Page 22 of Crowned for His Son

But then, ‘What happened in the past doesn’t change a single thing about what needs to happen for our son’s sake now,’ Azar murmured as they both watched Max eat. ‘He’s the most important thing.Sí?’

Turning her head, she met his implacable gaze, and in a split second a serrated white-hot memory pierced her brain, causing a gasp.

‘What is it?’ he enquired sharply.

She shook her head, her hand going to her midriff as her heart pounded. ‘It’s— Every now and then I get a…a twinge. A memory attempting to break free, the doctor says.’

‘Is it triggered by something specific?’

Sí.That word, spoken in lyrical Spanish with that almost seductive cadence.

Her face flamed as his eyes probed, awaiting her answer. ‘Sometimes,’ she prevaricated.

He stared for another handful of seconds, then exhaled. ‘I have meetings and calls to make. The butler will show you the guest suite when you’re ready. But, Eden…’

‘Yes?’

‘Be prepared to give me an answer when I return.’

‘Or what?’

A slow, heart-thumping smile curved his lips. ‘Don’t ask questions you won’t like the answers to,cara. Suffice it to say, I always get what I want. And trust me when I tell you that claiming the son I didn’t know I had, and ensuring I don’t miss a second of making up the time I’ve lost with him, is number one on my list of desires.’

Long after he’d brushed a kiss on Max’s head and left the room she was grappling with his grave words. Registering that while her father had done the opposite—ruthlessly cutting her off, then ensuring she would never be a threat to him by doing everything in his power to ensure she never thrived—Azar was using his power toclaimhis son. To name him hisheirwithin hours of meeting him.

But surely she was simply dealing with the other side of the same coin.

Wasn’t she?

* * *

Telling his father of his first grandchild’s existence was easier than Azar had anticipated, with the wry reminder that similar circumstances were the reason Azar’s own twin half-brothers existed easing the knots in his gut as he relayed the news.

‘I would prefer my sons don’t make a habit of following too closely in my footsteps, though,’ King Alfonso said, with a grunt that dissolved alarmingly into a hacking cough.

Azar’s fist tightened around his phone, his insides churning as he waited for his father to catch his breath.

‘Not that I would give any of you up for the world,’ King Alfonso added. ‘You and your brothers are the manifestations of a dream I believed would never come true.’

Then why didn’t you fight to prevent the nightmares of our childhood?

Azar grappled with the resurgence of bitterness as his father fell into the story he loved retelling, of how the palace doctors had pronounced him sterile after a bad case of mumps in his late teens. How he’d struggled through accepting that he would never father children and then, straight after finishing university, had gone on a months-long hedonism streak through Europe with a swathe of women. Only to discover after returning home that he’d got not one, but two women pregnant.

Azar’s right to the throne had only come about because he’d been the one born first—a fact he knew had always been and remained the subject that caused severe friction between his mother and his twin brothers’ mother.

Hell, it had been the reason why their respective mothers had spitefully connived to keep them apart until well into their early teens…a situation King Alfonso had been either laughably ineffectual at battling or blindly naïve about until too much harm was done.

Now here he was, following directly in his father’s footsteps. Alfonso had married the woman who’d birthed his first born in a hastily arranged wedding that had surprisingly withstood the test of time, despite her senseless rivalry with the mother of Azar’s twin brothers. And despite the questionable machinations from his mother that had warped Azar’s childhood and left him certain that marriage was anathema to him.

Yes, he’d known from the moment he’d been able to make such deductions for himself that there would come a time when he’d have to marry, to further the Domene line. But despite the recent rumblings through the royal council, telling him that it was time, he’d managed to put it off. Had given himself the mental deadline of age forty before selecting one of the many ‘suitable’ women lined up to be his queen.

Between that, his father’s failing health and the earth-shaking news of his son’s existence, he was surprised he wasn’t knocking back several whiskies to numb the shock.

Blinking, he refocused as his father asked, ‘What’s his name?’

He pulled in a long, sustaining breath, his chest doing that curious squeezing thing when he thought of his son. The boy he would move heaven and earth to protect from the acrimony and indifference he’d suffered.

‘She named him Max.’

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