Royal Games (The Royals of Monterra) (29 page)

I nodded, pretending at a confidence I did not feel. It would be fine. I would totally seduce him with my awkwardness and get him to love me again.

The servants opened the door to the ballroom for me, and I immediately found Rafe. He was looking out a window while people around him laughed, danced, and ate. He had a drink in his hand, but he just stood there, holding it. He was unbelievably handsome, but he seemed so sad that my heart ached for him.

Mustering all of the courage I had, I walked over. And with all those hours of planning and preparation, I laid the best opening line ever on him.

“Hi.”

He blinked at me a couple of times, as if he didn’t know what he was seeing. “Genesis? What are you doing? How are you here?”

I opened my mouth, but the words stuck. I glanced over my shoulder, wondering if people were watching us.

He grabbed my wrist and pulled me from the ballroom, setting down his drink along the way. I felt a thrill at the sensation of his strong hand on me. We went into a drawing room, and I only had a second to admire the old, expensive paintings on the wall and the antique furniture before he whirled me around to face him.

“What are you doing here?”

It was not quite the reception I had expected. So I decided to take Lemon’s advice and just tell him how I felt. “Someone tore my heart out and carried it across the ocean.”

I saw him swallow several times. I took a step forward. He stepped back.

“But it’s okay. I don’t want it back. You can keep it. It was always yours, anyways.”

He shook his head. “You don’t have to say those things to me. You’re not obligated to. You don’t have to say them because you feel guilty or you think you owe me. You don’t.”

“Is that what you think?” That was so far from how I felt that it stunned me. “That’s not why I’m here. I came here to tell you no.”

“No?” he repeated.

“You were always encouraging me to say no. So, no, I won’t accept you leaving me. No, I won’t be apart from you. No, you can’t go on without knowing how I feel about you.”

I put my hand out and let it fall when he didn’t make a move to take it.

“Aunt Sylvia told me what you told her. About the things I said in the ambulance. I don’t remember saying them. I never would have said any of that stuff to you if I’d been in my right mind. Because it was the opposite of how I feel. If I could slingshot a starship around the sun, go back in time, and undo it, I would.”

“You know that’s theoretically impossible.” Finally, a glimmer of hope.

“I know. And I wish you’d given me a chance to explain instead of leaving. Because that made me discover I kind of have serious abandonment issues.”

“I thought you wanted me to go. That you couldn’t or didn’t love me. And I loved you enough to respect your wishes, even though it killed me. And I was ashamed. Ashamed that I couldn’t keep you safe.” His voice had a jagged edge to it, the pain evident, twisting my insides.

When I stepped forward again, this time he didn’t move back. “Nothing that happened was your fault. I’m so sorry that you felt like you had to go. It was the very last thing I wanted. Because . . .” This was it. No hesitation this time. I wanted to say it. “I love you. You make me crazy sometimes, but I love you. I love your smile, I love your mind, I love that you get all my jokes, I love how you take care of me, I love your good heart, I love—”

He didn’t let me finish. He crushed me against him, pulling me into the warmest, strongest, most loving kiss imaginable. It was better than I had remembered.

“. . . you,” I said breathily when he let me up for air. “I love you.”

Closing his eyes, he put his forehead against mine. “
Ti adoro
.
Ti amo
, Genesis. I love you so much. I never thought I’d hear you say those words to me.”

“I’m going to spend the rest of my life saying them to you.” Being like this, here in his arms, it was all I ever wanted. It made me feel complete. Whole.

I was where I belonged.

“I will never leave you again,” he promised in a low voice that made shivers dance over my bare skin. “And I know you don’t like surprises, so I’m telling you up front. I’m going to ask you to marry me.”

Delirious, happy zings shot around inside me. That sounded like a good plan to me.

Until he got down on one knee and my stomach plummeted into my ankles. “You mean now?”

“Yes, now. I did warn you first.” He reached inside his coat pocket and pulled out a ring box.

“Have you just been walking around with a ring box?” I asked as I pressed my hands against my flushed face, realizing that wasn’t possible. “Did Lemon and Kat tell you I was coming?”

“This is the ring I picked out for you on the show. I carried it in my pocket when I missed you, which was all the time.” I thought of all the time we’d spent together. He’d had this with him the whole time? “And don’t be upset, but when you were taken, Marco put a watch on your passport just in case that monster tried to take you out of the country. So he got an alert when you got on a plane to Milan, and he told me. I didn’t know what you would say or why you were coming, but for the first time in a long time, I had hope.”

This was how my life would be. It would be more public than I’d prefer. Sometimes I would be watched. Sometimes I might feel trapped. But the trade-off was that I got Rafe, and he was worth anything else I had to go through. “I’m not mad,” I told him. “But I will have to go back to Iowa on Monday. I have class.”

“We can spend part of the year here, part in Iowa. We can create a room for your aunt and her husband in the palace, if you’d like. Whatever you want.”

I’d never felt as loved as I did in that moment.

He started to open the box, and then stopped. “Wait. I’m not sure you have follow-through. You never did do what you said you would.”

What in the world was he talking about? “Which was?”

“You never taught me to cook,” he said, his eyes sparkling.

“I suppose I do still owe you cooking lessons.” I put my hands on the sides of his face. “Especially since you taught me to love.”

“In that case . . .” He opened the ring box, and there was an enormous marquise-cut diamond that threatened to blind me.

“Was that your way of asking me to marry you? Because that wasn’t asking.”

He immediately caught my reference to the moment when I’d kissed him on Christmas Eve. “Are you saying you don’t want to marry me?”

“Maybe I don’t.”

“Liar.” He grinned. “Genesis Kelley, will you do me the honor of becoming my princess?”

“Princess Genesis.” I shook my head at the reminder.

“It only rhymes in English. We can make sure you’re addressed as
La Principessa
Genesis.”

“If you promise not to make me a walking Dr. Seuss character, then yes, I suppose I can marry you.”

He slid the ring onto my finger and finally stood up, kissing me again and turning my knees to jelly. “I’m glad to see you still have a way with words.”

“Yes, I’m quite the orator,” he said, holding me close. “So . . . it turns out that I’m the right man. Any idea when the right time will be?”

Probably not as soon as he hoped for. “I’m willing to entertain oral arguments.”

Then he launched into the most persuasive, compelling, mind-blowing argument ever.

Things had started to get a little interesting when we heard someone say, “Ha!”

The sound had come from the open doorway. We broke apart to see Serafina. “I told you! Five sisters! But ew, kissing.”

His sister ran off, cracking up both me and my Prince Wonderful. He kissed me again. “Kat warned you about betting against Serafina.”

She had. And where before it had just been me and Aunt Sylvia, now I would jump full speed ahead to five sisters, two brothers, parents-in-law, an assortment of animals, an uncle, a quasi-stepsister, homes in two countries, and the best husband I could have ever hoped for.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

I just can’t thank you enough for choosing to read this book and coming along for Rafe and Genesis’s wild ride. It is because of readers like you that I get to keep playing in my Monterra sandbox!

If you want to be kept up to date on all the happenings in Monterra (including those princesses who need to grow up and find their own soul mates), please sign up for my mailing list on my website:
www.sariahwilson.com
.

It’s an e-book jungle out there, and authors need all the help they can get. Reviews will help other readers discover and experience that royal Monterran
amore
. I would love it (and be so, so grateful) if you could leave a review of this book on sites like Amazon and Goodreads, should you feel so inclined. Thank you!

Do you want the Monterran stories to continue? Do you wish I’d done something different and want to write your own version? Be sure to check out “The Royals of Monterra” Kindle World on Amazon. You can read stories about the royals by other authors, and you can even submit your own story!

https://kindleworlds.amazon.com/world/Monterra

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First, I must thank each and every reader who has come with me on this journey, who demanded to know what happened to all the princes and left reviews, encouraging me. I am so thankful for all of you!

Thanks to Chris Werner for taking my drama, obstinacy, and competitiveness all in stride, for encouraging me and letting me know how to change things and keeping me on track, and for going out on a limb for me. Thank you to the entire Montlake team, and especially Susan, Kim, Marlene, and Jessica (the awesome sender of flowers!), for everything that you do. I may not be aware of all of it, but I am grateful. Thanks to my developmental editor, Melody Guy, for letting me know all the times I went off the rails (in the absolute nicest way possible) and what did work. And for making me laugh when she changed her mind. Thank you to Sharon Turner Mulvihill for her suggestions and Montreux Rotholtz for completely getting my inner nerd and helping me correct my Iowan mistakes (and for all the excellent copyediting). Achievement earned by fellow gamer Jessica Fogleman for excellent proofreading. Thank you to Damon Freeman of Damonza for my absolutely beautiful cover.

Thanks to Sean Fitzgerald, Joshua Abells, Thom Kephart, and Kindle Worlds for making “The Royals of Monterra” a Kindle World, allowing other authors to write their own stories set in this world. Thanks to M. R. Pritchard, Rebecca Connolly, Jina Bacarr, Marie Long, Carly Carson, Rachel Branton, Caroline Mickelson, Annette Lyon, Carolyn Rae, Debra Erfert, Jennifer D. Bokal, and Cindy Hogan for writing their own Monterran stories.

I also have to thank Lisa Ladle for always quickly and instantly translating whatever I want to say into Italian.

Thank you to Brilliance Audio for creating an audio version of this book, and to Lauren Ezzo for her narration.

To my four children, who continue to grow like weeds, all my love and gratitude that you let me keep writing books.

And thank you to my husband, Kevin, who I don’t think has ever read a single one of my acknowledgements to him, but supports me and loves me in every other way possible.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sariah Wilson has never jumped out of an airplane, never climbed Mount Everest, and is not a former CIA operative. She has, however, been madly, passionately in love with her soul mate and is a fervent believer in happily-ever-afters—which is why she writes romance.
Royal Games
is her seventh happily-ever-after novel. She grew up in Southern California, graduated from Brigham Young University (go Cougars!) with a semi-useless degree in history, and is the oldest of nine (yes, nine) children. She currently lives with the aforementioned soul mate and their four children in Utah, along with three tiger barb fish, a cat named Tiger, and a recently departed hamster that is buried in the backyard (and has nothing at all to do with tigers).

Her website is
www.sariahwilson.com
.