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It wasn’t capitulation, she assured herself. She was controlling the conversation.
And it certainly had nothing at all to do with the way looking at those green eyes of his made her heart thump wildly in her chest.
Or that melting feeling everywhere else.
CHAPTER FIVE
PIA REGRETTED HER impulsiveness the moment the car started moving.
She regretted it as they left Combe Manor behind, taking the little-used back road off the hill and leaving the paparazzi—and her brother, and her entire life—behind them.
Pia told herself she was only getting a few tests. That she wasn’t leaving anything, not for long. That this would all be perfectly fine once she and Ares were on the same page and plans were made for the future.
But she couldn’t shake the sense of foreboding that squatted on her, there on the smooth leather seats of the royal town car.
The car swept them off to a private airfield, and Pia dutifully trooped up the stairs into the jet that waited there, assuming that the prince would take them off to London. Where there were doctors aplenty who could administer the necessary tests, and give him the answers she already had, but he needed to see on official letterhead of some sort or another.
She told herself that she didn’t mind that he needed proof. After all, wasn’t that at the crux of all this? He didn’t know her. She didn’t know him. That would perhaps suggest that they shouldn’t have slept together, but they had, and it was only to be expected that he would require proof. Even if he really had been just some guy named Eric.
But the sound of the jet engines lulled her to sleep, and when Pia woke again because the air pressure was making her ears pop, she felt as if she’d been sleeping for a very long time.
“Where are we?” she asked sleepily, because a glance out the window into the dark didn’t show the mess of lights she would expect above a city like London.
Ares sat across from her on one of the royal jet’s low, gold-embossed leather couches.
“We will be landing shortly,” he said, without looking up from his tablet.
Pia always forgot that her body had changed, and kept changing. She went to sit upright and struggled a bit, certain that she looked as ungainly and inelegant as she felt.
“Yes, but where?” she asked, hoping her businesslike tone would divert attention away from what her mother would have called her persistent ungainliness. “That can’t be London, can it?”
Down below the plane, there were great expanses of darkness, and a few lights. They were headed toward the light, but it was far too contained to be a city.
“It is not London,” Ares said, something in his voice making her turn her head around to look at him directly. “It is the kingdom of Atilia. My home, after a fashion. I’m taking you to the Southern Palace.”
“But... Why on earth would you take me...?”
“Where did you imagine I would take you?”
He considered her, and she became aware—in a hot rush that made her cheeks flare into red—that they were, for all intents and purposes, alone in this compartment of his plane. His security detail had stayed in the main bit, while Ares had escorted her here and closed the door. She had no idea how she had possibly slept so deeply when Ares was right here, taking up all the oxygen.
And that was all before she started thinking about the ways this man could take her.
Not to mention the ways he already had.
“I assumed, reasonably enough, that we would pop down to London.”
“London is far too exposed. Here in the islands I can control who sees you and me together, what conclusions they might draw, and so on. And I can have my own doctors administer any tests.”
“I didn’t bring anything,” Pia protested. And when that aristocratic brow of his rose, as if she wasn’t making any sense, she felt her face get hotter. She cleared her throat. “Like a passport.”
“I am the Crown Prince,” Ares said dryly. “I do not suffer bureaucracy.”
“Because you are the bureaucracy?”
She regretted that. Especially when all he did was fix that overtly calm green gaze on her, making her want to squirm about in her seat. She refrained. Barely.
“And after I take all the tests you need me to take?” She blinked a few times, trying to clear her head. And the sleep from her eyes. “My life is in England.”
“If by some chance you are truly carrying my child and the unexpected heir to the kingdom of Atilia,” he said, with something far too complicated to be simple temper in his voice, “then you can be certain that life as you know it has changed irrevocably.”
“Well, of course it has,” Pia said. Crossly, she could admit. “But it has nothing to do with you. Impending motherhood generally changes a girl, I think you’ll find. It’s fairly universal.”
