Secrets Of His Forbidden Cinderella

A muscle worked in his lean, perfect jaw. “Allow me to offer a warning now, before this goes any further. If you have come here in some misguided attempt to extort money from me based upon an association I forgot before it ended, you will be disappointed. And as I cannot think of any other reason why you should intrude upon my privacy, I will have to ask you to leave.”

Amelia considered him. “You could have had the butler say that, surely.”

“I will admit to a morbid sense of curiosity.” His gaze swept over her. “And it is satisfied.” He didn’t wave a languid hand like a sulky monarch and still, he dismissed her. “You may go.”

Amelia ordered the part of her that wanted to obey him, automatically, to settle down. “You don’t want to hear why I’ve come?”

“I am certain I do not.”

“That will make it fast, then.”

Amelia could admit she felt…too much. Perhaps a touch of shame for having to come to him like this—especially after the last time she’d shown up here, uninvited. Her pulse kicked at her, making her feel…fluttery. And she was, embarrassingly, as molten and soft as if he’d smiled at her the way he had in September.

When he hadn’t ventured anywhere near a smile.

“Never draw out the ugly things,” Marie had always told her. “The quicker you get them over with, the more you can think about the good parts instead.”

Just do it, be done with it and go, she ordered herself.

And who cared if her throat was dry enough to start its own fire?

“I’m pregnant,” she announced into the intimidatingly, exultantly blue-blooded room. To a man who was all of that and more. “You’re the father. And before you tell me that’s impossible, I was at the Masquerade last fall and yes, I dyed my hair red.”

She could only describe the look on his face as a storm, so she hurried on.

“And because you asked, I’m Amelia Ransom. You really were my stepbrother way back when. I hope that doesn’t make this awkward.”

CHAPTER TWO (#u521ab2a7-bc45-586c-8e11-a36990a731d5)

HIS EXCELLENCY MATEO ENRIQUE ARMANDO DE LUZ, Nineteenth Duke of Marinceli, Grandee of Spain, and a man without peer—by definition and inclination alike—did not care for American women in general or the loathsome, avaricious Marie French in particular. He had viewed her corruption of his once proud father as a personal betrayal, and had celebrated their inevitable divorce as if it were his own narrow escape from the grasping woman’s mercenary clutches.

That his father had fallen for such a creature had been a deep humiliation Teo was terribly afraid stained him, too. They were de Luzes. They were not meant to topple before such crassness, much less marry it.

His father’s subsequent wives had, at the very least, been from a certain swathe of European aristocracy. Only Marie Force had managed to tempt the Eighteenth Duke into breaking from centuries of tradition. Only her, a coarse and common woman whose gold digging had already been a thing of legend.

Teo was the only heir to dukedom that had never been polluted in living memory—until Marie.

By extension, Teo had never cared for Marie’s daughter, either, with those same unearthly purple eyes that had always seemed to him a commentary on her character. Or decided lack thereof.

Even though Amelia had been little more than a child—sixteen is not precisely a toddler, came a contrary voice inside him that he chose to ignore—Teo had been certain her sins had been stamped upon her then, every new curve a bit of dark foreshadowing. With such a mother, she had only ever been destined to head in one direction.

“Pregnant,” he said, as if tasting the word.

“Coming up on eighteen weeks,” she replied, with rather appalling cheer. When he only gazed at her in disbelief, she continued. “If you count backward, you’ll find that it matches right up with the Masquerade.”

“Thank you, Miss Ransom,” Teo replied after a moment, in the frigid tones that usually made those around him quail, scrape and apologize. The woman standing just inside the door of his study looked notably unaffected. “I am capable of performing simple mathematical equations.”

All she did was smile. As if she doubted him, but was magnanimously keeping that opinion to herself.

It…irritated him. And Teo was rarely irritated by anything—because his life was arranged to avoid anything and anyone who might dare to annoy him in any way.

Perhaps he should have expected something like this. Pregnancy claims upon him were always and forever naked attempts to grab a chunk of the de Luz fortune and then bask in the glory of the many titles, honors and estates that went along with the name. It wasn’t really a surprise that this impertinent, insolent creature of questionable parentage had developed ideas above her station when she’d spent those mercifully brief years thrust into the exalted realm of his family.

Teo understood it, on some level. Who wouldn’t wish to be a de Luz?

Amelia Ransom, still cursed with those indecorous purple eyes, stood before him on a rug so old that its actual provenance was still hotly contested by the historians who periodically combed through the de Luz house and grounds and wrote operatic scholarly dissertations on the significance of the family collections. That she should be deeply shamed by her presence here—and the fact that the carpet beneath her feet boasted a pedigree while she did not—seemed not to have occurred to her.

Especially while she was issuing preposterous accusations. Involving fancy dress and dyed hair, of all things.

It was all so preposterous, in fact, that Teo could hardly rouse himself to reply further.

Because he was the current head of one of the most ancient houses in the world, and the favor of his time and good temper was not granted to any bedraggled creature who happened along and turned up at his door.

Not that many creatures, bedraggled or otherwise, usually dared “turn up” in his presence. Or managed to “happen along” in the first place even if they did dare, as he employed what he’d believed until now to be an excellent security service. He made a mental note to replace them. Before the next dawn.

And remembered as he did that Amelia’s mother had been notable chiefly for the things she’d dared. All of which she’d gone ahead and executed without the faintest notion of her own gaucheness.

Hadn’t he always known that her daughter would turn out just like her?

“I’ve learned many things since September,” said the creature before him. He had recognized her on sight, of course, though he had not intended to gift her with that knowledge. Because she should have assumed that she was entirely unworthy of his notice and his memory alike. Instead, she was talking at him in that same offensively friendly voice that made him think of overly bright, manic toothpaste commercials. “One of them—which you would think ought to go without saying—is don’t disguise yourself and have relations with your former stepbrother and think there won’t be repercussions.”

“I have yet to accept that any ‘relations’ occurred,” Teo said in what he thought was a mild voice, all things considered.

“Acceptance, or the lack of it, doesn’t change the facts,” Amelia replied, and Teo saw a glimpse of something steely in those garish eyes of hers. “And the fact is, I’m pregnant with your baby.”

“How convenient for you.”

He watched her from his position against his desk, where he felt significantly less at his ease than he had moments before. Amelia, meanwhile, did not seem particularly thrown by his reaction. There were no tears. No wilting or wailing, the way there normally was during outlandish pregnancy claims—if the reports he’d received were to be believed. If anything, she brightened.

“I’m informing you because it’s the right thing to do,” she told him, with a hint of self-righteous piety about her, then. “Not because I need or want you to do anything. Consider yourself informed.”

She turned then, and Teo almost let her go. Purely to see if she would do what he thought she meant to do, which was march straight off—but only so far, as it was difficult to extort money from a man once ejected from his presence. He assumed she knew it.

He decided he wouldn’t play her game. “Surely the point of disguising yourself, as you claim you did, and then deciding to have ‘relations’ with me under false pretenses, would be to stay. Not to flounce off because I’ve failed to respond as you would like.”

It would have been easy enough to find photos of the Masquerade, he told himself. He had danced with a luscious redhead, then disappeared with her for a time. Anyone might have guessed what they’d been up to.

That certainly didn’t mean that this woman was that redhead. His mind reeled away from that possibility even as his body readied itself, remembering.

Amelia waved a distinctly impolite hand in the air, and compounded the disrespect when she didn’t turn back to face him. “I don’t care what you do with the information, Teo. I think we can all agree that it’s appropriate to inform a man of his paternal rights. That’s all I wanted to do, it’s done, the end.”

“Surely a letter would have sufficed.”

She did turn then. Not all the way. She looked back over her shoulder, and he was struck against his will.

Hard.

Teo truly hadn’t believed that Amelia Ransom, of all possible people, was the mysterious woman he’d enjoyed so thoroughly at the Masquerade last fall. But he remembered…this. Almost exactly. The hair had been a bright red, the eyes a dramatic shade of green that now, in retrospect, he should have known was false, and she’d worn an intricate mask that took over the better part of her face. The mask had been a steam punk design and so intricate, in fact, that she’d claimed she couldn’t remove it—and he hadn’t cared, because her mouth had been sweet and hot, her hands had been wicked, and he’d had his fingers deep inside her clenching heat mere steps from his own damned party.