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In order to keep her job at the museum, she’d had to tell them that she could no longer work on the Liandero collection that had been the reason she’d spent so much time in Europe, and had met Vesuvius in the first place. And because she could not expose him—and not only because she had signed NDAs to ensure she never would—she’d had to tell her academic mentor, who had been instrumental in getting her a coveted position at the famed Chicago art museum in the first place, why. Why she would turn her back on what should have surely been the triumph of her career.

She’d had to invent a reckless, one-night affair with some nameless playboy in some other European country that had nothing to do with Liandero or Vesuvius. She’d had to embarrass and diminish herself in the eyes of her colleagues—but, in the end, she’d decided that had been a small price to pay.

Because she’d also bought this house, outright, in a celebrated part of her favorite city in all the world. She knew while still pregnant that she could afford to give her child a marvelous life, filled with opportunity, from education to whatever else her daughter might come to desire. She had been able to recover quickly from Faith’s birth when it happened, not just because her parents had helped out so much, but because she’d had the means to hire night nurses and nannies to help her round the clock. She’d been able to get back to work and to repair her reputation because she knew that Faith was in excellent hands.

She had suffered not at all, and sometimes when she was brutally honest with herself in the small hours of very long nights, she felt guilty about that.

And now, currently, the source of that guilt was standing in her foyer, looking…beset.

When Aeryn had never seen Vesuvius anything but extraordinarily controlled except, perhaps, when he was naked, and in bed, and undone—

But there was absolutely no need to go down that road.

“What are you doing here?” she asked him, when he did not speak. When he continued to look around as if he couldn’t fathom where he was. She couldn’t understand it. “Why on earth are you staggering around in weather like this? You do realize that people die in these conditions, don’t you? Surely it snows in the mountains where you come from too. You should know better.”

His gaze seemed unfocused, but it sharpened on her then. There was snow matted in that rich, dark brown hair of his. It had a tendency toward curling, but he’d always kept it at what she felt was a roguish sort of length for a man with a throne. Maybe that was the only rebellion he truly intended to embrace.

Yet when his eyes met hers, regrettably, they were still that piercing, intense hazel that seemed to sink deep into her, even now. Like a weapon, she tried to tell herself.

But she felt it more like a caress, intimate and consuming.

“What mountains?” he asked.

She tugged her gaze from his because he was dripping now, the snow melting from his body, right here in this foyer where she had vowed to forget him more times than she could count. Aeryn was convinced that this was either some kind of strange dream, or perhaps she was the one who’d succumbed to the snow, and was even now slumped somewhere along the Magnificent Mile, slowly freezing to death and with no chance of discovery until the weather cleared.

But on the off chance that this was real and King Vesuvius was actually in her house in Chicago, Illinois, instead of off in his royal palace in a little wedge of an ancient alpine kingdom between Italy and Liechtenstein, she thought she’d better fetch him a towel.

“Wait here,” she said, her frown beginning to feel a lot more like a scowl. “How long have you been outside?”

“Too long,” he said, and there was something almost haunted about his expression then. Maybe even confused—but this was Vesuvius. He had never been confused about anything in his life, mostly because it had been tightly plotted for him before he drew his first breath. “It was… It was a long walk.”

“From where?” Aeryn shot back at him. “When have you ever been allowed to wander about on your own? Surely you should have an entourage or two?”

“An entourage.” He repeated that, then frowned back at her.

Again with that look that couldn’t possibly be anything close to confused.

That settled strangely inside of her, but Aeryn couldn’t think about it. The more pressing issue was the puddle he was leaving on her floor, which, if she thought about it, was a bit of an apt metaphor for his…entire influence on the course of her life. Of course a snowstorm blew him in on Christmas Eve. Of course he was making her comfortable, deliberately undramatic life these days a mess.

She turned on her heel and moved across the front hall to the linen closet beneath the stairs to pull out a stack of fresh towels. When she marched back and handed them to him, for a moment, she almost thought he didn’t know what to do with them.

“You’re dripping all over my floor,” she said, and pointed, when surely he could feel his own sogginess. But then, maybe his great majesty had never actually been in a state that could be considered soggy before.

“I am,” he agreed after a moment. And after looking down as if to confirm the situation. He blinked, and then he started toweling himself off, and it wasn’t as if she hadn’t seen him do that before. She’d never thought she would see it again, though. And this was different.

It was clear to her that the towels weren’t exactly doing the trick. They took all the matted snow off, which was both a positive and a negative to her mind. Positive in that Vesuvius was no longer caked in snow. Negative in that she could now see him entirely too clearly.

Every part of him. Damn him.

He was named Vesuvius and it was appropriate. He was volcanically beautiful.

For he had the kind of lean, muscled form that begged to be captured and immortalized in marble and bronze, and given his station in life, likely had been. He was naturally athletic, though it also looked as if formalwear had been created specifically to honor his form. He was taller than was fair and the combination of his powerful shoulders and narrow waist often left his many throngs of admirers near to the vapors.

She had tried many times to take him apart, feature by feature to find a flaw, and she supposed she had come up with a list. His nose was a shade too bold. His jaw was a trifle too square. He was not perfect—and yet, there was something about him.

Vesuvius made an empty room feel full when he entered it. He made an overpacked room fall away when he arrived, as if no one existed but him and whoever had his attention. He seemed to carry his own atmosphere with him, perhaps even his own galaxy, and created his very own gravitational pull by simple dint of appearing.

He was a work of art in every sense of the term. Aeryn had never been able to explain it another way.