‘Aren’t we doing precisely that?’
She shook her head. ‘I mean our wedding, our marriage. Talk to me about how it would all work.’
‘The wedding is not something you need to think about. The palace would organise everything. You only need to show up, repeat the right lines, sign on the dotted line and it’s done.’
Her heart turned cold. ‘Wow. That’s every little girl’s dream right there.’
‘Did you dream of a big white wedding, Phoebe?’ he asked, and the question lacked the acerbity she’d become used to from him.
‘I—’ Once upon a time she had. Her eyes flitted sideways. ‘Is it possible that my personal life isn’t going to end up in the tabloids?’
‘Not even remotely possible, no.’
‘So you might as well hear it from me. I was engaged.’
Surprise flashed across his features. ‘That’s not ideal, but we can cope.’
‘Okay, for starters, that’s incredibly hypocritical, given that up until a couple of hours ago you were also planning to marry someone else. And secondly…it gets worse.’
He made a noise that might have been a garbled half-laugh and might have been a groan. ‘Of course it does. Go on.’
‘My fiancé was married to someone else.’ Her voice was so calm, so cold, even though she was telling him something that had shattered her into a billion tiny pieces. ‘They had two babies during the three years we were together. I had no idea, obviously.’
He swore softly under his breath, his eyes scanning hers, and for a moment—the briefest of moments—he was human again, not some angry royal automaton trying to manoeuvre her into a cold marriage of convenience.
‘You really didn’t know?’
She stared at him, aghast. ‘Do you honestly need to ask that?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know you. I thought I did, but this—’ He gestured to her stomach.
She angled her face away, frustration coursing through her. ‘How dare you?’
‘I’ll take that as a no.’
‘I had absolutely no idea. I thought he loved me. I was planning the damned wedding.’ She shivered. ‘I thought I’d found my Prince Charming, and my life was finally, finally going to work out. I was wrong.’ Another shiver.
She didn’t see the emotions that flitted across his face, nor the way a hand tightened into a fist in his lap.
‘How did you find out?’
‘That doesn’t matter. It’s not likely to come out.’
‘Does anyone else know?’
‘Well, my ex, for one.’
‘He’s not likely to reveal this to anyone. Who else?’
‘I don’t know. I didn’t tell anyone the reason we broke up, but I told people we were engaged. So that’s probably going to get out there, and after that, it’s not hard to unpick the rest of it. God, I should probably tell him this first, so he has time to prepare his wife.’
‘You are seriously thinking of how to mitigate that bastard’s inconvenience after what he did to you?’
‘Not for his sake, but for his wife’s. She was just as innocent as I was.’
He swore. ‘Ignore them. They don’t matter to you. If his wife wakes up and realises what he’s like, then he will have to deal with it, and she’ll be better off.’
Phoebe’s stomach swirled.
