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“I’ve never liked tests,” he said, and there was a hint, then, of the amusing, rambling, philosophical way he’d used to talk. So leisurely and unconcerned about everything because, truly, he’d been the most unsuitable Crown Prince anyone in Europe had ever heard of. Or so the tabloids had claimed. “Do you think I ought to recognize you?”
Madelyn felt something enormous inside her...shift.
And as it did, a kind of giddiness flooded in behind it.
She told herself that was what it was.
“No,” she said. “Certainly not.”
She did not curse his name. She did not indulge the part of her that would always be that foolish girl standing outside his bedroom door, unable to process that he’d moved on before she’d even left the country. Or that, in all likelihood, he’d never considered them a couple at all in the way that she had. She didn’t offer proof that she knew him. Because a part of her had long since accepted that in reality, she didn’t. She hadn’t. She’d never known him, because if she had, her life would look very different than it did now.
And shelikedher life, she reminded herself. Fiercely. Just as it was now, which didn’t mean that it was without difficulty—but it was hers. She’d made it. She claimed it.
It wasn’t her fault that his was a disaster, despite or because of his entire government playing games like this one. He clearly had no interest in fixing it, but why should she care? This had nothing to do with her.
“No,” she said again, more firmly. “If you don’t know me, you don’t know me. Enjoy your...hermiting.”
And then she turned and headed for the door and the path down the mountain, more than ready to get the hell out of this unpleasant spiral into the past before it ate her whole.
CHAPTER TWO
MADELYNJONESWASan inspired choice.
Paris Apollo could admit that, little as he liked it.
That Paris Apollo found himself King was a travesty beyond the telling of it. Every morning he woke enraged anew that this terrible thing had come to pass so far ahead of schedule. It had been nearly two entire years since his unwilling ascension, and if anything, his dark fury had only increased. Grief did not improve it. Solitude did not dissipate it.
Instead, it had become a part of him. Like breath. Like blood.
Like the yearning for vengeance that consumed him whole.
But this was not the time to think about his parents’ murder. This was not the time to unveil the great reckoning he had spent every moment of his time here planning.
Because the woman his ministers had sent him today—the latest in a long line of attempted lures and obvious bait and any number of attempts to sway him from the ancient, traditional retreat he had insisted upon taking though the world had gone modern—was the last woman he’d ever wish to see.
She was the one who had nearly wrecked him, back when he’d been so determined to live as loud and as wild as he could before his life of duty would begin. She was the one who had very nearly had him turning all his plans for committed debauchery on end...
He had thanked what gods there were, day and night for years, that he’d been saved from that fate by the most unlikely source. That the reality of the situation had been explained to him. That while he was a prince and would one day be a king—and had, it turned out, harbored a secret wish to make himself over into the kind of love story his parents had been—the object of his affection was an American student studying abroad.
She will go home and tell great tales of her escapades in London with a real, live prince, his friend Annabel had told him, and she had been in a position to know. She and Madelyn had become fast friends.That’s what she talks about most when you are not about, Paris Apollo. Do what you like, but are you really going to upend your whole life for a girl who sees you as a little fling best left abroad?
It served him right, he’d thought, that he’d imagined he could live up to his parents’ example. When, deep down, he’d always been certain that he wasn’t made like them. That he wasn’t good enough to love like that, for a start. He had been sickened by his own sentiment.
Much as he was now sickened by the sybaritic creature he’d once been—and the great many things he’d done to forget about this woman who dared present herself before him again.
That playboy fool disgusted him now, but then again, so did this woman who had led him to fling himself headlong into some of his worst excesses. That was how badly he had taken her leaving him and never looking back. Never even reaching out to him once she’d gone.
Her silence had proved that Annabel had told him nothing but the unpleasant truth.
Paris Apollo had never imagined he would see Madelyn again, and that had suited him fine. He had imagined that she was off having a gleaming little life, telling stories of her glory days. He had made surehisglory claimed a prominent place on every tabloid going, lest she imagine for a second that he had even noticed her departure.
He had been halfway to forgetting her before his parents died.
And now he couldn’t think of anything that mattered less. But he knew this was not the time for self-loathing—or, rather, anymoreself-loathing than he already indulged in regularly. There were things to be done and a whole lifetime that yawned out before him with ample opportunity to hate himself as he deserved.
“Wait,” he ordered her.
Because Paris Apollo could admit that he was faintly intrigued that a woman like her had turned to go in the first place. And it only grew when she didn’t stop walking. When she didn’t turn to stone or fawn all over herself while awaiting his next instruction.
