Page 44 of Reclaiming His Ruined Princess

Now she had the freedom, at last, to walk anywhere she liked. To do anything she pleased.

At first she worried that the citizens would respond badly to her presence, but it was the opposite. Everywhere she went, she was recognized, but that wasn’t a bad thing. People stopped to talk to her. Many complimented her for going away with such grace.

“I think I might’ve had a tantrum or two, me,” said one woman she met in the open-air market.

“I would bring the palace down,” vowed another.

“I might have lit a match,” Amalia replied, smiling. “But I stamped it out again.”

After she’d been back on the island for a solid ten days, she had narrowed down her favorite spots and toured the various neighborhoods—on foot, not in a royal procession. She bought herself a lovely little cottage on the hillside, where she could look at the palace but also the sea beyond.

And if she stood there in the first place she’d ever owned, just for her, and looked for the hint of an island fortress on the horizon...she couldn’t really blame herself. That was the good thing about a heart so thoroughly broken. Amalia doubted that any more damage could be done to it. Why not stare at the horizon? Why not cry herself to sleep?

It was just life. Her life, like it or not.

“You must be some kind of saint,” sneered her least favorite paparazzo one morning.

Amalia liked to walk to work, because it gave her time to clear out the cobwebs of the dreams she had each night, all of them featuring Joaquin. She got to breathe in the air that smelled as she recalled it, salt and flowers. She got to be a part of the island instead of in it, yet apart from it. And she liked to tell herself, as she walked along, that this was what being alive was all about.

Feet moving. Heart aching. Breathing in deep, and still, enjoying it all in its own way.

“I hope I’m not a saint,” she replied, smiling when she really did not feel like smiling at all. “Doesn’t that usually involve horrid death?”

“Want to tell me what kind of person gets kicked out of the royal family only to come back and set herself up as an advisor to the very person who kicked her out?” He shook his head, the odious man. “I’ll tell you what kind of person. A snake or a con.”

“Believe what you like, Maurizio,” she replied, with an airiness she was delighted to discover she actually felt. Because as little as she liked this man, she really didn’t care what he said about her. It reflected badly on absolutely no one. He could think whatever he wanted about her. “You will anyway, and I’m sure your paper will love that.”

Later that day, after preparing Delaney for a series of engagements that were deemed ceremonial but would actually be a test, Amalia ducked into a salon she knew was little used to make some notes.

And when she glanced up again, the Queen was there.

For a moment she could only stare. Then she remembered herself, and rose to her feet so that she could execute a proper curtsy. And not the one she’d used to greet her mother the first time she saw her each day, but the kind of curtsy she had not been called upon to give before. Deep and low, as befitting a commoner before a queen.

“I think that by rights you are an American,” Esme said coolly. “And as such are not required to curtsy to anyone.”

Amalia rose. “But I still think of you as my mother,” she replied simply. “And I don’t have it in me not to honor you.”

She’d meant that to come out lightly. She wasn’t prepared for the fact thatlightlywasn’t how it seemed to land. It hung there between them instead.

Then, as she watched, Queen Esme of Ile d’Montagne, who eschewed weakness in all its forms...looked very much as if there were tears in her eyes.

“I hope you know,” the Queen said after a very long moment, and not in her usual ringing tones. “That is, I hope you understand...”

There was a time when Amalia would have leaped in to finish the sentence for her. To save her mother from anything, even what passed for her maternal duties. She didn’t do that today. She was a new person, wasn’t she?

So she waited.

“I only know how to care about one thing,” Esme said stiffly, still with eyes far too bright. “This did not distress me overmuch, because I raised you to care deeply about the same thing. And I believed, for all these years, that whatever I lacked as a mother I would make up somehow as Queen. It never occurred to me that I could lose you, Amalia. I find what has happened...” She sighed. “It is unthinkable. I cannot fathom any part of it.”

“Delaney will be a far better crown princess than I ever could be,” Amalia said, and she knew she would have said that anyway. But she found she meant it as much when Delaney wasn’t in the room as when she was. “And she’s the rightful Princess besides. That matters.”

“But she has gone and married an Arcieri,” Esme said bitterly. Then she blew out a breath. “And she is not mine. Not the way you are.”

The old Amalia would have been replete at this. For a woman who was in no way demonstrative, Esme might as well have taken up skywriting with those two small sentences that set years of her life aglow in retrospect.

But Amalia was not the person who had stuck away from this palace, under cover of night. She was the Amalia who had knelt upon stone and walked through fire. She was the Amalia who had found a kind of peace in a Kansas cornfield and who had looked a stranger in the face and known her instantly.

She was the Amalia who had lost the man she loved three times. And had no hope that anything could ever change that. Some fortresses could be renovated and made into luxury hotels. She’d seen that with her own eyes.