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“Mama?” Delaney’s voice was thicker now.
More panicked, Cayetano noted, and that couldn’t be helped.
“For a time I thought something was wrong with me,” the older woman continued, her voice stronger with each word. Only then did she look at the girl she’d raised into a woman. The baby that wasn’t hers. “And it didn’t matter, because I loved you. With everything I am, Delaney, switched or not. But the switch explains too many things that have never made sense. That you can carry a tune, for one thing. There’s not a Clark stretching back into the old country who was anything but tone-deaf.”
Delaney was full-on scowling now. “Mama, this is ridiculous. Babies aren’t switched in hospitals. You’re as likely to have a child snatched by the fae folk and I hope we all knowthatis pure fantasy.”
“I know what I know, Delaney. No matter how addled you think I’ve become.”
“I don’t think you’re addled, Mama,” Delaney retorted. “But I know you’re weak. This sort of melodrama can’t be good for you.”
“I know what I know,” the older woman repeated, looking mutinous. She nodded at Cayetano. “And so does he.”
“There’s an easy solution,” Cayetano interjected, at his ease now, because as far as he was concerned the truth was already out. “We can perform a quick genetic test here and now. No need to debatewhat-ifs. This is not about feelings, you understand. It is about facts.”
And it was a fact that the way his future wife looked at him then should have set him alight. Cayetano found he liked the burn of it.
Something in him shifted. Readied itself.
He liked that, too.
Delaney’s fierceness faded a bit when they moved inside, her expression changing into something closer to apprehension. Cayetano sat there in the tidy, cozy sort of living space that looked the way he supposed he’d imagined an American farmhouse would. Having never entered one before. When he would have said he took in very little foreign media.
But this room felt familiar to him just the same, down to the stitched sampler on one wall.
He stared at it as his doctor administered the tests quickly. The results were nearly immediate. The man cleared his throat and made the expected announcement, there in the homespun room.
And then there was no further need to argue the point.
Delaney Clark was not related to her mother. She was, however, possessed of nearly fifty percent of the DNA of Queen Esme of Ile d’Montagne.
The facts did not lie.
“This can’t be happening,” Delaney said. More than once.
In a voice that sounded less and less like the one she’d used at first outside.
“As I have told you,” Cayetano said mildly, for he was at his ease now. All that was left was convincing her to do what he, for one, already knew she would. Because it could be no other way. “It is only science.”
He found himself unprepared when her bright blue eyes shifted to him, wide and accusatory. “It is not just science,” she whispered. “This is mylife.”
Cayetano did not have it in him to understand the lure of farmland when kingdoms awaited. But then again, who more than he understood the connection one had to the place they called home?
He settled himself in the chair that, for all it looked worn and tired, likely rated as among the most comfortable he’d ever sat in. He attempted to arrange his features into something...understanding.
Failing that, he attempted to look less forbidding.
Because now that the tests had been administered, he needed to present himself as less of a warlord, if possible. And more of a bridegroom.
He wasn’t sure it sat easily on him, but he attempted it all the same.
“It is time for a new era in Ile d’Montagne,” he told her quietly, holding that blue gaze. “For too long it has been a country torn in two. For too long it has been brother against brother, no one safe, no one trustworthy. There is no way to build a future in these conditions. There is only war and uneasy treaties in between. There is only loss, fighting, and generations of waiting for the next blow. It must end.”
Delaney was breathing roughly, but she did not speak. Cayetano looked over at her mother, sitting near her on the couch, but the old woman had her gaze lowered.
“You may think that I have come to find you to advance my own interests above all else,” Cayetano said gruffly.
“Because that’s why you came, didn’t you?” she asked, and something flashed in her gaze before she, too, dropped her focus to her lap. “You want that throne.”
