Secrets Of His Forbidden Cinderella

“Right,” she said. Drawled, really. And “disrespectful” didn’t begin to cover the tone she used. Or that direct stare. “Because you would have opened a letter that I sent.”

“Someone would have.”

“And believed it right away, I’m sure.”

“I don’t believe it now, Miss Ransom. I’m not certain what you thought a personal visit would accomplish. All you have done is remind me of the low esteem in which I hold your entire family.”

“I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that you don’t have a lot of feelings about my poor grandma in Nebraska. I doubt you know about her at all, so lowly is her existence next to this whole…display.” And Teo felt the umbrage of nearly twenty generations of de Luzes rise within him as she managed to do something with her face to indicate how little she thought of him, this grand house where history had been made and was still revered, and more or less everything he stood for. “So that low esteem, I’m guessing, is aimed directly at my mother.”

“Your mother is little better than a terrorist,” he retorted. Icily. “She sets herself a target, then destroys it.”

“Yes,” Amelia said drily. “This house is virtually rubble at our feet. It was the first thing I noticed.”

“Once she got her claws in him, my father was never the same.”

Teo discovered, with some consternation, that he was standing straight up from the desk when he hadn’t meant to move. More, he was far too tense, with the temper she did not deserve to see kicking through him.

“My condolences.” Amelia did not sound the least bit apologetic, much less sympathetic. “I must have misunderstood something. I thought he was Luis Calvo, the Eighteenth Duke of Marinceli, a man possessed of the same great wealth and immeasurable power you now wield. While my mother is…a mere divorcee. Who was the victim?”

“You must be joking. Calling Marie French ‘a divorcee’ is like calling a Tyrannosaurus rex a salamander.”

Amelia’s gaze flashed a deeper, darker shade of violet.

“There are very few things that I know to be incontrovertible truths,” she said. And though her voice was soft enough, her gaze seemed to slap at him. “But one of them is that wealthy men fend off paternity suits the way a normal person slaps down mosquitoes on a summer night. Since our parents actually were married, no matter what opinions you have about that union, I thought I owed you the courtesy of telling you in person.”

“Such courtesy. I am agog.”

She turned all the way around to face him then, but if he thought she would lower her gaze meekly, it was his turn for disappointment. Amelia held his gaze steadily, and Teo could admit he found it…surprising.

Not discomfiting. He was the Duke. He was not discomfited.

But the truth was that most people did not dare hold his gaze. Or not for very long. Most people, as a matter of fact, treated Teo with the deference due his title.

A deference he had come to believe was due to him, personally, as the holder of the title, because of course it was no easy thing to quietly command an empire while pretending he did nothing but waft about to charity balls. Thrones were for the powerless in these supposedly egalitarian times, and the de Luzes had always trafficked in influence and strength.

Teo was somehow unsurprised that it would be this bedraggled American, daughter to a woman so coldly mercenary that she was her own cottage industry, who not only dared—but kept staring him down.

As if he was a challenge she could win.

But the fact he was not surprised did not mean he liked it.

“What is it you want, Amelia?” he asked, aware that his tone was cool. The word of a de Luz had once been law. These days it merely sounded like the law, which was close enough.

She blinked at him as if he was…obtuse.

It was not a sensation he often had.

“I’ve already told you what I want. What you need to hear, at any rate. That’s all I wanted. To tell you.”

“Out of the goodness of your heart. You wished to inform me of my supposed paternity, and then…what? Blow away like smoke in the wind?”

“Nothing quite so poetic. I thought I’d go back home to San Francisco. Try to enjoy the rest of my pregnancy and prepare for life as a single mother.”

And she smiled sweetly at him, though he would have to truly be obtuse not to hear the decided lack of sweetness in her voice.

“I see. You are keeping this miraculous child, then?”

She tilted her head slightly to one side, her gaze quizzical. “I wouldn’t trouble myself with coming all this way, then storming your very gate—literally—if I wasn’t planning on keeping it. Would I?”

It was Teo’s turn to smile. Like one of the swords that hung on his walls, relics of the wars his ancestors had won.

“It is with great pleasure, Miss Ransom, that I tell you I have not the slightest idea what you would or would not do in any given circumstance.”

“Now you do.”

“I’m taken aback, you see.”

He had already straightened from his desk, and he suddenly found himself uncertain what to do with his hands. It was such a strange sensation that he frowned, then thrust his hands in the pockets of his trousers, as he would normally. It was almost as if he wanted to do something else with them.

But no. He might have shared a few explosive moments of pleasure with this woman—a circumstance he had yet to fully take on board—but he was a grown man stitched together with duties and responsibilities. He did not have the option to be led around by his urges.

“That must feel like a revolution,” Amelia said. Rather tartly, to his ear. “What’s next? Will the serfs rise up? Will they march on their feudal lord?”

“You seem to have mistaken the century.”

“Right.” Again, that insolent drawl. She made a great show of looking all around her, as if she could cast her glinting eye into every corner of the rambling house that had stood here—in one form or another—for so many centuries. “I’m the one stuck in the wrong century. Got it.”

“What astounds me is the altruism of your claim,” he said, finding his temper rather thinner than he liked. When normally he prided himself on being the sort of lion who did not concern himself overmuch with the existence of sheep, much less their opinions. “Out of the goodness of your heart, you chose to come here and share this news with me. That would make you the one woman in the world to claim she carries an heir to the Dukedom of Marinceli, yet has no apparent intention of claiming any piece of it.”

“I’m hoping it’s a girl, actually,” the maddening woman responded. In a tone he would have called bland if he couldn’t see her face. And that expression that seemed wired directly to the place where his temper beat at him, there beneath his skin. “If I remember my time here—and in truth, I prefer to block it out—there has never been a Duchess of Marinceli. Only Dukes. One after the next, toppling their way through history like loose cannons while pretending they’re at the center of it.”

His temper kicked harder. And he found he had to unclench his jaw to speak. “If you do not wish to make a bid for the dukedom, and you claim your only motivation is to inform me of this dubious claim of yours, I am again unclear why this required a personal audience.”

“I was under the impression that this was the kind of thing that was best addressed in person,” she said. Very distinctly. As if she thought he was slow. “Forgive me for daring to imagine that you might be an actual, real, live human being instead of this…caricature.”

“I am the Duke of Marinceli. The doings of regular people do not concern me.”

She rolled her eyes. At him.

Teo was so astonished at her temerity that he could only stare back at her.

“Noted,” she said, in that bored, rude way that he remembered distinctly from her teen years. Though it seemed far more pointed now. “You are now informed. When you receive the legal documents, you can sign them happily and in private, and we can pretend this never happened.”

“I beg your pardon? Legal documents?”

Amelia folded her arms, and regarded him steadily, as if he was challenging her in some way. And Teo was beginning to suspect that what beat in him was not strictly temper.

“Of course, legal documents,” she chided him. She chided him. “What did you think? That I would trust you to let this go?”