Virgin Princess's Marriage Debt

by Pippa Roscoe

  ‘Eventually,’ he said, the word marshalled as if he’d wanted to say more.

  Theo resumed his position behind the wheel and she folded her feet beneath her on the bench and sipped at her coffee, savouring the strong hit of caffeine and the smooth, sweet taste of the honey he had added. He remembered. She feared that he remembered everything.

  It had been so easy to embrace her anger for him when he was being demanding, blackmailing and ruthless. Even when he had played her body’s desires against her, plucking strings between them she had long thought severed. But now? Now she could see glimpses of the youth she had fallen for. His kindness, his acceptance of her, unlike anything she had ever known before then, and not since. Not even with Antoine.

  If he had forced her to explain, shouted and demanded, she would have retreated. But in this space he gave her she found herself unfurling, expanding within it in a way that was all about her. Not about duty, or trade negotiations, not about a ring she would wear, or a role she would play for her country, for her family.

  She couldn’t remember the last time she had found time for silence, for herself and her thoughts. Even as she considered it, she felt the rising panic, the fear that something might be happening and she wouldn’t know about it. As much as she hated it, she started to look for her phone.

  ‘Your people have instructions to call me if they need you. They have the number of the yacht’s satellite phone. Your mobile wouldn’t have signal out here anyway.’

  ‘But the meeting with the Hungarian ambassador—’

  ‘Has been rescheduled.’

  ‘And the interview with the New York Times?’

  ‘And with Paris Match, the Iondorran prime minister, and the Swiss consulate. Your assistant is nothing if not efficient.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, smiling at the thought of the apparently ruthlessly organised Theo dealing with her imperious assistant.

  Instead of panic at the thought of all these important events in her diary, she felt oddly relieved. For so long she had borne the brunt of her duties alone. For the first time it felt as if she had someone with her to share the load. Even if only to make the decision she would have known she had to make, but been incapable of making.

  She caught sight of Theo’s cocked head as he observed her. ‘What?’ she asked, feeling around her mouth and chin for flakes of the pastry that might have remained from her breakfast, oddly self-conscious under his scrutiny.

  ‘You don’t mind,’ Theo stated.

  ‘Mind what?’

  ‘That I rearranged it all. I thought you would be hissing like a cat, threatening to throw me overboard and leave me behind in the sea as you hightailed it back to dry land and the nearest helicopter.’

  ‘That’s quite a long chain of thought you had there.’

  ‘You were asleep for quite a while. I had enough time to imagine several possibilities.’

  ‘There was definitely a time that tossing you overboard would have seemed like the right thing to do.’ But her words reminded her that that was almost exactly what she had done ten years before. And just like that the dam was lifted on the all the questions and all the curiosity about him she had hidden beneath layers and years of denial about him. About them. ‘Can I ask...how did you get here? Your own yacht, a billion-euro wine industry...how did you make it happen?’

  * * *

  It hurt him, scratched at a wound that he had buried deep, that she had never thought to find out what had happened to him after that night. That she had so easily discarded him, even as he had at first stalked the internet to find any trace of news of her, as if knowing what she was doing would make the hurt and betrayal any less...or worse in some masochistic way. He pushed back his bitter thoughts and focused on her question.

  ‘When I returned to my mother, she was already packing our belongings. Moritz, my mother’s employer, was understanding, but his wife...not so much. She was furious that I had squandered the opportunity they had so generously provided and was determined that we should not bring further shame to their family name.’ He still remembered the woman screeching at him and his mother from the top of the stairs, the way all the servants in the house had gathered to watch and the way, despite all this, his mother had placed her arms around him as if to protect him. He remembered the last look Moritz had cast him before they had left. One of pity, not shame, but full sadness and disappointment. He had never wanted to see such a look ever again.

  ‘We returned to my mother’s family because there was nowhere else to go. And it started up almost immediately. The snide comments, the years of resentment. My father’s abandonment of his pregnant lover had consigned my mother to a life of shame. And the expulsion from school? Just compounded it.’

  He couldn’t look at Sofia as he told her this. He didn’t want to see her expression, to see the truth of her feelings, so instead he looked out to the horizon as he steered the yacht to some indefinable destination.

  ‘My mother had saved some money. Not a huge amount, but some. Enough to buy some land from her family. They were happy to get rid of it, and us, to the small home nestled in its boundary. The land was hard, dry and difficult and not one of them had ever been able to grow a thing on it. Their small winery was failing and, though they did not welcome her, they welcomed my mother’s money, every last, single cent of it.’ He couldn’t help the bitterness in his tone. He hated them for what they had done to his mother. ‘They could just as easily have given it to us because it had never made them any money and they hadn’t used it for years, almost two generations. Which, ironically, is why it was much easier for me to work with it.

  ‘For the first six months, I simply cleared the land. Each day, each night, bit by bit.’ It was as if the mind-numbing work had been the only thing that had kept him going in those first few months where he’d been so raw it felt as if his very heart was exposed to the elements. The pain, the ache of her betrayal, the humiliation that he’d been taken in by her lies. But now, after all that had happened between them, he began to recognise something else in his feelings... the heartbreak that she had turned her back on him. That she had left him. The jagged, wrenching pain that had made it almost difficult to breathe at times.

  ‘My mother would help.’ But only when she was feeling up to it, he now recognised. ‘I hadn’t realised how much knowledge I’d garnered from working in my mother’s family’s fields. The soil was good, having been left fallow for so long. I worked to ensure decent irrigation systems were in place to not undo all the work already achieved.

  ‘Nikos, my neighbour, would watch from the seat in front of his home. He and my mother would sometimes share a coffee, and occasionally he’d call out suggestions. Mostly he was calling me several shades of a fool for doing it, but,’ Theo said with a smile, ‘it just made me more determined.

  ‘Once the land was cleared, the night before I was to start planting Nikos called me over for dinner. Of course, his idea of food was three-day-old, tough-as-a-boot rabbit stew, but the raki was good. And so was a bottle of wine he produced from his cellar.

  ‘He explained that it was his own wine, from a small variety of grape that had been growing on his land for generations. He’d never told my mother’s family because in his opinion they were money-grabbing, pious malakes—his words—something we both agreed on. We stayed up until about three in the morning that night, drinking the few bottles of wine he’d produced. The problem with his grape was that, while it was hardy, it was also harsh. But it had potential. I think we must have talked about the characteristics of the grape, the barrel, the age, with more detail than scientists discussing genetic testing.

  ‘So the next day, instead of planting pure malagousia, I took a risk. Half the land was the malagousia, and the other half was Nikos’s grape. He didn’t know the lineage of it, and his grandfather had probably forgotten the name of it. To Nikos, it was just wine. To me, it was the perfe
ct grape to blend.

  ‘The first two years were terrible.’ He huffed out a reluctant laugh. It covered the sheer hours of the day he had spent outside, tending to those damn vines. But he wouldn’t have changed it for anything. Those years were ones spent with his mother. Eating together, working together, laughing... Before it was nearly cruelly ripped away from him and he realised the true cost of the land.

  Could he really lay the blame of his mother’s illness at Sofia’s feet? Could he hold to the anger that had driven him over the years and once again the moment she had refused to make a different decision? One that might have prevented his mother from ever having to experience such a devastating attack on her health?

  In the silence that had settled between them he realised that the wind had picked up and set about securing the lines, considering whether or not he needed to bring down the sail.

  ‘Did you ever think about giving up?’

  ‘Every single hour of every single day,’ he replied.

  ‘But you didn’t.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be standing here today if I had.’

  ‘Do you...?’ She paused and it drew his gaze to her. ‘Do you ever wonder,’ she pressed on, ‘what would have happened if I had stayed? If perhaps...we could have had the life we’d hoped for?’

  Whether he blamed her for what happened to his mother or not, Sofia had still not learned the consequences of her actions. Or she would never have asked that damn question.

  ‘Never,’ he bit out.

  Her sigh was stolen by the wind, and he stalked the length of the deck, hoping that she would leave the conversation alone. But his hopes were in vain.

  ‘I do. I thought I hadn’t, but... I was just lying to myself. I did. Especially in those first few months. I’d wake up expecting to see you beside me, expecting to find my reality a dream, and my dream a reality.’ The wistfulness in her voice cut him deep and he tried to ignore it, especially as she stood and made her way towards the side of the yacht. ‘But perhaps,’ she pressed on, ‘it wouldn’t have worked. It was a childhood fantasy. We couldn’t have lived off dreams and desire. Reality would have always been waiting around the corner.’

  ‘We would have made it work,’ he said despite himself, finally looking back at her to find her standing at the side of the yacht, looking out at the sea.

  ‘Really? The princess and...’

  ‘The pauper,’ he replied.

  ‘You were never a pauper to me.’

  ‘You were always a princess to me.’

  The wind cracked the sail, lines creaking and groaning under the sway of the boat. The boom started to move, and terror raced through his veins. He shouted a warning to Sofia, but it was too late—she didn’t hear him and, facing the sea, was ignorant of the oncoming danger. As the large wooden boom swung round with speed and weight he launched himself towards her, but was too far away. Sofia turned just in time to raise her hands to take the brunt of the hit, but not enough to avoid it. It caught her across the shoulder and thrust her into the sea.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THEO HATED HOSPITALS. He felt as if the sterile scent of them carried on the air entered his bloodstream and scratched at him from the inside out. He hadn’t been back to this one since he had mortgaged his life to the hilt to fund his mother’s operation, and he couldn’t stop pacing, desperate to escape its walls, but unable to leave.

  Lyssandros, the doctor who had become his personal physician of sorts, had kicked him out of Sofia’s room for his assessment. Fear. It was a feral, living thing within him. Had he reached her in time? She hadn’t been under the water more than five seconds before he’d dived in to reach her. He’d pulled her out, hauled her onto the deck and secured her as quickly as possible, before he dropped the sail and used the motor to get them back to land, breaking every maritime speed law around the world. A helicopter had met them at the marina, and staff had dealt with the vessel as he and Sofia were brought to the hospital.

  He’d fought with Lyssandros not to leave her side, and even during the MRI scan he’d been in the small booth with the older man, ignoring the quiet discussions and assessments going on around him as he’d been unable to take his eyes from Sofia’s small frame.

  She’d been in and out of consciousness, babbling strange words that had scared him. She seemed to have been having an argument with someone about not wanting to leave. It had taken him a few rounds of the repeated conversation to realise that she wasn’t imagining herself on the yacht with him, but at some long-ago point in time as she begged and pleaded to stay. He’d been able to do nothing but soothe and promise her that he wouldn’t make her leave, but he doubted Sofia had heard him.

  A sound at the door to her private room alerted him, and he spun round to find Lyssandros saying something to a nurse and dismissing her. Finally the older man turned to him.

  ‘She is going to be okay.’

  Breath whooshed out of Theo’s lungs, and he pinched the bridge of his nose as if it were the only thing holding him together. Dóxa to Theó.

  ‘She has a concussion, unsurprisingly, so I want to keep her in overnight at least. Given her...status, it’s possible that her people might want to move her—’

  ‘They don’t know about it yet.’

  ‘Theo,’ the doctor admonished. ‘She’s a princess, so her people, family, even her country, will want to know about this.’

  ‘I’m not keeping it from them, but she needed this time away and—’

  ‘Okay. It’s your call, but if I’m asked—I had no idea who she was, other than your fiancée.’

  ‘That’s very ethical of you.’

  Lyssandros smiled ruefully, though there was a hint of something in the other man’s eyes that made Theo pause.

  ‘What’s wrong? You said she was okay,’ Theo practically growled.

  ‘She is, Theo. She is,’ he said, placing a large hand on Theo’s shoulder. ‘But...look, I really shouldn’t be saying anything, and I wouldn’t...but it did give me some concern. It wouldn’t have been picked up in a normal assessment, but you asked for every test under the sun, and I did them.’ Lyssandros led Theo a little further away from the nurses’ station of the private wing Sofia had been brought to.

  ‘I don’t know what happened, only Sofia will be able to tell you that, but I’ve noticed a few injuries that would seem...unusual for a...for someone of her status.’

  Theo frowned. ‘Injuries? She usually has the reflexes of a cat.’ Or at least she had done when they were at school. She had to have had, to get the headmaster’s car on top of the sports hall. Except when she was distracted, as she had been on the yacht.

  ‘It looks to have happened about a year, maybe a year and a half, ago, from the healing patterns, but around that time she took what must have been a pretty hard hit.’

  ‘A hit from what?’

  Lyssandros shrugged. ‘She had a fractured ulna—’ he gestured to his forearm ‘—and several broken ribs. I only mention it because it’s uncommon for an adult to fracture only one of the two bones in the forearm, unless they are defending themselves.’

  ‘Could she have done it horse riding?’ Theo queried, unable to quite understand how else it could have happened.

  ‘I would have expected more damage, or less, depending.’

  ‘You think it was a person. You think she was attacked.’

  The older man nodded. ‘As I said, it’s only because of her status that I ask.’

  Theo clamped his jaw on a million unasked questions, able to voice only one. ‘May I?’

  ‘Of course,’ Lyssandros said, directing him to the door to Sofia’s room.

  * * *

  Sofia’s throat felt as if someone had poured sand down it, and she was half convinced that someone was trying to prise her head open with a jackhammer. When the door opened she managed to force her eyelids up enough to take i
n a figure wearing blue scrubs, and promptly closed them again. If she never saw another doctor again, it would be too soon. She wanted to go. Where, she wasn’t sure. She didn’t want to be back in Iondorra yet, and she wondered why Theo hadn’t arrived to whisk her away. Had he left her? Had he finally decided that even his wine sales weren’t worth this much hassle? The thought rocked her. Is this what he’d felt that night? Tears began to gather behind her closed eyes, but she wouldn’t cry. Not in front of some stranger.

  ‘Sofia...’

  Her eyes flew open to find Theo coming to sit on the edge of the bed.

  ‘Theo? What are you doing in scrubs?’

  The rueful smile on his perfect lips did nothing to hide the fierce concern in his gaze. ‘Lyssandros, the doctor, told me that I was getting his medical centre wet, so forced me to change into these,’ he said, pulling distastefully at the blue material.

  ‘Why were you wet?’

  ‘Do you not remember? You fell into the sea, and I went in after you.’

  ‘You did?’

  ‘How else would you have got out?’

  Sofia sighed. ‘I’m surprised you didn’t leave me in there,’ she grumbled, frustrated with herself for not being able to put the pieces of what had happened together in her own mind. The doctor—Lyssandros—had explained that it was to be expected, and, as long as the confusion was only around the accident, he wasn’t too concerned. All her tests had come back fine mostly. A bang to the head from the fall, a decent bruise to her shoulder from where the boom had caught her, but aside from that she’d been lucky.

  ‘I was tempted. But the Greek government might frown at the manslaughter of a princess.’

  ‘It would have been murder if you’d intentionally left me.’

  ‘I’d have got away with it.’

  A smile pulled at the corners of her mouth, just as a wave of exhaustion descended. ‘When can I get out of here?’