on the balcony, telling each other silly, throwaway things while the moon rose above them.
He had never expected to miss anyone the way he missed her now, even when she stood before him.
