Mia watched them go, then dropped the poker to the floor. “Somebody shoot me now. I know matchmaking is a time-honored Marcelli tradition, but could we please first find out the man in question isn’t an ax murderer?”

Grandma Tessa handed her the passport. “You’re the one who’d know that. Is he who he says he is?”

Mia stared at the picture. So much the same and yet so much different, she thought. Was it possible Diego hadn’t died that night? That he was really the Crown Prince of Calandria?

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “I don’t know anything.”

Grandma Tessa moved to the door. “He was supposed to have been killed five years ago?”

Mia nodded.

“So he’s Danny’s father.”

She nodded again.

“Then this is going to be interesting.”

Twenty minutes later Mia walked into the kitchen. She’d showered and dressed in record time. She would have been down sooner, but she’d debated both putting on makeup and blow-drying her hair. On a normal summer morning she wouldn’t have bothered with either, but this was hardly normal. Besides, if Rafael was really who he said he was, a little mascara and lip gloss were probably a good thing.

She found the man who claimed to be Diego sitting at the kitchen table, being force-fed coffee and toast. Judging from the yummy smell coming from both ovens, fresh scones and cinnamon rolls were already on the way.

“Morning,” she said as she approached the table.

Rafael immediately stood and smiled. “Mia.”

He sounded so pleased to see her, as if he’d been waiting for this moment forever. But he couldn’t have been. They’d been apart for years, and he hadn’t once gotten in touch with her. She had a feeling she was only a simple Google away from being found, so why hadn’t he looked before? And why was he here now?

“Your prince is very charming,” Grandma Tessa said as she held out a cup of coffee. “Too charming, if you ask me.”

“No one did,” Grammy M said tartly. “You’re always looking for the bruise on the apple. Sometimes there isn’t one.”

Grandma Tessa sniffed. “How can you be as old as you are and still so foolish about the world?” She narrowed her gaze as she looked at Rafael. “Crown prince or not, what do we really know about him?”

At that moment, Rafael’s lineage was the least of Mia’s problems.

“This has been fun,” she said, and grabbed Rafael’s coffee cup along with one for herself. “Let’s go for a walk.”

“Stay close to the house,” Grandma Tessa told her. “I’ve called Joe. He’ll be keeping an eye on you.”

“Joe?” Rafael asked as they left the kitchen and stepped into the sunny late June morning. There was still dew on the flowers, and the scent of grapes from the acres of vineyards filled the air.

“The ex-Navy SEAL brother I mentioned before.”

“He lives nearby?”

She handed him his coffee and nodded toward a large house on a hill, less than a quarter mile away. “He lives there.”

“A very close family,” Rafael said.

“You have no idea.” She clutched her coffee in both hands and turned to the man walking next to her. “Who are you and why are you here?”

“I told you. I am the man you knew as Diego.”

“As simple as that?” She tried to laugh, but the effort fell flat. Her mind wouldn’t accept what was happening. She didn’t know what to think, what to feel. Her anger had faded, leaving behind confusion and a sense of loss. As if seeing Diego after so long made her miss him all over again. “Nothing makes sense. You’re supposed to be dead.”

“You have mentioned that before. Are you disappointed to find otherwise?”

“I haven’t decided.” A lie. There were a thousand emotions swirling through her right now, but disappointment wasn’t one of them. “I saw you die.”

“You saw me shot and fall to the ground. There is a difference.”

Not to her. That night was forever etched in her brain. The roar of the helicopter, the way the wind whipped up by the blades slapped her. She’d been crying, screaming, afraid. And then the gunshots. Diego had staggered back before falling. The world had slowed to just that moment, as he hit the ground and the blood poured out of him.

She’d yelled for the pilot to take her back. She’d tried to jump out of the helicopter, but someone had held her in place. She’d strained and clawed but hadn’t been able to break free. They’d flown over Calandria. She remembered staring down at the bright lights, blurry through her tears, knowing that the hole his death had left in her heart would never heal.

“Mia?” He touched her arm.

His voice jerked her back to the present. She pressed her hand on his shoulder and shoved him back. “Dammit, Diego, you lied about dying? You lied and let me suffer all this time and never once thought maybe you should drop me a note saying ‘Hey, not as dead as you’d think’? I mourned you. I didn’t think I was ever going to recover.”

She wanted to hurt him the way she’d been hurt. She could handle anything but betrayal and being played for a fool. She wanted to demand to know why he hadn’t come after her, but she couldn’t seem to ask that. Maybe because his sudden return from the dead illustrated the possibility that he hadn’t loved her as much as she’d loved him.

Or maybe he hadn’t loved her at all.

“Was this just a game?” she demanded. “Let’s jerk around the American girl. It will be so much fun.”

“It wasn’t like that,” he said, staring into her eyes. “I swear. I wanted to tell you the truth. I left Calandria to find you. It took me some time to learn your real name and then to convince your government to give me any information about you.”

Right. Because he wasn’t the only one keeping secrets.

She hadn’t been the ditzy American tourist she’d led him to believe when they’d met. She’d been a newly trained operative, working for the United States government on her first assignment. In the words of James Bond, she had been a spy.

Not a very good one, she could admit now. She’d botched the assignment from the beginning. Fortunately, the only items of value on the line had been Calandrian artifacts, not lives. Not until she’d thought she’d seen her lover die.

“Allow me to start at the beginning,” he said, his voice low and slightly accented.

She was willing to admit she remembered that voice. If she closed her eyes and simply listened to the words, it would be easy to believe, to get lost in a confusing mist of past and present. She almost wanted to-because back then her choices had been the relatively simple right and wrong. Now everything was complicated.

“My cousin Diego never accepted the fact that due to an ancient rule and a quirk of birth order, he would not rule Calandria. As he grew older, he vowed his revenge, on whom I do not know. Perhaps on the country herself. No one could reason with him, not even me, but we were, until our early twenties, close.”

“But if you’re the heir”-a fact she wanted confirmed by a reliable outside source, because thinking about it was just too crazy-“wouldn’t he have resented you the most?”

“In a way he did. Yet we were friends. No matter how I tried to make Diego feel welcome, to give him something to do in our government, he remained bitter. He turned his energy to researching our ancient past and discovered a treasure trove of antiquities just beyond the waves. That discovery itself could have made him a very famous and wealthy man, but for Diego, it wasn’t enough. Instead of announcing his find, he kept the knowledge secret and sold the jewels and artifacts on the black market.”

“I know that part,” Mia said. “That’s why I was sent there-to help uncover the ring of thieves.” She’d been thrilled to get an undercover assignment so quickly after finishing her training. “But you were Diego.”

“Not at first. After he was killed, the director of intelligence came to see me.”

Tiny Calandria had a director of intelligence? The island was barely the size of Manhattan.

“He and his men had decided the best way to trap all the would-be thieves was for me to go in and pretend to be Diego. We told no one. Not even the Americans who were assisting us. As no one knew Diego had died in a car accident outside of Paris, it was easy for me to step into his place.”

She walked to the wooden railing at the edge of the vegetable garden and rested her arms on top. Her head hurt from trying to get all this straight. “You were a plant?”

“Yes.”

“Then you were never the bad guy.”

“Not in the traditional sense.”

Mia would deal with that later. When she was alone, she would pick apart his story, piece by piece, and try to get her mind around the fact that Diego hadn’t been bad at all.

She looked at him, then wished she hadn’t. Listening was safe, but seeing the differences in his appearance startled her. Not that he wasn’t good-looking now, but everything was wrong.

“You set me up. You wanted me to see you die so I would report that little tidbit back to my government. You used me.”

“I didn’t want to, but there wasn’t another way. Per the plan, the authorities arrived to arrest everyone. You escaped, Diego’s people watched Diego die, and the heritage of my country was restored.”

All very tidy, Mia thought, except for the fact that she’d been in love with Diego. She’d gone against all her training and her beliefs when she’d found herself falling for the man she thought was the enemy. Torn between what her head told her was right and what her heart begged her to claim, she’d barely been able to function.

Anger returned. She glared at him. “You must have been so delighted that I conveniently fell in with your plans. Imagine how difficult things would have been if I hadn’t fallen for you.”

“Mia, no. I never meant to hurt you or use you. I wanted to tell you the truth.”