Bride By Royal Decree

* * *

Reza Argos, more widely known and always publicly addressed as His Royal Majesty, King and Supreme Ruler of the Constantines, was not a sentimental man.

That had been his father’s downfall. It would not be his.

But either way, there was no doubt that he was a king. That meant there was no room for the maudlin trap of sentiment, especially in a country like the Constantines that prided itself on its correctness with, it was true, a certain intensity that suggested a number of unpleasant undercurrents. Like all the whispers about his father’s longtime mistress, for example, that no one dared mention directly—especially not after the way his father had died. Not that anyone said suicide, either. It was too messy. It hinted too strongly at the darkness beneath the Constantines, and no one wanted that.

It was all unpleasant history. Reza focused on the present. His trains ran on time. His people paid their taxes and his military zealously maintained his borders. He and his government operated transparently, without unnecessary drama, and in the greatest interests of his people to the best of his ability. He did not succumb to the blackmail of a calculating mistress and he certainly did not risk the whole country because of it. He was nothing like his father. More than that, the Constantines were nothing like their closest neighbor, the besieged Santa Domini, with its civil and economic crises these last thirty years.

Unsentimental attention to detail on the part of its rulers was how such a small country had maintained its prosperity, independence, and neutrality for hundreds upon hundreds of years. Europe might rage and fall and rise again around them, but the Constantines stood, a firm guard against encroaching darkness and Santa Dominian refugee crises alike, and no matter how grim and worrying it had all been these last three decades.

His father’s descent into cringe-inducing protestations of what the heart demanded—followed by what might well have become a constitutional crisis had it not been stopped before the blackmail had truly ripped apart the kingdom—did not count. Since very few people knew how bad it had all gotten outside the royal family and the most highly ranked ministers.

Reza had held his tiny alpine country together since his ascension to the throne at the tender age of twenty-three following what had been widely reported as his father’s sudden heart attack, as the latest in a long line of monarchs from the House of Argos. The Constantines was a small country made up of two pristine valleys high in the European Alps. The valleys were connected by a vast, crystal blue lake, bristled with picturesque villages and plump, comfortable banking concerns, and were bordered on all sides by crisp snowcapped mountains and luxury ski resorts.

The Constantinian people liked the kingdom as it was. Untouched. A legacy of a bygone era, yet with all the comforts of the present day. That their longtime ally and closest neighbor, Santa Domini, had suffered a violent military coup when Reza was a child, had lost its exiled king and most of its royal family when he was eighteen, and had strewn out refugees seeking escape from the harsh military government all this time made Constantinians...upset.

Reza did not particularly care for the fact that his reign was often characterized as “rocky,” purely because he’d had to spend so much of it handling his neighbor’s messes and making up for his father’s adulterous yearnings, the blackmail that had nearly brought the kingdom to war, and the suicide he’d had no choice but to conceal from the public lest all the rest of it come out, too. He’d handled that necessary lie. He’d handled his furious, spiteful mother. He’d even handled his father’s awful mistress. It was unfortunate that no one outside his inner circle knew how much he’d handled. But things were looking up. Next door in Santa Domini, the usurper, General Estes, was dead. The rightful Santa Dominian king’s restoration to the throne had changed his country and calmed the whole region.

If this woman in front of him was the lost, long presumed dead Princess Magdalena as he suspected she was, that changed everything else.

Because Reza had been betrothed to the Santa Domini princess since the day of her birth. And while he prided himself on his ability to live without the mawkish sentiment that had brought down his father and led him straight into an unscrupulous woman’s hands, he suspected that what his people truly wanted was a convenient royal fairy tale with all the trappings. A grand royal wedding to remind them of their happy fantasies about what life in the Constantines was meant to be was just the ticket. It would generate revenue and interest. It would furthermore lead to the high approval ratings and general satisfaction Reza’s grandfather had enjoyed throughout his long reign. Contented subjects, after all, rarely plotted out revolutions.

He opted not to share the happy news with his prospective bride just then.

The woman before him shook slightly as she stared at the picture on his mobile. He’d expected joyful noises, at the very least, as he’d imagined anyone standing in a second-rate resort town undertaking menial labor might make upon learning she was, in all likelihood, meant for greater things than her current dire straits. Or a celebration of some kind, particularly given the circumstances under which he’d found her. On her hands and knees, scrubbing the floor like the lowest servant. Her hair like brittle straw around her bony shoulders, making her look even more pale and skinny than she already was. Wearing the sort of fabrics that looked as if they might set themselves alight if they rubbed together.

Her mouth as foul and crude as the rest of her.

This, then, was his long-lost queen. The fairy-tale creature he would use to beguile his people and secure his throne, all rough, red hands and that sulky, impertinent mouth. He supposed he would have to make the best of it.

And if there was some part of him that was pleased that he could not possibly be in any danger from this creature—that she was about as likely to beguile him as was the exuberant potted plant in the corner—well. He kept that to himself.

She raised her gaze to his again, her eyes a deep, rich caramel that he found he couldn’t read as he wished. He watched the curious way she set her frail shoulders and lifted her stubborn chin. As if she wished to hold him off physically. As if she thought she’d have a chance at it if she tried.

On some level, Reza was deeply appalled she might ever have had reason to lift a finger to protect herself. He was almost entirely certain that she was the lost princess of Santa Domini. His princess. A blood test would merely confirm what was obvious to the naked eye, as the family resemblance was astonishing. And the lost princess of Santa Domini, the future mother of the kings of the Constantines, was not a scrubbing woman. She was not this...hardscrabble washerwoman persona she’d concocted over the past two decades.

He told himself that he should find it in him to be sympathetic. If he was correct in his assumption about what had happened, she’d been granted a strange mercy indeed—but that made it no less merciful.

“I don’t have a mother,” she told him, without the faintest shred of deference. Or any hint of manners. And Reza admired her spirit, he supposed, even if he deeply disapproved of its application. “And if I did, she certainly wasn’t the queen of anything, unless maybe you mean welfare.”

Reza ignored that, already trying to work out how he could possibly take this...fake blonde sow’s ear and create the appropriately dignified purse, one worthy of being displayed to the world at his side.

She had the bones of the princess she clearly was. That was obvious at a glance. If he ignored the tragic clothes, the questionable hair, and the decidedly unrefined way she held herself, he could see the stamp of the Santa Dominis all over her. It was those high cheekbones, for a start. The sweet oval of her face and that impossibly lush mouth that was both deeply aristocratic and somehow carnal at once. She was an uncivilized, hungry sort of skinny, a far cry from the preferred whippet-thin and toned physique of the many highborn aristocratic women of Reza’s acquaintance, but she was evidently proud of the curves she had. He could imagine no other reason she would have gone to such trouble to wear her cheap clothing two sizes too small.

What Reza could not understand—what curled through him like smoke and horrified him even as it sent heat rushing through him—was how, when he had no worries at all that she could access his heart no matter who she was, he could possibly want her in any way. This...renovation project that stood before him.

And yet.

It had slammed into him the moment he’d walked into the shop and it had appalled him unto the depths of his soul. It still did. He was the king of the Constantines. His tastes were beyond refined, by definition and inclination alike. His mistresses were women of impeccable breeding, impressive education, and all of them were universally lauded for their exquisite beauty, as was only to be expected. Reza did not dabble in shallow pools. He swam deep or not at all.

The woman he’d intended to make his queen, until he’d seen this creature before him now in a photograph ten days ago, was appropriate for him in every possible way. The right background. Unimpeachable bloodlines dating back centuries. An excellent education at all the best schools. A thoughtful, spotless, and blameless career in an appropriate charity following her graduation. Never, ever, so much as a breath of tabloid interest in her or her close friends or anything she did. Not ever.

The honorable Louisa had been the culmination of a decade of hard searching for the perfect queen. He hadn’t imagined he’d ever find her until he had. Reza still couldn’t entirely believe that he was here, across an ocean from his kingdom and his people and the woman he’d intended to wed, hunting down a crass, ill-dressed creature who had already insulted him in about seventeen different ways. It offended him on every level.

As did the fact that every time she lifted that belligerent chin of hers or opened her mouth to say something indelicate if not outright rude, the most appalling need washed through him and made him...restless.

His Louisa had been crafted as if from a list of his desired specifications for his potential queen, and yet he had never, ever felt anything for her beyond the sort of appreciation for her lovely figure he might also feel for, say, a pretty bit of shrubbery or an elegant table setting. Reza was the king of the Constantines. The state of his garden and the magnificence of his decor reflected on him. On his rule. On his country. So, too, would his choice of bride.

His feelings, appropriately, were that all of these things should be beyond excellence. And that sort of distant admiration was the only feeling he intended to have for his queen, as was appropriate. Unlike his father’s disastrous affair of the heart.

“Perhaps you failed to understand me.” He waited for the princess’s unusual eyes to meet his and gritted his teeth against his body’s unseemly reaction to her. It would be one thing if she were dressed like her mother had been in that picture. If she looked like the princess she obviously was instead of a castoff from Les Misérables. What was the matter with him? “Ten days ago my aide returned from a brief location scouting expedition in the area.”

“A location scouting expedition.” She echoed his own words in much the same way she’d said the word douche earlier, and he liked it about as much now as he had then. “Is that fancy talk for a trip?”

Reza could not recall the last time any person had managed to get under his skin. Much less a woman. In his experience, women tended to fling themselves into his path with great enthusiasm, if impeccable manners befitting his status, and if they found themselves on their knees, it was for entirely different reasons. He opted not to share that with her. Just as he opted not to share that he’d been planning an engagement trip to ask Louisa to become his queen in appropriately photogenic surroundings. He had not been at all interested in America for this purpose, but his enterprising aide had made a case for the enduring appeal of the New England countryside in winter and the smallish hills they called mountains here.

“I saw you in the background of these pictures.” He eyed her brash, blond hair, looking even less attractive in the overhead lights the more she tipped her head back to glare unbecomingly at him. In the pictures her hair had swirled around her shoulders, feminine and enticing, the dark chestnut color suiting her far more. It had also made it abundantly clear whose child she was. “The resemblance to Queen Serena was uncanny. It took only a phone call or two to determine that your name matched that of the lost princess and that your mysterious past dovetailed with the time of the accident. Perfectly. It seems too great a coincidence.”

Again, her chin tilted up, and there was no reason at all Reza should feel that as if her hands were on his sex. He was appalled that he did. Until tonight, his desires had always remained firmly under his control. Passion had been his father’s weakness. It would not be his.

“I don’t have a mysterious past,” she told him. Her caramel-colored eyes glittered. “The world is filled with bad parents and disposable kids. I’m just one more.”

“You are nothing of the kind.”

She folded her arms over her chest in a show of belligerence that made him blink.

“I’ll return to my original question,” she said. Not politely. “Who the hell are you and why do you care if some barista in a photograph looks like an old, dead queen?”

Reza drew himself up to his full height. He looked down at her with all the authority and consequence that had been pounded into every inch of him, all his life, even when his own father had failed to live up to the crown he now wore himself.

“I am Leopoldo Maximillian Otto, King of the Constantines,” he informed her. “But you may call me by my private family nickname, Reza.”

She let out a sharp, hard sound that was not quite a laugh and thrust his mobile back at him. “I don’t want to call you anything.”

“That will be awkward, then.”

Reza took possession of his mobile, studying the way she deliberately kept her fingers from so much as brushing his, as if he was poisonous. When he was a king, not a snake. How this creature dared to treat him—him—with such disrespect baffled him, but did nothing to assuage that damnable need that still worked inside him. She confounded him, and he didn’t like it.

But that didn’t change the facts. Much less what would be gained by presenting his people with the lost Santa Domini princess as his bride.

He met her gaze then. And held it. “Because one way or another, you are to be my wife.”

CHAPTER TWO

“I GET IT,” Maggy said after a moment. The word wife seemed to pound through her like an instant hangover, making her head feel too big and her belly a bit iffy, and if there were other, stranger reactions to him moving around inside her...she pretended she didn’t notice. “Someone must have put you up to this. Is this some new reality show? The Cinderella Games?”

Reza—as the other six hundred names he’d rattled off, to say nothing of the title he’d claimed, were apparently not fit for daily use—blinked in obvious affront.

“Allow me to assure you that I have not, nor will I ever, participate in a show of any kind.” He managed to bite out his words as if they offended him. As if the very taste of them in his mouth was an assault. Then he adjusted the cuffs of his coat in short jerks of indignant punctuation. “I am a king, not a circus animal.”

Maggy found that despite never having seen a king in all her life, and having entertained about as many thoughts about the behavior of monarchs as she did about that of unicorns and/or dragons, she had no trouble whatsoever believing this man of stone and consequence was one.

“I’ll make a note that you’re not a sad, dancing elephant.” Somehow, she kept from rolling her eyes in the back of her head. “Good to know.”

“I suggest you look it up,” he said, very much as if she hadn’t spoken. Maybe for him, she really hadn’t. It was entirely possible that a king simply wasn’t aware that anyone else spoke at all. He nodded toward her hip, and the phone she’d stashed in her back pocket. “Pull up an image of the king of the Constantines on your mobile. See what appears. I think you’ll find that he resembles me rather closely.”

And Maggy opted not to explore why the certainty in his voice shivered through her, kicking up a commotion in its wake.

“It doesn’t matter what comes up,” she told him, careful to keep that shivering thing out of her voice. “I don’t care if you’re the king of the world. I still need to clean this floor and lock up the shop, and that means you and all your muscly clowns need to go.” When he only stared at her in cool outrage, she might have smirked a little. Just a little. “You’re the one who mentioned a circus. I’m only adding to the visual.”

“What an extraordinary reaction.” His gray eyes were fathomless, yet still kicked up entirely too many tornadoes inside of her. And his voice did strange things to her, too. It seemed to echo around inside of her. As if he was inside of her—something she was better off not imagining, thank you. “I have told you that it is highly probable you are a member of one of Europe’s grand, historic royal families. That you are very likely a princess and will one day become a queen. My queen, no less. And your concern is the floor of a coffee shop?”

“My concern is the lunatic in the coffee shop with me, actually,” she managed to say, fighting to keep her voice even. Because she knew, somehow, that if she allowed herself to feel the reaction swelling inside of her, it might take her right back down to her knees. And not by choice this time. “I want you to go.”

He studied her for what seemed like a very long time. So long she had to rail at herself to keep from fidgeting. From showing him any weakness whatsoever—or any hint that she was taking him seriously when she wasn’t. She couldn’t. Princesses? Queens? That was nothing but little girl dreams and wishful thinking.

If there was one thing Maggy knew entirely too much about, it was reality. Cold, hard, grim, and often heartbreaking reality. There was no point whining about it, as she knew very well. It was what it was.

“Very well,” he said after what seemed like a thousand years, and was that...disappointment that washed through her? Had she wanted him to keep pushing? She couldn’t have. Of course she couldn’t have. “If you feel you must continue with these unpleasant tasks of yours, then by all means.” This time he waved a hand, and it was even more peremptory and obnoxious than his previous partially raised finger. It made her blood feel so hot and so bright in her veins that she flushed with it. With temper. And she was certain he saw it. “Don’t for one moment allow your bright future to interfere with your menial present circumstances.”

Maggy had wanted to hit quite a few people in her time. That was what happened when a girl found herself on her own and entirely alone in the world at eighteen, when the foster care system had spit her out. She’d found herself surrounded by bad people and worse situations in places where violence was the only reasonable response to pretty much anything. Still, she’d scraped by and she’d survived—because what was the alternative?

But she wanted to hit this man more. She even did the math as she eyed him there in front of her. His four goons would likely object to any manhandling of their charge, but she was closer to him than they were. She was sure she could land a satisfying punch before they flattened her. She was equally sure it would be worth the tackle.

She didn’t know how she kept her hands to herself.

“I appreciate your permission to do my job.” Maggy was not, in fact, anything remotely like appreciative. “Here’s a newsflash. Even if you are a king, you aren’t my king.”

She watched, fascinated despite herself, as a muscle worked in his granite-hewn jaw, indicating the impossible. That this man of stone and regal airs was having his own set of reactions to her.

To her.

There was absolutely no reason she should feel that as some kind of victory when she didn’t want to win this. Whatever this was.

“You will dine with me tonight,” he told her, in the manner of one who was used to issuing proclamations and, more, having them instantly obeyed.

Maggy let out a short, hard laugh. “Um, no. I won’t be doing that. Tonight or ever.”

Reza only gazed back at her, and she told herself she was imagining that little suggestion of heat in his stern gaze. That she was a crazy woman for imagining it. That he was a king, for God’s sake. That she shouldn’t care either way, because it was her own, personal law that she didn’t do complications of any kind.

And there was no pretending a man who pranced around calling himself a king in a coffee shop wasn’t one giant complication, no matter how harshly compelling that fierce face of his was.

“Then I am happy to remain where I am,” he told her after another long, tense moment.

“Until what?” She shook her head, then shoved a chunk of her hair back behind her ear. “You convince me that this insane story is true? I already know it isn’t. Princesses don’t go missing and end up in foster care no matter how many little girls wish they did. You’re wasting your time.”

“You cannot possibly know that until you take a blood test.”

“Oh, a blood test? Is that all?” Maggy bared her teeth at him. “You can expect that to happen over my dead body.”

He smiled then. And it was devastating. It...did things to his face. Made it something far closer to beautiful than any man so hard and uncompromising should ever look. It should have been impossible. It was certainly unfair. Maggy’s mouth went dry. Parts of her body she’d stopped paying any attention to outside of their sheer biological functions prickled to uncomfortable awareness.

Oh, no, she thought.

“Let me tell you how this will go,” Reza said softly, as if he knew exactly what was happening to her. As if he was pleased it was. “You will give me a blood sample. You will sit and eat a decent dinner with me tonight not only because I wish to get to know you, but because you look as if you haven’t eaten well in some time. If ever. The blood test will confirm what I already know, which is that you are Her Royal Highness Magdalena of Santa Domini. At which point, you will leave this menial existence that is beneath you in more ways than it is possible to number and is an insult to the blood in your veins. And then, among other things, you will assume your rightful position in your brother’s court and in the line of ascension to his throne.”

She’d opened her mouth to protest his snide reference to her menial life, not to mention his idea that she was some wayward waif who’d never eaten a meal, but got caught on that last bit.

Maggy’s heart seemed to twist in her chest. “My brother?”

And she knew she gave herself away with that. There was no chance this overwhelming man didn’t hear the breathiness in her voice. The longing for that life so many people took for granted. A life with family. With people who were as much hers as she was theirs, whatever that looked like. The kind of life she’d never had—and had taught herself a long time ago to stop wishing for.

“Yes,” Reza said. His harshly regal head canted to one side, though he kept his gaze on hers. “Your brother. He is the king of Santa Domini. Previous to his coronation, he was rather well-known as one of the world’s greatest and most scandalous playboys. If you have been in the vicinity of a tabloid newspaper over the past twenty years, you will have seen a great deal of him, I’d imagine. Too much of him, I would wager.”

Her hands felt numb. With some distant part of her brain, it occurred to her to think that was a strange reaction. That pins and needles should stab at her fingers as if her arms had fallen asleep when they hadn’t. When, despite what was happening here, she was very much awake.