Marrying Her Royal Enemy (14 page)

Curled up in the massive bed with its luxuriously soft silk sheets, she felt chilled, apprehensive and alone—more alone than she’d ever felt in her life. And that was saying something. She’d thought it couldn’t get any worse. Perhaps it was because last night with Kostas she’d felt that elusive emotional connection she’d been searching for her entire life.

Where once it had seemed unobtainable, it had been organic with her husband, as if it had just taken the right connection to slot into place—the connection she’d always known was special. Dangerous to her.

The irony of it was undeniable. She’d found that bond with Kostas, the one man she could never explore it with because he wanted no part of it.

An ache wound itself around her heart. What he had told her about his childhood had chilled her, had given her so much more insight into what made him tick. But it had also made her wonder if it wasn’t so much that Kostas didn’t
want
love, but that he didn’t know
what
it was. That he’d been taught it was a weakness,
any
emotion was a weakness, a vulnerability to be exploited.

He was
afraid
of it. If he let someone in, if he admitted his master plan was wrong, if he became anything less than impenetrable, it might all fall apart.

She bit her lip, the salty tang of blood filling her mouth. It might all fall apart anyway if he kept this up; if he refused to bend. But what more could she do than she’d already done? She could only stand by his side, be that unconditional support she knew he needed, ignore the fact that with every day that passed, her true feelings for him were bubbling closer and closer to the surface, threatening to complicate an already too-complicated scenario, the very thing she’d said she’d never do.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

K
OSTAS
SAT
IN
his office finishing up work, knowing Stella was likely back from her meeting with the charity, but he elected to push on until dinner. Avoiding his wife was easier than talking about forgiveness and absolution, something he couldn’t stomach.

He sat back in his seat and rubbed a hand across his brow. It had been like this since their confrontation in the bedroom. Better to withdraw now and save his wife more pain in the long run, than continue to let her uncover too much of him. Ask for the things he’d warned her he could never give.

A knot tied itself down low. He was hurting Stella with his withdrawal, could see it in her eyes when that tough facade slipped for just a second. Knew it was the last thing he should do to a woman who’d been marginalized by the people she’d loved, who’d experienced enough rejection for a lifetime. But what choice did he have?

He’d tried to make it up to her by allowing her to attend an executive council meeting yesterday as the council prepared to transition to its postelection membership. It had been good to see her light up, to see her brain working frantically as she scribbled notes, had assuaged his guilt just the slightest little bit. But she was looking for more than that from him—she always had been.

Pushing his attention back to his schedule for tomorrow, he perpetuated his avoidance strategy; how that knot twisted itself into a dozen more tangled iterations.

Takis knocked on the door and entered for their final debrief of the day. Working through a few urgent items, they finished with his latest approval ratings that had just come in. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up at the look on his aide’s face. Dipping his head, he scanned the numbers.
They were disastrous.
“You’re sure these are accurate?”

Takis nodded. “We expanded the poll. The numbers came back the same.”

He threw the report on the desk, his heart plummeting. The goodwill he’d amassed since becoming king had vaporized in the wake of that damning editorial and the increasing public discontent that had followed. In fact, he was back to where he’d started. Given they were three and a half weeks away from the elections, it was a disaster.

A disaster his wife had warned him about when he’d shut her down in the bedroom.

“I need time to absorb these.” He looked up at his aide. “We’ll pick this up in the morning. Discuss a strategy to counter them.”

Takis nodded and left. A low, rough word escaped him. How could he have been so shortsighted? Have so vastly misjudged public sentiment as to allow this to happen?

A buzzing feeling settled over him as he attempted to absorb the disaster he’d created. Stella had been right all along. He should have listened to the people, should have compromised, should have found a middle ground. Instead, in his need to be right, to correct his mistakes, to prove to his father, a
dead man
, that he had been wrong about him, that he
would
lead this country to its freedom and self-determination, he had sewn the seeds of his own demise. Given the military an opportunity to hang him.

Rising to his feet, he walked to the bar stored in a hidden cabinet and poured himself a drink. Carrying it to the window, he took a long sip of the smoky, aged whiskey as he looked out at the dark mass of the Ionian Sea spread out below the rugged cliffs that bounded Carnelia.

It was his people’s voice he had been fighting for.
Their
voice that needed to be heard. But somewhere along the way he’d forgotten that, the principle swept aside by his blind ambition to save this country.

He took another sip of the whiskey, welcoming its fiery burn down his throat. He struggled with his father’s legacy, he knew. Always had. His father had drilled his propaganda into him with such force and regularity, it had been impossible for him to escape his legacy completely.

Confused, caught between what his grandmother was teaching him and what his father was drilling into his head, he had kept his developing thoughts to himself. Closed himself down. Shaped himself into that impenetrable force his father had been. Made himself
unbreakable
in order to survive.

The knot in his gut expanded. His arrogance, his need to become impregnable, had become an obsession, defined his existence. Usually, he managed to keep it under control, rein himself in when he knew he was swinging too far to the other end of the pendulum, but that self-awareness had disintegrated the night Athamos’s car had plunged over that cliff on a hot Carnelian night borne of temporary insanity. Then nothing had made sense anymore.

Are you punishing yourself?
Stella’s words floated back to him on a quiet mental whisper.
Was he?
He thought he’d put Athamos’s death behind him, forgiven himself for his own self-preservation so he could accomplish what he needed to do. But now, as he stared out at the sea from which they had pulled the crown prince’s car, the sky as solid a black as it had been the night he and his rival had raced, lit by a sea of stars, he wondered if he had. If Stella was right—that he had made this country his penance... If the one thing he’d never told anyone was the one thing he could never forgive himself for...

A darkness rose up inside of him, an all too familiar, corrosive guilt that had once threatened to eat him alive. He’d been operating on autopilot ever since Athamos’s death, determined to lift this country from the ashes, to salvage
something
from the wreck of his life, his wife the only thing that came close to jolting him out of it.

He
had
lost his passion. His idealism. Stella was right. He didn’t even recognize himself anymore.

The sight of Athamos’s car careening off the road ahead of him filled his head. The squeal of brakes as his rival attempted to steer away from the deadly drop to the cliffs below. The heart-pounding silence that had followed.

His heart pounded in his chest at the memory, so violently he thought his ribs might bruise it. That night was a hell he would never fully escape, a stain on his soul that would forever mark him. But somehow, he knew, he had to find the lessons his guru had preached. Some he knew he’d learned. Others he was sure were yet to come.

It occurred to him as he looked out into the dark, star-strewn night that perhaps part of truly moving on was not becoming what he had been, but what he would
become
. Something better than before. Something worthy of the second chance he’d been given.
Something that would make up for all of it.

He would make this right.

* * *

Stella regarded her husband over the very old, very good bottle of Bordeaux he’d unearthed from the castle’s wine cellar, the agony he was clearly in threatening to crush her heart, steal her breath. The emotional knives that had been turning inside of her the entire meal, making it impossible to eat, forced her to finally lay down her fork and knife.

Her husband, who had consumed only a few bites of his meal himself, finally spoke. “Aren’t you going to say, ‘I told you so’?”

She shook her head. “I think you’ve punished yourself enough already.”

He took a sip of his wine. Pushed the glass back onto the table. “I called Aristos before dinner and asked his advice on how he’s dealt with public opposition to his properties.”

She nodded, hiding her surprise. A good idea given Aristos had built hotels and casinos all around the world.

“What did he say?”

“He took me through the key interest groups. Told me which ones are key to get onside, which ones we need to court to neutralize the negative factions. He said to make them a part of the decision-making process.”

Exactly as she’d counseled.
“Good advice. But that will take time. You need something you can execute immediately, something that will turn the tide of public opinion before the elections.”

His expression was bleak. “I’m not sure that exists.”

“What about a town council?” She voiced the idea that had been percolating ever since that editorial had run. “Get everyone out and let them have their say. Once they’ve had a chance to offer their opinions, you choose some of those key influencers Aristos was talking about to join your advisory council. Nothing will
happen
before the elections in terms of results, but at least the people will see the promise you are making to listen.”

He gave her a skeptical look. “That could end up being a zoo. They will ask for the moon.”

“You don’t make any promises you can’t keep. You agree to compromise.”

Kostas was quiet for a long moment, swirling the wine in his glass. “It could,” he said finally, “be positioned as me being an empathetic, inclusive leader rather than my backtracking on my plans.”

“Yes,” she said quietly. “There are worse things than being seen as an empathetic leader.”

His gaze sharpened at the gibe. “The people are right to be frustrated. It should never have been allowed to get to this point.
I
should have done something sooner.”

Finally, an insight into what was going on in his head. “It took decades of your father’s misrule to get the country to this point. You yourself told me how complicated the political situation was before you left. You can’t second-guess your decisions.”

“It’s impossible not to wonder how much damage I could have prevented.”

Her heart squeezed. “But it won’t solve your problem. You need to leave the past in the past.”

He was silent for a long time. When he looked up at her, there was a myriad of emotions blazing in his dark eyes. “Do you really believe that’s possible?”

“Yes,” she said. “I do. I have these past few weeks and you need to do it, too, Kostas. You’re spending so much time trying to prove yourself right, to prove you aren’t your father, you’ve lost the vision that’s always guided you, the one your people are looking to you for.”

His mouth thinned. “Sometimes I swing too far to the wrong end of the pendulum, I know that. I have a lot of my father in me. In this case I know I have.”

“So do the town hall. Open yourself up, show everyone who you are,
prove
to them you are on their side.” She shook her head, her voice softening. “I signed up for the man who gave that speech at our engagement party about the self-determination of his people. For
that
man, not
this
one. For the Kostas who sat in that tree and told me he was going to be a more empathetic king.”

His gaze fell away from hers. He picked up his wine and took a sip, staring into the flickering candlelight.

“What are you afraid they’re going to see?” Her quiet voice brought his head up. “What are you afraid
I’m
going to see, Kostas? Why did you shut down on me the other night?”

He lifted a shoulder. “It would take a psychologist years to get to the bottom of it.”

She bit her lip. “And that’s it, is it?” she murmured. “Your job is done. Wife secured, wife deconstructed, wife in her appropriate box, the work toward an heir under way? No need to put in any additional effort toward this so-called relationship you wanted?”

The skin across his cheekbones went blade-sharp. “You know it isn’t like that.”

“Tell me how it
is
, Kostas, because I have no clue.”

“We are good together.” His amber eyes blazed. “We are making a great team. I
have
made an effort with you. I have told you things I’ve never told another human being. But you need to know when to pick your battles, when to push and when to stop.”

“So you can walk away when it gets hot in a room? ‘Be careful what you wish for, Stella, you might not like what you see.’ What does that even mean?”

“You’re reading too much into it.”

“I think I’m not.” She fixed her gaze on his. “You asked me to trust you at the beginning of all of this and I have. I’ve let you in. Now you need to play by the same rules. You are capable of opening up, you’ve shown that. This marriage hinges on you doing it, because we left the old rules behind us a long time ago. And if you think I can’t take it, this is me, Kostas, saving a country with you while a madman waits in the wings.”

He gave her a long look. “I know you can take it, Stella, but tonight is not the night.” He pushed his chair back, the screech of wood across stone making her wince.

She watched him walk away
again
, her heart dropping. She could only hope she’d given him a potential solution to think through.

Getting to her feet, she went to bed because clearly he needed to process. Pacing their beautiful exposed-stone bedroom, she couldn’t settle. The distance between her and Kostas seemed like a million miles apart tonight. Her tumultuous relationship, the tenuous situation they were in coated her mouth with fear.

She should have kept to their original agreement, should never have allowed Kostas to convince her to turn this into a real relationship because exactly what she’d feared would happen was happening. She had allowed her emotions to get involved and Kostas was shutting down, as emotionally unavailable a man as her father ever was.

Her insides twisted into a tight, protective ball. The silence, the palpable strain of dinners in the formal dining room of the palace as her parents had forced her and her siblings to suffer through mandated family dinners, had been toxic, thick with her mother’s hurt and anger, her father’s ambivalence. Nik used to come up with every excuse in the book to miss them, the atmosphere had been so tense, inventing a stomachache one day, a sprained ankle the next.

When she couldn’t stand the empty room one minute longer, she picked up the phone and called Alex. They talked about the latest news, the gossip at home, about the jazz concert Alex was putting on in the spring with the Akathinian legend Nina Karvelas for the youth charity she chaired.

Her sister was over the moon about it, clearly in her element. Stella grew quieter and quieter as the conversation went on.

Alex paused. “You okay?”

She brushed away the tears sliding silently down her cheeks. “Alex,” she whispered, “I feel like I’m walking on quicksand.”