CHAPTER FOUR

C RISTHIAN DID NOT find anger to be a productive emotion. He preferred to diffuse any boiling intensity with whatever suited the moment—a joke, withdrawal, distraction. Fury led to rash decisions as much as fear did.

And what was anger but fear with a target?

His target stood on the other side of that glass.

A princess . He knew the kind of games royalty played. He’d been well-versed all his life. The manipulations and maneuverings his mother had gone to great lengths to try to escape. Then, when she’d died instead, he’d been jostled about, isolated from anyone who actually cared, as though he were merely an inanimate object to be possessed or disposed of. A narrative to be protected, not a life to be protected.

Sometimes he thought he was at peace with it.

Sometimes he realized he was not even close.

He watched Zia through the window. She took a deep breath, then disappeared. Before he could find any emotion about that, the doorknob turned, and she opened it. She stood there, framed by the rustic door.

She looked so different—dark hair, green eyes. And yet the same—the slope of her nose, the point of her chin. That regal way she held herself that he’d noted and dismissed in his sexual haze.

Except in the here and now, she seemed softer. More...

Everything inside him dropped out as his gaze lowered. He heard nothing but a high buzzing in his ears. He saw nothing now but a very rounded belly underneath a fuzzy sweater that could not hide it.

A pregnant belly.

“You had better come inside,” she said in that voice he remembered all too well. Like she was all too used to ordering people around. “It’s very cold.”

He didn’t feel the cold at all. Hadn’t, since he’d seen her in that window. And he had no desire to step inside what seemed a cozy enough little cabin out here on this tundra. He wanted to stay rooted to this spot. Or rewind time. Something . But he was a man of action.

He had to be.

He stepped inside, let her close the door behind him. It was certainly warmer in here, out of the bitter wind, but he wasn’t sure it was warm enough for her...condition. He stared at it now, too many things inside him jostling for space when he’d long ago learned that every feeling, thought, and action had an ordered space within.

She’d jumbled it all up almost seven months ago. Now, again. Seven months. “What is this?” he demanded, his voice too rough.

“Perhaps you should tell me why you’re here first,” she said, with a kind of businesslike demeanor that infuriated him beyond reason.

Fury is just fear with a target.

He wanted to growl at his internal monologue, but he didn’t.

“Were you...looking for me?” she asked carefully. There was a neutral look on her face, but he saw something he didn’t like in her eyes. A kind of hope.

For a moment, he was rendered perfectly frozen by it. Hope . When he had settled hope firmly behind him long, long ago. When he’d realized would always be the only person looking out for his own good. When he’d realized he had to take a stand against the forces who wanted him to be nothing more than an anecdote trotted out when they were trying to hide their more sordid truths.

Uncle Gregio found with his pants around his ankles in a young woman’s room? Let’s run an in-depth story on the poor orphaned child of a princess and an actor, raised benevolently by the grieving family—ha!—left behind. Pictures. Of him. Of his parents’ crash. All of it dragged out again.

No, hope was useless, but he had learned it could be a weapon.

It felt like he’d been assaulted. A child. A child growing inside this beautiful woman. A royal child.

Still, he needed a weapon to fight all this. So he could lie. Get under all her defenses and get all the information he desired in seconds flat with said lie, no doubt. Let her believe in that hope until he’d gotten every answer he needed to know how to move forward, and then do whatever needed to be done to fix...this.

But he’d made promises to himself long ago about what kind of man he wanted to be. What kind of legacy he would leave his parents’ memories.

And since he was the only one he trusted to make that legacy, he gave Zia the truth.

“My name is Cristhian Sterling. I was hired by your father to track you down. When he gave me the details of your disappearance early this week, I saw a photograph and this is when I recognized you. He did not mention...” Cristhian waved a hand at her stomach.

“My father’s men have been looking for me for months. He hired you this week ?”

“I am a finder, Zia. I would have found you months ago if he’d come to me.”

Something about the word finder must have struck her, because she tilted her head and studied him. “Cristhian Sterling. I know that name.” Her eyebrows drew together as though she were thinking.

There was some strange relief in her having not known who he was either those months ago. That, if nothing else, the night they had shared had been honest. True.

But a tense, coiling dread at the idea she knew anything about him now that she knew his identity wiped away any relief.

“You...you tracked down Lady Lina Sorenson,” she said after a while. “A friend of mine. Years ago. We were fourteen.”

He immediately remembered the name, because it had been one of the first cases he’d taken on as an official job, on his own, after helping a few of his mother’s relatives track down people.

“You saved her, actually,” Zia continued. “She was in quite a dire situation.”

Cristhian shrugged, remembering all too well how close the young teen had been to being left to the whims of a group of very dangerous gentleman. “This is my job.”

Zia inclined a royal nod. “Ah, yes. So you are here to drag me back to my father.” She shook her head. “He doesn’t know.” She rested her hands over her stomach as if to protect the life inside it. She kept her gaze calm and on his. “It’s best if he doesn’t.”

“Does the father know?” he asked, once again gesturing toward her belly. And maybe he knew what her answer would be. Maybe he knew all too well what he’d just walked into.

But he wanted her to say it. In no uncertain terms.

“Cristhian.” Her voice was scolding, slightly disdainful. “ You are the father.”

And that complicated everything .

Zia still couldn’t quite believe this was happening. A name for the man she’d spent the past six months dreaming about. What had brought him here. Her father . His job. She knew of him, even if she didn’t know him, and that she hadn’t expected at all.

And still, she found herself wanting to throw her arms around him. He was here , and it felt as if...it meant something. Because now he could know, and didn’t that change everything?

But she could tell from the look on his face that it meant and changed nothing.

“So, you were never planning on telling me,” he said, a harsh statement. An indictment, not a question.

She blinked at him. He had been there and knew just how little they knew of each other, so the indictment felt patently unfair. “I did not even know your name , where you came from. How was I supposed to tell you?” Of course, he’d found her, but that had been with her father’s help. It had been by accident .

“You have ample resources, Zia.” Her name rolled off his tongue, and in his unique, piecemeal accent of too many different places to count, her whole body lit up in reaction.

She could not allow that to distract her from the important thing here. Protecting her children. Protecting herself . Her father had sent him, and she did not consider her father an evil man, exactly.

She just knew that what was best for the kingdom was his only priority, and nothing else ranked against that. Not her well-being, not Beau’s. Not their mother’s. The kingdom and only the kingdom. She couldn’t even blame him for that—he’d been bred from the cradle to think and feel and act that way.

She did not know why she couldn’t have absorbed his blind faith in the crown above all else, but she had not been able to. Perhaps only men could be that foolish.

And now this man was here, father of her children or not, as an arm of that crown. And she could not forget that. The crown had never cared about her . Only what she kind of tool she could be used as.

“The hotel would have had my name,” Cristhian continued. “Someone at the bar, the dancing club. So many avenues would have led you to my name and me if you had only tried . ”

She supposed all of that was true, but it never would have occurred to her, which felt like an insult to her intelligence, she supposed. Or maybe how sheltered she was, no matter how hard she tried to be otherwise. But there was no point in lying, in trying to save face.

If her father had hired him, he knew every unsavory detail of her already.

“None of that ever occurred to me, Cristhian. I am not a finder of lost things. I am simply a princess. Not even that anymore. I have left that life behind.”

“Unfortunately, you are wrong. You are just another runaway princess who would do best if she were returned to the responsible people in her life. We will leave at once.”

She sighed heavily. It had been much nicer when he’d only been a fantasy. When she could make him into the man she wanted. Now he’d ruined it, by being like every other man in her acquaintance. Sure he—or the king who’d supplied him the information—knew everything.

When Cristhian clearly knew nothing. He was being paid by the king. And he hadn’t taken this new piece of information into consideration. Because his involvement in her pregnancy changed everything.

“Do you honestly think you can return me to the palace like this and escape unscathed? I can only imagine what my father will do now. You’re not a commoner, are you? Your mother was...some kind of royalty in her own right, was she not?”

He did not respond immediately to that. Instead looked fully impassive, so she cast back trying to remember the story of him. The finder of royal pedigree. His father had been American. A movie star? Something like that. But his mother... “They call you a prince.”

“I am not a prince.”

“Your mother was a princess.” She didn’t remember all the details, but after Lina’s return, there was much talk about the handsome young man who’d saved her. He had indeed been called a finder. Over the years, she thought perhaps she’d heard other stories, though she’d never paid much attention to them. But he was known, and he was royal.

Which was actually a worst-case scenario for the both of them.

“My mother was the youngest of seven princes and princesses of a very, very small country,” he said, and she could read the reluctance in every word.

But each word was pertinent. “Regardless of her place in line, you would be an heir of something. You must have a title yourself. A royal title.”

“I have rejected it,” he returned, looking so stormy and disdainful, and yet... She knew royalty well enough, knew his story somewhat. That would have caused a ripple, and she remembered no ripples.

“Formally?” she returned. She even smiled placidly. “Or in your head when it suits you?” Because she knew plenty of lesser royals who wanted to live in both worlds. Who claimed whatever when it suited them.

She could tell by the way he crossed his arms over his chest and firmed his mouth, without saying a thing, that she’d hit the nail on the head. He didn’t wish to be royalty, but he was, after a fashion. And hadn’t cut all ties with that.

Which made this even more complicated than it had been. “My father will insist we marry. Perhaps I was meant for greater than minor, unknown royalty, but...” She gave her stomach a little pat. “If you take me back, this will seal both of our futures.”

This did not faze Cristhian for even a moment. He lifted a large, muscled shoulder. “Perhaps I will insist we marry.”

Her mouth dropped open at that. “What?”

“I haven’t decided yet. This is a shock. I’ll have to work through the possibilities.”

He couldn’t be serious. “We don’t know each other. We can’t...”

His gaze moved from the top of her head, all the way down to her toes and back up again. Her body throbbed with memories that had kept her warm at night for some time. She now wished she’d eradicated them rather than indulged them many a sleepless night when she’d wished to know his identity. Fantasized about a future that could include the possibility of him in it.

And now he was standing there like a jail sentence. Even if it was one that still made everything inside her buzz with a physical anticipation that did not match her internal, emotional dread.

“We know each other well enough, Princesa,” he said, his voice a low scrape against the most sensitive parts of her.

But he was saying marriage was some kind of option. Returning her to her father was an option. She could only stand, mouth dropped open, air struggling to reach her lungs. Was he insane ?

He made a shooing motion. “Go on then. Pack your things.”

“I will not go back to my father,” she said through gritted teeth. Her hands curled into fists. She knew she couldn’t fight him. Not physically. But the desire to do so coursed through her all the same.

“Not yet. No,” he agreed with annoying ease. “We have some decisions of our own to make first, but not here.” He looked around her small cabin with clear distaste. “We will go to one of my estates.”

“ Estates? Tell me again you’re not royalty, Cristhian.”

“I am a self-made man,” he returned. Then gave a grand, elegant bow, though his gaze never left hers. “I will not wait, Your Highness. We leave in thirty minutes.”