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Cayetano could hear the wealth of pain there. The hurt. The betrayal. He recognized all of it.
And for the first time in a long while, he found...he didn’t know what to do.
He reached over and took her hand as he’d done before. He held it in his, though he could not have said, in that moment, if he sought to comfort her...or himself.
Delaney frowned down at her hand as if it wasn’t connected to her. Or to him.
“You have everything you ever wanted,” she said quietly. And before he could figure out how to answer that, though he registered the tone as dangerous but had no earthly idea why, she kept going. “But what do I have?”
Me, he wanted to say. But couldn’t. Because he’d barely seen her since their wedding day. Because he had gone out of his way to make certain she had everythingbuthim.
And he could spin any story he liked to anyone who asked. He did it all day long.
But he couldn’t lie. Not to her. “Delaney.”
Her fingers gripped his, but she lifted her gaze and it speared straight through him, pinning him to his seat.
“I love you, Cayetano,” she said, but in a quiet way. A warning sort of way. “I thought you must know this, because why else would I spend twenty-four years perfectly happy to keep to myself only to fling myself into your arms with such abandon? I followed you across the world. I made myself into a princess when all I’ve ever loved is good, honest work in the dirt. For you.”
He felt choked. He couldn’t speak. It was as if there were hands tight around his throat, and he was fairly certain that if there were, they were hers.
“Little one,” he began.
“I love you,” she told him, with a little more intensity. “Even though you left me on our wedding day. Even though it is as if you’ve disappeared since.”
“You knew what had to happen,” he managed to grit out, and no matter that it sounded inadequate even to him now.
She smiled, but it was not that smile of hers that made the sun shine brighter. It hit him then that he didn’t know when he’d last seen it.
And this one was sad. So deeply sad it broke his heart, when until this moment he would have sworn he didn’t have one. That he’d lost it long ago.
That he had banished it the way he’d banished any hint of emotion within him.
The way he’d banished his own mother, too.
Cayetano didn’t much care for the way that realization sat on him.
“I love you,” Delaney again, her voice faintly scratchy now. “But all you love is this throne that you won’t even have until an old woman dies. I love you, Cayetano. I do. But all things considered, I think I prefer the cornfields.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
DELANEYPROBABLYCOULDhave picked a better moment.
The car had nearly made it into the island’s main city. Outside, the sun was heading toward the waiting sea, sending a lustrous golden light dancing over the white and blue buildings, interspersed with splashes of terra-cotta and covered in bougainvillea. As they made it further down the mountainside, the roads changed, too. Still winding and narrow, so unlike the wide-open roads where she’d been raised—but made treacherous in places by the curious spectators who’d come out to see if they could get a glimpse.
Of her. Of Cayetano.
Of the unexpected new future of their country.
She’d experienced the same thing on her way to her meeting with Princess Amalia, too. A meeting she would have put off forever, if it had been up to her. But then, nothing was. She’d handled the churning inside her by channeling it into an intense interest in this part of the island, so different from up in the valley where she had been treated more as a prize than a curiosity.
Tonight she found herself scanning the different faces, looking through the different expressions. Much as she had when she’d been unable to let herself think about her imminent meeting with Princess Amalia. The real Clark.
And she had changed so much in her weeks on this island. She had accepted that she was holding on to Kansas in ways she shouldn’t. She had also accepted that falling in love with Cayetano was an excellent way to avoid thinking about all the unpleasant family things that still made her stomach twist.
She’d become okay with taking on the role of Cayetano’s queen.
It was the current Queen—and the woman who’d expected to succeed her—that made her feel off-balance again. One was her biological mother. The other might as well have been a blood relation, given how much they shared, like it or not.
