by Maisey Yates
It was fair enough, she had to admit. It was a little bit disconcerting. But sometimes she forgot, and lost herself in looking at his stern male beauty, and the fact that there was a cat around was the furthest thing from her mind.
Anyway, the cat couldn’t talk. It’s not like he was going to tell tales.
His gaze sharpened, looking at her bare legs.
“You can come down here and join me.”
“I don’t...sit in the grass.”
“You don’t think you’d ever make love in the grass?”
The corner of his mouth turned upward, and she found herself pinned to the earth, his great, muscular form come down on top of her at the speed of light. “That is a different suggestion altogether.”
The show of humor, playfulness, coming from Alex buoyed her. She lifted her head up from the ground and bit his lip. He growled, gripping her wrists and drawing them up over her head, flexing his hips forward and letting her feel his hardness.
“Very wicked,” she said. “Much more wicked than I ever thought I could be.”
“I always knew I could be,” he said, his voice suddenly rough. “At least, I always knew I could be with you.”
He said things like that, and it made her feel special. Made her feel like this was so singular and special nothing else could ever come close to it. Ever.
Which made her special, and that, above all else was a revelation. He was a mountain, it was true, and everything good that went with it. But he would also get down on the ground for her, with her. She made him smile.
She touched the stern lines around his mouth.
“What?”
“Nothing,” she said. “Except you know I find you impossibly beautiful.”
“Beautiful,” he said, his voice filled with disdain.
“Yes, beautiful. Such a beautiful man.”
“Tinley,” he said, his voice rough. “I would have you...”
“People could come out,” she said, feeling slightly nervous about being too much of an exhibitionist. The baths were one thing. The garden was another. “Too much staff and all of that. Oh, could we...? Could we have a picnic?”
“A picnic?”
“Yes. Come on. It will be fun.”
“Fun? Eating out here on the ground?”
“Yes,” she said. “I’ll even put Algie back in his cage, and take him inside. And then it will just be you and I out here. And whatever happened after the picnic...”
“It would make you happy?”
“Yes,” she said.
Something shifted in his expression. “It is so simple to please you?”
She reached out and touched his hand. “It can be.”
She could see, for just a moment, emotion in his dark eyes. “I will arrange it.”
He stood, and made his way quickly back to the castle, and Tinley laughed at his retreating figure. He wanted her. It was a wonderful revelation. Just then, something caught Algernon’s attention, and he sat up, his ears facing forward. The little cat was never that alert, and Tinley thought it was odd. He was staring into the woods.
“All right,” she said, “let’s get you back—”
The cat sprang into action, and then ran into the forest, disappearing from view before Tinley could grab him.
She stood, staring after him. He couldn’t have gone far. He was only capable of short bursts of speed. She sighed heavily and took a step toward the forest. Dread crept over her. She knew that she wasn’t supposed to do this. Knew that she wasn’t supposed to go here.
Alex would be furious.
“And I’ll be back before he is.”
And on a deep breath, Tinley slipped into the trees.
CHAPTER TWELVE
WHEN ALEX RETURNED from the palace, he found the garden empty.
Tinley wasn’t there. Her cat wasn’t even there.
A wash of dread went over him.
And he knew. He knew exactly where she was and what had happened.
He had let his guard down.
And it happened again.
Fury rose up inside of him, and he charged headlong into the forest without thinking.
It was dark here under the trees. Completely black.
It was evening as it was, and here beneath the canopy of trees, there was nothing. Panic ate at him.
For he knew exactly what could happen here. And so did she. She knew better than this. She knew better than to play around with this.
Perhaps this is it. The end of the curse.
Everyone who touches you dies.
He gritted his teeth. There was no point in thinking that way. Not with Tinley lost in the woods, and with nothing to be done for her except find her.
He pushed through the trees, listening intently for anything he might hear.
He heard the howl of a wolf, and the hair on his arms rose on end.
He took two steps forward, found a large tree branch and held it like a club. An entire pack of wolves would be no match for his fury. Anything that dared touch Tinley was already dead. Man or beast.
There were no paths in the wood, and the trees reached out to grab him, and he elbowed his way through. Listening. He didn’t want to call out, for some reason. Something inside of him prevented it. And he felt the need to trust that sensation.
For he always did.
The kingdom of Liri was an ancient one, and the only thing more feared than the wood itself was superstition of what might happen if it was destroyed. That sense of old-world magic was something he still carried inside himself, though he was pragmatic in many ways.
He felt the weight of the mystical here.
And if nothing half so fanciful as old magic lived here, then many animals did. Trees. A delicate ecosystem that scarcely existed anywhere in the world before. It was for men to be respectful of it. Careful of it. Not to destroy that which they could not dominate.
Even he believed that.
He heard another wolf howl, and that was when he knew the silence had to end. He growled in response, and pressed forward quickly, bursting through the trees and into a clearing. Tinley was sitting there, clutching her cat, looking wide-eyed.
“Get up,” he commanded, reaching his hand out.
She looked up at him, a mixture of gratitude and fear in her eyes. “Come with me,” he said.
She didn’t need to be asked twice.
He hauled her up off of the ground and brought her up against his chest. “What were you thinking?”
“Can we get out of the terrifying forest, please?”
“Nothing will touch us.” He looked around. “You’re with me.”
He propelled them both back through the woods, back toward the palace, and when they were on the grounds again, free of the oppressive darkness of the trees, he rounded on her. “What the hell were you thinking?”
“Algie... He went into the trees. I was sure that he was only just a little bit away, but then he was gone. I found him and that clearing, and I have no idea how he covered so much ground so quickly. But I was about to walk back out, when I heard the wolves. And I needed to figure out which direction they were coming from...”
“Every direction,” he said, his voice hard. “You can never let your guard down like that again. Ever. You cannot expose yourself to such dangers, Tinley. I forbid it.”
“I know. But it’s... It’s only a forest, and nothing is cursed. I understand that people have died going into it, but many people have gone into it and not died.”
“It’s only the people who have were my brothers.”
“I know,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“It will not happen again,” he said, his voice stern.
“No, it won’t. I... I’m sorry. But everything’s okay.” She looked around and saw the picnic that he had brought out
for them. “Let’s have dinner.”
“No. There will be no picnic.”
“Why not?”
“You’re not to go in the garden anymore. Not for a while.”
“Are you... You putting me under house arrest?”
“If I must. I will. It concerns me not in the least to cut you off of the outside world if I have to do it to keep you safe.”
“Alex...”
She could have been killed. The idea of coming upon her...her blood staining the ground. For the first time he was tempted to tear the forest apart. Raze it to the ground.
How could he have forgotten?
How could he have let himself slip into this fantasy?
This was not an old-world fairy tale. Where the crows ate your eyes, ships were dashed on the rocks and the dark magic won. This was not happy endings and true love.
Those things did not exist.
“I am the King. I am not... I’m not your boyfriend. We are not on a date. I forgot, for a moment, who I am and what I must do. But I will not forget again. My word is law, Tinley. We will marry next week. You will take your place as my Queen. You will do your duty. And that is all.”
He marched her into the palace, up to her room. “Put the cat away.”
Then he went furiously to his own chamber, slamming the door behind him and pacing the length of it.
He had forgotten himself. He had forgotten himself again. It was unforgivable.
And the exact same thing had nearly happened.
He had nearly lost her. Because of his own selfishness. Because he had taken his eyes off of his duty. And he had given in to temptation. It could not be endured. It could not be.
And it never would be. Never again. He was not a man, he was a king. And he would not forget.
* * *
It was only two days till the wedding. Alex had not come to her bed, and she had endured endless days of frost ever since she had gone into the wood. She knew what he was doing. It was all related to those things he’d said to her about not being able to be a man and a king. Not being able to have fun. To ever loosen the hold on his reins.
Because if he did, bad things would happen. And somehow, the picnic, all of that, had combined to create the perfect storm inside of him the other day.
She’d been so stupid going into the wood. She knew she had been. But she had been...
It was difficult to explain the journey she was on in herself, and it was not terribly compatible with the journey he was on.
But she was finding courage. Finding her own feet, and it made him want to lock down and control her.
There had to be a middle ground. Had to be something else. Had to be a path to freedom.
For both of them.
She made sure the animals were fed and happy, Algernon sleeping on the bed, the others in their habitats, and she decided that she was going to do something to breach the silence between them.
She walked down the hall, toward his bedroom. She had always let him determine when they might sleep together, but she was done with that.
She wasn’t afraid to put herself forward. Wasn’t afraid of being rejected.
She didn’t know why.
Because you know now it has nothing to do with you, even if he does tell you to leave.
It was true. She did know that. And she knew it well. She had found a sort of comfort with herself here, in a place she would have said should’ve made her the most uncomfortable.
And it was magic.
She felt magic, even now in this precarious position. She slipped down the hallway and she paused in front of that family portrait she had looked at when she had first arrived.
Her eye went right to Alexius.
And she didn’t feel lonely. She didn’t feel isolated.
No, he wasn’t quite where she wanted him to be. And she didn’t know how long it would take for him to get there.
But he was... He was hers.
And she had found a way to open herself up, join all of the pieces together. No longer compartmentalized.
He understood her. Understood the life she had here at the palace, and he had gotten to know the person that time spent in Boston at school had helped shape her into.
He understood about the charity, and he tolerated her animals.
He knew her in a way that nobody else ever had. Perhaps in a way no one else ever would.
And it made her chest burn bright.
She’d made a mistake. Going into the wood had been a mistake, but she had a feeling it was one she had to make.
Without knocking, she pushed open the door to his bedroom. And there he was, lying on the bed, that lounging predator. His eyes were sharp, hard. “What are you doing here, Tinley?”
“I think it’s past time we talked, don’t you?”
“Why would you say that?”
“Well, because. Because we ought to, don’t you think? About what happened.”
“I wasn’t confused about the incident that you might want to speak about.”
“Good,” she said. “I’m glad that you weren’t confused. Because it’s important. It’s important that we have this discussion. I... I’m very sorry. I didn’t think. I didn’t think, and I should have. It was so important to me to go get Algie that I didn’t think about my own safety. But I want you to know that I would’ve crashed in even if you were standing out there. You would have had to come after me either way.”
“I would have stopped you.”
“It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t change the fact that I would have needed to go in after him.”
“I would’ve gone for you.”
“All right. But you can’t control me, Alex. I’m finding myself for the first time in my life, and I don’t want to be married to a man who wants to control my every breath. That’s a thing. I really don’t want a king. I want you. And I know that you think they’re one and the same, but they aren’t. I belong to you. But you do not rule me.”
“They’re the same.”
“They aren’t. Because a king is born ruling over a people, royalty is inevitable. But love? I give you that. Freely.”
“Love?” he asked, his voice deadly.
“Yes,” she said. “Love. I... I love you, Alexius.”
His eyes were flat, his chest pitching with the effort it took him to draw in breath. He looked angry. More than angry. He looked furious. This was the first time she had ever truly feared him.
“Love is not what a sane person would call this thing between us.”
“Perhaps I’m not sane, then. It wouldn’t surprise me overly much.”
“Love is a distraction. Love is a lie.”
“It feels very much like the truth to me.”
“Yes, it was the truth to you when you thought you loved Dionysus as well. When are you going to accept that your naivety makes you believe things that simply aren’t true?”
“You don’t get to tell me what it is I feel. You don’t get to tell me who I am or what I’m naïve about. I might have been wrong about Dionysus, but that doesn’t mean I’m wrong about you. I’m not. I understand what this is between us. It’s real. You cannot tell me otherwise.”
“No,” he said. “I trust my head. I do not trust my heart.”
“Because of Lazarus? You were a boy, Alex, and you were forced to pay for sins that not even a man should have to pay for. Accidents happen.”
“One time is an accident,” he said. “Twice is not.”
“It isn’t the same. I understand why it feels that way, but it isn’t. It isn’t, and it never could be. Dionysus was responsible for his own actions, as a man. He might’ve been young, but he was still an adult man. What happened to Lazarus is a tragedy, what happened to Dionysus is... Idiocy. An idiocy that was not yours.”
“No,” he said,
his voice harsh. “There is something you don’t know.”
“There’s nothing you could tell me that would make me change the way that I feel.”
“The night that Dionysus went into the wood I did not discourage him. In fact, I was glad of it.”
“What?”
“I knew he was going to create a spectacle. Dragging that socialite who was with him off into the darkness. I knew it would create a sensation, and that you would know for certain what he’d been up to that night. And in fact, I was coming to tell you.”
“You... You were?”
“Yes. I was intent on letting you know just how unsuitable your fiancé really was. That even now, so close to when the two of you were to be married, he was off with another woman, all showing off and being a fool. And I was going to seduce you.”
“What?”
“Oh, yes,” he said. “You see, I wanted you for myself. And as long as I thought my brother was keeping his vows to you, I wasn’t going to touch you. But then he didn’t. He didn’t, and I thought that you deserved to know. And that I would make you mine. But Tinley, I was not going to offer you marriage. I was going to offer you the chance to be my mistress. Such is my weakness. I was going to take advantage of the fact that my brother was drunk, that he was a fool, and use it to maneuver myself into a situation where I might have his fiancée. His future Princess. I felt we could come to an arrangement that would be quite satisfactory to us both.”
“But you... You didn’t come to me.”
“I was on my way, when I got the news of my brother’s death. I let my brother go into the woods so that I could seduce his fiancée. There is no sugarcoating that. I let my first brother die because I wanted to go off and have fun. I let my second brother die for the same reason. Do you not see? I am selfish. I am weak. More than either of them could ever be. Though, they’re dead. So it makes no difference, does it?”
“Alex...”
Shock slammed through her. She tried to imagine the self that she’d been then. Young and fragile. Naïve.
What would have happened if she’d found out before his death that Dionysus had gone off with another woman, even while she was in the palace? Feeling like she loved him? And what would she have done to the bearer of the news? And if he tried to seduce her?
