Chapter 5 – Sebastian
SEBASTIAN
Gawking at me, she doesn’t speak for the longest of moments, her eyes wide, hardly blinking.
“Your Majesty,” she finally manages in French, her voice shaky as she does some sort of awkward curtsy-bow thing.
She quickly replaces the book she had been looking through, fear flickering across her features, though she’s maintaining eye contact with me.
Brave. I’ll give her that much.
Her fear does things to me I wish it wouldn’t, and I mentally fumble for a way to diffuse it, pissed off I’m reacting to her at all.
I enter the room, storming until I’m standing almost directly before her. Above her, for how much shorter she is compared to me, and I’m reminded just how small and feminine she is. How I got this close, I don’t even know.
I can’t breathe. I can’t run. All I can do is sneer as my defense and utter, “Miss Wright?”
“Yes, sir. I’m so very sorry,” she rushes out, switching to English, her beguiling blue eyes searching mine, hopeful in their inventory.
She won’t find what she seeks there, and when she realizes it, the corners of her mouth tilt down ever so slightly.
She clears her throat. “I came here to find my father and take him back to the facility he’s living in.
One of the guards brought me inside the palace, and while I was waiting, I was appreciating…
well…your family portrait.” She emits an uncomfortable laugh, a small blush staining her cheeks.
“Anyway, I took a step back and knocked into a pedestal. I was unable to save the bust of your great-grandfather before it fell and broke.”
“I see.” My tone is harsh. Cold. Indifferent, perhaps, and she shifts her stance, and in doing so assaults me with her scent that, much like her eyes, reminds me of sunshine and summer.
It’s annoyingly distracting, just like her.
“So after you coaxed your way into my home, it is my understanding that you then spoke with my daughters at some length.”
A smile overtakes her face and Jesus. No wonder the girls and Emily are so taken with her.
Her smile is completely disarming and enchanting.
How awful. I keep my guard up and my distance for a reason.
It doesn’t escape my notice that she’s the first woman in…
fuck, ages, eternity, to capture my undivided attention.
To have my body craving and my mind wandering, exploring.
An enchantress, she immediately has to go.
“Yes!” she exalts, oblivious to what she’s doing to me. “They found me just after the accident happened. They’re such lovely, sweet gir…er, princesses. I hope it’s okay that I spoke with them.”
“No. It’s not okay. Why would I want my daughters to speak to strange, clumsy women who entered the palace uninvited and broke our things?”
Hurt flashes through her that she quickly replaces with something else. Ire, maybe. Her gaze flickers to the left, out toward the window, as she tries to rein it in before returning to me. Holding my gaze, she doesn’t cower for a second beneath my withering stare.
“Right,” she bites out. “Again, I’m very sorry for breaking the bust. It was an accident. Surely you’ve made one or two of those in your life.”
I gawk at her. The fucking audacity.
“I do know that visitors are not allowed here, and I completely understand,” she rushes on.
“I was not intending to break any rules and I assure you, my father wasn’t either.
I hope they informed you by now that he has dementia and was very confused about where he was.
I’m not sure if there is a protocol for such things, but I’d very much like to take him home now.
As for the broken bust, is there a way I can—”
“Pay for or replace the priceless sculpture of my great-grandfather, who is dead, done by Vincenzo Alrimi, who is also dead?” I cruelly cut her off.
“That was a Vincenzo Alrimi?” Her hand covers her mouth, and she sucks in a breath through her fingers.
She looks stricken, and though I’m loathsome to admit it, something about her despair over an old bust surprises me.
“I don’t know what to say. Your Majesty…
I truly am deeply sorry. Please, tell me what I can do. ”
Yet another image of her dropping to her knees and taking my cock between her full, pouty lips fills my head, and what the fuck?
Beautiful or not, I cannot lust over her.
I take a step back, anxious to go and leave this woman behind.
I certainly don’t need to continue whatever this… feeling she’s evoking in me is.
But damn, those eyes. Those big, round, electric-blue eyes.
They hold me. Beg me. And…soften me. Nothing short of a miracle, only my children have managed that.
I breathe out a sigh, my hands on my hips, and I force myself to even my temper.
A noise leaves me, a heavy breath mixed with an incredulous laugh. I don’t know what to do with myself.
For as well-bred and trained as I am, it’s as if, since the moment Nora died and I sequestered us to this palace, I’ve forgotten how to be around people.
Around women. I try to remember why she’s here.
Why I’m here. I dig around, searching for a sliver of my inner humanity, and what I come up with isn’t all that great.
“I’m sorry,” she murmurs again at my long silence, her expression contrite.
I don’t know what to say to her or how to respond. Too many emotions and thoughts war within me. A strange need to comfort her. To take her against me and demolish all her worries with the touch of my hand slithers through me like the first sip of bourbon at the end of a long day.
On the flip side, I long to command her, own her, punish her.
It’s just that you haven’t left the palace in three years. That you haven’t been laid in even longer. Yes. That’s it. It has to be. There is no other reasonable explanation for my reaction.
She sighs at my odd and prolonged silence and scours about the room as if she’ll find something here to help her, only to sling back up to me and hold. Cling. Discover. Her head tilts and recognition lights her eyes.
Out of nowhere, her hand is on my face, tickling the skin beneath my eyes. “I used not to sleep either,” she tells me. “Guided meditation helped me. I used to listen to online recordings for it.”
“What?” I grip her wrist and force her hand from my face, only I don’t release her, and I don’t know why. Her skin, perhaps. Soft and warm and smooth like silk. Christ.
“Sleep,” she explains without apologizing, though she knows she clearly overstepped. “You don’t get much of it. Do you?”
I blink at her, stunned. “It’s none of your business.”
She jerks her arm free from my grip. “Perhaps not. All I’m saying is I know what it’s like, and if you’re interested, I can give you some techniques that worked for me. A king and father of three probably needs more sleep than most.”
“You’re out of line. You know nothing of me.”
A sly smirk. “Am I wrong?”
No. She’s not wrong. I haven’t slept through the night in years. Perceptive woman, no one is aware of this. I go for runs, and I read tomes that bore me to tears and nothing, nothing has helped. I manage a few hours a night at most. Part of my curse, no doubt.
Is she truly this creature? Sensitive and intuitive and caring? Even for a man who has done nothing but yell and bark at her?
Now it’s my turn to scrutinize her. To truly take a deeper delve beyond what my body reacts to. The girls want her. Emily wants her. Fuck, I want her, too, but for all the wrong reasons.
Focus, Sebastian! Discover her truth and set yourself free from her.
“You’re a schoolteacher here in Messalina?
” I don’t know why I’m asking. Validity, perhaps.
I want to see if she’s a liar, skilled or not.
I want to test if this is all a ruse, a ploy, a way to gain access to me and my children and ruin us for good.
I can’t have this woman here, and I certainly can’t have her here working for me.
She’s part of the curse. I know it. A siren meant to torment me until I jump to my death. But all I hear are the words of my daughters and Emily suddenly filling my head.
“Yes.” That’s it. No elaboration.
“You didn’t finish school?”
She absently plays with a piece of her hair, twirling it around and around her finger, more than a little uncomfortable with my questions. She’s likely curious what my questions have to do with the sculpture or her father.
“No. I had to drop out to afford the care facility my father is now in.”
“Hmm. Is teaching not what you wanted to do?”
She stares up at me, nonplussed, her hands going wildly about.
“I didn’t know what I wanted to do other than stop moving for a while.
University was the only way I could convince my father to stand still for longer than five minutes.
We moved around a lot after my mother died, and I needed a break. ”
Interesting. “How old are you exactly?”
Her arms fold in front of her chest, her hips swinging to the side as she adjusts her stance, growing impatient with my line of questioning. She’s young. A lot younger than I am. I know that much by looking at her. But there is a maturity in her eyes beyond her age.
“Twenty-one. What does any of this have to do with the broken statue or my father?”
Hell. I was expecting closer to twenty-five. This woman is fifteen years my junior.
“Nothing,” I admit. “Nothing at all. But you’re American. Flighty. With any hope, you might choose to leave Messalina instead of continuing to live here.”
“Or I might choose to stay,” she counters acerbically. “Who knows? Last I heard this is a free country like the rest of the EU, is it not, Your Majesty?”
I play with my smirk. No one has ever spoken to me the way she is now. I don’t know if it’s because she’s American and isn’t used to royalty or because she’s scared I’m going to slap her with a massive bill for the bust or if this is how she always is with anyone who challenges her.