Chapter Three
IT WAS A foolish thing to agree to. He should’ve insisted on maintaining his distance from her.
What he should never have done was tell her how much she meant to him. He wasn’t entirely sure that she understood what he was saying.
That was for the best.
The cabin he’d been given for the journey was not going to work for him.
He was never going to spend time in the lower decks of a yacht.
Images of water pouring in from the top haunted him.
He would much rather be on the top deck, where he could jump off into the ocean if he needed to escape.
Of course, that presented the concern that if there actually was a problem he would have to find and save Emerald.
And she had no issues with the ship whatsoever.
They were projected to have smooth sailing the entire way to Alabria, and additionally, the ship was sound and expensive, with many safety features that had been absent from the vessel that his family had stowed away on from Romania while on the run from very bad men.
His father had been a bad man, of course. And so it was the exact sort of justice you earned when you yourself were a monster.
Still, the events of that day haunted him.
Which was how he found himself standing still on the top deck, looking out at the vast, endless expanse of water.
It was a kind of blue he hadn’t seen anywhere else.
The surface rolled in a rhythmic motion, the surf so calm that the only whitecaps in the water came from the boat’s wake. It was beautiful. But treacherous.
“Are you ready to eat?”
He turned, and his stomach went tight.
Beautiful. But treacherous.
Emerald was standing in front of him, her red hair free around her shoulders, curling delicately against her pale, bare skin.
The dress that she was wearing clung to her generous curves, and the green, like her name, was a glorious foil for all her natural beauty.
She had put on red lipstick, highlighting her mouth in a way that made his blood turn to liquid fire.
He was a man of great control. He had been alone with her countless times since that first spark had been ignited in his blood. He’d thought that he had mastered the art of self-denial.
But he feared, then and there, that that control had never truly been tested before.
Out here in the ocean, surrounded by nothing but water, with Onyx far away on a distant shore, and his time with her running down like sand in an hourglass, his control felt much more tenuous than it ever had before.
Yes. He was ready to eat. But it was not food that he was hungry for. It was her.
If she knew the fantasies that he had about her, she would run away and hide.
In spite of all the pain that she had endured, Emerald was an innocent.
It was something that made him feel both pride and shame.
She had never been able to date, had never been able to bring a man home, because he had always been there.
Standing in the way. If he had been a different bodyguard, one who wasn’t interested in her body, but only in the guarding, then perhaps he would’ve made space for her to have romantic entanglements.
As it was, he hadn’t allowed it on his watch, and if he had ever observed a man showing interest in her, he had done his level best to scare the man away.
Emerald was untouched, and he knew it. Because no one had ever been given the chance to touch her.
Courtesy of Andrei.
“Andrei?”
He realized that he had lost himself, and the number of times that had happened was negligible. If it ever had before.
Normally, he was supremely in control of himself, and his reaction to her. It was always there, present, lurking beneath the surface like sharks out in the ocean. But he had dominion over it. Not here. Not now.
He couldn’t afford it. He was going to have to be hypervigilant once they got to Alabria. King Lucian had the potential to be an enemy, a danger to Emerald, and Andrei had to keep her safe. Above all else.
“Yes,” he said. “I’m ready.”
“Oh good. I asked to have your favorite made.”
“Why did you do that?”
“I don’t know. To tell you the truth, I was mad at you and my brother.”
He snorted. “I noticed.”
“But I realized today how much I’m going to miss you both.”
“I’m with you,” he said. “You can’t miss me.”
He ignored the way that made him feel. He ignored his feelings with the same ease with which he drew breath.
With her though, it was always harder.
Suddenly her eyes filled with tears. “I know. But it isn’t the same.”
Why? Why wouldn’t it be the same?
He knew why it wouldn’t be for him, but suddenly he was desperate to know why that was true for her.
It was a question he couldn’t ask. A question that he shouldn’t even have.
He had never allowed himself to believe she felt what he did. But now…now he wondered. He shouldn’t wonder. He shouldn’t ask things like this.
So he shoved it down deep and followed her to where a table was set with white linens, overlooking the sea, almost as if it were a date, which was something neither of them had ever had.
Not with each other, not with anyone.
“Pasta,” she said, smiling, making her way to the table and taking a seat that faced the water. He didn’t need a view. He only needed to see her.
“I gathered, when you said it was my favorite.” It was one of the first meals he had at the palace. A simple pasta dish with red sauce, and after everything he’d been through it had felt like salvation. It still did in many ways.
And she knew it. Of course she did. Because Emerald could never be accused of being a spoiled princess. Her actions, even now, were evidence of that. He might not agree, he might wish to kidnap her, take her far away from all of this, but he knew that what she was doing was for the greater good.
It was just that he didn’t care much about the greater good. Not in the face of her safety.
He moved slowly to the table, taking his position across from her, and putting his napkin in his lap. He had a vague memory of when he had first come to the palace. Slightly feral, and uncertain of how exactly table manners worked.
His father never included children at dinners. Which would always have colleagues—people he had discovered later were from crime syndicates.
The kids had always eaten in the playroom. When he’d been young, he’d found aspects of his childhood to be truly wonderful. But he’d been in danger, and he’d never known it.
Not until they’d had to run away.
Not until it had been too late.
The king and queen and Basilia had taught him.
How to be civilized. How to be less feral.
At least in appearance. The truth was, his foundation would always be what it was.
He would always be the son of a crime lord.
He’d thought his childhood was fine, because he didn’t know better.
He did now. There were things his father had instilled in him, shown him, encouraged him to do, that had been twisted, wrong and vile.
They were baked into him, part of the formation of his being.
And he would always be a product of a childhood that had encouraged him to embrace his baser instincts.
He kept it on a leash with her. That leash felt dangerously close to breaking now.
“I remember the first time I saw you,” she said.
They never talked about this. The truth was, they were in each other’s lives every day, and they didn’t often discuss the past or memories.
They had lived through many of them together.
He had spent the first twelve years of his life in Romania, and after that he had been with the royal family.
He had been with Emerald. The boat, the water, the fact that everything was about to change, that, he assumed was driving these conversations.
He wasn’t sure what to make of that.
Or if he should indulge her.
But he decided to. Because there were other things he could not indulge, and so he would indulge in conversation.
“And what did you think?”
“I thought you were amazing. And quite possibly a merman.”
That almost made him laugh. The sensation was so foreign, he didn’t quite know what to do with it. “A merman?”
“Yes. You came right out of the sea. I know you don’t remember when we found you.
We were walking on the beach near the palace, and there you were, washed up on shore.
Mother picked me up and tried to hide my eyes, because she thought you were dead.
Onyx ran to you. Before my mother or father could stop him. He found that you were alive.”
He had heard the story recounted to him before, but never by Emerald. He found himself fascinated. He wished that he had the memory, truly. Of that first moment when they found him. When he had been saved.
But it was lost to him.
“When they discovered that you were breathing, my father picked you up, and they began to run back to the palace. We had doctors there, and they immediately called for emergency equipment, more medical people to come and check you out.”
“I remember waking up in bed,” he said.
He wouldn’t speak of the shipwreck itself. “Warm and safe. I was sure that I had died. That I was in heaven, though I did not expect heaven to have bedrooms.”
“You didn’t?”
“I thought you just sat on clouds.”
Emerald and Onyx had been sitting on the foot of his bed when he woke up. Onyx looking grave, Emerald excited, her eyes shining brightly. “You’re awake!” Hers had been the first voice that he’d heard in his new life.
“We brought you spaghetti, with marinara sauce and meatballs. And you ate it like you hadn’t eaten for months.”
“It’s funny to me that you remember that.”
“How could I forget?”
He refused to put weight to that. Refused to apply significance.
They ate their dinner as the sun set into the sea, and Andrei did his best to ignore her beauty, his reaction to it, how sore his chest felt.
He was not a man given to rumination. He knew his mission, he knew what he had to do.
He had accepted a long time ago that there would be no love for him.
No happy ending. No wife, no children. It was better that way.
Better that he not continue with a poisonous bloodline.
Better that he simply focus on serving Onyx and Emerald, being their protector, being everything that they needed him to be.
That was what he had chosen. It was the path that he walked. He couldn’t deviate from it now that Emerald was getting married.
He had always known this day would come. He hadn’t anticipated that he would have to watch it happen. That he would have to stand by and attend to her new life with her new husband. But he hadn’t anticipated her selling herself to a man who might be dangerous.
“I know you think you don’t want to meet anybody, but you might,” she said.
“I won’t,” he said, his voice flat. He looked at her profile, graceful and elegant.
The swoop of her nose, the curve of those red lips.
He had met someone. She was the only person that he would ever meet who did this to him.
He had read once about courtly love. About knights who devoted themselves to ladies and accepted the fact that it would never be physical.
That it would never be anything other than honor and protection. That was how this would be. Always.
“We’re going to go to Alabria, and who knows? The court might be filled with beautiful women.”
“I will not be part of the court. You and your brother do not observe protocol the way that everyone else in the world does. A bodyguard, even if he is the head of security, is not part of the royal family. Nor will he ever be.”
“I will insist that you are included.”
“And I am not asking that of you.”
“Well, I want you to be included. When there is a party, when our wedding celebration happens, I want you to be there as a guest.”
“I will be guarding the proceedings to make sure it isn’t a red wedding, so to speak.”
“You are so grim.”
“I’m paid to be grim. It is my job to be grim, and to be distrustful of the world.”
“Will you at least dance with me at my wedding?”
He felt like he had been punched in the stomach. “You know full well a queen cannot dance with a commoner. Ever. Least of all at her own wedding.”
“We danced before,” she said softly.
He looked at her, their eyes meeting, holding. The impossibility of her request revealing in so many ways. Revealing things he’d never allowed him to see. A mirror of his own heart.
Yes. He remembered that ill-fated event.
Far too clearly. He chose never to think about it.
Chose to keep that firmly locked away in the deep, dark recesses of his memory.
It had been a mistake. She had been just eighteen, and it had been her birthday party.
She’d asked him to dance, and then she’d taken his hand in hers.
She was so soft. Her fingers slim, her frame petite, and as he pulled her body against his he had felt desire like he’d never known before.
Need that went beyond the physical.
He wanted her. He wanted to cup her face in his hands and kiss her, but he wanted more than that. He wanted to be close to her, not just skin to skin, but something deeper.
Something he wasn’t able to articulate or explain.
He could feel it echo inside him now.
“I don’t think we will dance at your wedding.”
“Then you should dance with me now,” she said.
She was pushing. There was an edge to her now, and it was cutting deeply into him.
He wanted to tell her no. He wanted to scold her.
Why? The only reason to do that would be…
For the shameful, secret reasons that he kept buried inside himself.
As far as she was concerned, the dance on her eighteenth birthday had been innocent.
He was the only one who knew that it wasn’t, and he would take that to his grave.
Why not? Why not take this one last chance to touch her? To hold her. Why not dance with her one last time?
He would not do it at her wedding. He would not do it when she was married to another man. He refused.
He stood up, and extended his hand to her. “All right, Princess, show me how you’ve improved these past years.”