Chapter Four
SHE DIDN’T KNOW what she was doing, pushing him recklessly like this.
She had been doing that ever since they boarded the ship.
Trying to make him angry, trying to make him smile, trying to get some emotion out of him.
Trying to see if he felt what she did. And now, pushing him into a dance…
She was playing a dangerous game, except she didn’t know if it was the kind of danger she was hoping to find herself in.
Andrei had never once demonstrated attraction toward her.
He had never expressed interest in her body.
Only in her protection. She was a duty to him, and she understood that.
But she was also a woman, and he was a man.
Of course, he had known her since she was a child, and it was possible that he would never truly see her as she was.
But now his hand was in hers, rough and big and warm, and he was drawing her toward his body, and she chose to forget everything but this.
If this was the last time Andrei would ever hold her, then she would revel in it.
Relish it. Then she would live and love only this moment for as long as she could.
She wrapped her arms around his neck, and he put his on her lower back. There was no music; his gaze was intense.
You mean everything to me.
Those words flashed through her mind, and she felt electricity skitter down her spine. She was everything to him. Did that mean what she hoped it did? Did it mean that he wanted her?
There would never be another chance for this.
This was why she’d wanted to get away from him, so she didn’t…so she didn’t do this. But God, how was she supposed to deny it? How was she supposed to be given this time with him and do nothing with it?
She angled her face upward, bringing her mouth perilously close to his, and if it created any feelings inside him, he didn’t show it.
Her own heart was beating so fast she thought she might pass out.
His hands were hot against her lower back, and then he moved them, so that he was holding her hips.
She couldn’t stop the feminine sounds that caught in her throat, and she closed her eyes, willing herself to keep standing even though her knees had gone weak.
She opened her eyes again, and he was right there, all that molten heat directed at her. His expression was stern, and hard, and she knew looking for anything soft or welcoming in that face was a losing proposition. Except she could see the heat in his eyes.
He wanted her.
Andrei did want her.
A blessing, a curse. A total upending of everything she’d allowed herself to believe. If she’d known he wanted her…
She would never have been able to resist touching him. Tempting him. Tempting them both. She couldn’t resist now.
Not now, when they were sand in an hourglass.
“Andrei.” She whispered his name, and reached up and touched his face.
He drew back as though she had slashed him with a knife. “Princess,” he said. “I would advise you not to step outside protocol.”
“There is no protocol for us. There never has been.”
“Do you or do you not have a marriage arrangement with King Lucian?”
“I do, but…”
“But?”
“He is not on this boat.”
“I see. And so you think a man like me, a peasant, should be happy to be your entertainment for the ride before you marry the man who is worthy of you?”
Her thoughts were racing. What he was saying wasn’t fair, and it definitely wasn’t true. She didn’t have any experience. Wanting to touch him, wanting to kiss him, wanting… That was the momentous thing. It was not some throwaway, it was everything. He’d had lovers before, she knew that.
One time, when she’d been in a bar in university, and he had been in the back of it, brooding against the wall, there had been a woman who had sat down next to her and her college friends, and she had told the story of how the man in the back had taken her to bed and blown her mind, but then never called.
She was the one who apparently wasn’t special enough for that.
Or common enough.
But she was too wounded to say that. Because what he’d said wasn’t fair at all.
She had never treated him that way. Not ever.
She had never treated him as anything other than special.
As anything other than one of the most important people in her life.
And him trying to make this about snobbery, trying to make her marriage to Lucian about anything other than benefiting Basilia was utterly and completely unfair.
She’d been brave now. She’d been the first one to speak the truth of the thing that burned between them, and he’d humiliated her for it.
All while being a coward.
“If you don’t want me, then just say so.”
She turned, and left him standing there, and she didn’t look back.
If he didn’t want her?
He was plagued that night as he lay out on the lounger on the top deck, trying to sleep.
Of course he wanted her. He had wanted her all this time, and she dared to say that to him?
It didn’t benefit either of them for her to know how much he wanted her. So he had not gone after her, and he had not sought to close any of the distance between them because that could only end in disaster.
It nearly had.
The way that she had looked at him, the way that she had touched him?
God. He had been undone. All these years of practicing discipline.
Of turning himself into a good guy. A man who could be trusted.
A man who could not be called a villain, not the way that his father had been, and he was ready to destroy it all for her.
To burn the world down to touch her lips to his.
I would very cheerfully kill him.
Because there was no good end to it. There was nothing that could come of it.
She had run away from him, and it was for the best.
His phone lit up in the dark. There was Wi-Fi on the boat that allowed for messaging even out in the middle of the sea. It was Onyx.
How is everything?
As good as it can be.
Meaning?
Your sister is still marrying a man who might kill her, and I am taking her to her doom.
But everything is going according to plan.
According to plan. Yes, the plan where he sent Emerald to another man’s bed.
Fuck.
He threw his phone down on the deck, and it made a loud clatter.
He heard a gasp. “What are you doing out here?”
“Sleeping,” he responded, annoyed that yet again, it was Emerald. Yet again, he could not escape her.
“Don’t you have a cabin?”
“Yes. I don’t wish to make use of it.”
“Why not?”
“Go to bed, Emerald.”
She came into the dim light glowing from the deck above. She was dressed in pajamas now, her face scrubbed clean, and she was no less beautiful for it. Brave for standing there, facing him in spite of what he’d said. “I don’t want to fight with you,” she said.
“There may be no other option for us,” he said.
“But why? We’ve always been important to each other, and everything is going to change. So why can’t we be like we’ve always been to each other now.”
“You do not always touch me,” he said.
“No,” she agreed, sounding subdued. “I don’t have to do that again.”
“I will need you to not do it again.” His voice was hard, and he was aware of what he’d done here. That with this statement he’d exposed himself. His desire for her.
“Okay.” She came and sat down in the chair next to his, her hands folded in her lap. “Look. I’m behaving myself.” Her smile was almost impish, and it made the desire inside him rage.
He did his best to keep it on the inside, to not let it show. A memory rose to the surface, and he decided to speak it aloud. Anything to crush the desire that was threatening to stage an uprising inside him.
“I was on a lower deck when the ship began to sink when I was a child. And I remember the water coming in from above. Beginning to fill up the room. If we hadn’t been able to get to higher ground, we would’ve drowned then and there.
I don’t like the feeling of being trapped in small spaces, and I particularly don’t like it when there is water all around. I am happy to sleep up here.”
“Oh. I’m so… Sorry. I don’t think we’ve ever talked about what you remember from that day.”
“Because none of the memories are good.”
“I know. But have you ever talked about it with anybody?”
“No. I remember everything about the shipwreck, until I passed out from not being able to breathe in the water. But I remember fighting with the water. I remember being certain that I was going to die, that the ocean was going to swallow me whole. I could hear the crew, my parents, other passengers, screaming before they went under.” She had asked, and so he was telling her, though there was no purpose to any of it.
To either being cold to her or kind to her, because none of it would change anything.
None of it would change what he had to be to her, what she was intent on doing.
“I’m so sorry. I would touch you, but I’m forbidden from doing that.”
“Yes,” he said, his voice rough. “You are.”
“I think that if you weren’t here I would be very scared,” she said.
“I think if I were doing this on my own… I would do it. I’m the one who signed the papers.
I’m the one who made the agreement. I would do it.
But you don’t know how much you being here matters to me.
To think that all those years ago I could have lost you in the bottom of the sea… ”
“You have to have me to lose me, Emerald. And it isn’t like that between us.”
He was being cruel to be kind.
Perhaps he was just being cruel to protect himself. As deadly as it was to want her, the deeper, emotional need for her was almost worse. He needed her to not touch him.
It would shatter him. Everything that he was, everything that he had styled himself to be.
“I don’t have you?” She squinted, looking at him as though she were trying to see him from a great distance. As though he were difficult to see clearly. “Yes, I do. You are with me all the time. Every day. You are my silent shadow, standing behind me, ready to put your life on the line for me.”
“For the Crown.”
“So, is it only my brother that you care about? Or is it the position. Your loyalty and allegiance to my parents, even in death.”
“All of those things.”
“But not me?”
“Not in the way that you are asking.”
He stood, but so did she. “Andrei,” she said. “I’m doing this for the country. Because this has always been my fate. There has never been another path for me. Just like Onyx.”
“I know that,” he said. “I know that. You must marry royalty, you must marry for the good of the Crown. Just as I must not marry, also for the good of the Crown.”
“And is that all we are?”
“Duty and honor? Yes. It is all we are. It is all we can be.”
She looked ahead sightlessly at the black horizon. “I thought it would feel better. I thought it would feel like something triumphant.”
“Does it not?”
She shook her head. “I wonder what my mother felt. When she came down from her village, the only place she ever knew, and married a man she had never seen before. I wish that I could ask her.”
“That is one of the terrible things about loss. It echoes, continuously. There are always questions you want to ask, always things you want to tell them. But you can’t.”
They’d never spoken of such deep things. But everything felt different now, now that their time together would end. It felt like it all might as well be said.
She looked at him, her eyes glossy. “I don’t know that I will ever feel like the fullest version of myself.
Because somewhere out there perhaps there is a version of me who got to learn all of her mother’s wisdom.
But I didn’t. All I can do is study about her in history books just the same as everyone else who lives in Basilia. All I can do is know her in writing.”
“But you did know her,” he said.
“I didn’t know what to ask. Not then. I didn’t know how to ask what I wish, so desperately, I knew now. I only ever asked her to do things for me. To read to me, to watch me dance. I wish I’d asked her how I should live. What makes a person brave? What made her brave?”
“I think that is the burden of growing older. You lose people, and realize all that you didn’t say. When you were a child, your mother was only your mother. But now you see her as the queen. As a woman who made difficult decisions.”
“Do you wish that you could ask your parents questions?”
“Yes,” he said, standing up and moving away from her. “But I do not think that I would like any of the answers. You should go to sleep, Emerald. We have another full day and night of sailing yet.”
“You say that like this is taxing.” Perhaps it was only taxing for him.
“Either way, they are your last days of freedom.”
He hadn’t intended to say it. But he had, and neither of them could fully argue with the sentiment.