Seeing the princesa they adored tipsy and horny and rushing through the halls to screw a rock star in her canopy bed might put them over the edge.
She’d given Aish a head start. She hoped he could read the directions she’d scrawled on the cocktail napkin.
He’d stuck to water as they laughed and danced and mingled, and that discipline in a man whose drunken slurring had landed him in her kingdom, in a boy who encouraged her to run naked into rainstorms, had proven irresistibly provocative. She didn’t want to wait to get back to the hospedería.
As she kicked off her Pradas, hid them behind a suit of armor, picked up her skirts, and ran through this endlessly long wing of the castle, she realized that sometimes discipline could be overrated.
Finally, she reached the hallway leading to her bedroom. At the end, her door was closed. Hopefully, Aish was behind it.
Her eagerness to find out meant that she didn’t notice the open door of a never-used sitting room. But she did hear the regal command that issued from it as she passed.
“Sofia. Ven.”
Joder. She turned to see her mother sitting in a tall, carved-wood chair, the slipcover thrown to the floor beside her. When was the last time her mother had been in this portion of the castle? Titi had soothed their childhood fears and nightmares since the king and queen had installed their suites in a separate wing. It was the one thing Mateo hadn’t changed with his cost-cutting measures.
Sofia glanced at her closed door before she sighed and, head held high, walked into the sitting room steeped in the mustiness of stale air and ancient furniture. She knew from vast experience that it was easier and faster to let the queen have her say. And don mental armor as the queen said it.
Her mother tapped rhinestone-studded nails against the chair arm’s carvings. “What do you think you’re doing?” she asked in Spanish.
“Sneaking away from a party to fuck my lover,” Sofia replied. “You know all about that, Mother.”
The queen stiffened in her teal silk as Sofia eyed her. She was wearing an Elie Saab gown, not new but well taken care of. Sofia was almost impressed how straight and silky her mother’s platinum sheet of hair looked. She was naturally a wavy-haired brunette, and she no longer could employ a team of stylists.
Rather than the responsive rage and slaps Sofia had come to depend on, her mother stayed seated. “Lover. Interesting word. Do you love him?”
Sofia frowned. “What?”
Her mother smiled the smile that Sofia recognized in the mirror, the smile she’d practiced to obscure everything she didn’t want anyone to know. That smile was her most effective mask. She’d erred in forgetting it now and, instead, giving her mother an opening with her surprise.
“You obviously loved him once,” her mother said. “Do you love him again?”
The question, out of her mother’s lips, was strange and jarring. Not once in her entire life had the queen asked about her emotional state.
“Mother, having spent your child-rearing years striving to be as far from me as a private jet would allow, you have no gauge on what is obvious about me.”
“That’s still not an answer.”
Sofia rolled her eyes. She was a millionaire and had dual degrees in enology and wine chemistry. But conversations with her mother could still drag her back to her thirteen-year-old self.
“No... I...not that it matters to you, but no, I don’t love him.” She hated that she’d stuttered. She settled herself into her more dependable emotion of disdain. “I learned the tragedy of that mistake from you.”
Again, her mother surprised her.
“Did you?” the queen asked calmly. “I don’t think so.” She tilted her head, sending that sheaf of hair over her bare, bony, shoulder. And despite it all, the dye job and the tan and the plastic surgery and the self-hating artifice, Sofia still found her so pretty.
“Do you know why our relationship has been difficult?” the queen asked.
“You mean, why you hate me?”
The queen nodded. “Perhaps.”
Now. They were doing this now, while a gorgeous man who would be gone in four days was waiting, hopefully naked, down the hall.
Sofia squared her shoulders. “Because I know what you don’t want anyone to know. I know that you love your cheating, humiliating dog of a husband.”
That night in deep winter, that time of the season when the Picos de Europa declared their dominance over the sun and forced residents to remember they were tiny mortals living among forbidding mountains, Sofia had been so young, only seven or so. She’d still believed she could find a magic combination of words, deeds, and princess prettiness to draw her mother’s attention away from the trips and soirees and boy toys and drooling dukes. Discovering from staff that her mother was in residence, she’d crept into her suite—she wasn’t supposed to be in there—to recite the French she’d learned. Her mother liked non-Spanish things and her tutor told her she looked adorable when she spoke it.
Sofia had heard her mother before she’d found her, in a robe on her dressing room floor, sobbing in a pile of gauzy clothes she’d ripped off the hangers. An empty crystal decanter and broken shards of a perfume bottle glittered near her. The heavy ambergris scent of the perfume was choking in the small space. Her mother had been bleeding and Sofia rushed in to grab a towel and press it to her. The queen started slurring between moans and tears, telling her about how she’d been the timid teenager of a wealthy grocery store chain owner, how she’d felt so blessed to be selected for a young king when all she could offer him was a share of her family’s fortune. The king had made her weep in both good and bad ways on her virginal marriage bed, and then left that bed to have sex with her cousin, who he’d stowed away on their honeymoon yacht. After that initial humiliation,
