Forbidden Royal Vows by Caitlin Crews

Author:Caitlin Crews
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2024-05-28T12:28:26+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

SEPTEMBER WAS LIKE a dream—the kind of dream that Caius had woken up from, wild with desire, unsettled, and without her, more times than he could count over these past five years.

This high in the mountains, autumn was already making its appearance. The mornings were cold, though they warmed into achingly blue days and crisp nights that came earlier all the time. The trees were turning bright, bold colors, as if gripping on tight to the long summer days already past. Caius could relate.

It was a dream, these September days, but Caius could not fool himself the way he had once before. Because this time, he knew how this dream was going to end. There was no point in imagining otherwise, the way he had once before.

What he couldn’t understand was how, knowing what was to come, he still couldn’t bring himself to change a thing.

“I thought you were going to enact some kind of dastardly revenge plan,” Mila said one evening as they moved around the kitchen together. They had taken to playing music as they assembled their meals, the kitchen brightly lit against the dark that waited there outside the windows, music dancing in the air like some kind of spell to keep the world away.

The kind of spell Caius had wished he’d known as a child, forever languishing in hotel rooms and dreaming of exactly this kind of life. Of becoming the kind of person who was capable of this kind of life. This ease and sweetness instead of his mother’s chaotic rages. This pervasive wave of something he thought might be happiness, instead of the battle to assess his mother’s condition in any moment and figure out how to pretend to be whatever version of her son she might have decided he was that hour.

It was easy, here, to pretend they were other people. People who did not play vicious games with one another and call it family. People who did not fight nasty little wars for supremacy, imagining that somehow they might escape the Countess’s notice—that too-sharp focus that always boded ill.

Here in the September House, they did none of those things.

Here they were different people entirely. People who prepared food because it was good and put out table settings because they were pretty, and then enjoyed each other’s company when they sat down. People who talked of the weather, not because they had nothing else to say, but because even the most innocuous conversations were layered and textured with all the ways they took each other apart and put each other back together when they were naked.

As if it was all the same thing, in one form or another.

Mila did not cook in the classic sense. But she was a deft hand at putting together ingredients that were preprepared for her. He discovered that she was a big fan of a hearty soup or a stew, accompanied by freshly baked bread with a liberal application of butter. That she would eat it night and day, if possible.

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