by Kate Hewitt
Her lips were soft and tasted of champagne and she let out a breathy sigh as he deepened the kiss. She grabbed his shoulder to steady herself but even so they ended up sprawled on the sand, the kiss going on and on and on.
He slipped his hand under her T-shirt and revelled in the warm softness of her body. As he tugged on her capri bottoms she let out a little laugh.
‘Here...?’
‘Why not? It’s not as if anyone can see.’ He smiled down at her and she blinked up at him, a look of wonder in her eyes. She cupped his face with her hands and for a second Mateo’s heart felt like a cracked vessel that had been filled to the brim—overflowing and leaking, going everywhere. She’d done this to him. She’d awakened the heart he’d thought had been frozen for ever behind a paralysing wall of grief and fear. Love was too dangerous to consider, and yet here he was. Here they were.
‘Rachel...’ He couldn’t bring himself to say the words, but he felt them, and he thought she saw it in his eyes as she brought his face down to hers and kissed him with both sweet innocence and passionate fervour. With everything she had. And Mateo responded in kind, moulding his body to hers, wanting only to keep this moment between them for ever.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
RACHEL WAS HAPPY. It was a frail, fragile thing, like gossamer thread or a rose just about to bloom—all it would take was a gentle breeze to blow it all away. But, still, she was happy.
Since their afternoon on the island, Rachel had sensed a shift in Mateo, a softening. He’d willingly talked about his family, his emotions—things that Rachel had sensed had been off-limits before. The aloofness she’d felt from him since their marriage—the shadow lurking in his eyes, the slight repressiveness of his tone—had gone. Mostly.
Mateo, Rachel suspected, was a man at war with himself. He was starting to fall in love with her—if only she really could believe that!—but he didn’t want to. At least, that was her take on the matter, and Agathe surprised her by agreeing.
They’d been having lunch in one of the palace’s many salons when Agathe had said quite out of the blue, ‘You must be patient with him, my dear.’
Rachel had nearly choked on a scallop. ‘Pardon?’
‘Mateo. I know he can be...difficult. Remote. It’s his way of coping.’
Rachel absorbed that remark, tried not to let it hurt. ‘What is he coping with?’ she asked even as she thought, Me? Was his marriage something her husband had to cope with?
‘Everything,’ Agathe answered with a sad little sigh. ‘The pressures of the kingship, certainly. His father was the same.’
‘Was he?’ Once again Rachel realised how little she knew about the Karavitis family.
‘My husband believed he needed to keep a certain distance between him and his people. It was a matter of respect and authority. I don’t know if he was right or not, but Mateo feels the responsibility, especially when he was never meant to have any royal role at all. I am afraid we did not prepare him as we should have.’
‘Yet he is rising to the challenge,’ Rachel returned, a fierce note of pride in her voice.
‘Indeed he is, but at what cost?’ Agathe smiled sadly. ‘But it is more than that. Mateo has lost so many people...if he closes himself off, it’s because he doesn’t want to risk losing anyone else. Losing you. But it doesn’t mean he doesn’t love you.’
‘You don’t know that,’ Rachel said after a moment. She paused, deliberating whether she should mention the person who was still utterly off-limits. ‘Sometimes I wonder if he has any more room to love, after...’ she took a quick breath ‘...after Cressida.’
Agathe’s face softened into sympathetic lines. ‘Of course he does. His relationship to Cressida...that was no more than schoolboy infatuation.’
‘He doesn’t talk about it like that,’ Rachel said, even though she desperately wanted to believe it. ‘He won’t talk about it at all.’ Agathe nodded slowly, and Rachel looked down at her plate. ‘I shouldn’t be talking to you about this. I know Mateo wouldn’t like it.’ He’d feel as if she’d betrayed him, and she couldn’t stand that thought.
‘Give him time,’ Agathe said by way of answer. ‘Be patient...and believe.’
Rachel was still holding onto those words, praying they were a promise, when she got ready for an engagement in Constanza one foggy afternoon in November. She and Mateo had been married for six weeks, and winter had finally hit the island country, with thick, rolling fog and damp, freezing temperatures.
Mateo remained as busy as ever, but not as aloof, and Rachel continued to feel she had reason to hope. To believe. And, she reminded herself, she was happy.
A knock on her bedroom door had her turning, expecting Monica to tell her the car was ready to take her into the city. To her surprise, Mateo stood there, stealing her breath as he always did, wearing a navy-blue suit with a dark green tie that brought out the brightness of his eyes.
‘You have an engagement?’ he asked and she nodded as she fastened the second of her pearl earrings. ‘Yes, at the bazaar in the city. Supporting women stallholders.’
‘In the bazaar?’ Mateo frowned. ‘That’s not the safest place.’
‘I’ll have my usual security.’ Rachel glanced at him in concern. ‘Has something happened? Are you worried?’
‘No, I just don’t like you being in such an exposed, rough place.’
‘It’s a market, not a Mafia den,’ Rachel told him with a little laugh. ‘I’m sure I’ll be fine.’
Mateo nodded slowly, still looking less than pleased. ‘I suppose so.’
He didn’t sound convinced and Rachel laid a hand on his arm. ‘Is there something you’re not telling me, Mateo?’
He hesitated, his lowered gaze on her hand still resting on his arm. ‘The insurgents are still active,’ he admitted after a moment.
‘But in the north...’
‘Yes, but it isn’t that far away.’
Nerves fluttered in Rachel’s stomach at his grim tone. ‘Surely they’re not in the bazaar?’ she asked, trying for a light tone and almost managing it.
Mateo was silent for a long moment, his gaze still lowered. ‘No,’ he said at last. ‘Of course not.’
‘Then I’ll be fine.’ She looked at him directly, willing him to meet her gaze. When he did, the look on his face—a mixture of resolution and despair—made her want to put her arms around him. Tell him she wouldn’t go.
But then his lips curved in a quick smile and he nodded. ‘It will be fine, I’m sure. I’ll see you later today, for dinner.’
‘All right.’ He gave her a quick kiss on the cheek and as Rachel watched him walk away she had a strange, tumbling sensation that she forced herself to banish. Mateo’s worries were just that—worries. Worries of a king who cared too much, who had lost people before. She was just going to the city’s bazaar; she’d be surrounded by security. And really, she should be pleased that Mateo cared so much. Another sign, she wondered, that he was coming to love her? Or just wishful thinking?
An hour later Rachel had banished all her concerns as well as Mateo’s as she entered the colourful bazaar with its rickety stalls and colourful banners. She spent an enjoyable hour meeting with the female stallholders and chatting about the goods they sold—handmade batik cloth; small honey cakes dotted with sesame seeds; hand-tooled leather wallets and purses.
She was impressed by their ingenuity and determination, and charmed by their ready smiles and cheerful demeanour. They faced far more challenges than she ever had, and yet they’d kept their heads as well as their smiles.
She was just saying goodbye when she felt the heavy hand of one of her security guards, Matthias, on her shoulder.
‘Your Royal Highness, we need to go.’
‘We’re not in a rush—’ Rachel began, only to have Matthias grip her elbow firmly and start to hustle her through the crowds and alleyways of the baza
ar.
‘There is a disturbance.’
‘A disturbance—?’ Rachel began, craning her neck to see what he meant.
In her six weeks as a royal, she’d become used to being guarded, even as she’d believed it to be unnecessary. There had never been any ‘disturbances’, and the unrest Mateo spoke of in the north was nothing more than a vague idea.
Now, as she saw Matthias with one hand on her elbow, one hand on the pistol at his hip, she felt a flicker of the kind of fear she’d never experienced before.
This couldn’t be happening. This couldn’t be real. It felt as impossible as Mateo’s proposal, as her arrival in Kallyria, as her over-the-top wedding. Just another moment that she couldn’t compute in this crazy life of hers.
‘Get her in the car,’ Matthias growled into his mouthpiece, and Rachel saw another guard emerge from behind an SUV with blacked-out windows, and Matthias started to hand her off.
Then she heard a sizzle and a crack and the next thing she knew the world had exploded.
* * *
Mateo could not ignore the tension banding his temples and tightening his gut as he tried to focus on the briefing one of his cabinet ministers was giving.
There was no reason to feel particularly anxious about Rachel’s visit to the bazaar, but he did. Maybe it was a sixth sense. Maybe it was just paranoia. Or maybe it was the fact that he was finally acknowledging to himself that he cared about Rachel. Hell, he might even love her, and this was the result. This gut-twisting fear. This sense that he could never relax, never rest, never even breathe.
Love was fear. Love was failure. Love was dealing with both for ever, and it was why, after his experience with Cressida, he’d chosen never to pursue that dangerous, deadly emotion again. Yet like the worst of enemies, it had come for him anyway.
‘Your Highness...’
Mateo blinked the minister back into focus, realising he’d stopped speaking some moments ago, and everyone was waiting for him to respond.
‘Thank you,’ he said gruffly, shuffling some papers in front of him, hating how distracted he was. How he couldn’t stop thinking of Rachel, for good or ill, for better or worse. Just like the marriage vows he’d made.
But it wasn’t supposed to be this way.
He’d been so sure, when he’d first come up with his great plan, that with Rachel he’d be immune. He’d had ten years of inoculation, after all. How could he possibly fall in love with her after all that time together? How could he barely keep his hands off her, when for an entire decade he hadn’t even considered touching her?
How had everything changed since their vows had been spoken, most of all himself? Because loving Rachel felt both as natural as breathing, as terrifying as deliberately stepping off a cliff.
He was already in free fall, because he knew it was too late. He already loved her. He’d been fighting it for weeks now, fighting it and revelling in it at the same time, to his own confusion and despair.
He knew Rachel saw the struggle in him, just as he knew she was patiently waiting for him to resolve it. He saw the hope in her eyes when she looked at him, and that made everything worse, because he knew he was going to disappoint her, no matter what.
‘Your Highness.’
He’d stopped listening to the conversation again. Irritated with himself beyond all measure, Mateo made himself focus on the minister again, only to realise he wasn’t the one speaking.
A guard who had entered the stateroom was, and Mateo suddenly felt as if he’d been plunged underwater, as if everything were at a distance and he could only hear every third word. Bazaar...bomb...wounded.
He lurched up from the table, panic icing his insides, making it hard to breathe. Impossible to think. Rachel was in danger...and it was his fault. He’d been here before. He knew exactly how this felt.
‘Is she alive?’ he rasped.
‘She’s being taken to the hospital—’
‘Get me there,’ Mateo commanded, and he strode out of the room.
Half an hour later he was at the Royal Hospital on the outskirts of the city, the wintry fog obscuring the view of the terracotta roofs and onion domes of his city, his kingdom, so all was grey.
On the way there Rachel’s security team had briefed him on what had happened—a clumsy, homemade bomb thrown into the bazaar; the explosion had hurled Rachel in the air and she’d hit her head on a concrete kerb. Two other people had received non-life-threatening injuries, including her personal bodyguard, Matthias; they were both being treated.
‘And the Queen?’ Mateo demanded. ‘How is she?’
‘She sustained an injury to the head,’ the doctor, an olive-skinned man with kind eyes, was telling him, although Mateo found it hard to listen to a word he said. His mind kept skittering back to other doctors, other sterile rooms, the awful surreal sensation of hearing what had happened and knowing he was to blame. Just him.
There was nothing we could do...so sorry...by the time she made it to the hospital, it was too late.
‘Is she in a coma?’ Mateo asked brusquely. ‘Is there...brain damage?’
The doctor looked at him strangely and Mateo gritted his teeth. He couldn’t bear not knowing. He couldn’t bear being in the same place, knowing the life of the woman he loved was hanging in the balance, and it was all because of him. ‘Well?’ he demanded in a throaty rasp.
‘She is conscious, Your Highness,’ the doctor said, looking unnerved by his sovereign’s unprecedented display of emotion. ‘She regained consciousness almost immediately.’ Mateo stared at him, not comprehending. Not possibly being able to understand what this meant. ‘She needed to have six stitches to a cut on her forehead,’ the doctor continued, ‘but other than that she is fine.’
‘Stitches?’ Mateo repeated dumbly.
‘She might have a small scar by her left eyebrow,’ the doctor said in an apologetic tone, and Mateo just stared.
Stitches? Her eyebrow?
‘She’s...?’ He found he could barely speak. ‘She’s not...?’
The doctor smiled then, seeming to understand the nature of Mateo’s fear. ‘She’s fine. I will take you to her, if you like.’
Mateo found he could only nod.
A few minutes later he walked into a private room where Rachel was sitting up in bed, looking tired and a bit exasperated.
‘I’m quite sure I don’t need to stay overnight,’ she was telling one of the nurses who fussed around her. ‘Den... Chei... Efharisto...’
He almost smiled at her halting attempts at Greek, which the nurses resolutely ignored with cheerful smiles, but he felt too emotional to manage it. He stood in the doorway and simply drank her in, his heart beating hard from the adrenalin rush of believing, of being so certain, she was in danger. Of thinking he was to blame.
Rachel turned and caught sight of him, smiling wryly. ‘No one seems to be listening to me,’ she said with a little shrug of her shoulders. Her gaze clouded as she caught the look on his face, although Mateo didn’t even know what it was. ‘Mateo...’
He didn’t answer. He simply walked over to her and kissed her hard on the mouth. The nurses scattered like a flock of sparrows.
Mateo eased back and studied the six neat stitches by her eyebrow.
She was all right.
‘I’ll have quite a cool scar,’ Rachel joked uncertainly, looking at him with worry in her eyes.
‘I thought you were dead.’
Her lovely, lush mouth turned downward as she realised what he’d gone through, although of course she didn’t realise at all. ‘Oh, Mateo...’
He shook his head, the remembered emotion, the absolute terror of it, closing his throat. ‘Dead,’ he forced out, ‘or in a coma. A traumatic brain injury...’
‘Barely more than a graze.’ Her fingers fluttered on his wrist. ‘I’m okay, Mateo.’
Now t
hat he knew she was all right, he couldn’t escape the awful knowledge that this could have been so much worse...just as it could have been avoided. ‘I knew it was dangerous.’
She shook her head. ‘It wasn’t the rebels. Just some poor deranged man acting on his own. No one could have predicted—’
‘This time.’
‘Mateo—’
‘You should never have gone to the bazaar. I shouldn’t have let you.’ The words came out savagely, a rod for his own back.
‘You can’t keep me in a cage, you know.’ Rachel’s voice was deliberately light as her concerned gaze scanned his face. Mateo had no idea what she saw there. He felt as if he were a jumble of disparate parts; he’d been so terrified, and then so relieved, and now, inexplicably, he felt possessed by a fearsome, towering rage. He wanted to shout at the doctors. He wanted to tear apart the lone assailant with his bare hands. He wanted to hold Rachel and never let her go.
As the feelings coursed through him, each one more powerful and frightening than the last, he knew he couldn’t handle this tempestuous seesaw of emotions any more. He couldn’t live with the endless cycle of fear, relief, hope and guilt that had been his two years with Cressida. It had left him a husk of a man fifteen years ago, and he couldn’t bear to have it happen again. He couldn’t bear for Rachel to see it...or worse, far worse, for her not to see it, because one time it wouldn’t be six stitches above her eyebrow.
This was what love wrought—grief and guilt, fear and failure. And he didn’t want any part of it. He couldn’t.
