The Prince's Scandalous Baby Read online

  She rewrote the email four times. She wanted, badly, just to send it off and not have to sit there, worrying about what might happen while she edited. In the end, though, she had what she thought was the perfect message. She thought it indicated, just enough, that she personally knew the Prince, without making it obvious that they’d been intimate—although she imagined that any number of girls the Prince had been with had probably written similar emails, trying to get another shot with him. At least, that was what her googling of the Prince after the fact had led her to believe.

  And then she waited. For four days, there was no reply. And then, finally, a message arrived in her inbox from the royal family’s domain. Unfortunately, the sender was listed as “Contact”, not Giancarlo’s name.

  It took her a full minute, looking at the email subject, before she worked up the courage to open it and read what it said.

  Dear Juliette,

  We thank you for your interest in meeting the Crown Prince. As a citizen of Campania, we understand that you feel very close to him. Many of us feel this way, and we are happy to count you among his fans.

  Unfortunately, Prince Giancarlo does not have any public appearances planned for the near future. If you would like to be notified about any future public appearances where you can show your support for the Royal Family, feel free to sign up for our newsletter by clicking here.

  Had they even read her letter? Juliette felt nauseous, as she had so often lately. But this time it wasn’t the baby laying her low.

  They’d treated her like she was a fan! The opportunity to sign up for a newsletter, to “show support” at his next public appearance? It all felt so wrong. She was carrying the man’s child, and all she had to show for it was a form letter.

  They hadn’t read her email. It wasn’t possible. They must have been behind on things, which was why they hadn’t gotten back to her for so long. That would explain why whatever intern manning the email account hadn’t understood what she’d meant by her message.

  She wrote again, this time putting “[IMPORTANT]” in the subject line, in the hope that that would get her message a little more personal attention. She included her phone number, too, in case they wanted to call her. Although every time she tried to connect to the contact number listed on the website, the line went dead.

  It only took two days for them to reply this time, which seemed more promising. But, when she opened the email, Juliette saw that it was yet another form letter. This one was a bit more insistent, talking about how the royal family loved their citizens, but valued their privacy. It offered the same link to sign up for a newsletter, and had a note at the bottom stating that any further emails from this address would not be answered.

  She closed the email after one angry read through. She couldn’t look at it for a while after that. She didn’t want to think about it. She felt insulted, but she also felt regretful that she hadn’t been more upfront in the initial email.

  She’d been so careful not to say anything that might cause an awkward conversation between the Prince and his staff that she’d managed to blow her chance at getting through to him.

  The more she thought about it, the more Juliette realized that she would need to be more forthcoming. She needed to drop specific details, and, while she wouldn’t announce her pregnancy in the email itself, she would certainly make sure that whoever was reading it would understand that she was someone who could do damage to them if she weren’t paid attention to.

  She didn’t relish the thought of doing that, but she knew she had to. So she told herself she would give herself a few days to think before sending her next email—from a newly created address. She was dreading it, but it would have to be done.

  But on the third day, while she was in the middle of filling out an extremely detailed online application form for a job for which she was overqualified, that was asking for information that was already on her resume, her phone started vibrating on her desk.

  Glad for the distraction, Juliette picked it up. She was expecting a call from a friend from high school who was coming through town and wanted to catch up.

  When she saw the number began with an Italian country code, however, she sat up straighter in her seat.

  “Pronto,” she answered hesitantly.

  “Please hold,” the polite feminine voice on the other side of the line said in Italian, and then a saccharine pop song began to play.

  Not sure what to do, Juliette waited, her hopes already getting up, and her heart beating hard in her chest.

  Finally, she was going to hear his voice again. She felt sure of it. She’d thought she didn’t want to, when she’d left Italy. But since then, it had been all she really wanted. She hadn’t realized how much, until just this moment.

  But the voice that came on the line was not Giancarlo’s. Neither was it the slightest bit polite.

  “You want to meet the Prince?” the male speaker said, without preamble.

  Juliette hesitated. Something about the voice set her on edge. He didn’t sound like an assistant—friendly or otherwise. And he certainly didn’t sound like a member of the PR team. No one who made their living talking to the public would have this sort of brusque way about them.

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m trying to get in contact with him. If you tell him it’s Juliette, I’m sure he’ll want to—”

  “I understand,” the voice said, cutting her off. “If you still want to meet him, you may do so. But it must be done in person.”

  Juliette thought back to the last time she’d looked at her bank account balance and student loans repayment plan. It wasn’t a pretty picture.

  “If I could just get a number for him…”

  The silence that greeted that suggestion was as good as a refusal.

  “How long will it take you to get here?” the voice asked. “I see this is an American number.”

  “Yes,” she said, “it is. I’m not sure. A few days? Maybe?”

  She wasn’t sure that whether she should have said later, so that she could have gotten more affordable tickets and had time to explain to her parents. But she wasn’t given an option to change her mind. As soon as she spoke, the voice was gone, and the line came alive with the same hold music that had played earlier.

  She pulled the phone from her ear and looked at it, as though that would help her understand what was going on.

  After a moment, the same polite female voice came over the line.

  “Juliette?”

  “Yes, I’m here.”

  “I have you down for next Friday at the palace at 3 pm. Is this correct?”

  A million words sprang up in Juliette’s mind to answer, but she was certain that this was not a woman who it would do any good to say them to.

  “Yes,” she said instead. “That’s correct.”

  “Excellent. Goodbye.”

  Then the line went dead, and Juliette was left staring at it, wishing it would make some kind of sense in retrospect.

  ELEVEN

  The flight back to Italy was even worse than the flight to Wisconsin had been. This time, instead of feeling vaguely melancholic and regretful, Juliette was consumed with nerves. She couldn’t sleep the whole way, even as her body told her that she was exhausted. And she had to keep heading to the bathroom with every nauseous wave. Her body had apparently decided that, since it couldn’t tell when morning was supposed to be, it would just be sick constantly.

  The fact that she was going to see her beloved Italy again—the one silver lining to the whole thing—wasn’t even as good as she’d hoped it would be. She’d heard the phrase that you can never go home again, sure, but she hadn’t expected it would apply here. She’d thought that, somehow, she would just slide back into the way things had been.

  But as soon as she landed, and Juliette realized that she would not be able to go to her comfortable little apartment, or go through any of her usual routines. She felt more like she’d lost Italy than she had when she was half a world away.
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  She didn’t tell her friends she was back. She wouldn’t know what to tell them. Besides, she didn’t know if the Prince would be angry if she told anyone she was pregnant with his child before she told him, and she didn’t want to take the chance.

  So, alone, she went to a hotel.

  It was late on Thursday night, and she had a whole night to sleep and a whole morning to prepare herself for the next day. She’d planned it this way, but she hadn’t taken into account the fact that her body would be ravaged by jetlag and its less-than-calm emotional state.

  So, instead of sleeping, she looked out the window. She’d gone for the cheapest hotel that she could find, so that she would be able to get the whole trip bought under her credit card limit. The room wasn’t nice or particularly central, but it did have a pretty good view.

  She felt a twinge of sadness as she found among the mess of buildings the newly-restored baroque theater she’d talked to Giancarlo about. Did he think she’d made up that opinion, along with her supposed profession? Did he know that she’d meant every word of it? Had he been able to tell?

  She wished she knew. Maybe she would ask him, if they were able to get to the point where they could talk to each other that way.

  By morning, Juliette had only managed a few hours of fitful sleep. It wasn’t enough, she knew, but she wasn’t going to get any more. She needed to get out of the room; the very walls felt like they had been stained with the speculation and worry that she’d been throwing against them all night.

  So, she went for a walk.

  She headed for the city. The palace was on the other side of it, and she wanted to see everything again. She was no longer sure what the future held, so she no longer had the thought hanging over her that this would be the last time she would see any of it. But she had missed it.

  She went and had lunch at a place she used to frequent all the time. One of the waitresses recognized her, and said it was good to have her back. She kept noticing little changes—a picture on the wall she couldn’t remember seeing before; two tables that were in a different order than they had been. But what bothered her the most was that she couldn’t tell if anything had actually changed, or if she just didn’t remember it very well.

  She stayed at the café for a while. She had her tablet with her, so that she could check her email. She had heard back from a job, and needed to write a reply to them, but was at a loss how to explain to them that she was in Italy at the moment. She didn’t even know, for sure, when she’d be back. So much was hanging on her meeting with Giancarlo.

  At last, it was time. Juliette packed up her tablet and paid her bill, before calling a cab. A part of her wanted to walk some more to get her nervous energy out, but the nervous energy was just thin plastering over a deep layer of exhaustion.

  When the cab pulled up at the palace, Juliette barely recognized the place. She had thought back so often to everything that had happened here that it had all warped in her memory. The windows had grown bigger. The wall had grown higher. The sea had grown closer, and the building had grown wider.

  But it was the same place, she knew—it even had the scaffolding still up to prove it. When she got out of the car, Juliette could even see the patch of grass in the gardens where she and Nico had sat and watched the sunset.

  She could have laughed at herself, if she didn’t already have the uneasy feeling that she was being watched. Nico. She’d done so well since she found out his true identity not calling him that. But somehow, being back here brought that night so clear in her memory, and made it harder to think of anything after it as really having happened.

  As the cab drove away, she suddenly felt very alone. The gate was open, and she wandered through it, but no one was on the other side to greet her. The work was still underway, but there were no workmen around today, nor any sounds of them elsewhere on the property.

  She was worried, for a moment, that she’d somehow gotten the location wrong. But she’d asked around, and done her research, and this was definitely the palace that the woman on the phone had referred to.

  Her next thought was an even less welcome one.

  She’d been duped.

  Maybe that was it; someone in the PR office had gotten tired of dealing with requests from Giancarlo’s conquests—stupid, love-struck girls—and had decided to have a little fun with this one from so far away. They’d had her fly all the way to Italy, only to leave her hanging here.

  The only thing she had to wonder was whether they had chosen this location just because they knew that no one would be around, or if they knew that this was somewhere that had special significance to the Prince.

  Maybe he brought all his one-night stands here, she thought, bitterly. Would that make it easier, or harder to accept that she was on her own with the child he would never know he had?

  The cab was gone. She’d have to call another. She got out her phone, and was about to dial when she felt a wave of nausea, followed by a wave of anger. It was his fault that she felt sick to her stomach. And it was his fault for hiring such hateful people that she had been lured out here. She had been financially ruined by the trip back to Naples, and was still no closer to knowing what to tell her parents about what had happened.

  The least he could do was to lend her his bathroom to be sick in, even if he didn’t know it was happening.

  She walked up the stairs to the grand front entrance. It probably wouldn’t be open, she knew, but she had to try anyway. Better that than being sick into the perfectly manicured bushes.

  To Juliette’s surprise, the door handle gave way under her gentle pressure. She was relieved for only a moment, however, before her heart dropped all the way into her tumultuous stomach.

  There, standing just a few feet away from her, was Rafaele—King of Campania.

  TWELVE

  “Won’t you come in, dear?”

  The King’s words were kind, but his tone was not. Juliette recognized his voice immediately as the one she had heard on the phone. The icy chill it had had before was only more intense in person.

  She followed his gesturing hand inside the house, and wandered forward as he led her into the salon.

  The view was still amazing. The frescoes—the ones she’d been too upset to look at on her way out—were easier to see in the daylight than they had been at night. They were beautiful. She found herself fixating on them. Something gorgeous in the midst of all this uncertainty. It was a small comfort.

  “Please,” the King said, pulling her attention away from the walls. “Won’t you sit down?”

  Two large, uncomfortable-looking wooden chairs had been set in the middle of the living room. They hadn’t been here before, Juliette knew. She imagined they’d been brought in just for the purpose. They seemed out of place in the midst of all the signs of renovation around them.

  She sat in one of them, finding it exactly as uncomfortable as it had looked.

  “You are Juliette, correct?”

  Juliette cleared her throat to speak. It was the first time she’d spoken since she’d told the driver where to go, and her voice sounded weak even to her own ears.

  “Yes, I am.”

  “And you’ve been attempting to contact my son, have you not?”

  She nodded. Her eyes were large, she knew. It probably made her look even more out of place than she already felt, but she couldn’t change it. Something about the man and the situation terrified her.

  “Ah, what am I doing?” the King said. His tone had gotten a little bit friendlier—or at least he’d tried to make it so. To Juliette, the malevolent tones underneath still rang through. “I’ve been drinking a lovely Pinot as I’ve been waiting for you. Would you like a glass?”

  He was putting on a show as though he had just remembered he had it on hand, and that it would be a good thing to offer to a guest. He hadn’t forgotten. It wasn’t a coincidence. Juliette felt her blood boil just as it had the last time she was here. Only this time, her ire was directed at a more deservin
g target.

  “No, thank you,” she said, quietly. This was a trap.

  He smiled at her widely, but not kindly. “I’m afraid I insist! Any friend of my son’s is a friend of mine, and I always like to share an afternoon glass of wine with my friends. Will you refuse the King of Campania?”

  “Why don’t you just come out and say it?” Juliette said. She could feel her hands trembling as she clasped them in her lap.

  “You want to speak plainly? Very well, then. It will save us both some time.”

  He set down the glass he’d been offering her on the floor beside him. A servant appeared from nowhere and whisked it away. The King’s servants were probably all like that, Juliette imagined—chosen for their ability to just fade into the background.