Shy Queen in the Royal Spotlight Read online

  She curled her toes with delight. There was nothing better than stealing time for just the two of them. She’d never known such fulfilment and happiness.

  ‘So...’ He leaned back to look into her eyes. ‘Has my bringing you here caused any problem for what you had planned?’

  She shook her head. ‘My plan was vague but portable.’ Her heart pounded and to her amazement tears formed, bathing her eyeballs in hot acid that spilled before she could speak any more.

  Alek’s eyes widened. ‘Hester?’

  She nodded quickly. ‘I’m fine.’ All the emotion clogged her throat so she could only whisper. ‘I’m better than fine. You know...’

  He still frowned but a small smile curved his mouth and his hold on her tightened. The contact strengthened her. She trusted him completely—knew she could expose herself, reveal her greatest vulnerability—because he always caught her. He always listened. He cared.

  ‘I’m pregnant,’ she blurted.

  He stared, frozen for eternity before his expression exploded with intensity. ‘Say it again.’

  ‘We’re having a baby.’

  Because this was them, together, and their little unit of two was going to become three.

  A huge rush of air hissed from his lungs and she felt the impact as relief and joy and incredulity radiated from him.

  ‘It’s been hideous keeping it from you these last couple of days.’ She lifted her hands to frame his beloved face. ‘But I wanted to save it just long enough to tell you today.’ She rose on tiptoe and pressed her tear-stained mouth to his.

  They’d decided to delay trying for a little while after their wedding so they could discover and delight in each other and solidify the intense connection they’d forged so quickly. But a few months ago they’d discarded any contraception. And now? Now her joy was so fierce, it burgeoned, encompassing him too.

  ‘Not going to lie—I’m terrified. But I can’t wait, Hester.’

  He pressed her to him and she felt his strong muscles shaking.

  ‘We can still make love? Is it safe—?’

  ‘There’ll only be danger if we don’t!’ She laughed and growled at the same time. ‘I need to have my way with you, my King.’

  ‘Well, you are my Queen and I will always bow before you.’ He didn’t just bow, he dropped to his knees, his hands firm on her hips as he gazed up the length of her still-slim body. ‘I can’t wait to meet our child, Hester.’

  ‘Neither can I.’ She dropped to her knees too—desperate to feel again the pleasure that was only theirs.

  With him she was free and utterly unafraid to reveal everything—her body, her soul, her secrets—all the things that scared her, all the things that delighted her. He didn’t just accept them, he embraced them, and he shared his own so together they were stronger still.

  ‘Alek...’ she breathed, enraptured by the fantasy world into which he’d cast her.

  ‘I’m here, Hester.’

  And he was.

  Because beneath it all—the crowns, the diamonds, the palaces and castles...everything—their love was real.

  * * *

  If you fell in love with Shy Queen in the Royal Spotlight you’re sure to adore these other stories by Natalie Anderson!

  Awakening His Innocent Cinderella

  Pregnant by the Commanding Greek

  The Innocent’s Emergency Wedding

  The Greek’s One-Night Heir

  Available now!

  Keep reading for an excerpt from Claimed in the Italian’s Castle by Caitlin Crews.

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  Claimed in the Italian’s Castle

  by Caitlin Crews

  CHAPTER ONE

  This door you might not open, and you did;

  So enter now, and see for what slight thing

  You are betrayed... Here is no treasure hid,

  No cauldron, no clear crystal mirroring

  The sought-for Truth, no heads of women slain

  For greed like yours, no writhings of distress;

  But only what you see... Look yet again:

  An empty room, cobwebbed and comfortless.

  Yet this alone out of my life I kept

  Unto myself, lest any know me quite;

  And you did so profane me when you crept

  Unto the threshold of this room tonight

  That I must never more behold your face.

  This now is yours. I seek another place.

  —Edna St. Vincent Millay, Bluebeard

  HER SISTERS WERE in a dither.

  This was not an unusual state of affairs. Petronella and Dorothea Charteris had never met a molehill they couldn’t make into the Alps. Angelina, the younger sister they preferred to exclude from anything and everything, usually ignored them.

  But as Angelina slipped through the servants’ passageway this evening, racing to change for dinner after another long day of hiding from her family in this petri dish they called their home, she paused. Because she could hear the rise and fall of her sisters’ voices a little too well, and they weren’t discussing one of their usual topics—like why they were cruelly sequestered away in the family mausoleum as their youth and vitality slipped away...

  Because it never occurred to them to leave and make their own way, as Angelina planned to do, when they could sit at home and complain instead.

  “We shall be slaughtered in our sleep!” Petronella screeched.

  Angelina paused, there on the other side of the paper-thin wall of the drawing room, because that sounded extreme. Even for the notably dramatic Petronella.

  “It will be me, I am sure of it,” Dorothea pronounced in the trembling tones of an Early Christian Martyr. Her happy place, in other words. “He will spirit me away, and no. No, Petronella. Do not attempt to make this better.” Angelina could hear nothing that suggested Petronella had attempted anything of the kind. “It will be a sacrifice—but one I am prepared to make for the sake of our family!”

  Angelina blinked. Dorothea preferred to talk about sacrifices rather than make any, in her experience. What on earth was going on?

  Petronella wailed, then. Like a banshee—a sound she had spent a whole summer some years back perfecting, waking everyone round the clock with what their mother had icily called that caterwauling. That had been the summer Petronella had wanted to go on a Pilates retreat to Bali with the loose group of pointless women of indiscernible means she called friends—when she wasn’t posting competing selfies on social media. Petronella had claimed the screams had nothing at all to do with Papa’s refusal to fund her trip.

  “Everything is blood and pain, Dorothea!” she howled now. “We are doomed!”

  That sounded like the usual drama, so Angelina rolled her eyes. Then, conscious that time was passing and her happiness was directly related to remaining invisible to her stern mother, she hurried along the passage. She took the back stairs two at a time until she reached the family wing. Though it was less a wing and more the far side of the once great house that everyone pretended had not fallen into ruin.

  Charming, her mother liked to say stoutly whether or not anyone had asked. Historic.

  Angelina was well aware that in the village, they used other words. More appropriate words. Rundown, for example. She had once pretended not to hear the grocer’s wife refer to the once-proud Charteris family estate, nestled in what bits of the French countryside her father hadn’t sold off to pay his debts, as “that crumbling old heap.”

  Though it had never been made clear to her whether the woman referred to the house or Angeli
na’s father.

  Either way, while her sisters flounced about screaming and carrying on about everything from the lukewarm temperature of their thin soup at lunch to the lack of funds for the adventures they wished to take with their far flashier friends—because they wished to perform it on social media, not because they had an adventurous bone in either one of their bodies—Angelina had spent another pleasant afternoon practicing piano in the conservatory. A room not a single member of her family had been inside in the last decade, as far as she knew. Mostly because there was nothing there any longer. Just the old piano and Angelina, who far preferred the company of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven to her sisters.

  She had nurtured grand dreams of leaving the family entirely and going off to Paris when she hit eighteen. Or anywhere at all, as long as it was elsewhere. But there had been no money for what her father had sniffed and called her “vanity project.”

  There had been money for Petronella’s Year of Yoga, as Angelina recalled. And for Dorothea’s “art,” which had been two years in Milan with nothing to show for it but some paint smudged on canvases, a fortune spent on wine and cafes, and a period of dressing in deeply dramatic scarves.

  But that was a long time ago. That was when Papa had still pretended he had money.

  “Of course there’s no money for you to play piano,” Dorothea had scoffed. “When Petronella and I have scrimped and saved these past years in the vain hope that Papa might throw us a decent debutante ball. Ironically, of course, but still.”

  Angelina had learned early on that it was better not to argue with her older sisters. That was a quick descent into quicksand and there was no getting out of it on one piece. So she had not pointed out the many problems with her eldest sister’s statement. First, that Dorothea was thirty and Petronella twenty-six—a bit long in the tooth for debutante balls, ironic or otherwise. And second, that there was no point in pronouncing oneself a debutante of any description when one was a member of a rather shabby family clinging desperately to the very outskirts of European high society, such as it was.

  Her sisters did not like to think of themselves as shabby. Or clingy, come to that.

  Even if it was obvious that the house and family were not in a decline. The decline had already happened and they were living in the bitter ashes that remained.

  She slipped into her bedchamber, staring as she always did at the water damage on her bare walls. Her ceiling. All the evidence of winters past, burst pipes, and no money to fix it. Her mother claimed that the family’s reliance on the old ways was a virtue, not a necessity. She waxed rhapsodic about fires in all the fireplaces to heat the house, no matter how cold it got in this part of France. She called it atmospheric. It is our preference, she would tell anyone who even looked as if they might ask. A family custom.

  But the truth was in the cold that never lifted in this place of stone and despair, not even in the summertime. The house was too old, too drafty. It was June now and still chilly, and the picked-bare rooms and stripped walls didn’t help. Slowly, ever so slowly, priceless rugs disappeared from the floors and paintings from their hooks. Family heirlooms no longer took pride of place in the echoing rooms.

  When asked, Mother would laugh gaily, and claim that it was high time for a little spring cleaning—even when it was not spring.

  The more time Papa spent locked up his office, or off on another one of those business trips he returned from looking grim and drawn, the more the house became a crumbling patchwork of what had once been a certain glory.

  Not that Angelina cared. She had her piano. She had music. And unlike her sisters, she had no interest at all in scaling the heights of society—whether that was bright young things who called themselves influencers, who Petronella desperately emulated, or the dizzy heights of the European once-nobles who turned Dorothea’s head.

  All she wanted to do was play her piano.

  It had been her escape as a child and it still was now. Though more and more she dreamed that it might also be her ticket out of this house. And away from these people she knew only through an accident of birth.

  She hurried into the bath attached to her chamber, listening for the comforting symphony of the leaking pipes. She wanted a bath, but the hot water was iffy and she’d spent too much time in the servants’ passage, so she settled instead for a brisk, cold wash in the sink.

  Because evening was coming on fast, and that meant it was time for the nightly charade.

  Mother insisted. The Charteris family might be disappearing where they stood, but Mother intended they should go out holding fast to some remnant of their former grandeur. That was why they maintained what tiny staff they could when surely the salaries should have gone toward Papa’s debts. And it was why, without fail, they were all forced to parade down to a formal dinner every evening.

  And Margrete Charteris, who in her youth had been one of the fabled Laurent sisters, did not take kindly to the sight of her youngest in jeans and a sweater with holes in it. Not to mention, Angelina thought as she stared in the mirror, her silvery blond hair wild and unruly around her and that expression on her face that the piano always brought out. The one Mother referred to as offensively intense.

  Rome could be burning in the drawing room and still Angelina would be expected to smile politely, wear something appropriate, and tame her hair into a ladylike chignon.

  She looked at herself critically in the mirror as she headed for the door again, because it was too easy to draw her mother’s fire. And far better if she took a little extra time now to avoid it.

  The dress she’d chosen from her dwindling wardrobe was a trusty one. A modest shift in a jacquard fabric that made her look like something out of a forties film. And because she knew it would irritate her sisters, she pulled out the pearls her late grandmother had given her on her sixteenth birthday and fastened them around her neck. They were moody, freshwater pearls, in jagged shapes and dark, changeable colors and sat heavily around her neck, like the press of hands.

  Angelina had to keep them hidden where none of her sisters, her mother, or Matrice, the sly and sullen housemaid, could find them. Or they would have long since been switched out, sold off, and replaced with paste.

  She smoothed down the front of her dress and stepped back out into the hallway as the clock began to strike the hour. Seven o’clock.

  This time, she walked sedately down the main hall and took the moldering grand stair to the main floor. She only glanced at the paintings that still hung there in the front hall—the ones that could not be sold, for they had so little value outside the Charteris family. There were all her scowling ancestors lined up in ornate frames that had perhaps once been real gold. And were now more likely spray painted gold, not even gilt.

  Angelina had to bite back laughter at the sudden image of her mother sneaking about in the middle of the night, spray painting hastily-thrown-together old frames and slapping them up over all these paintings of her austere in-laws. Margrete was a woman who liked to make sweeping pronouncements about her own consequence and made up for her loss of her status with a commensurate amount of offended dignity. She would no more spray paint something than she would scale the side of the old house and dance naked around the chimneys.

  Another image that struck Angelina as hilarious.

  She was stifling her laughter behind her hand as she walked into the drawing room, just before the old clock stopped chiming.

  “Are you snickering?” Mother demanded coolly the moment Angelina’s body cleared the doorway. She looked up from the needlepoint she never finished, drawing the thread this way and that without ever completing a project. Because it was what gently bred women did, she’d told them when they were small. It wasn’t about completion, it was about succumbing to one’s duty—which, now she thought about it, had been the sum total of her version of “the talk” when Angelina left girlhood. “What a ghastly, unladylike sight. Sto
p it at once.”

  Angelina did her best to wipe her face clean of the offending laughter. She bowed her head because it was easier and dutifully went to take her place on the lesser of the settees. Her sisters were flung on the larger one opposite. Dorothea wore her trademark teal, though the dress she wore made her look, to Angelina’s way of thinking, like an overstuffed hen. Petronella, by contrast, always wore smoky charcoal shades, the better to emphasize her sloe-eyed, pouty-lipped beauty. None of which was apparent tonight, as her face looked red and mottled.

  That was Angelina’s first inkling that something might actually be truly wrong.

  “Have you told her?” Petronella demanded. It took Angelina a moment to realize she was speaking to their mother, in a wild and accusing tone that Angelina, personally, would not have used on Margrete. “Have you told her of her grisly fate?”

  Dorothea glared at Angelina, then turned that glare back on Petronella. “Don’t be silly, Pet. He’s hardly going to choose Angelina. Why would he? She’s a teenager.”

  Petronella made an aggrieved noise. “You know what men are like. The younger the better. Men like him can afford to indulge themselves as they please.”

  “I’ve no idea what you’re talking about,” Angelina said coolly. She did not add, as usual. “But for the sake of argument, I should point out that I am not, in fact, a teenager. I turned twenty a few months ago.”

  “Why would he choose Angelina?” Dorothea asked again, shrilly. Her dirty-blond hair was cut into a sleek bob that shook when she spoke. “It will be me, of course. As eldest daughter, it is my duty to prostrate myself before this threat. For all of us.”

  “Do come off it,” Petronella snapped right back. “You’re gagging for it to be you. He’s slaughtered six wives and will no doubt chop your head off on your wedding night, but by all means. At least you’ll die a rich man’s widow.” She shifted, brushing out her long, silky, golden blond hair. “Besides. It’s obvious he’ll choose me.”