The King She Shouldn't Crave, page 1
He’d known, eventually, they’d have to talk.
He was well aware of the conversations he’d avoided.
The wedding night he’d denied her.
Denied them both.
He’d prepared himself for the impact of her. The scent. The delicateness of her. The song of her voice in his ear.
But he wasn’t ready.
She was anything but simple. But their situation was. A marriage to placate the people. A marriage on paper only.
Never for him.
“You haven’t glanced at the diary,” she said, “let alone asked what it is I—”
“I do not need to read a diary entry to tell you the answer is already no.”
“It isn’t a diary entry,” she corrected. Dark brown hair fell about her slender shoulders. Her collarbone was so pronounced it sat like an adornment. Begging to be touched. Demanding his fingers smoothed along it and then up her pale neck.
Beautiful.
“And even if it were,” she continued, “wouldn’t you be curious?” The fluctuating flush to her cheeks deepened. Such a fascinating skill. To blush on demand. And oh, in another life, he would have tested that skill. “Aren’t you curious about me?”
He was curious. That was the problem.
Lela May Wight grew up with seven brothers and sisters. Yes, it was noisy, and she often found escape in romance books. She still does, but now she gets to write them, too! She hopes to offer readers the same escapism when the world is a little too loud. Lela May lives in the UK with her two sons and her very own hero, who never complains about her book addiction—he buys her more books! Check out what she’s up to at lelamaywight.com.
Books by Lela May Wight
Harlequin Presents
His Desert Bride by Demand
Bound by a Sicilian Secret
Visit the Author Profile page at Harlequin.com.
Lela May Wight
The King She Shouldn’t Crave
Lisa, this one’s for you. The middle child of two generations, this book is dedicated to you for all the reasons you know and some you never will. Love you. Always.
Contents
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
EPILOGUE
EXCERPT FROM UNTOUCHED UNTIL THE GREEK’S RETURN BY SUSAN STEPHENS
PROLOGUE
‘AREN’T YOU AFRAID?’
‘Never,’ Princess Natalia La Morte soothed, despite the double beat of her heart and the hitch of her breath.
It wasn’t fear making her skin clammy. It never had been. Because her future was preordained.
It was her fate.
The body getting into her bed was cold and Natalia shifted to be closer, wrapping her arms around a waist as slender as her own and holding her handmaid and friend close.
‘I’m nervous.’
‘Don’t be, Hannah,’ she told her, warming her up with gentle strokes of her open palms on her bare upper arms. ‘We’ve done this a thousand times. More. It’s the same as every morning.’
‘It’s not the same. Today you—’
‘That’s later,’ she corrected. ‘Not now. Now is the same. Later is—’
The future. And she’d been waiting twenty-one years for its arrival.
She cupped Hannah’s cheek. The skin there was as cold as the rest of her. She met the blue of her wide eyes and reassured her with the steadiness of hers.
Because Natalia needed this. Today more than any other. This moment. This reminder of what she must do. And why she must do it.
‘You will rest.’
‘Rest? What if they come early? What if they discover—’
‘They won’t. They never have.’
Hannah nodded. ‘Okay,’ she agreed, lips pursed.
‘Thank you.’ Natalia closed her eyes and pressed her lips to Hannah’s forehead. Her friend. Her confidante. Her jail-breaker.
Every morning she slipped from her bed and Hannah slipped into her place to become the Princess. To become her. And Natalia would do the opposite. She’d exchange her silk nightdress and soleless slippers for sturdy boots, trousers and a cloak of heavy wool, and then proceed to the next step of her morning ritual.
‘I’ll go,’ she continued. ‘But I will come back,’ she promised. Because she would.
A life for a life.
It was what Natalia understood. Her mother’s life had been the price paid to give her daughter life and every day she honoured her mother’s sacrifice. Reminded herself of the debt she owed.
Natalia pulled the hood close to her cheeks. Hid the face her father had instructed the palace staff to protect at all costs and walked, unseen, through the palace. Through the winding halls and high ceilings that caused the smallest sound to echo off the marble floors.
Pretending, for a short time, that she wasn’t the Princess any more, but only another member of staff. A staff member who rode the Princess’s horse every morning because the Princess could only ever amuse herself in the palace grounds at a gentle trot. Never gallop. Never push. She should never exert herself. But all animals needed exercise. Needed to feel free.
Natalia slipped through an unguarded door to the gardens. Samson. Black as a raven’s wing. Ready. Waiting. For her. For freedom. And she would let him taste it. Feel it.
Slipping her foot into the stirrup, she hoisted herself into the saddle and gave him a gentle kick. On cue, he trotted.
There were no bars in her prison, but it was a prison nevertheless.
It was a palace with sweet cherub faces mocking her from the highest turrets of dark grey stone with their faces full of whimsy. Idyllic. Safe. But there was always a border where she must stop. A barrier between her and the world. Between her and her people.
Her father’s love—her father’s grief—was her jailer. That was what kept her inside. Safe, as he had not kept her mother.
Freedom was an illusion.
She’d go back. She always did. Put on her dainty silk nightdress, slipped back into bed, watched her handmaid leave.
But Hannah wouldn’t leave her today. They’d wait together for the circus to arrive. To pinch and pull and fold her body into folds of white silk. Prepare her for a promise made long before her birth.
Head bent low, she drove Samson faster, harder. He knew the way. Through the tall trees surrounding the palace grounds. Through the opening into the clearing.
Squeezing her thighs against hard muscle and snapping the reins, she urged him onwards to reach the same view they always did. The same destination. The top of the mountain path, where his gallop slowed to a heavy-hoofed stop.
And there it sat. On the horizon. Out of reach. Just as it had every day for twenty-one years.
Her destiny.
Camalò.
The palace was on the edge of the border separating two nations. Two kingdoms side by side, nestled in the heart of the Alps. Two mountain kingdoms of lush greens and snow-capped peaks piercing the skyline. But that was where the similarity between the two kingdoms ended.
Vadelto, her home, was a prison of love and grief. Beautiful, underdeveloped and archaic. Camalò reeked of the future, tantalising her with of its newness like a book with a newly cracked spine. Roads wound into the mountains themselves, where white buildings with red roofs rose and fell on each new tree-lined tier of the alpine kingdom.
Her nation had been stuck in a time loop of regret because her father couldn’t deal with his own grief.
Her mother had been the light, dragging her people and her kingdom from the Dark Ages, and when she’d died the light had been snuffed out. All the changes her mother had been implementing had stopped. The borders had closed. The doors had been locked.
Her only chance to put things right...?
Marriage.
Today, she’d marry a king.
CHAPTER ONE
ANGELO DIZIENO KNEW the wrong man stood at the altar. The wrong twin. A man who should never have received the crown. A man who had forgotten his duty and abandoned his brother.
They’d shared a womb. Monochorionic-monoamniotic twins. Identical in all ways. Until life had separated them and stamped its differences on their skin.
Two minutes had separated their birth. One hundred and twenty seconds. Two sons. One heir...one spare. And an heir and a spare could never be the same. They’d both known it. Understood their roles.
Had understood them.
Bitterness crawled up Angelo’s throat and sat on his tongue. His gaze swept over his audience. Pews full of European monarchs, diplomats, Prime Ministers...all waiting for him to show them he would not forget his duty again.
He was the King they needed, because he was the only King they had.
It was never meant to be this way.
It was never meant to be him.
And this was his punishment, wasn’t it?
Marriage. Uniting two neighbouring nations because of a promise made and set in
He couldn’t help it—couldn’t stop it. His top lip dipped in the centre to curl his mouth, because any second now they’d deliver a bride that never should have been his to his feet.
A bride whose face had lived in his mind for three long years. A bride he’d blamed for exposing him to the ugliness inside him and the extent of his resentment for being born the spare.
An acrid burn crawled up his throat. He sealed his lips, swallowed it down, buried it deep in his gut.
Just as you should have three years ago.
Angelo set his jaw, fixed his mouth, but regret cut deep. Because three years ago he should have looked away. Buried his feelings deeper. Pretended not to feel anything. Because he had not been himself. He’d been pretending to be the King. His brother.
They’d swapped places thousands of times before that day. Angelo had brokered many deals in his brother’s stead, with charm and the grace of a royal. What was the difference in negotiating a decades-old treaty? Negotiating the terms of his brother’s marriage?
Nothing should have been different.
Angelo had been better at those things, anyway. Better than Luciano at talking and teasing out the outcome they needed in diplomatic circumstances. They’d swapped places because Angelo was the better—
The better King?
He stiffened. His suit was too tight, too itchy.
What if...?
What a ridiculous what if. But it lingered. The regret. What if he’d never gone inside her ugly castle, grey and dark, with its tall turrets and winding towers?
He sucked in a silent breath through his nostrils. He was lying. Her home had not been ugly. It had been enchanting, almost mystical. Ripped straight out of a fairy tale.
Her father, the old King, had pointed down to the gardens below, outside the arched windows of the tallest tower. A garden of tall, lush greens. And he’d seen her. The daughter the King wouldn’t let the heir to Camalò’s throne meet until their wedding day.
His reaction had been primal.
Mine.
The lush greens had trapped her inside a maze. This way or that? Did it matter? She’d seemed oblivious. Slowly, she’d walked. Her dress had been a deep purple. Her brown hair loose, untied, feathering across her shoulders and teasing at her waist. She’d touched the leaves of the bushes containing her, stroked them with gentle fingers.
And the recognition of her surrender had overwhelmed him.
She was just like him.
She was waiting to be summoned. Waiting for her father to tell her it was time to do her duty.
Charm had left him that day. He’d demanded the King’s surrender to the inevitable. No choice. A promise of old. Their kingdoms would merge.
The King would keep the promise that their nations had set into a royal decree all those years ago. She would marry Luciano in three years’ time, when she was twenty-one.
And that day had changed everything.
Because the mere sight of her had exposed what Angelo had already known but hadn’t been able to voice. He’d wanted more than to pretend to be the heir to the throne. He’d wanted to be him. The heir. Not to take the crumbs of what the heir decided the spare could have. But to claim it all. Claim her. For himself...
The realisation of what he must do had been swift. He had to leave. Before his resentment became more than a heat inside him...became a fire that would destroy them both.
Angelo had severed all lines of communication. Cut himself free from anything and anyone that would keep him tethered to life inside the palace. He’d rejected the invisible bond between him and his twin. He’d rejected his duty to him because he was selfish.
And his exit from royal life had caused a riptide in the country’s very foundations.
He’d left without preparation, with no transition for the people who needed him. No one to support his brother the way he had.
Now his twin was dead.
And the kingdom of Camalò was on its knees.
The country of his birth was falling apart at the seams, coming undone, because without him his brother had made all the wrong choices. The change to the dynamic had been too swift for him. Too fast. And everyone had suffered—all because he’d wanted her.
Angelo’s neck snapped up as metal slid against metal and the smallest opening in the gothic arched doors at the other end of the aisle revealed his bride, dressed from head to toe in white lace.
Natalia La Morte.
His heart throbbed.
His blood roared.
Every muscle in his body pulsed. Hardened.
Duty demanded he didn’t look away, didn’t turn his back on her, but by God he wanted to. Every instinct told him to avert his eyes. Look away. But he had to look at her as a king and not as a man. Not as a human being with needs—wants. He had to look at her as he should have three years ago.
And there she was. Her face obscured by a veil.
He’d thought time would have dulled his reaction to her. Maybe he’d given his body’s response to her too much credence. Too much blame for all the things that she’d exposed. Because it had already lived inside him, hadn’t it? The bitterness?
And yet he wanted to see her face. Her lips. Her eyes. His body demanded it. The hands at his sides were threatening to reach out.
He flexed his fingers. Kept them loose and demanded they stay where they were. By his sides. Still.
But inside he was not still. He was restless. His skin itched...needing a lotion, a balm...
He couldn’t drag his gaze away from the woman walking towards him. An innocent brought into the spotlight because this royal game needed her.
And she was getting closer.
White-tipped slippers peeked at him from beneath the layers of puffed fabric falling from her hips. Bringing her closer, step after step, along the red carpet. A bouquet holding an assortment of short-stemmed flowers was grasped between small, white-gloved fingers.
She was the catalyst of everything.
And now she was to become his queen.
He’d fulfil the old promise and join the two neighbouring countries. Marry her. What choice did he have? It was his duty now.
This long-awaited union of the two neighbouring countries would bring peace to an unsettled nation, wouldn’t it? Show the people that their new king would do what should be done. Follow the path already set and be the leader they needed.
The leader his brother should have been. Could have been if Angelo had stayed.
The Princess moved to stand in front of him. A warm wash of floral aromas clung to his nose, smothering his pores with the heady scent of all that had been forbidden to him.
His hands stopped obeying his command. They reached out...pinched feather-light fabric between his fingers, and he curbed his instinct to reveal her face swiftly.
Slowly...oh, so slowly...he lifted the silk away from the tip of her pale chin, away from her lips, her rosebud mouth, to reveal her eyes.
His hands stayed where they were, frozen at her temples, but the veil fell from his fingers, gliding over her diamond-encrusted tiara to fall down her back.
Lagoon-green eyes pulled him in and under. Trapped him. Bewitched him as they had three years ago. Lust speared through him. Flowed through his veins in a gush.
She was everything he remembered. Her curled lashes. The wideness of her eyes. The deep dip between her full upper lip and her long, up-flicked, haughty nose, all enclosed in an oval-shaped face.
Beautiful...
But it wasn’t her beauty that had stayed with him. Or it wasn’t just her beauty. It was what she was. What the royal game had turned her into. Turned him into. A royal pawn.
It was a similarity he had never shared with his twin, and yet he shared it with her. Silently. In the shadows. And he’d wanted to drag her into the light three years ago. Play with her in their own game instead of being the royal pawns they were. Pieces to be moved around to suit a monarchy older than time.
They had both been waiting for duty to summon them...demand their obedience.
They would be obedient now.
They would follow the rules.
