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The Crown Princess was always supervised. Never left to her own devices, for fear that any decisions she might make on her own would lead to embarrassment for the palace.
Far too many European royals work out their adolescent drama on the front pages of the tabloids, the palace media manager had told her severely when she was still a girl.Her Majesty the Queen does not intend for Ile d’Montagne to join these ranks. Do you understand, Your Highness?
Amalia had understood. How could she not? The contours of the glass bowl she lived in had always been clear to her. And it only took a few unflattering turns on a tabloid cover to understand that there was very little benefit to smashing her face up against that glass. It could leave unsightly marks. It might even cause a commotion. But what it didn’t do, ever, was change her circumstances.
The summer of her twentieth year, the rebel faction in the mountains had been louder than usual. And the warlord, Cayetano, was entirely too good at whipping up international sympathy for his cause. It had driven her mother mad.
Maybe that was why it was agreed that the Crown Princess could have a holiday, instead of following her mother around from engagement to engagement as usual.
As long as I do not hear of any yachting about the Côte d’Azur, the Queen had said gravely.Like some common Hollywood tart.
And looking back now, Amalia couldn’t remember how she’d found Cap Morat. Once thought to have been connected to the Spanish mainland, the island had been a fortress for many ages, then had fallen into disrepair. It had been bought at some point before that summer and transformed into a luxurious hotel experience boasting the height of privacy there in the Balearic Sea.
The palace had rented the whole of the island for the summer, so that her guards could keep themselves to the perimeter—meaning mostly on boats and the odd beach—and Amalia could wander about and pretend she was normal.
As the only guest on the island, she’d made friends with the staff immediately.
But it had been the owner who had captivated her.
Joaquin Vargas. She couldn’t remember, now, what she had known about him at the time and what she had learned in the five years since. That he was self-made. That he had come from nothing and only by sheer force of will had he made himself into a myth. A legend. Capable of transforming a rock in the sea and a crumbling old fortress into an opulent retreat for the wealthiest and most famous—and that was but one of the tricks he’d used to cement his position as the darling of the financial world.
Though what she remembered chiefly about him from that very first meeting was the green of his eyes, gleaming with intent and too much fire from a face that seemed cut from stone. And polished to shine.
It was not too sentimental to admit that she had fallen at first sight. It was a fact. One moment she had been who she always was, eating a breakfast out on the patio overlooking the sea. She had been enjoying the touch of the breeze against her face. The song of birds in the trees. She had been trying her best to fully inhabit this freedom she knew would not come again. Amalia had been thinking about her mother’s insistence in choosing a husband for her only daughter. And how little interest she had in any of the candidates her mother favored.
Same old, same old.
Then she looked up and Joaquin was there. And nothing that summer was ever the same.
Shewas never the same.
She shivered again, now, in her comfortable berth in the boat that took her across the water, heading for that same rock set down in the sea. She drew her soft cashmere wrap tighter around her and tried to take the sort of deep, cleansing breaths that one of the personal trainers she’d worked with over the years always claimed held near-magical properties.
Amalia could admit, privately, here in the privacy of her own head, that there was a part of her that wished that she was running to Joaquin after all this time.
When she knew that if she tried such a thing, he would likely set her on fire as soon as look at her.
That was the choice she’d made. The only choice she could have made, she told herself now as she had then, but that didn’t make it any less harsh. Because summer had ended. There had been no possibility Queen Esme would ever accept a self-made Spanish businessman as an appropriate mate for her only heir. No possible way that she would even entertain the conversation.
Amalia had gotten one perfect summer. And that was more than she had ever dared hope she would get. But she and Joaquin had loved each other so well, so deeply, and with such earth-shattering intensity that she had known there was no way he would ever accept the idea that she wouldchooseto leave him.
Because she wouldn’t—if she had been anyone else. If she had been anything but a crown princess, heiress to a throne and subject to her mother’s decrees in all things. She had ended it abruptly, and unkindly. And had fled back to her duties, her responsibilities, her plotted-out life and suitors she hadn’t wanted even before she’d met a man like Joaquin.
She sighed as she closed her eyes and remembered. And she could pretend, as she lay in her bunk, that she was returning to those syrupy gold, endlessly sweet days five years ago. She’d pretended exactly that on more occasions than she could count. Joaquin was her secret and she’d kept him tucked away inside her like a precious jewel too dear to expose to the light.
When instead, the truth was that she had rented herself a little villa on the island under a false name, because that might keep the tabloids at bay. And she expected no syrupy sweetness, because she did not expect that she would run into the island’s owner at all. Not after the way she’d left him five years ago. This time she merely intended to hide away from the other guests and the whole of the world, until she felt strong enough to face what was happening to her. And perhaps, somewhere in there, able to come up with some kind of plan for the future.
Because hers was no longer plotted out for her, step by step, until her death. Maybe, at some point, she would find such a freedom exhilarating. Until then, she intended to stare at the sea, hide herself away from the intrusion of press and idle speculation, and heal in the only place she’d ever let herself imagine...what if?
She might even consider seeking out her real mother at some point, she supposed. A woman with a farm in Kansas, which was as fanciful a location as another planet to Amalia. But first, she supposed, she needed to let go of the mother she’d had in Queen Esme all these years. Distant, difficult. Often demanding. Always formidable.
But still, her mother for a quarter of a century. And Amalia loved her, for all the good it had done her. She still felt too brittle and taken aback to process any of that, but she knew it was coming. Along with a healthy dollop of grief, she imagined.
Because it was one thing to complain about your life. And another thing to have it snatched away from you with no possibility of ever getting it back. At some point, she expected she would need to mourn what was lost.
But not tonight.
Tonight, she drifted off into sleep and only woke when the boat docked at Cap Morat.
