The Marcelli Princess

She’d yelled for the pilot to take her back. She’d tried to jump out of the helicopter, but someone had held her in place. She’d strained and clawed but hadn’t been able to break free. They’d flown over Calandria. She remembered staring down at the bright lights, blurry through her tears, knowing that the hole his death had left in her heart would never heal.

“Mia?” He touched her arm.

His voice jerked her back to the present. She pressed her hand on his shoulder and shoved him back. “Dammit, Diego, you lied about dying? You lied and let me suffer all this time and never once thought maybe you should drop me a note saying ‘Hey, not as dead as you’d think’? I mourned you. I didn’t think I was ever going to recover.”

She wanted to hurt him the way she’d been hurt. She could handle anything but betrayal and being played for a fool. She wanted to demand to know why he hadn’t come after her, but she couldn’t seem to ask that. Maybe because his sudden return from the dead illustrated the possibility that he hadn’t loved her as much as she’d loved him.

Or maybe he hadn’t loved her at all.

“Was this just a game?” she demanded. “Let’s jerk around the American girl. It will be so much fun.”

“It wasn’t like that,” he said, staring into her eyes. “I swear. I wanted to tell you the truth. I left Calandria to find you. It took me some time to learn your real name and then to convince your government to give me any information about you.”

Right. Because he wasn’t the only one keeping secrets.

She hadn’t been the ditzy American tourist she’d led him to believe when they’d met. She’d been a newly trained operative, working for the United States government on her first assignment. In the words of James Bond, she had been a spy.

Not a very good one, she could admit now. She’d botched the assignment from the beginning. Fortunately, the only items of value on the line had been Calandrian artifacts, not lives. Not until she’d thought she’d seen her lover die.

“Allow me to start at the beginning,” he said, his voice low and slightly accented.

She was willing to admit she remembered that voice. If she closed her eyes and simply listened to the words, it would be easy to believe, to get lost in a confusing mist of past and present. She almost wanted to-because back then her choices had been the relatively simple right and wrong. Now everything was complicated.

“My cousin Diego never accepted the fact that due to an ancient rule and a quirk of birth order, he would not rule Calandria. As he grew older, he vowed his revenge, on whom I do not know. Perhaps on the country herself. No one could reason with him, not even me, but we were, until our early twenties, close.”

“But if you’re the heir”-a fact she wanted confirmed by a reliable outside source, because thinking about it was just too crazy-“wouldn’t he have resented you the most?”

“In a way he did. Yet we were friends. No matter how I tried to make Diego feel welcome, to give him something to do in our government, he remained bitter. He turned his energy to researching our ancient past and discovered a treasure trove of antiquities just beyond the waves. That discovery itself could have made him a very famous and wealthy man, but for Diego, it wasn’t enough. Instead of announcing his find, he kept the knowledge secret and sold the jewels and artifacts on the black market.”

“I know that part,” Mia said. “That’s why I was sent there-to help uncover the ring of thieves.” She’d been thrilled to get an undercover assignment so quickly after finishing her training. “But you were Diego.”

“Not at first. After he was killed, the director of intelligence came to see me.”

Tiny Calandria had a director of intelligence? The island was barely the size of Manhattan.

“He and his men had decided the best way to trap all the would-be thieves was for me to go in and pretend to be Diego. We told no one. Not even the Americans who were assisting us. As no one knew Diego had died in a car accident outside of Paris, it was easy for me to step into his place.”

She walked to the wooden railing at the edge of the vegetable garden and rested her arms on top. Her head hurt from trying to get all this straight. “You were a plant?”

“Yes.”

“Then you were never the bad guy.”

“Not in the traditional sense.”

Mia would deal with that later. When she was alone, she would pick apart his story, piece by piece, and try to get her mind around the fact that Diego hadn’t been bad at all.

She looked at him, then wished she hadn’t. Listening was safe, but seeing the differences in his appearance startled her. Not that he wasn’t good-looking now, but everything was wrong.

“You set me up. You wanted me to see you die so I would report that little tidbit back to my government. You used me.”

“I didn’t want to, but there wasn’t another way. Per the plan, the authorities arrived to arrest everyone. You escaped, Diego’s people watched Diego die, and the heritage of my country was restored.”

All very tidy, Mia thought, except for the fact that she’d been in love with Diego. She’d gone against all her training and her beliefs when she’d found herself falling for the man she thought was the enemy. Torn between what her head told her was right and what her heart begged her to claim, she’d barely been able to function.

Anger returned. She glared at him. “You must have been so delighted that I conveniently fell in with your plans. Imagine how difficult things would have been if I hadn’t fallen for you.”

“Mia, no. I never meant to hurt you or use you. I wanted to tell you the truth.”

“I know, but you were just so busy. There wasn’t any time.” She took a step back. “I suppose the moment you were pushing me onto the helicopter wasn’t convenient enough? Or what about afterward, when I was falling apart? I thought I loved you. I thought you were special, and you walked away and let me think you were dead for five years?”

“I wanted to come after you,” he said. “I needed to tell you the truth. You must believe me.”

“Not a chance. How hard would I have been to find?”

He set his coffee on the fence post. “Your government was not exactly forthcoming. You were an operative and they insisted on protecting your identity. In desperation, I went through diplomatic channels. I used every power of my office to find you. At last I received word from a source I trusted that you had been killed only a few weeks after you had left Calandria.”

“Bullshit.”

He reached for her again, but this time she stayed back.

“I’m not lying,” he said. “I was devastated. I could not imagine a world without your laughter.” He shook his head, then looked away. “I know what I felt and I will not explain myself further.”

If he’d tried to convince her, she wouldn’t have believed him, but the arrogant tilt of his head, the lack of concern for her feelings, sort of made her wonder if he was telling the truth.

Rafael was right-the United States government didn’t give out personal information on intelligence personnel to foreign governments. Even intelligence personnel who quit after their first job.

He stared at the vineyard. “If they hadn’t told me you’d died, I never would have stopped looking. I believe that’s why they made up the story. The source was someone I trusted. I had no reason to question the information.”

“So you knew who I was,” she said.

“I knew you were with the American intelligence community. I knew you were there to get information on the thefts. I knew we were both on the same side.”

“Wish I’d had that information,” she murmured. “So what happened next? You returned to your life?” She shook her head. “Are you really the crown prince?”

He smiled. “You have seen my identification. Speaking of which, I will need my passport returned to me.”

“Sure thing.” She glanced at the driveway and saw the front of the large, long limo with flags fluttering. “You’d better not be lying about that being your car. Even as we speak, my brother is running the plates.”

“Then he will be able to confirm the truth of my statement.” His smile deepened. “Would I really lie about being a prince? Something so easy to prove or disprove?”

He had a point. She sipped her coffee and wished she could take a couple of days to absorb all this.

“Why now?” she asked. “Why did you come back?”