Princes of Castaldini: The Once and Future Prince

“Yes.” The S lingered as she pressed all that reason-annihilating femininity against him. The world faded as the sound did, as she nestled her face into his open shirt. His heart did its best to tear open his ribs for a direct rub. “Now promise me again.”

Was this survivable? He frankly didn’t care. “I’ll let you come to me. But I’ll keep showing you how much I want you to, how mind-blowingly better than ever it will be when you do.”

Her giggle was a cocktail of distress, mirth and yearning. “This I have to experience to believe.”

He still kept his hands to himself. Somehow. “You will. Experience. And believe. When you make up your mind.”

She trembled as she leaned on him. He swayed. As they said in his hometown, sandadet ala haita mayla—she sought support from a collapsing wall.

“Oh, my mind’s made up. It took you a whopping twenty-four hours to make it up for me. I need longer than that to follow conviction with action.”

“Your pace this time. I might not have given you reason to believe that, but my stamina is legendary.” He paused, groaned. “And that sounded like so many famous last words.”

Her laugh shook him. It contained something he’d never heard, not from her. Carefree cheerfulness. Its power was total. “Oh, you gave me every reason, in that sense. As for the one you meant now, I hope my stamina lasts long enough to give yours a workout.”

“And I’m at once hoping it lasts as long as it takes for you to feel right about coming to me, and hoping it will crumble within the next three minutes so we can cut to just living this.”

“Forty-eight hours ago I wouldn’t have believed it. But I’ve been hearing it with my own ears nonstop, so I have to sanction the verdict. You talk good. Too good. As I’m sure you know.”

His lips twisted. “You’d be surprised what I don’t know.”

“I don’t know…” she ran a finger of fire down his sternum and marked him for life yet again “…about you, but I want to get goodbyes out of the way. I’m dying to…see your home.”

“And I’m dying—probably literally—to see you in it.”

She hooked her arm through his. “Then come on.”

Feeling like he could indeed sprout wings if he clucked hard enough, as she’d once said, or that he’d already sprouted them, he shared unfettered smiles with her as they hurried to her sister’s apartment. The sister he no longer felt like strangling.

Until he laid eyes on her.

The tinier—and in his eyes, off-putting—loosely-based-on-Phoebe variation was sitting in her wheelchair like a queen bee surrounded by her workers. Paolo, her doting idiot of a husband, the brood of children she’d shackled him with—and from the shape of her belly, she wasn’t done smothering him, not by a long shot—and an assortment of nannies and maids all flitted around her.

As soon as they entered the sunset-drenched family room of the apartment that occupied a hefty part of the palace’s left wing, the two girls and the two boys, all dark-haired and healthy-looking, hurtled toward their aunt, yelping at her like excited puppies. Paolo targeted him with a smile.

A tall, slender man with an eternally boyish face, Paolo looked younger than his thirty-one years. Until you looked into his eyes. There you could see the toll of being a father four times over, with the fifth—or only Julia knew how many more—on the way.

Paolo had kept in touch with Leandro over the years. Not that they’d been close before, but he’d become a better friend after the breach than before it. Leandro had appreciated that. Even if he didn’t appreciate Paolo’s choice of wife. When that choice had led to Leandro’s meeting Phoebe, he couldn’t have endorsed it enough. Not anymore.

“Leandro! So good to see you back in Castaldini.” Leandro let himself be pulled into Paolo’s hug and kissed on both cheeks. Paolo pulled back but kept both hands on his arms as he beamed at him. “I hope this time you’re here to stay.”

Leandro smiled as he extracted himself, trying to make it seem a natural move. He was bursting with impatience to get this visit over with.

He got right to the point. “That’s still up in the air. And it’s why we’re here.” He explained his plan and Phoebe’s role in it.

As he finished his explanations, a sense of oppression came over him. Her eyes were on him. Had she wanted to do the explaining? Had he made amends only to commit a worse offense?

He tried to gauge her reaction as she stood there, covered in kids, and the sense of oppression deepened. They looked as if they were extensions of her life force, made of her flesh. As they were. Partially. So many of the desires he’d repressed since she’d walked out on him besieged him, forced him to look, acknowledge. Things he thought he’d never have, because she’d left his life. Now, seeing her this way, the thought of her growing bigger with…

Paolo moved into his line of vision, interrupting his fevered musings. “I really hope you come to the right decision. You know what I think that is.You’ll make a helluva king, Leandro.”

“No need to kiss up to him yet, Paolo. We don’t know if he’s going to be crown prince this time or if he’ll blow it again.”

Silence fell like acid rain in the wake of Julia’s vindictive comment.

Then Paolo’s laugh boomed. “Mia moglie cara—my darling wife, the consummate diplomat. Guess Phoebe sucked that trait right out of your family’s gene pool and left you with none.”

“Yeah, and I don’t envy her the job it landed her with.”

Julia didn’t even try to disguise the glare she impaled Leandro with. To his delight. It gave him license to glare back.

But instead of teaching his nemesis that Phoebe wasn’t an extra in the play starring her, he just wanted to snatch Phoebe away. And never let her return.

“Say, caro, how about you and the kids show Leandro around?”

Leandro bared his teeth at Julia in a parody of a smile. “Thanks, but no thanks. We have to get going.”

Julia’s full lips thinned. “Okay, since you won’t take a hint. I want to talk to my sister. Alone. Do you mind?”

Phoebe couldn’t believe that Leandro had submitted to Paolo’s cajoling and left her and Julia alone. She’d thought there’d be an explosion. A belated one between the two most important people in her life who’d detested each other on sight. Probably more proof that she and Leandro weren’t meant to be.

Now accusation simmered in Julia’s eyes as she stopped her chair a couple of feet away. Then she stood up.

Phoebe winced. The effort it took Julia to stand always left her feeling traumatized. The two steps she took to come nose to nose with her were even harder. Julia really wanted to lay into her. And she could guess why.

“So that’s your secret,” Julia hissed, her voice rough with anger and hurt. “The reason you’ve been frozen ever since we came here, the reason you do anything you can to avoid having a personal life.”

“I have a personal life, Julia. I’m a person, and I’m alive—”

“Don’t. Just don’t, Phoebe.”

“Uh-oh. If I’m Phoebe now, things must be dire indeed.”

“Phoebe, shut up. I’m so angry I could kick your stubborn ass. You still think I’m just an invalid, don’t you? You still think you have to protect me from even a moment’s discomfort? What can I do to make you realize I’m not the clingy, needy mess I once was? That I can support the people I love? Support you? When will you stop giving and accept that I have something to give back?”

“Darling, of course you have…”

“Don’t you dare placate me, Phoebe. This isn’t about me, dammit. I’m not the center of the universe, so for God’s sake stop putting me in the center of yours. This is about you.”

“What about me, Jules? I have a wonderful, ever-growing family, you rabbit, an incredible job, a palace to call my home, and the fact that I haven’t yet found the man for me—”

“But that’s the problem, isn’t it? You think you found him ten years ago, and that’s why you never gave anyone else a chance. Even Armando, that droolicious hunk of a human being. You blew it with him, big time. And it’s all over that ex-royal pain in the rear, isn’t it?”

Phoebe’s lips twitched with distress and amusement. “He’s royal again as of this afternoon, by the way.”

“You’re not glossing over this, do you hear me?”

“I think the whole capital can hear you, sweetie.”