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The way she did today, and he felt another pang, for there was no sign left of his farm girl. He hadn’t been able to get rid of those overalls quick enough, the world was obsessed with them, and now he found himself missing them, almost. Because this Delaney was almosttoopolished. This was the Delaney who sat beside him in interviews and sounded cultured. Sophisticated. Royal. No trace of Kansas about her.
Today she was dressed in one of her uniforms, a quietly elegant A-line dress in a bright shade that complemented her coloring. Nothing too flashy. Nothing off-putting. Her hair was styled to casual perfection as it fell around her shoulders. She sat in his office with her usual self-possession, as if she hadn’t noticed that they only really talked here, now.
She had long since far exceeded even his most optimistic hopes for her.
He had made a farm girl into the perfect princess.
Cayetano should have felt nothing but joy at his success.
And yet.
“I am not surprised that the Montaignes finally wish to see you in their lair,” he said, trying to focus on the matter at hand, not these strange and unwelcomefeelingsthat seemed to pounce on him at odd hours. These bizarre emotions he would have said he was immune to, for he always had been before. “They have tested and retested your blood. And Princess Amalia’s. And Queen Esme’s, too. It’s only been a matter of time.”
Once again, he thought he saw a glimpse of something too dark in her gaze, but it was gone in the next breath.
“Time has run out, apparently,” she said in the same steady way she said everything these days. He found himself recalling that brash, awkward girl who had blurted out her innocence at his table.
That version of Delaney seemed like a dream he’d had.
“It is an invitation to private dinner with the Queen,” she told him. “Family only. She has not mentioned you specifically, but I’d prefer it if you came.”
“She’s testing you.” Cayetano sat back in his chair and wished his wide desk was not between them. “She wishes to see for herself how ambitious you are.”
Delaney frowned and he was so pleased to see it—afrown, for God’s sake—that it was unseemly.
“What does ambition have to do with an awkward family dinner?” she asked.
“An ambitious woman would come without her husband,” Cayetano told her smoothly, but he was more focused on the novelty of seeing her frown at him to worry that she was that sort of woman. “And dedicate herself to making an ally of the Queen instead.” He considered her for a moment. “Is that what you wish to do?”
Delaney shrugged, and something in him eased, because it was the shrug of that girl he’d found in Kansas, not the perfect princess he crafted here. He did not care to examine how relieved he was to see she was still in there. “I don’t really see the point. She is not young. And whether she and I are allies or not will not matter in the end, will it?”
He found himself smiling at her. At that relentless practicality. “As you say.”
But then his ministers were at the door again, Delaney excused herself, and it was another late night of giving interviews to different time zones. And once again he found her sleeping when he made it to their bedroom. This time she did not wake, so he lay down beside her and waited for sleep to claim him.
And found himself wondering why it was that now, having gotten what he wanted in every possible way, he had never felt more alone.
Come morning, Cayetano was appalled at his own mawkishness. He punished himself with a brutal training exercise with his guards, then prepared himself for the showdown he’d been anticipating for most of his life.
Tonight he would face Queen Esme. And not as a rebel, but as the man who would take back her throne. But first, he took himself to see the other woman who’d influenced his life beyond measure.
His mother.
Her lover, his would-be stepfather, had left the country after Cayetano had defeated him in combat. His mother could have taken that option, but had chosen to remain instead. Even though he would only allow her to do so under supervision.
“Call it what it is, Cayetano,” she said this day the way she always did. She lit herself one of the long cigarettes she favored—as much because he disliked them as anything else, he assumed. “The mighty warlord has kept his mother in jail while he makes a run at the throne. How proud you must be.”
“Soon you will be as free as the rest of us,” he told her, deliberately bland. Because he knew how to annoy her, too. “Tonight I dine with Queen Esme. I have already married her true heir. The deed is done, Mother.”
His mother blew out a plume of clove-scented smoke. “A lost princess, switched at birth.” She shook her head. “It’s like something out of a storybook.”
“It’s science,” he replied.
“Yes, yes, your precious facts,” she murmured in her raspy way. Dismissively, as ever.
And when Cayetano looked at her, he hated the part of him that was still her son. The part that was only her son, and still wished she’d been less...angular. Less ambitious. Less about power and more about him.
But he had found the lost Princess of Ile d’Montagne. A man could not ask for too many miracles. It became greedy.
