Chapter Two #3
“I could have been smart, or I could have been defeated growing up in the palace like I did. But my options were limited. It really was one or the other.”
“You have a room prepared for you at the palace.” She stared at him. “I was not going to force you into my bed.”
She felt her face getting even hotter. “I didn’t say that you were.” Now she was reassuring her kidnapper? What was the matter with her? “I didn’t accuse you of anything, but I wanted to make my stance clear.”
“Are you a nun?”
“No. Though maybe I would like the chance to decide if I want to be one. Maybe I want the chance to decide if I want to be a pole dancer. Maybe I just want the chance. The choice.”
“What a sweet, modern idea. Choices are rarely actually available. And even when they are, they’re generally an illusion.”
“That’s not true,” she said.
“You challenge me?” he asked, clearly shocked.
She was used to men like him, though. It was true that in the space of only a few hours he’d shown her more respect than her father had in years, but that was more of a commentary on her father than on him.
But he didn’t intimidate her—maybe he should. But what would he do? Hurt her and start a war? He wanted her for diplomacy and the truth was, he needed her.
In many ways, she’d probably never been safer.
It made her want to laugh except it wasn’t funny.
“Yes. I do challenge you, because no one ever has, clearly, and they should. You men love to tell yourself you have no choice when in fact it simply means you take whatever it is you want. Saying there is no choice is an attempt at insulating yourself from argument. You didn’t accidentally take the throne back over from an evil dictatorship.
You had a choice, and you made your choice. ”
He laughed. Hard. Low. Rolling. It didn’t make her feel amused, no. It chilled her. All the way down to her bones.
“Fernanda—” he used her name for the first time “—I bled for this. I fought my way up from nothing, for this. Perhaps, as you say, there was a choice, but as far as I’m concerned this was a mandate created in my very bones.”
She gazed back up at him, and swallowed hard. “That is spoken like a man. You believe that you’re the only one in the world who can accomplish this, but you need to use me? I’m just an accessory to your goal, and as long as you say that there’s no choice it justifies it?”
“You think that your happiness is more important than that of an entire country?”
“I have spent my entire life being told that I’m inconsequential. I cannot be nothing to my father, a thing to be manipulated and moved around at will, and yet essential to this.”
“I never said you were inconsequential, and the truth is your father doesn’t believe you are either.
If he did, he never would have hidden you away at the convent.
He would never have used you as a bargaining chip in the first place.
This much you can know for certain. I have certainly never said you had no value.
I would not have run you down on my horse if you didn’t. ”
“Perhaps,” she said, still making eye contact with him. “And if you had any sense of fairness you would have tried to capture me in a foot race so that we were evenly matched.”
He nearly laughed; she was glad that he didn’t.
Because the sound of his voice, his laughter, was in no way pleasant.
“Little one, I was not striving for fairness. I was intending to win. Rules and warfare are for other men. The stakes in this are too high for me to leave anything up to chance. For now, we have an agreement.”
“And how am I supposed to know you’ll honor it?”
He looked her up and down again, like she was a mere object. “You don’t. You can only choose to take my word or not. But at the end of the day, any negotiating we have done is out of the goodness of my heart. You are my captive. And you will take what I give you.”
Anger spiked in her blood, and she took a step forward, forcing herself to continue to look into those fathomless blue eyes. “You see how far you get if you have to drag me kicking and screaming off this plane. You see how well your plan works if your bride is a captive for all the world to see.”
“You have to trust me,” he said. “I have given you my word. I’m not your father.
And I am not the man who held this position before me.
I am the rightful king, and my only aim was to restore this country to its former glory, and then some.
If you cannot trust in the goodness that may or may not lurk in my heart, trust in that.
I do not care if it is you or any other woman who is by my side in my later years.
I do not care if you are the one to give me an heir.
All I care about is this. This moment. This agreement. ”
Whether she should or not, she believed that. Those callous words that might have wounded her if she cared even a little bit. But it was to her advantage that he didn’t have any designs on her. To her advantage that he didn’t care about her one way or the other. Specifically.
There had never been a silver lining to being a political pawn. There was now.
He stood tall, and held out his arm, and she looked at him for a moment before realizing what she was intended to do. Then she took a step toward him, and placed her hand over his forearm, and allowed him to escort her from the room.
She kept her word. Part of him had expected that she would fight him, but instead she had done exactly as she had promised.
She had fire in her. It was a surprise. When he had discovered that the bride promised to the ruler of his country had been spirited off to a convent, he had imagined someone pious. Quiet. Prayerful, even. She was not a nun; that much was certain.
Not that he knew anything of the faithful. He had no use for fantasies. No ingrained connection to some spirit in the sky that was supposed to offer health, safety and blessing.
He had never experienced it.
No. When he had been alone in his life, he had been alone. There had been no comforting presence. No divine comfort to be had.
Still, he had thought that it might be a good thing to have a bride who had a more tempered personality.
She was not the one. It was no matter, however, because what he had said to her was true.
He did not care how long they remained married.
Once he felt secure in his position. Once the trade routes were well established, and they proved to be beneficial to everyone, once he had signed long-standing military treaties, he would have no use for her. He could trade her in for a new wife.
This one could be like another adviser. Not a wife in truth.
He looked down at her as he opened the door to the car that was waiting for them. Her eyes met his, and he felt the impact of her gaze like a freight train driving straight through him.
Apparently his body appreciated the challenge.
It was very like him.
If he wasn’t fighting, he didn’t know who he was. So in many ways, it wasn’t a surprise that this woman who looked at him as if he was not great and terrifying, but was an obstacle to try to overcome, was appealing.
Most people found him frightening. For good reason.
He was barely more civilized than a wild animal. Than the wolves that had once famously roamed Asland. Women who were interested in him were often as hard as he was, experienced and jaded.
Princess Fernanda had a core of steel, but it was different.
She was not jaded.
She still believed that there was some measure of freedom out there for her to possess. Some great joy that she could find if only she were unfettered.
He knew that wasn’t the case.
Responsibility would always pull you back, and if you owed yourself to no one and nothing, then it was simply a black hole of nothingness.
No purpose. No point.
And yet she was beautiful.
“Get in the car,” he said. She obeyed, but she continued to look at him with those green eyes. He slammed the door shut, and got in on the other side.
“Shall we invite your family to the wedding, Fernanda?”
“Fern,” she said.
“Excuse me?”
“I prefer to be called Fern. I don’t like my full name. It makes me think of my father being angry with me. It makes me think of my time in the palace. At the convent, I was just Fern. And that’s what I would like to be here.”
“Isn’t that a plant?” But as he said it, he thought that her eyes were rather that color. That cool green found in the depths of the forest. A plant that thrived even in darkness, even without the sun.
“Yes. And I have a greater connection to nature than I do to my family.”
“Queen Fern,” he said. “It does not have a particular ring to it.”
“All the better that it won’t be permanent.”
“And you imagine when all this is over you will go off into a life of obscurity?”
“Yes,” she said. “Why wouldn’t I?”
“It is not feasible to expect that you would be queen of a nation and then simply slip off into the darkness.”
“I suppose both of these things appeal to the rather erratic things I have been told all of my life. I am forgettable enough to slip into nothing. But important enough that I have to do this first. The paradoxical nature of being the youngest in a royal family. Of being the only daughter.”
“I’m the only one,” he said. “I wouldn’t know.”
Silence ruled as the car began to drive away from the airfield, up the winding road that would lead them to the castle on the craggy mountaintop. It overlooked the largest city in the nation. There was only one.
It was a small country, but with a rich history. Or at least, he would have considered it a rich history prior to the coup.
“Of course,” she said, “I’m sorry. Your parents were killed.”
“Yes,” he said. “They were. A strange thing to have your personal tragedy in the history books.”
She nodded. “I’m certain.”
She looked…almost sorry for him and he did not care for it.