by Maisey Yates
“They’re all coming with me.”
He narrowed his gaze. “All?”
“Yes. Peregrine, Alton and Nancy.”
“Are they all cats?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
He regarded her expression, which had gone mulish. “I’m sorry. I don’t know how to respond to that.”
“Peregrine is a ferret. Alton and Nancy are hedgehogs.”
“I live in a palace, not a menagerie.”
“I thought my happiness was important to you. I have a life. I have a charity to run. I have rescue animals.”
“I suggest you open the cages and release the animals into your garden. Hedgehogs are often quite happy in gardens. I have it on good authority they can often be heard rutting beneath windows, so it must be a happy place for them.”
Tinley’s face went beetroot. “You of all people should know that it’s dangerous out in the woods.” Her eyes clashed with his, sparks in their green depths.
And he was done sparring with an impotent creature.
“I will bring my men in to pack up your detritus.” He looked around at all of the baskets. “Do you require...everything?”
“Yes,” she said. “I do require everything. If I don’t have my yarn I won’t be able to knit.”
“God forbid. We cannot have a knitting crisis.”
“Indeed. You say that dryly, but you have no idea. Also, we should bring the pie.”
She looked around. “I’m able to work on my charity remotely.”
“It will please you to learn the castle has Wi-Fi.”
“Really? I’m somewhat surprised.”
“Why are you surprised?”
“Because nothing about you seems modern, Alex.”
Though on the outside, he remained stone, her words hit him strangely. He could not recall the last time a person had called him Alex.
His brother had done. Everyone else referred to him as Your Majesty. No one was so bold as to be quite so familiar with him. But of course, Tinley would be.
She would have heard her father refer to him as such. Alex walked to the window of the cottage and waved his hand. It was a signal for his men to come, and come they did. They descended on the small cottage and made quick work of everything in it. But by the time they had done so, he and Tinley, and a carrier that contained Algie, were bundled up in the back of the sleek black town car.
“He does not like to travel,” she said. “If he couldn’t hear my voice he would be very cross.”
“Tinley, do not mistake me, I am doing this for my own convenience. You have to marry.”
“Have to. So much have to in your world and I would have thought I’d escaped it when your brother died, but no. Here we are. Trying to get me to conform with all this protocol.”
A wealth of memory flashed between them. Every time he’d ever scolded her for breaking that protocol.
He could remember clearly the time she had come with his family on a vacation to the Amalfi Coast. And she’d worn some swimming costume that was horrendously inappropriate. One piece but plunging down to her breast bone, the cut around her legs coming up over her hips.
He’d been entranced by her body.
And it had angered him.
The press makes it their mission to get photographs of our family outings. You must be conscious of that, Tinley.
What’s wrong with this? It’s not a bikini, and this isn’t the Dark Ages! Should I make sure I’m covered from crown to ankle?
You are to be my brother’s wife. You must conduct yourself with a bit of decorum.
Then perhaps you ought to cover yourself. What will the world do if it gets a glimpse of your royal chest hair?
She’d planted her palm in the center of his chest to give him a shove and he’d caught her wrist, their eyes locking together.
And he’d nearly been lost then. He’d been able to see clearly that Tinley had no idea why their eyes made sparks when they clashed. Why the air suddenly felt thick.
But he knew.
He knew and she didn’t. And it was all the reason he’d needed to release her.
Protocol had not come into it.
“Well. It’s a shame that your protocol wasn’t functioning when you let Dionysus get lost in the woods.”
“I did not over consume alcohol on my brother’s behalf. Neither did I beseech him to try and impress the equally drunk and luxuriously curvy woman he was with.” He knew that was unkind. To bring up the woman. That betrayal had hurt Tinley then. He didn’t care. He couldn’t afford to care. And he had no patience with her accusations. “And finally, I did not direct a pack of wolves to tear him limb from limb.”
He felt something in his chest that might have been pain once. But the years had left him too hard and scarred to feel it.
He wore grief like a cloak. As much a part of him as the crown. It was not painful. It was not sad. It simply was. There was a weight to it, but it was not unbearable.
The grief for Dionysus, though, it was tinged with anger.
For he should have known better.
He knew the stories of how Lazarus had vanished.
He had gone in anyway. Brash and bold to impress a woman. For the forest would surely deem him worthy. As everyone had deemed that golden child, born after the King and Queen’s first loss.
Worthy, more than worthy. Invincible.
But it had proven not to be so.
Dionysus had been lost in the wood, cementing Alex’s reign as inevitable. Cementing his reputation as a fated ruler.
It was the Lion who remained. The Lion who claimed the throne.
The Lion who now found himself alone with the woman who had once been his brother’s. Soft and delicate. And not for him.
It was all a bit gothic.
“How can you talk about it like that? You don’t have a heart.”
“No,” he said, and that at least was true. It had been replaced with granite long ago. And without a heart, all he could fathom was duty.
Tinley was a duty. No matter how she might try him.
Her animals, her yarn, everything she came with. They would be his problem for just a little while longer.
“But I do have the means to find you a husband. And I will do so, Tinley, you have my word. I will return to you that which I stole from you. I will find you a husband. You have my word.”
CHAPTER TWO
TINLEY HADN’T BEEN back to the palace since King Darius’s funeral. It had been just two weeks after Dionysus’s funeral and she’d been shocked the palace hadn’t crumbled around them all.
To lose both of them so quickly had been... It had been unthinkable, and yet it had been real.
Her life had felt like an absolute parade of grief. One blow after another. Her father. Her fiancé. The man she’d thought of as an uncle.
Her mother was still alive. She had her mother, but...they had never been...close. She had always been such a disappointment to her mother.
When King Darius had told her that she would marry Prince Dionysus she’d been so honored. She’d been young enough she hadn’t fully understood what married meant. But she’d felt...approved of. She’d felt special.
Her mother had been so upset. Why Dionysus? Why not Alexius? Why not the future King?
A princess, not a queen. A slight, her mother had said.
Because of her tromping footsteps, frizzy hair and dizzy demeanor.
That was the first time she’d realized her mother had had loftier plans for her than she would ever reach. The first time she’d realized she would never be what her mother wanted.
Their distance had not improved in the years since.
Tinley had felt like she might as well not have a family, while her mother had gone to Italy and joined a fashionable crowd there.
Her engagement then might not have been all her mother had wanted, but it had brought Tinley into the fold of the royal family and from the time she was eight onward she lived in the palace part-time, along with her father who acted as advisor to the King. When he was there, she was too. They went on family vacations, attended royal balls and ate dinner with the family.
She’d been besotted with Dionysus from the moment she’d learned he was to be her husband.
He was beautiful, and kind. Closer to her age than Alexius, who frightened her. And who never smiled. Who always seemed to disapprove of her and who had not gotten less forbidding, but more so once she became a teenager.
Still, she’d been happy with her engagement.
But second best would never be good enough for her mother.
Her parents had been older when her mother had finally fallen pregnant with her. She’d been like a fairy tale gift and her mother had built up a store of expectations for what that might mean.
But she had been her father’s pride and joy. Just as she was.
Then she’d lost him. And the other two men in her life who’d meant the very most to her.
Illness had taken her father, and the King.
Dionysus had been taken so cruelly she...she couldn’t even allow herself to think of that night. It was too painful.
So she had left Liri. She had immersed herself in her new life. In University. In the friendships she’d made there. The new hobbies she had discovered.
She had joined clubs. She had learned to bake. She had taken knitting lessons from an older woman who lived near the University. She had enjoyed her years in Boston. She had experienced new food, new culture, and she had escaped.
But it had never been real. Because marriage was the end destination for her, whether she wanted it to be or not.
Or else she’d be exiled in poverty, which wasn’t a great option.
She had returned to Liri six months ago somewhat reluctantly, but there was a cottage there waiting for her, and she had known that. She had also been given the opportunity to head up a charitable foundation that contributed to the education of special needs children. The combination had been irresistible. So home she had gone.
Home.
After the death of King Darius, that final loss of the familiar life... Liri hadn’t felt like home.
But the cottage had begun to feel like home.
This palace...
She had spent weeks at a time there sometimes.
It was a second home, and she had moved between her parents’ grand manor home in the Lirian city of Tanaro and this castle with ease.
She’d felt happier here than there. For a time.
Coming back she felt nothing like happy at all.
It had been strange to come back to Liri at all, moving into the cottage near the edge of the wood.
There was dark magic at the center of the wood, and she knew it. Every Lirian child knew it.
And the palace overlooked the Dark Wood. This forest that had taken the love of her life away.
Even now, it made her heart ache.
She had been promised to Prince Dionysus since she was eight years old, and he was twelve. She had fallen in love with him when she’d turned fourteen.
A smile from him had been worth a pound of gold. More. She had thought he was the most beautiful, brilliant man. She had tried to explain her situation to some friends when she’d been at school, and they had all been horrified, that two children had been promised in marriage to each other. But they didn’t know the truth of it. They didn’t know him. They didn’t understand how handsome he was. They were imagining some kind of medieval arrangement, but it hadn’t been. The affection between their fathers had been real.
The honor it had been, for her anyway...it had been real.
And the way that she had felt for him had been... Well, it had been equally real.
The idea of getting married now...
She didn’t want to. Her life was a monument to the loss of Dionysus. She was trying to be useful in the position she found herself in. In many ways it was better that she not be a princess, she supposed.
She knew he hadn’t been... She knew there had been other women.
And yes, she’d been disappointed there had still been other women, even when she was old enough that he might have turned his attentions to her.
But he was gone. And there was no real reason to hate him for being with another woman when he died. He’d never been with her anyway. He’d never made any promises.
She chose to remember the things she’d loved about him.
She wouldn’t have been suited to being a princess, though. And she wasn’t really suited to marriage at all, she didn’t think. Her path had been determined for her from a young age, and because of that there were some things she’d never really thought about it.
Really, she had never thought of what it meant to be a princess. Only what it would be like to walk down the vast Cathedral aisle in a white dress toward the man her heart had longed for ever since she had understood why men and women were different.
The reality of it... Well, it fairly horrified her.
She had discovered that she liked to work behind the scenes. Doing hair and makeup just frustrated her. It reminded her of how frustrated she made her mother. Whenever she and her father had been back in residence in the family home, or when her mother had come for stints at the palace, her mother had picked at her.
Reminded her of all of her shortcomings.
She’d told her King Darius and her father might have been accepting of her in the role of Princess, but the press would have been vicious. She would have been subjected to millions of people scrutinizing her as her mother did and the idea of that was...intolerable.
Apart from the reasons she didn’t like the idea of being looked at, she had also discovered that she liked quiet evenings at home. That she was good at particular things, just not socialite and royalty things. She had an artistic flair that she didn’t discover until she went to University, and she expressed that through her baking, and with her knitting.
Losing Dionysus had been a tragedy. But from that, she had discovered some deep and important parts of herself. And somehow coming back here... It made it feel like that new creation she’d knit herself into was all beginning to unravel.
She was wearing leggings and a sweatshirt.
She hadn’t been expecting Alexius to come to her house today. But Alexius didn’t announce himself. He didn’t ask permission, and he didn’t make plans. He simply was.
It had been like that when she’d been at University. He’d come to see her three times, with no warning each time.
And good luck explaining why a man who radiated regal bearing and who was so handsome he made women swoon in the dorm halls, had come to see her.
Well, she’d had to just explain.
She was the ward of the King of her home country. As simple and complicated as that.
Just like the current situation.
She had seen the paperwork, and there was no use arguing.
She needed the money. Not for herself, but to fund the charity. Well, she did need to live, as well. Have money to feed her animals...
But the idea of a husband...
She was well used to the idea of an arranged marriage. It was just that the first one that had been arranged had suited her so much.
“I have a few requests.”
Alex turned and looked at her, and there was something about that stark, rock carved expression that made her stomach feel hollow.
He was such a large man. Having him in her cottage had been strange and disorienting. He was so firmly associated with a life that she had left behind. With the forbidding palace walls.
That was why he made her feel so strange.
He always had
. So grim and dark and brooding. A long shadow cast over her sunny days at the castle. He had never thought she was good enough for his brother. Her mother was angry with her for failing to be good enough to be Queen.
Alexius had never even thought her good enough to be Princess.
She doubted he thought she was good enough to scrub the floors.
“Requests?”
He was looking at her as if she’d grown a second head. One he didn’t like any more than the first.
“If you’re going to help me find a husband...”
“It isn’t going to just be any husband. He must meet the requirements that I know your father would have.”
She could say no. But he would only force her to go with him. There was no point opposing him here and now. Maybe she would be able to regroup at the palace, or perhaps they could come to an understanding after she met with some of his suggestions. But arguing now would get her nowhere.
She was too familiar with the brick wall that was Alexius to bother trying.
“Fine. But find me...the most bookish aristocrat you can. A man with a library. A man who likes to stay home in the evenings. A man who likes cats.”
“I’m afraid our criteria are different, Tinley.”
“My criteria have to matter,” she said.
“I could easily find you a noble who doesn’t care what you do.”
“True.”
The idea of that kind of marriage filled her with a great unease. Her parents had been a bit like that. Tinley was absolutely wild about her father. Her mother had always been untouchable. A beautiful doll in a glass case. There had been a distance between the two of them that could be felt when you were standing with them.
She had never wanted that. And she had been convinced that she and Dionysus wouldn’t. Because he had looked at her and her insides had lit up.
Given the way he’d died... She knew that there were other women. She hadn’t thought about it, not until then. Not until that poor traumatized girl in the woods, who had watched him die while she’d hidden.
But before then she simply hadn’t thought about that. She’d considered the chasteness in their relationship a sign of his respect for her. Their engagement had felt like something enchanted, just like the forest.
