AllFreeNovel
Share Us
All he’d done was live. Imperfectly and often foolishly, but he’d lived a life. He might have been lying to himself. He might have been hopeless. But he’d survived all of that.
The only thing he was guilty of was of not being Felipe.
“I am your son,” Rodolfo replied, his voice like steel. “I am your only remaining son and your only heir. It doesn’t matter how desperately you cling to your throne. It doesn’t matter how thoroughly you convince yourself that I am worthless and undeserving. Even if it were true, it wouldn’t matter. Nothing you do will ever bring Felipe back.”
His father looked stiff enough to break in half. And old, Rodolfo thought. How had he missed that his father had grown old? “How dare you!”
He was tired of this mausoleum his father had built around Felipe’s memory. He was tired of the games they played, two bitter, broken men who had never recovered from the same long-ago loss and instead, still took it out on each other.
Rodolfo was done with the game. He didn’t want to live like this any longer.
He wanted to feel the way he did when he was with Valentina. Maybe it had all been a lie, but he’d beenalive.Not putting on a show. Not destined to disappoint simply by showing up.
And there was something he should have said a decade or two ago.
“I am all you have, old man.” He stood then, taking his time and never shifting his gaze from his father’s, so perhaps they could both take note of the fact that he towered over the old man. “Whether you like it or do not, I am still here. Only one of your sons died all those years ago. And only you can decide if you will waste the rest of your life acting as if you lost them both.”
His father was not a demonstrative man. Ferdinand stood like a stone for so long that Rodolfo thought he might stand like that forever. So committed to the mausoleum he’d built that he became a part of it in fact.
But Rodolfo wanted no part of it. Not anymore. He was done with lies. With games. With paying over and over for sins that were not his.
He inclined his head, then turned for the door. He was reaching for the knob to let himself out—to leave this place and get on with his life—when he heard a faint noise from behind him.
“It is only that I miss him,” came his father’s voice, low and strained. It was another man’s sob.
Rodolfo didn’t turn around. It would embarrass them both.
“I know, Papa,” he said, using a name he hadn’t thought, much less spoken aloud, since he was little more than a baby himself. But it was the only one that seemed appropriate. “I do, too.”
* * *
The first week after that shattering trip to Rome, Natalie tried Valentina so many times she was slightly afraid it would have bordered on harassment—had she not been calling her own mobile number. And it didn’t matter anyway, because the princess never answered, leaving Natalie to sit around parsing the differences between a ringing phone that was never picked up and a call that went straight to voice mail like an adolescent girl worrying over a boy’s pallid attentions.
And in the meantime, she still had to live Valentina’s life.
That meant endless rounds of charity engagements. It meant approximately nine million teas with the ladies of this or that charity and long, sad walks through hospitals filled with ill children. It was being expected to “say a few words” at the drop of a hat, and always in a way that would support the crown while offending no one. It meant dinners with King Geoffrey, night after night, that she gradually realized were his version of preparing Valentina for the role she would be expected to fill once she married and was the next Queen of Tissely. It also meant assisting in the planning of the impending royal wedding, which loomed larger with every day that passed.
Every call you don’t answer is another questionable decision I’m making for YOUR wedding,she texted Valentina after a particularly long afternoon of menu selecting.I hope you enjoy the taste of tongue and tripe. Both will feature prominently.
But the princess didn’t respond.
Which meant Natalie had no choice but to carry on playing Valentina. She supposed she could fly to London and see if she was there, but the constant stream of photographs screeching about herfairy-tale love affairin the papers made her think that turning up at Achilles Casilieris’s property this close to Valentina’s wedding would make everything worse. It would cause too much commotion.
It would make certain that when they finally did switch, Natalie wouldn’t be able to seamlessly slip back into her old life.
Meanwhile, everything was as Rodolfo had predicted. The public loved them, and the papers dutifully recycled the same pictures from Rome again and again. Sometimes there were separate shots of them going about their business in their separate countries, and Natalie was more than a little embarrassed by the fact she pored over the pictures of Rodolfo like any obsessed tabloid reader. One day the papers were filled with stories about how daredevil, playboy Rodolfo encouraged Valentina to access her playful side, bringing something real and rare to her stitched-up, dutiful life. The next day the same papers were crowing about the way the proper princess had brought noted love cheat Rodolfo to heel, presumably with the sheer force of hergoodness.It didn’t matter what story the papers told; the people ate it up. They loved it.
Natalie, meanwhile, was miserable. And alone.
Everything was in ruins all around her—it was just too bad her body didn’t know it.
Because it wanted him. So badly it kept her up at night. And made her hoard her vivid, searing memories of Rome and play them out again and again in her head. In her daydreams. And all night long, when she couldn’t sleep and when she dreamed.
She was terribly afraid that it was all she would ever have of him.
The longer she didn’t hear from Rodolfo or see him outside of the tabloids, the more Natalie was terrified that she’d destroyed Valentina’s marriage. Her future. Her destiny. That come the wedding day, there would be no groom at the altar. Only a princess bride and the wreck Natalie had made of her life.
Because she was a twin that shouldn’t exist. A twin that couldn’t exist, if Rodolfo had been right in Rome.
