Toby smiled and leaned over to put a third piece of home-made fruit cake in her mouth before he kissed her: the best way to ensure she didn’t protest at the food. She rarely did when they were alone together, especially when she was in her beloved outdoors. “My peasant princess,” he teased, and kissed her again. “Such low tastes.”
She chewed and swallowed the cake, smiling, her fingers learning the shape of his dimples, tracing the line of his jaw. “I always wanted to touch you like this,” she murmured, glowing, her shining eyes stress free.
He might never be good enough for her, but she still needed him, and the lower-class fireman fought the man in love on a minute-to-minute basis.
“You were always welcome to,” he murmured back, loving the way she made him tingle and ache from head to foot with wonderful, agonised desire.
It had been painful enough before, sensing but never knowing the sensual woman he’d always believed was slumbering inside her: it had been like being able to view paradise from behind prison walls. But now she’d shown him her passion he felt like a walking bushfire, in a constant state of burning, the high wind of her touch fanning the flame, and it was made stronger by being forbidden.
Oh, it was exciting to have their desire always in the subtext of their words, in every hidden look she gave him: Come to me tonight.
But every kiss awoke the old longings, crushed his noble decision to let her stay in Hellenia. This delicious affair in hiding wasn’t right, wasn’t enough—not with his beautiful Giulia—and it hurt that she didn’t know how she felt beyond wanting him sexually. It hurt that, not even knowing the truth, she’d still put Hellenia above him.
“You look as if you need another kiss.” She fell back on the blanket and pulled him down for a deep kiss.
Soon she was moaning and arching up to fuse their bodies. Her hands slipped under his windcheater, caressing his skin urgently, frantically, and the kiss went on and on. He couldn’t stop it, and she sure as hell couldn’t. She couldn’t keep her hands off him when they were alone. Night after night they met in secret, talking and kissing, the passion ripping to life with a glance. The moment he opened the door to her room, or she came to his room, she’d bolt into his arms, greedy for his hands, mouth and body.
It was everything he’d ever wanted; it was so right…and so wrong.
He tore his mouth from hers, almost giving in again when he saw her sleepy eyes so dark with desire, her lips swollen. “Tell me, Giulia,” he rasped. “Tell me now, and we’ll make love all night.”
Shutdown, turn-off. From adorable, addictive passion, she seemed a thousand miles from him, staring at him as if he’d betrayed her somehow.
He sighed and rolled off her, wishing he knew how to right old wrongs, how to make her see how lovely she was to him, how irresistible. “Let’s talk.”
“About what? How beautiful I am to you?” She sighed.
The tone told him not to go there, but suddenly he’d had enough of not going there, of never telling her what she needed to know, of her never saying the words he’d give his life to hear. He was tired of walking on eggshells around her damaged self-esteem, when it didn’t seem to help. “It’s a good start.”
Her face turned pale and sad. “Repeating words by rote doesn’t work, Toby. It’s only good for the times tables. You should know that by now.”
He leaned over her, looking in her eyes. “You’re hurting me, Giulia.”
She blinked and opened her mouth, but nothing came out.
He got to his feet and turned to the fire to tend it; he couldn’t look at her as he said the words he’d kept locked inside for a decade, but they came out all wrong, filled with bitterness and pain. “You’re ripping the heart from my chest. Damn it, you’ve been my best friend for years—how could you use me like I’m your kept man, treating me as if I’m not enough, when you have to know I’m in love with you?”
The silence felt stricken, and yet he felt the doubt shimmering from her like the moonlight bathing her in its radiance. He didn’t speak. For once he refused to fill the silence for her. He stirred the coals of the little fire, waiting.
“You want me to bring us out into the open?” she asked, her voice quivering. “Charlie told you at the wedding that, now I’ve publicly accepted the role of princess, I can’t renounce my position without the agreement of the King and the House of Hereditary Lords, didn’t he? And that I didn’t know it until the night we kissed?”
“Yes,” he said slowly, feeling like a fool. He’d been punishing her for a rejection she didn’t even know about.
Knowing what was coming, and that he deserved it, he waited.
“So you know that, by law, I can’t just go home with you. They all want and believe they need me here. And I am needed here, Toby. You’ve seen it. The people need me to stay. The women and children believe I’m their advocate. They trust me not to let them down.”
He picked up some pebbles beside the blanket and began tossing them at a fairy-seat, knocking the moss off in short, savage blows. “I know.”
“So, why are you here with me? Why did you try to be more than my friend that first night in the passage, even here tonight, knowing I no longer have a choice to make?” she said, sounding as hurt as he had before. “Do you want us to disappear like Papou and Yiayia did? It’s not so easy these days, nor so romantic. We’re in the electronic age, Toby. Our faces have been plastered across the world—yours as well as mine. Will you give up your job and life in Australia to be with me? Can you think of a way to become a high lord or a prince so we can bring this out into the open?”
Having seen the constant hoops Charlie had had to jump through to make his people and the current king happy—having seen Max forcibly engaged to one woman after another, with no say in it—Toby shuddered at the thought.
“No,” he muttered. “But I waited ten years to be with you, Giulia, and I wanted my chance.”
“Try fourteen years,” she said wearily, her eyes dark, remote. “Unfortunately, this is all I have to give. And you’re the one who said whatever I want from you is mine. Right now I need time-out.”
He didn’t turn or look at her, didn’t speak. He knew her, knew when she had something to say, and silence helped her think.
“You know what life’s like for me. It’s a privilege and honour to be able to help a country rebuild itself. But instead of my biggest daily decisions being what to add to the year-end concert or what to make for dinner, I’m deciding how to split funds that need to go a hundred ways. Instead of thinking about where we’ll go on the weekend, I’m thinking over which destroyed town or abused woman is most worthy of my help. Instead of standing under a spotlight on a small stage in the backblocks of Sydney, I’m standing in front of lines of begging or grateful people, or smiling for the media. On my days off I’m being pressured to decide who to marry—Max, Orakis or one of the Hereditary Lords’ sons that keep showing up wherever I go. Marriage to a commoner is apparently an act of treason for me, unless you magically become acceptable. Even renouncing my position is an act the King can call treason if he wishes.”
He almost burned his hand putting twigs in the fire when she tossed the word “treason” in his lap like that. Giulia was putting herself in danger every time she touched him—and yet still she’d come to him.
Giulia kept talking as if she hadn’t thrown an emotional bomb at him. “I spent most of my life being ordinary, invisible to the world. Now I’m this, and everything I do is under scrutiny. Every decision affects the lives of others. I’d hoped for a little time-out with you, my best friend and lover, without making yet another life-changing decision. But after a week I’m hurting you because I can’t tell you what you want to hear, because I can’t choose you over everything else. Once I would have been so proud to be your girl, Toby, but you choose now to tell me…” She shrugged, the way she always did when she didn’t know what to say without hurting him. “You say you love me, but is it love when you’re demanding something I d
on’t have to give you?”
She spoke with a bone-deep weariness that shook him. He’d known all this, had worried over her fatigue and stress, so why hadn’t he seen it, understood her as he always had before?
I gave unconditionally before, because she was always mine unconditionally. I hate not being good enough, and I resent sharing her with the world. I wanted her to turn her back on duty and conscience and the fate of eight-million people, all for me.
He felt small, mean and petty. His aspirations and dreams of personal happiness were life-shaking to one man, not eight million.
So he said, “I’m not asking for anything from you but faith, Giulia—faith in yourself, in your beauty and desirability in my eyes.”
The long silence was broken only by the crackling of the fire and the rustling of the wind in the leaves high above. “As I said, I can’t give you what I don’t have.”
He turned to her. She was sitting jack-knifed, arms around her knees, her face downward to the earth, looking small and lonely. “Still?” he asked huskily.
Her lips sucked in, she gave a short, jerking nod. “I don’t doubt you love me. But the rest—are they words my best friend’s using because I’m losing weight? Are you saying you want me because you want to save me again? How can I believe you when you only say the words when you feed me, or feel guilty over what you believe you’ve done to me?”
Startled by the depth of her insight, he rocked back on his heels. “What would it take to make you believe me?”
She shrugged, staring at the ground, at the fire, anywhere but at him. “Maybe if I’d had one man interested in me before I became sister to a future king, if someone thought I was pretty before I became Europe’s last single princess, if you’d shown me you wanted me before now…But it’s too late for might-have-beens.” She smiled at him, heartbreaking in her courage and sacrifice, refusing to lay blame. “C’est la vie.”
He knew this was going to amount to the equivalent of shooting himself in the foot, but it had to be said. “Almost all the single guys at the station have the hots for you, Giulia. Dozens of other men have wanted you. Why do you think big brothers kept coming to pick up the girls from ballet class—for the joy it gave their sisters?”
She frowned, but kept her gaze on the fire. “Nice try, but it’s not going to work. They were all nice to me, but not one asked me out.”
Here we go. Now he had to pull out that shotgun and aim it right between his eyes. He knew better than to touch her as he made the confession. “The only reason none of them asked you out was because I was always there, acting like your boyfriend—and if that didn’t work I scared them off.”
“What?” She looked up now, her eyes bewildered. “Why would you do something like that?”
Like a condemned man, he saw his life flash in front of his eyes as he searched for a way to make it sound better, gave up and told the truth. “I couldn’t stand the thought of anyone touching you but me. I loved you too damn much, waited years for you. I wasn’t going to lose you to some guy who wouldn’t love and appreciate you like I did. Like I do,” he finished hoarsely, his heart screaming for his beautiful best friend, his love, to understand.
She was silent for a long time, and he felt every single thud of his heart as he waited for her answer.
“So essentially what you’re telling me is that, while you enjoyed a normal life with flirtations and relationships, had all the fun and made all the mistakes of the normal human, you left me alone for ten years wondering what was so wrong with me that no man even saw me as attractive?” she asked, her tone almost conversational. “That’s your idea of loving me?”
He sat on the blanket as his legs gave way. She’d just shown him the last ten years through her eyes.
After saving her life from a disease that was all based on self-image, he’d left her alone, feeling ugly and unwanted, because he hadn’t spoken. Though he’d dated, even slept with other women when he’d lost hope with her, he’d stopped any man coming near her because she was his, because he’d burned with near-insane jealousy at the thought of any other man touching her. While she’d gone through the torment of knowing where he was and what he was doing with those other women, he hadn’t been able to put himself through the same.
How she’d remained strong enough to not fall into anorexic patterns all these years, he had no idea. How she was surviving royal life without running, screaming back to Australia was still a mystery to him.
The King had been right about her. Max had seen everything in her that he’d been blind to. The real woman beneath the one he’d chosen to see was strong, wise and courageous, far more than he’d ever been during any fire.
Did he know her at all?
She sat there, watching him with no accusation in her eyes. She knew him, knew he was accusing himself enough for them both.
“There’s nothing I can say,” he mumbled eventually.
“No,” she agreed, still impassive.
“They were real, Giulia. Those guys, the ones at the station. Hell, Sean and Jack and Tim always fought over who you’d smiled at the most when you came to visit—at least until I was around,” he told her, frantic to find a way to fix his latest mistake with her. “Remember they all came to the local production of Giselle, and you thought it was to laugh at me being Loys? They came to see you. Ask Charlie if you can’t believe me,” he added, knowing at last that he hadn’t earned her trust after all these years.
Throwing out the anorexic rulebook had saved her ten years ago. But, smug, thinking he knew her better than anyone, he’d thrown out the more commonsense advice such as letting Giulia fly when she was ready, allowing her to find her own life. No book knew what Giulia needed—he did.
But he now saw the truth: it had never been about what she’d needed. He’d done it to keep her with him because he needed her, because he was scared stupid that, if he let some other man near her, she might need them more.
He felt sick, realising the King and Max had been right. He’d never treated Giulia with the respect and dignity of an adult free to make her own choices.
“Thank you,” she said after a while, with a politeness that put miles of distance between them. “It was kind of you to tell me that.”
“But you don’t believe it, do you?”
She opened her mouth and closed it. She didn’t have to answer.
“We should go back in. I have a big day tomorrow, and so do you,” he said, cursing a brain so scrambled he knew anything he said now would make it worse.
She nodded, and started putting food in the rucksack. “Thank you for my lovely picnic, Toby. It was, um, nice to relax after a hard day.”
And he’d blown it again, putting his needs before hers, and those of millions of others who needed her.
He couldn’t tell her about the real source of his so-called death threats now. How would it change her mind when he was only “time-out” to her? And no wonder at that. He’d been her first kiss, the kiss she should have had at sixteen. He’d had the normal rounds of first kisses and sweet, innocent dates, but he’d denied them to her.
He’d even ruined this time every woman ought to be able to treasure by bringing shame on their assignations, and by his demands that she put him first. And even now, he’d demanded she overcome the pain he’d inflicted on her, change the ruin of her self-esteem, and see how much he loved her anyway.
He’d spent years trying to love the way Giulia did—the way all the Costas did, giving without expectation—and still he was a scrapping, grabbing Winder, wanting more than he had, never able to let go of what he saw as his right, his due.
As they headed back to the cave, he said what he had to. “I think you should date.” Every word came out gravelly, as if spoken through broken glass. “Max is a good guy. Some of the Lords’ sons are decent too—and it’s obvious a few of them really like you.” He named the men he thought had a chance of making themselves worthy of her, even though a streak of pain went through his left side
, as if his heart squeezed out its protest in blood.
After hearing him out, she said quietly, “You might be right, but I’m not ready for it yet.” And though she smiled at him, he knew she meant: They don’t want me…
He felt like Judas, betraying her with his kiss.
“Why don’t you hit me?” he demanded, drowning under the weight of her sweetness, the regal bearing that was born in her. From little Lia, holding her hand out to him saying, “Come and live with us,” to the princess walking beside him in her jeans and pullover, she’d always been so high above him, he didn’t deserve even to look at her. “You deserve to take a swing at me for being so damned selfish all those years.”
She lifted one shoulder. “You were anything but selfish, Toby—and it wouldn’t change those years anyway. They’ll still exist.”
In other words, the damage is done and there’s nothing you can do to fix it.
In the cave, she turned to him, her lovely, sleepy eyes shimmering with sadness and regret and half a lifetime of trusting love shattered that she was trying so hard to hide for his sake. “Don’t blame yourself, Toby. You saved my life. I’ve never doubted how much you love me. And if I’d spoken, tried again…”
“Don’t try to absolve me, Giulia, I couldn’t stand it,” he said hoarsely. And with the last word, he plunged into a secret passage as dark as his soul at this moment.
CHAPTER EIGHT
A week later
TOBY had known it was only a matter of time before Orakis made a blunder. All he’d had to do was wait for the spoiled lord’s anger to build high enough.
Two nights ago Giulia had tired of Orakis’s calls, extolling his own virtues. Politely, but with a firmness that told everyone listening in that he had no hope of winning her, she’d said she was too busy at present to take his daily calls. No, she wouldn’t have a private dinner with him either.
Giulia had shuddered when she’d told him about it later, as she recounted listening to the icy silence before Orakis had hung up the phone. But Toby felt the ripple of inner excitement. It was time.
His Princess in the Making Page 11
