Virgin Princess's Marriage Debt

by Pippa Roscoe

  Had she known that was the moment she might have been able to save herself from what was to come, she might have answered differently, he thought. But she hadn’t. Instead, she only confirmed the words he needed to hear.

  He pressed away the excuses she had given him about their time together, the slow erosion that had begun against the bedrock of his need for revenge. The image she had woven between them of a young woman trapped within a gilded cage of duty as she battled the natural, sprite-like instinct within her. Of a reckless young girl, ignorant of the consequences of her actions. His determination had begun to give...to loosen its grip around his plans and his feelings for her.

  But Sofia’s decisions that night had put into motion a chain of events that had led him and his mother to such pain... Had he stayed at the school, gone on to university, his mother would not have had had to work every back-breaking moment of those first five years alongside him, pouring their blood, sweat and tears into the very earth that eventually repaid them. But not without cost. His mother’s heart attack could have been prevented. The bright, determined, loving woman he knew had been transformed into a vulnerable, weakened, pallid imitation of herself. And it had only been by nearly losing everything again that he’d been able to fund her treatment. But he could have done better. He could have taken his mother away from that hardship, from that life-or-death battle, had it not been for Sofia.

  It took him a moment to realise that the buzzing wasn’t just in his ears, but that of a mobile phone nestled on her dressing table.

  ‘Do not answer it,’ he commanded darkly. They were not done yet.

  He watched her take in the number on the screen.

  ‘I have to.’ And for the first time after these ten years of absence he saw fear in her eyes and, speaking into the phone, she asked, ‘What’s wrong?’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  HE HAD MADE Sofia wait while he quickly showered and changed. When she had insisted she needed to go now he had refused, firmly stating that five minutes would do no harm. And she hadn’t been able to tell him why he was wrong. Bound by secrets she bitterly resented.

  She had tried to walk out, but he had caught her arm and ordered her to take a breath. A breath? Even now she felt she hadn’t inhaled once since hearing her mother’s desperate pleas on the phone. He had dogged her steps as she had tried to leave without him, leaving muttered words like ‘stubborn’ and ‘pig-headed’ in their wake.

  She scanned her mind for her father’s routine. For something that would perhaps explain what could have happened to make her mother beg for her presence.

  ‘You need to come here. Now. Please, Sofia.’

  Panic was a feral thing, eating up the small, dark, cramped space of the limousine whisking her away to the small estate where her mother and father lived. Between her fear and Theo’s brooding presence, she could barely move. It pressed in around her as she clutched the silk of the trouser suit at her thigh.

  ‘I’ll ask again—’

  ‘And I’ll say again, Theo, I cannot tell you what’s going on. I don’t even know.’ And she hated the helplessness of her words and the truth in them. As the car drew up to the entrance to her parents’ home, she commanded him to stay in the car.

  And, for once, he must have seen the seriousness of the situation and listened.

  Leaving him leaning against the limousine, the early morning sky barely touched by the light of the sun’s rays, Sofia raced through the halls, the bodyguard who had ridden with the driver flanking her side.

  One floor down from her parents’ living quarters and she could already hear the muffled sounds of her father’s anger. Her speed picked up, nearly causing her to stumble at the top of the marble stairs. She rushed through the heavy wooden doors, partly open as if ready for her arrival.

  ‘Get your hands off me. Do you not know who I am?’ her father demanded, his face red with anger and frustration.

  ‘Of course they do, Frederick.’ Her mother’s gentle, soothing tone was doing nothing to calm her father’s fury.

  The sight of her father’s frail old body being restrained by two men was almost enough to bring a cry to Sofia’s lips. The skin on his arms loose, as if he were a puppy, still yet to grow into himself. Was this growing old? Sofia wondered. Reverting to a childlike state of tantrums, and folds of paper-thin skin?

  ‘Sofia!’ her father cried. ‘Make them see. Make them see that they have to let me go. I need to speak to the council. The Prime Minister wants to raise the duty taxes on the...on the...’ Becoming even more frustrated with his lack of memory, he growled, pushing and pulling against the two men restraining him.

  Sofia didn’t know where he was in his mind, but it wasn’t now. The Prime Minister had greater things to deal with at the moment than raising duty taxes on anything, so it must have been some years ago.

  ‘Papa, it’s okay. We’ll speak to him later. It’s four o’clock in the morning, and he’ll still be asleep. There’s time, Papa.’

  ‘No, there isn’t,’ he said, almost succeeding in throwing off one of the men. Sofia took a step back instinctively, hating the familiarity of the fear thrumming her pulse like a guitarist. Once again she rubbed at her forearm, at the place where a similar night had caused her father to accidentally fracture her arm and two ribs. She’d never forget the look of shock and confusion in her father’s eyes as he’d utterly failed to grasp what he had done. It was a terrible thing to fear her own father.

  ‘It’s you, isn’t it?’ he demanded now, bringing her back to the present with a thump.

  ‘What, Papa?’

  ‘You’re keeping me from him. You only want the throne for yourself. You’ve been...poisoning me. Whispering evil into my courtiers’ ears. You want me gone.’

  ‘Papa, that’s not true,’ Sofia said, gently, knowing that any trace of concern or upset only made him worse. Everything in her cried, no. Proclaimed that she had never wanted it. ‘This country needs you. I need you.’

  ‘You never needed me,’ he growled. ‘Running around the castle like some pixie. Desperate to run off with that Greek boy and turn your back on us all.’

  The stark irony struck home for Sofia, but she tried instead to cling to the quickly changing direction of his chain of thought, so easy to flip between her wanting the throne and wanting to throw it away.

  ‘We should have let you go to him. You will be the death of this country. You were never fit to rule,’ he cried as one of the carers administered an anti-psychotic drug. For them to be doing this now meant that they must have been struggling with him almost since he’d left the engagement party. Sofia knew they would have tried everything else.

  ‘I know, Papa,’ she couldn’t help but admit as he somehow drew out her greatest fears. ‘But I’m trying. I really am.’

  As the two men assisting her father settled him gently back into a chair, her mother watched her with large, shimmering eyes.

  ‘Sofia—’

  ‘It’s okay, Mama, I know. I know he doesn’t mean it,’ she lied as she turned away. Fear, sadness, loss, grief, it all pressed against her skin like little pin pricks, drawing blooms of invisible blood that left her feeling drained and exhausted.

  * * *

  Theo was watching the sun rise slowly over the forest surrounding the estate, the scent of pine and earth slowly unfurling from the ground in the gentle heat of the early morning. He relished that almost sappy resin taste and he tried to combine grape lineages in his mind in an attempt to distract himself from Sofia’s revelation only an hour before.

  He could tell that she had been giving him some truths. There was definitely something she was holding back, but...tiny tendrils of doubt about that night were corroding his fierce belief that she had purposefully set him up. They spread through his chest and tightened around his heart. Because just beneath that erosion was something deeper. Something darker and much more pain
ful. Something that spoke of grief and the acrid taste of loss, one he remembered from years before meeting Sofia. This odd sense that he’d lived with almost all his life...a barely audible whisper from an inner voice...abandoned, again.

  Usually Theo could go for months without thinking of the man who had run from his mother, run from him. But ever since he had set out on this path of revenge he had always been a shadow at the periphery of Theo’s vision, hovering, waiting. He remembered thinking as a child that it was only natural to think of his father and had half convinced himself that when he became a man, when he was eighteen, he’d somehow magically stop thinking of him. And to a certain extent that had been true. But only because of the damage limitation he’d been forced into following Sofia’s actions. But here, in Iondorra, a place that—as far as Theo knew—his father had never set foot, a phantom pain was tingling, burning back into a life he thought he’d long snuffed out.

  The creak of the large doorway at the top of the stone steps to the estate cut through the early morning air, and the moment he saw Sofia all thoughts fled his mind.

  She looked...devastated. And it was horrible. Because he recognised that look. It was the look a child wore, no matter their age, when something truly awful was happening to a parent. He had seen it the moment he’d looked in the mirror after his mother had been taken to hospital.

  He went to take a step towards her but held himself back. He wanted to take her in his arms, to hold her in the way that no one had held him that day. But he couldn’t. Whether for her, or himself, he didn’t know.

  ‘Sofia?’

  She descended the steps as if in a daze, her eyes unseeing, a numbness almost vibrating from her. This woman who had come alive in his arms, to his touch and his need only hours ago, was now hollow and absent. She came to stand before him, her head barely reaching his shoulders, so that he had to bend almost, to try and catch her sightless gaze.

  ‘Sofia...’ Her name almost a plea on his lips.

  ‘Take me away, Theo. Please.’

  Her request rang out over the years from all that time ago, the one he so desperately wanted to forget. They were words he had thrown back at her outside the Parisian ballroom. As if realising it herself, only after it was too late to recall them, she flinched. And then trembled.

  ‘Entáxei.’ He nodded. ‘Okay,’ he repeated for her benefit. ‘We will go.’

  And then he finally gave in to his desire, and pulled her into an embrace.

  * * *

  He had spoken briefly to the chauffeur of the change in plans and, while settling Sofia into the back of the limousine, Theo started on the phone calls needed. He’d pulled up the contact details for Sofia’s personal secretary, ordered her to pack a bag and get it to the airport, and cancelled all Sofia’s appointments for a week. He’d messaged Seb to make his apologies to Maria, realising that he’d be unable to make the exhibition he’d assured her he’d attend the night before.

  As the limousine ate up the miles of smooth tarmac, he began to doubt his decision. He had never taken a woman back to his winery, to the place where his mother still lived. He wondered what she would make of the young princess and hated that he had once had the same thought, under the same circumstances. Hated the fact that he would introduce Sofia to his mother as his fiancée, only to abandon her at the altar. But he would. He must. Because only then would she realise just how much damage she had caused. Just how much hurt...

  But as the limousine passed the castle and carried on, it failed to draw any kind of response from Sofia. The kind of numbness that she wore about her like a shield began to scare him. He remembered that feeling. That hopelessness that was so very easy to hide in. And he couldn’t help the wish, the need, to protect her. To shelter her, even if it ran contrary to his own plans. She needed to get away. She needed to find herself again. And for the first time Theo began to doubt his plan for revenge.

  * * *

  Sofia opened her eyes and frowned in momentary confusion at the unfamiliar sights that met them. And then she remembered. Remembered the short flight on Theo’s private jet, the drive to the exclusive marina, remembered the way that Theo had ushered her onto the small, but beautiful and most definitely luxurious, yacht and walked her straight into the cabin and ordered her to sleep.

  Smooth mahogany surrounded her, and the gentle, rhythmic sway beneath her called her back to that blissful slumber. Sofia wanted nothing more than to bury herself in the comfortable bedding, but unease told her she couldn’t. Instinct, memories, they all crashed about her mind and she felt...it all. The numbness that had settled about her had finally worn off, and everything in her hurt. Ached. Her heart for her father, her head for Theo, and her bones, a deep, low ache—that was for herself.

  Untangling herself from the nest of sheets wrapped around her body, she sat up, swung her legs over the side of the bed and saw a bathroom off to the left. Peeling off clothes that felt days old, she turned on the shower, not even giving it time to warm up. The shocking cool jets of water hit her skin like a slap, bringing her round, before the water warmed and comforted like an embrace.

  By the time she had emerged from the bathroom, a selection of clothes were laid out on the bed. Someone had been in here while she was in the shower. Unseen hands had placed the clothes on the bed she had only just left, an unseen body had been barely a foot from hers while she was naked in the shower, and instinctively she knew. Theo.

  While everything in her wanted to scrabble into the clothes and rush to find him, demand that he take her back to Iondorra, she forced herself to stop. To slow the speeding of her thoughts.

  Take me away, Theo. Please.

  She had asked him for this. She blinked back the tears that pressed against the backs of her eyes. She wouldn’t cry. She wouldn’t break. But she needed this. She needed him. Perhaps, instead of rushing back to be the princess everyone wanted, she could steal this time away, just for herself. Before duty fell like a tolling bell against her, before there was no turning back.

  * * *

  Dressed in a soft white linen shirt and blue capri trousers, Sofia left the bedroom and followed the small galley to the stairs in front of her. The sun beckoned from where it slanted through the shadows and Sofia realised she had no idea what time it was.

  Bare feet took the metal steps up to the deck of the boat, and when she emerged into the light she looked up at the stunning sloping arc of a brilliant white sail against a cloudless azure sky. The yacht was small—as in not one of the monstrosities that many rich Europeans preferred—but long and incredibly beautiful.

  She would have stopped at the sight of the sea, stretching out on all sides as far as the eye could see, the magnificence of the aquamarine water melding with the sky at an invisible horizon. She would have stopped to relish the heat of the sun as it drenched her in a comforting warmth, finding even the darkest places of her heart and healing it beneath the touch of the rays. But nothing, nothing compared to the sight of Theo at the helm of the boat tall and proud as he directed the wheel with just the palms of his hands, his fingers outstretched, his movements smooth and his gaze on the horizon...until he turned that powerful gaze on her.

  The sight of him took her breath away. His dark hair was wind-tousled, and a pair of sunglasses may have masked his eyes, but they did nothing to conceal the proud cheekbones and jut of his strong jaw, a jaw covered in a dark brush of stubble that just cried out to be touched. His white shirt, buttoned low, exposed a chest of defined muscle, dustings of dark swirls hidden then revealed as the linen was shaken by the wind. Dark navy linen trousers hung low on his lean hips, and Sofia bit back a curse or a plea to the gods, she honestly couldn’t tell any more. This was not the man-child she had fallen for in her youth, this was something altogether different. Her eyes ate up the changes in his body, the muscles corded in his forearms, the glimpses of the trail of hair leading below the beltline of his trousers, the wide
stance of his bare feet planting him securely on the wooden deck, looking for all the world as if he were its ruler.

  All these things she had not taken in when they had come together...she had been blinded by passion then, and now? Now he simply stood there bearing the weight of her scrutiny, allowing her to take her fill. It was too much, and she used the excuse of the bright sun to shield her eyes, breaking the connection that had bound them together for a moment.

  ‘There are sunglasses over there. As well as some deck shoes, and in the cooler bag some breakfast.’

  He gestured to the bench just across the deck and she found everything he had described.

  ‘You need to use the sunscreen too,’ he said as he secured the wheel, and disappeared below deck. She sprayed herself liberally with the lotion and donned the pair of beautiful sunglasses. She was just reaching into the cooler bag for a pastry when the scent of fresh coffee mixed with the sea-salt air. She nearly groaned out loud.

  ‘Still drink coffee like a lifeline?’

  ‘Yes,’ she smiled, the feeling on her lips foreign and strange after the last few weeks. ‘Can’t live without it,’ she said, gratefully accepting the mug he offered her. She watched as the sea wind whipped away the steam before it could swirl and dance above the dark liquid. Waiting for it to cool before taking a sip, she turned back to the horizon. ‘Where are we?’

  ‘The Ionian Sea.’

  ‘It’s beautiful.’

  He nodded. And for a moment she was glad that they shared this silence. That he allowed her to listen to the sounds of the waves crashing against the hull of the yacht as it glided through the water, the whip and crack of the sail as it strained against the wind. She knew he had questions, she could feel them emanating from him, but that he had not yet voiced them was a pleasant relief.

  ‘You got your boat,’ she said with a sad smile, remembering their youthful plans of some impossible future, the ones made at the Swiss boarding school.