by Maisey Yates
She knew he was talking about facing the press. “Yes.”
He walked out of the hospital and she followed slowly, dread filling her, her brain fuzzy, the world titled slightly.
“As has already been reported, in less than flattering words,” he said, his voice loud, the microphones unnecessary, “I have returned, and I intend to take my place as heir to the throne. Of course, while my father is unwell, that doesn’t mean it will happen now, or even in the next year, but I am here, and I’m here to stay. Layna Xenakos has graciously agreed to partner with me as I get familiarized with my home again. She’s been living in service to this country, and she is the best choice, in my opinion, to show me where the greatest needs lie. If Layna can forgive me my choices, and welcome me back, I hope that her forgiveness is the start of my earning forgiveness from everyone. Though, I know that is a lot to ask. We all want what is best for the country. If you can’t trust me, at least, for now perhaps, we can stand united in that.”
The air roared with questions as the press crushed in on them both. Xander took her hand and pulled her through the crowd. She tried to keep her head down, tried to keep them from being able to snap shots of the worst of her damaged face. Tried to let all of the questions blend into an indistinct blur so that she didn’t hear any of them.
But she heard words. Attack. Scars. Beauty. Ugly.
She’d never spoken to the press after her attack, and neither had her family. There were so many unanswered questions for them. Between her and Xander the press had the most salacious bits of the past, right there before them, and they were rabid now.
“In the car,” Xander said, opening the door. She obeyed and slid inside. He followed, slamming the door behind them. “Back to the palace,” he said before putting the divider up between them and the driver.
He let out a rough breath and put his head back on the seat. “Well, that went a bit better than anticipated.”
“Did it?” she asked.
“They let me make a statement before mobbing us.”
“Okay, yeah, there’s that.”
“It was better than they can be.”
She looked at him. “How have you managed to avoid the press all these years?”
“Easy, actually. I don’t go to places where they hang out. There will be no place to avoid them in Kyonos, but in the rest of Europe? In the States? No one cares. I made brief splashes in tabloids for the first couple of years. ‘Dishonorable Heir Gambles Away His Fortune,’ et cetera. But then people lost interest.”
“I suppose it was the same for me. After the attack it was news. But they weren’t allowed in the hospital to interview me. Then I was in too much pain to even consider talking to anyone. For a long time. I had a lot of surgeries.” She didn’t even like to say how many. “After that I didn’t go anywhere. My parents moved to Greece where, you’re right, no one cares about the drama that happened here, and I stayed on in their house with their servants for a while.”
“Why didn’t you leave?”
She frowned. “I...I was too tired.” It was a terrible thing to admit. Even to remember. The depression had controlled her, not just emotionally, but physically. Breathing had often seemed too big of a trial. To move to Greece? It would have been unthinkable.
Those years were a haze, where she kept herself cradled by the gentle hands of painkillers that helped her sleep, helped her ignore the pain from her most recent surgery, and helped her live her days with blunted senses.
She preferred never to remember them. She’d come too far since then, and that place had been too dark. Although, there were times when it was important to remember it. It reminded her just how bright the sun was. How much better things were now.
Even sitting in the limo with Xander, with the press all but chasing the limo, it was better than that place. Because above all else, she had control now. She could leave if she chose. Could get up and walk away from Xander, from whatever she wanted to.
She had the power now. The energy and strength inside of herself to do it. She would never be stuck again.
“And has it been better here? Are you happy with your decision to stay?”
“It was terrible here, at first. That first five years...it was hell. The recovery was awful, Xander, I won’t lie. It wouldn’t have mattered where I was, not really. But when I got...well, when I got the worst, and I knew I had to figure out how to get better, it was right to change things as radically as I could. And that’s why the convent was best for me. It’s impossible to worry too much about your own drama when you have to confront what’s happening with others.”
“How did you connect with them?” he asked.
She looked down at her hands and smiled. “Some of the Sisters visited me in the hospital when I was recovering. And after every surgery. They checked on me sometimes. They cared. And they didn’t look at me and see my scars. But they did see my pain, and they...cared.”
“Your family?”
She sighed. “They didn’t realize how bad it was. How bad it had gotten for me. Mainly because I lied to them. I told them I was fine when I wasn’t and they wanted to believe I was telling the truth because it was so much easier. I don’t blame them at all.”
“Do you blame me?”
His words were stark in the silence of the car. Emotionless. He was asking, but he gave no indication that he cared either way.
“Yes,” she said, and only realized just when she spoke the words that she meant them. That she did blame him, deep down, for the pain, for the isolation.
If he had stayed, at least she would have had a husband to stand by her. And maybe it would never have happened. Maybe the economy wouldn’t have crashed, that she could never know. But she could have had someone.
She wouldn’t have lost everything.
He nodded slowly. “I think that’s fair. And I can handle having another sin added to the list.”
“Do you think so?”
“Confession would take too long at this point, Layna. I’m beyond it. I might as well just accept it for what it is and move on from there.”
Her heart thundered, anger burning through her veins. “At least you can move on. Gloss over it, pretend it didn’t happen. It’s a lot harder to do that when you have to look at the effects of the past in the mirror every day.”
“Then how about I wake up to the effects of the past every morning?”
“What?” she asked, her stomach hollowing out.
“I’ve changed my mind about changing my mind.” He put his legs out straight in front of him, his eyes fixed ahead. “After thinking about it, I believe the best idea is for you to marry me.”
CHAPTER SIX
SHE HAD BEEN silent the rest of the ride back the palace. He supposed that it was probably a no, but he wasn’t going to let her get away with not giving an answer. In his mind, it just meant he had to change hers.
“I’m tired,” she said, once they reached the entryway of the palace. “I’m going to my room.”
“I shall accompany you.”
“No, you shall not,” she said, starting to walk away from him, down an empty corridor, away from where the servants were bustling around.
“Then we will speak here.”
“No, we won’t.”
He went to stand in front of her and she stopped and backed up quickly, her back making contact with the wall. “Yes,” he said, advancing on her. “We will.”
He studied her face, really studied it, for the first time since that day at the convent. It was a shame what had been done to her beauty. She’d been uncommon. He could remember her clearly. Those full pink lips, smooth skin, perfectly arched brows. Oh, he had wanted her badly. He could still remember that.
Being twenty-one and wanting his fiancée with a ferocity that he could scarcely understan
d. He’d been no virgin, even then, but she’d made him feel like one. And his father had made it clear Xander wasn’t allowed to touch her, at least not until closer to the wedding. Something about respect and honor. About preserving the people’s vision of their future queen.
So he had obeyed.
But they never would have made it that long. The chemistry had been too potent.
He’d nearly kissed her once. He remembered because it had happened the day before his mother’s death. The day before the revelation about who he really was.
After that, he hadn’t seen her.
He lifted his hand and put his fingertips on her scar-roughened cheek, drawing them down her neck. He could imagine the attack clearly, how it had made these particular scars. A hard hit to her cheek, spray over her nose, eye and forehead, down one side of her neck.
The other side of her face was virtually untouched, but it made her scars all the more shocking. It gave them contrast. A living, breathing before-and-after shot.
“Can you feel that?” he asked.
She nodded slowly. “Some. Where the grafts are.”
“Some of this is a graft?”
“Yes. Not...nothing more than was necessary because I couldn’t bear for them to add more scars to my body and...it would never have looked normal anyway. As it is, it’s kind of Frankenstein’s monster.”
“You’re hardly a monster,” he said.
“Flattery won’t get you your way,” she said, her tone guarded, hard.
He dropped his hand back to his side. “I don’t need flattery. You must see that this is going to be a challenge. We were going to marry, we wanted to marry.”
“A lifetime ago. A face ago.”
“Your face doesn’t matter to me.”
She laughed, a bitter sound. “For God’s sake, Xander, don’t lie. It insults us both.”
“It doesn’t matter. I won’t be coy with you, Layna. I have to take a wife someday and when I do it will be because she specifically brings a benefit to my position and to Kyonos as a country. At the moment I think you’re the most beneficial wife for me. My personal feelings for you as an individual, or for your looks, have no bearing on anything. I doubt I should be faithful to any woman I marry, so I don’t see how wild attraction is an issue, either.”
She jerked back as though he’d slapped her. “You’re asking me to marry you, knowing you don’t truly want me, and admitting to me that you will sleep with other women?”
“I’m being honest with you. It’s how I would treat any marriage to any woman.”
“And why is it you won’t be faithful?”
“Does it matter if you aren’t truly vying for the position?”
“Pretend I’m considering it,” she said, “indulge my curiosities.”
He shrugged, a vague sense of shame washing over him as he looked at the woman he would have promised his life to years ago and spoke of planned faithlessness. As he realized that, had he married her as a beauty queen, he would have been unfaithful to her even then.
He’d been young. In lust, not in love. The center of his own universe. Certain of his absolute entitlement.
The moment he’d gotten hard for another woman he would have had her without a thought, no matter the vows he’d made to Layna, because that was the manner of man he’d been. Now...he had no practice in restraint. In turning away from the various and sundry pleasures of the flesh. He’d spent their years apart bathing in them because if he couldn’t get clean, then he would at least cover his transgressions in new layers of sin and hope that people never looked deeper. Hoped that he never had to look deeper.
“I have no practice at being with one woman,” he said. “I can’t imagine a lifetime with the same person in my bed, and I have low expectations of myself in that regard.”
“Especially if your wife is ugly,” she said.
“It doesn’t matter. It’s how things are, it’s how I am.”
“I thought you were changing.”
He shook his head, taking a deep breath. “I came back because it was right, not because I have any burning conviction about the rightness of it. I can’t condemn Stavros and Eva to a life they don’t want when I was the one who was raised for it from the cradle. And it’s one thing to walk away and ignore responsibilities when actually having to rule the country is years in the future. But with the way things are now...with the way Stavros’s marriage turned out and the fact that the heir will be up to Eva without me. The fact that my father could die at any moment and a decision had to be made, that changed things. But it didn’t change me. The one thing I can give for sure is honesty, so I’m giving that. Or would you rather have lies?”
“I rather wish I would have known you, really known you, back when we were engaged. I don’t think I would have been so eager to say yes.”
“Back then you had other options, too, but now you only have two—the convent, or standing at my side, ruling a country.”
Black fire lit up in her eyes, the kind of anger he’d never seen on her face before, not in the time since he’d walked back into her life, and not in the life before. “You’re so quick to remind me of how low I’ve fallen, but let me take a moment to show you a mirror. Your face might be as beautiful as it ever was, Xander, but you are nothing more than a dead limb on the Drakos family tree. Stavros made something with this country after you destroyed it, Evangelina was brave enough to fight for something she wanted, she didn’t just run away. And what have you done?”
“Nothing,” he said, his voice rough, his heart beating, bloody and ragged. “I have done nothing, and I would seek to change that. I am trying to change that. I made mistakes, Layna, and I will not deny it. I was a hurt, frightened child when I left, and then I became jaded. Now I have no heart left to wound and about a thousand things to atone for. So I am here, and I am trying. I am offering you this, the chance to rule with me. To make a difference. To give you children. Or you can go back to your convent and hide—because you’re too afraid to face criticism—and make a small ripple in a giant pond with your good deeds when you could be changing the world. You can accuse me of anything you like, and you’re probably right. But if you turn me down, you’re turning down a chance to make a real difference.”
She snorted, her lip curled. “You say that like marrying you, sharing your bed, is an incidental I shouldn’t have to worry my head about so long as I can do my duty.”
“Lie back and think of Kyonos,” he bit out. He didn’t know why he was pushing this so hard. He should let her go. He shouldn’t be standing in the hall of his palace all but begging her to marry him. And yet he was.
Because he’d decided that Layna Xenakos would be his wife and now he couldn’t fathom it being anyone else. No one would make a better queen. No one would help his image, or his country, in a deeper way than she would.
And he wanted her. That was the end of the reasoning really. When he wanted something, he got it.
“You’re disgusting.”
“And yet you’re still here.” He put one hand on the wall behind her and leaned in. “Would it be so bad?”
“You realize that I was prepared to swear off sex for life, that if I take my vows it means no men ever. Do you honestly think you’re going to entice me with your looks?”
“Your altruism, then. And the chance to rise above where you fell. The chance to show all of Kyonos that, in the end, you have triumphed. Or, keep hiding.”
Layna struggled to catch her breath. Rage, sadness and a deep, dark need all pulled at her. Xander, near enough to touch, smelling like rain and sin and man, was enough to make her pulse go into hyperdrive.
She lied when she said sex wasn’t the way to tempt her. She was a woman who was prepared to take vows in part because she believed no man would ever want her, and, he was right, because it was easier t
o hide than to be out in the world experiencing rejection.
She liked men. And had things not changed the way they had, she never would have chosen a life that meant no men. No marriage. No children.
Children. A chance to make a difference.
She looked at Xander, at his strikingly handsome features. He was as perfect as he’d ever been, and the idea of him stuck with her...it was laughable.
And why are you like this? Because of him. Because he left. Because he left the country to rot in its own hell. And he never once thought of you. You needed him and he was gone.
Yes. It had been his decision to leave. To steal the future she’d always dreamed of for herself. Why couldn’t she have it back? But if she was going to take him, the decisions wouldn’t be his alone. Not again. He’d had enough control for too long.
He would sacrifice, too. She would not be a martyr. She would have something for herself. And why not? Why ache for a man’s touch when she could have it? Why long for the glitter of the palace in deep, secret parts of herself when it could be hers? Why wish that she could have a baby when it could be her reality?
“You can have me,” she said, her voice hard, “on one condition.”
“What is that?”
“I am the only woman you’ll ever have in your bed again.”
“I told you already...”
“Yes, and I already told you I wouldn’t marry you, but that didn’t stop you from building your case and asking again. You don’t get to name all the terms, Xander. I am giving up my future at the convent and as much as you belittle it, I did find something there. Peace. With myself. With God and with those around me. You’re asking me to leave that, and I’m consenting. To put myself out there before the world and expose myself to ridicule. And I won’t do it for free. I won’t make all the concessions. From this moment on, you will have no other woman. And you won’t have me until vows are made. As I know well given the current state of my life, nothing is final until vows are spoken.”
“And if I am unfaithful? If I agree now, but transgress later?”
