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Which was to say, it was a normal breakfast at Combe Manor. Pia could have drunk the hot lemon water herself, but she’d long ago learned that it was better to disappoint her mother as early in the day as possible, so there could be no grand expectations over the course of the day she would then fail to meet.
Alexandrina had let her gaze sweep over her daughter as if she was sizing her up for market. “You will work in some or other worthy charity that we will vet, of course. You will dedicate yourself to your good works for a year, perhaps two. Then I imagine your father will suggest a suitor. He might even allow you to pick one. From a preselected group, of course.”
“You make it sound as if he plans to marry me off.”
Pia had spent much of her life despairing over the fact that while she had the same dark hair and gray eyes as her mother, Alexandrina’s all...came together. She was simply beautiful, always, no matter what. It was a fact, not a to-do list. Pia had the raw material, but she was put together wrong. No matter how hard she tried to glide about, exuding effortless beauty.
“Dear girl, your brother will run the business,” Alexandrina had replied, as if Pia had said something amusing. “He is already in line to do so. You are here to be decorative, or if not precisely decorative—” the look she’d slid at her daughter had been a knife, true, but Pia had been so used to the cut of it she hadn’t reacted at all “—you can be useful. How will you accomplish this, do you think?”
Pia hadn’t had an answer for her. Her accomplishments, such as they were, had always been a serene collection of tidy, unobjectionable nouns. She’d no idea how one launched off into a verb.
“What did you do?” she asked her mother instead.
She already knew the story, of course. Her father liked to belt it out at cocktail parties. Alexandrina had been set to marry some stuffy old title of her father’s choosing, but then she’d met Eddie. First they’d made headlines. Then they’d made history, uniting the brash, upstart Combe fortune with the traditional gentility of the San Giacomos.
Pia rather doubted that an epic love story was in the cards for her. Epic love was the sort of thing that just happened to women like her mother, and led to decades of true love. Which in the San Giacomo/Combe family had always meant operatic battles, intense reunion s, and a revolving door of scandals and sins. Pia had always thought that, really, she’d be quite happy to find herself reasonably content.
“You and I are not the same,” Alexandrina had said softly that day, something making her gray eyes glitter. “And I can see that you think I’m being cruel to you. I am not.”
“Of course not,” Pia had agreed, staring at her plate and wishing she could truly rebel and order a stack of toast instead of her one, lonely slice. But she only dared antagonize her mother—who despaired over Pia’s sturdy figure, inherited from the Combe side of the family and suitable for factory work, not fashion—so far. “I don’t think that at all.”
“We have wrapped you up in cotton wool as a gift, Pia,” Alexandrina had intoned. “Always remember that.”
Pia remembered it, all right. She’d decided she wanted no part of any cotton wool, so she’d charged right out and shed it in New York. Enough with nouns, she’d thought. She wanted to be about verbs, for a change.
And look what that had got her.
“You look as if you’re mulling over a very important decision,” Ares said, still watching her from the door. “But you must realize that you have no choice here.”
“It’s out of the frying pan, into the fire.”
Pia hadn’t meant to say that out loud. But there it was, dancing between them.
Ares didn’t reply with words. He only inclined his head in that way of his, that she already knew was him at his most royal. Too royal to live, really.
And Pia thought of her father, blustering and brash Eddie Combe, who had called her names and then died. She would never see him smile at her again. She would never stand there while he blustered and bullied, then softened. He would never pat her on the head the way he had when she was small and tell her things like, Buck up, girl. Combes don’t cry.
But another thing her father had said, so famously that the vicar had quoted him in the service today, was that if the worst was coming, you might as well walk into it like a man rather than waiting for it to come at you as it pleased.
Control the conversation, Eddie liked to say. And had said, often.
And then did.
Pia told herself that was why she moved then, walking across library floor as if she was doing the bidding of her unexpected prince. That was why she followed after him, ignoring her brother and their guests as his staff led them through the manor house, down and around to the servants’ entrance, far away from the mess of reporters out front. That was why she got into the car that waited for them there, meekly and obediently, and sat next to Prince Ares as he drove her away.
