Royal Surrender - chapter nineteen

Noe could not believe that this was happening.

“I am no one,” she argued.

“You are everything,” Cajetan said simply. “You are the woman I love. Who else should you be?”

“Your people will never accept it,” she assured him, because she knew the world was kinder to people like him because of the accident of his birth. “You are to be their king, and I’m nothing but a commoner. An orphan.”

“A love story,” he reminded her, and her heart hurt. “Then and now.”

“They won’t allow it,” she insisted. “No one in your family goes about marrying commoners. There must be a law.”

“It is a tradition, and traditions are made to be broken,” Cajetan told her, gazing up at her as if he could stay there on his knees forever. “Besides, it seems to me that the best queen I could pick is the one who makes me happy, and in your case, is already so well trained in diplomacy that you might well teach me a thing or two. The question isn’t if you are worthy of being my queen, Noe. But whether I am worthy of being your king.”

“Cajetan…”

“There’s only one question that you must answer, and then all the rest will fall into place,” he told her, his amber eyes so warm, so bright. “Do you love me?”

And the truth was, she was weak. For she had loved him all along.

She had loved him at first sight, or she never would have gone to the Diamond Club in the first place. She never would have risked it.

Not for anything less than the kind of love her parents had known.

Noe had spent her whole life wanting to belong. And here he was, the man of her dreams in the best, most sparkling summer, asking her if she would belong not simply to him, but to an entire kingdom.

But all she could do was stare back at him, stricken by how much and how deeply she wanted this thing that she had been too afraid to hope for.

He pulled a ring from his pocket, a grand diamond.

“To remind us,” he told her with a smile. “Of the best nights of my life.”

But it wasn’t the ring that mattered, it was him.

Her beautiful, impossible prince, who might as well have been conjured up from her wildest daydreams.

Only he was real. And he was here.

And for him, she would happily give up all she’d worked for—because this was better. This was everything.

“Of course I love you,” she told him, finding her voice at last. “Surely you’ve known it from the start.”

“I’ve hoped it.”

And then, as she watched, Cajetan slid that ring on her finger, where it fit like a dream come true.

“Please, Noe,” he said, her charming prince. “Be mine, body and soul, forever.”

And how could she do anything but say yes?

There in her flat, in the narrow bed where she’d always slept alone.

And every day after, for as long as they both drew breath.