by Maisey Yates
She had experienced a measure of pretty intense grief at only eighteen.
She had lost the future she’d been dreaming of. She had rebuilt herself to an extent. But the more she thought about it the more she realized that in every space she’d ever occupied, from being Dionysus’s fiancée, to being a college student, to working at a charity, to being here now, she had only ever given pieces of herself in those places.
No one had all of her.
Sometimes she wasn’t even entirely certain she had all of her.
“Were you not hungry?”
She nodded, and reached out and took a stuffed date from one of the trays. It was good, but her hunger was no longer the most pressing issue she faced. It was this strange, desperate feeling of isolation, and the desire to be rid of it.
“What do you care about?” she asked.
“Being the King my country needs.”
It was like flinging herself at a brick wall. “But what do you care about. You’re not just a king, Alex. You’re a man. And I can’t... Nothing in this castle is yours. It’s all your father’s. All your ancestors’. Even the scolding you gave me that night at the state dinner back when I was engaged to Dionysus... That wasn’t yours either. It was what you thought you had to do to behave in a way that fit the crown. But what do you care about?”
“You’re wrong about one thing, Tinley, King is not just a title. It must be who I am. All of who I am. It is essential. For it is in the man that you find weakness. I can afford no more weakness.”
“If you mean Dionysus... It’s ridiculous that anyone blames you. And I’m sorry that I’ve been one of them. I felt... I cared about your brother very much. And for a whole lot of my life I was convinced that I loved him. He was easy to love. I got angry at you yesterday because I had to face how foolish I was to not realize that he didn’t love me back. The things that I excused, and the things that I decided had explanations... They were born of naivety. Nobody wants to believe that they are naïve. But I was. I am. I felt like a silly child next to you yesterday, and I hated it. Because we were naked together. I didn’t want to feel that gulf.”
She took a deep breath. “You’re not responsible for what he did.”
“When Lazarus disappeared, it’s because I... I forgot myself. I was more interested in fun than doing my duty. We were playing together in the yard. He said he saw something in the forest. Something that moved. And he wanted to see. I... I was tired of him. He was badgering me. I got angry. We were supposed to be playing ball, and it had gone the opposite direction of the wood, and we couldn’t find it. I told him to go on then, and he would have to deal with Father. I left him. I went to the hedge to search for the ball. When I turned back, he was gone. Because I was selfish. Because I didn’t want to deal with him. Because I didn’t want to do my duty. It doesn’t matter how old I was. I had a responsibility.”
“Alex, you know that’s just kid stuff, it’s not anything you can be held responsible for.”
“Dionysus. I knew he was drunk. You had left the ballroom by that point, so you won’t remember this. He was making grand claims about how he was going to brave the wood. About how it was clear he was the real lion. The true heir. He had a woman with him, and he was bound and determined to show off for her. And I... I didn’t stop him.” There was something strange in his voice. As if he was holding something back, but she couldn’t figure out what it might be.
“His decision is not your responsibility.”
“I am the King. I am the King and in those moments of weakness, when I was simply a brother, simply a man, I allowed petty things to get in the way of what I knew to be better. What I knew to be true. I did it twice, and the consequences were fatal. No, a man should not blame himself for the actions of others, but a king has no choice. For I hold the future of the nation in my hand. For the responsibility of the people is mine. My brothers were my people. And I did not serve them. I did not protect them. I failed. I made a decision then. To be King. Not Alexius and a king. But King Alexius of Liri. There is no other identity. There is no other piece of me. There cannot be.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“Believe it. It is a decision I made with great weight.”
“I can’t be just a queen. I can’t. I can’t disappear behind a façade.”
“I would not ask it of you.”
“I feel like it puts you on one side of the glass and me on the other.”
“I never expected to know my wife.”
“And is your... Is your temptation toward me something of the man or the King?”
His posture stiffened, his face turning to stone.
“You’re to be my Queen. You are not a temptation.”
It was like a brick wall had gone up between them.
Like he was intent on proving something to her. On distancing her.
But she had agreed to marry him. He could not do that. And she couldn’t live this way. So near to him, and yet so far.
“Then tell me something else,” she said. “If you will not talk of temptation.”
Her heart beat a sickening rhythm at the base of her throat. Her hands were damp. Shameful excitement bloomed in her midsection.
And she cast her mind back, to all the times she had catalogued with him over the years. And there was a catalog of encounters, to be sure. She remembered each and every one of them, as if they happened only recently.
“Dionysus made me feel warm. Happy. Accepted. And I understand now that...he had a different plan for our relationship than I did. I understand that what I thought was love between the two of us was... It was not love for him. It wasn’t even love for me. I confused friendship for love. And I didn’t consider desire at all.” She swallowed hard. “That day that you scolded me in the corridor. I felt very upset. My heart beat fast, and my stomach twisted. I thought I was angry. I thought I was furious with you. I wanted to get closer to you. I wanted to hit you. Something. Make contact. Did I want you? Is that what was happening?”
His face seemed to turn to stone, and a muscle in his jaw jumped, the only sign of life. “I cannot answer that question.”
“Your cold fury, your disapproval... I thought about it all the time. Your eyes. The way that you looked at me. It upset me so much, Alex, that I could not make you like me. Dionysus was so easy...”
“There is no benefit to this discussion.”
“Was it always going to happen? We’d have found ourselves alone after some party, me the Princess, married to your brother, and... Would we have touched? What about if I had been with him, and what transpired between us didn’t make me feel half so much as what looking into your eyes did?”
“Tinley, it doesn’t matter. He’s dead.” Those words came out raw. “You were never with him. And you will be with me.”
“I think it matters. Because I want to understand. I want to understand desire. And why it doesn’t seem to make sense. Why sometimes it makes it seem like the world is turned inside out. Is it why I make you so furious? Is that why you had to marry me? Because you are afraid if I was wandering around out there married to another man, and you married to another woman that we might... That we might violate who we want to be in order to be with each other?”
“I turned temptation into duty. All in all, I feel it was the best decision I could’ve made.”
“So you were afraid of that. You were afraid of me. Were you always? Is that why you opposed me so very much when I was engaged to Dionysus?”
“None of this matters.”
“It matters to me.”
“I told you. I made the decision to be a king, and not a man.”
“You outran temptation rather than being potentially subject to it. You would bind yourself to me forever so that you don’t ever have to feel weak again.”
“If it is a weakness that you’re looking for, Tinley, then lo
ok no further than this moment here. Does that make you happy? You are correct. What you’re reaching around for, searching for... It’s true. I made the decision to marry you so that I would not be fallible. Now your body is my duty. Your children will be mine. And there will be no vows to violate.”
Her heart pounded in her ears.
“Why does it make you so angry?”
Because that was one thing she couldn’t understand. Hadn’t he won in some respects, gaining her as a wife? If the temptation of her had vexed him all this time.
“Because nothing should test me in this way.”
“Why is that? Does it bother you so much because of the temptation in general? Or because... Because it’s me. Because I’m so unsuitable.”
He closed the distance between them, cupping her chin, forcing her to look into his eyes. “It is that the strength of my desire for you makes me unsuitable.”
And this was it. A window into the man. The man that she was going to marry, for whatever he said, it was not simply the King she would bond herself to for her entire life. For it was not a king looking at her now. He needed to believe it, and she understood that. She understood that the blame that he carried around was heavy on his shoulders. That he believed he couldn’t want things for himself. That he couldn’t want fun. That he couldn’t want pleasure. And he had moved her into the category of duty to sidestep that, and he recognized it was a side step. He had also tried to make it as a grave decision. One that seemed a better choice than simply pining and taking chances.
She wanted to believe it meant there was more, and she couldn’t even quite say why, for she was only just beginning to wrap her mind around the fact that she had wanted Alex for quite some time. That Alex was something uniquely special to her. It occurred to her then that maybe there was a difference between the disapproval that her mother had shown her, and the actual feeling Alex had given her when she was near him. Perhaps it wasn’t disapproval at all. Perhaps the real issue was that Alex made her feel like she needed to be different, and the idea of having to try like that terrified her. Yes, it was rooted in what her mother had made her feel, because she had gone into her awkward phase, her teenage years, already feeling at a deficit. Already feeling like there was no possible way for her to triumph over the awkwardness she had been born into.
But there was a difference between that, that shallow disapproval of her mother, and limiting herself because she was afraid to be disapproved of. Because she was afraid of trying her absolute hardest and failing.
What an easy thing it was to fail at having straight hair when your hair was frizzy and curly. What a difficult thing it was to try your absolute hardest to be the best, to try to be the Queen and not manage it. It was such a vastly different thing than failing at living up to a standard her mother had invented for her that she didn’t even want. One showed her a glimmer of the feeling.
Of feeling like a failure. Of feeling not quite good enough.
The other would be... It would be devastating. To well and truly be rejected by someone she really wanted. Doing something she really wanted to do. Something that mattered.
She had hidden herself away because it was easier.
And this desire to know him... It was deep and real, and it meant she couldn’t hide. Not anymore.
So, she clung to that thing he’d said. To that one honest thing. To the fire burning in his eyes.
That to him, the way he wanted her made him unacceptable.
For that was real, and it was human. It was the man and not the King.
And it was what she was desperate for.
It was, she was certain, the place that she would find the answers to what she desperately needed to know.
And so she stood from her chair, and positioned herself in front of him.
“Is it how you want me now?”
“You’re to be my Queen.”
“Then I’m yours. And you can take me if you want. You can do whatever you like. Because I belong to you.”
“Say that again,” he said, his voice like iron.
“I belong to you.”
He growled, wrapping his arm around her waist and drawing her down onto his lap, she could feel the hardness of his arousal pressing up against her behind.
“You’re mine,” he said, kissing her jawline. “Mine at last. I’ve wanted you... It has been like a sickness. But now you belong to me. And no one else. Do you have any idea how intoxicating it was to discover that no other man had ever touched you? Not just my brother, but none of the men at your University? No one. As if you were waiting for me.”
She turned to him, conviction burning in her breast. “But I imagine I don’t have the same sort of gift. I imagine there have been women. You weren’t simply waiting around for me. So, are you to be mine? As I’m yours?”
His eyes went flat. “I belong to Liri. My first service must be to my country.”
“So I’m to share you with a nation? While I belong solely to you? That doesn’t seem fair.”
“Everything here is mine. You among them. It is as fair as anything.”
“You belong to me,” she said, pressing her forehead to his.
She could never have imagined doing this even weeks ago. Touching Alex like he was a human. Pressing her face to his. So close that she could see the lines at the corners of his eyes, the deep grooves that bracketed his mouth. That she could see the beginnings of his evening beard, dark and heavy on his jaw.
She knew how it felt to be kissed by those firm lips. What it was to feel those whiskers on his face scratching at her skin.
She had been afraid of him. Or rather...wary, because somewhere inside of her she had always known it could be this way. Yes. She had been wary. Desperately so.
And now, it was as if a wall had come down. And she could see him, truly. Challenge him. Touch him.
“You’re mine,” she whispered. “And I don’t care if you believe it. I don’t care if you’ll admit it. You belong to me, Alex. Me. I had your body inside mine, and I don’t care if there have been other women. They weren’t me. I’m the one that tempted you. And you don’t succumb to temptation.”
“Must you believe that?”
“I know it,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper.
“I know it.” She repeated that again.
He growled, cupped the back of her head and brought her in for a kiss, hard and ferocious. He might not admit to being hers, but she could feel it. Every move of his lips over hers, and the slide of his tongue against hers. The way his hands moved over her body. He was trying to claim possession, but he had already done so. It was that she could feel her own possession in the way they touched. In the way he tasted her. For there was a care in the way he handled her that spoke of someone taking great pains to be gentle with something that was precious to them. Precious belonging.
But there was something deeper and richer underlying it, and she knew. Knew that it was flowing both ways. Knew it to be true.
And if he wouldn’t admit, it was all right. She would simply know it in her heart until he could.
And she would try. With everything. Not in the way that she had been.
Not sliding under the radar, hiding out in a cottage in the woods.
No. With everything.
She reached behind her back and undid the zipper on her dress, let it fall to her waist.
The undergarment was built into the gown, and unzipping it left her breasts bare.
“These are yours too,” she said, a small smile tugging at her lips. “My body is yours.”
It was sort of cheesy, and she felt half silly saying it, but his response wasn’t silly at all. He gathered her up in his arms and kissed her. With everything.
It was a claiming. An absolute devastation.
And she loved it.
“Do you have any idea
how beautiful you look tonight? Coming down the stairs with your hair loose? It’s everything I was afraid to see in you. Your wildness. Your beauty. Because I was afraid that if I thought, I would not be able to resist it. Disapproval was so much easier.”
“And running away was always easier. Pretending that what I felt was fear.”
It was true. It was so much easier than this. Than diving headlong into a flame that might consume them both, reduce her to ash, leave her less than nothing.
He was the King, and in the end he would stand, even if he was reduced. But she... She would not. She knew it. With everything inside of her she knew it.
He shifted her on his lap so that she was astride him, so that the very heart of her was pressed against the hardness in the front of his slacks. Then he reached between her thighs and began to stroke her there. He pushed his fingertips beneath the edge of her lace panties, teasing her, finding her wet and ready for him.
She had been ready for him. For so much longer than she’d realized. And she felt no shame at all, golden and brazen in the great dining hall of this palace.
“You were so scathing of my being loud at this table some years ago,” she said, wickedness overtaking her. “What do you suppose you would have thought of such a display?”
“I wanted it then,” he growled. “Make no mistake. I wanted it then.”
Pleasure bloomed low in her stomach and he continued to stroke her, gliding through her pleasure, using his fingers inside of her and tormenting them both. She tilted her hips against his hand, moving with the rhythm of his strokes. Then she reached out and curved her fingers around him through the fabric of his pants, squeezing him before unbuttoning the pants, drawing his zipper down and freeing his hardened masculinity.
He was glorious. The feel of him in her palm satiny and hard. Hot.
“I did not know a man could be so beautiful.”
“How can you speak of male beauty when you are here? When you are golden? When you are every fantasy a man could ever possess. Tinley,” he said, her name a growl on his lips.
