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“Marry me,” he demanded, because he could do nothing else. “Live with me, Amalia, and let us spend every moment we have together fully alive.”
“Not merely existing,” she whispered.
“Never,” Joaquin promised. “Not as long as we draw breath.”
And he waited there, on his knees before a palace, while the only princess he had ever loved gazed back at him.
He would wait forever.
And then, a smile breaking across her face, Amalia threw herself fully into his arms. Then she looped her arms around his neck, and kissed him.
As if, together, they’d written themselves a brand-new fairy tale. The one about a man like a wolf and the perfect princess who’d tamed him by not taming him at all, but loving him as he was, no matter how he snarled.
And then, together, they’d won.
Because there was only one way a story like that could ever be won.
With true love...and forever not far behind.
Joaquin couldn’t wait.
CHAPTER TWELVE
QUEENESMEINSISTEDon throwing Amalia a wedding. She brought Catherine over from Kansas, and Amalia knew that both she and Delaney were equally taken aback and entertained by the way the two older women, each powerful in her own way, danced around each other—and yet seemed to like the dance.
“I guess we really are sisters, after a fashion,” Amalia said after witnessing her two mothers laughing together, when she could not recall ever seeing the Queen laugh like that.
“Oh, this is definitely our family,” Delaney agreed cheerfully. “There’s no getting out of it now.”
And so that was how Amalia Montaigne, no longer the Crown Princess of Ile d’Montagne, married the one true love of her life in the Royal Cathedral where she had been expected to marry a tedious bore at her mother’s command.
This, she thought as she floated down the length of the church in a dress that had made both of her mothers teary,is much better.
Because it was Joaquin who waited for her at the head of the aisle, looking deliciously disreputable in his wedding clothes, his green eyes glinting all for her.
And when it was done, not one, but two mothers kissed her and hugged Joaquin, too.
Amalia supposed that all the papers the next day would try to outdo each other with their clever commentary—though the swords had been dulled by the world’s delight in Joaquin’s kneeling response to yet another vile paparazzo—but, in truth, she didn’t care.
Because she and Joaquin returned once again to Cap Morat. Only this time, they stayed in the honeymoon suite there at the top of the fortress. And the sensual pull between them would always be a huge part of who they were, but this time, though they enjoyed each other as they always did, their hearts were unguarded. They were wide open.
And so they talked.
They took walks around the island together, hand in hand, and it was as if they’d talked like this forever. There was no subject too grand or too small. They told each other stories, they made each other laugh.
They got to know each other all over again, the way they had that first summer.
The way, Amalia thought, they always would.
And that was what they did.
They put love first, and when they did, love followed.
They left the island sometime later, but didn’t discover that Amalia was pregnant until a month or so after that, when they were back on Ile d’Montagne. Joaquin, who liked her cottage but preferred more room to move around, had bought up the properties on both sides and was already meeting with architects to create the perfect home for them. One, he assured her, that would not be filled with refurbished jail cells or uncomfortable midcentury furniture. He could fly in and out of the island as easily as anywhere, and it was nothing to go back and forth to London as needed.
“You had better build a nursery,” Amalia told him.
“I told you that I want children,” he said, looking at her intently in a way that never failed to make her knees go weak. “Your children. I do not go back on promises,mi cariño.”
