Chapter Ten
WHEN AIKATERINI DID not appear in the grand hall that evening to accompany him to a dinner that had been in both of their calendars for weeks—and had been confirmed this morning—Kyriakos told himself he wasn’t surprised.
He assumed she was licking her wounds. It actually gave him some measure of satisfaction to imagine that she had wounds after that scene in her sitting room, as he had been under the impression that only he had been struggling through that entire conversation.
It wasn’t that he wanted her to suffer. It was more that if he had to, and he was, he rather thought she might as well.
Kyriakos had not expected to feel like this about anyone, and certainly not about the woman who was all wrapped up in the duty he had been pledged to carry out since his birth. Like it or not.
He had not expected his sheltered Princess to look straight through him and call him out. It was possibly the most uncomfortable he’d ever been in his life.
Obviously, he chose to interpret this as righteous anger on his part.
The portraits lining the walls of the hall provided their usual questionable company and when another quarter hour dragged past, Kyriakos went and looked for her. He expected to find her having some sort of crisis in her bedchamber. Or perhaps she had holed up in her sitting room.
But she wasn’t there.
On his way back downstairs, he saw one of her staff rushing past and called the woman over.
“I am looking for the Princess,” he said, and was not impressed with how difficult he found it to keep his tone appropriately smooth. “She is unusually late for an engagement.”
“Yes, Your Serene Highness,” the woman murmured, dropping into a curtsy. “I believe Her Highness spent most of the afternoon with the palace attorneys.”
Kyriakos did not care for that news at all. He could scarcely begin to comprehend what it could mean.
He nodded his thanks and wheeled around, pushing his way through the great front doors of the palace.
Then he ignored his own staff’s attempts to get his attention as he walked past the car waiting in the drive and headed around toward the outbuildings that dotted the grounds.
The palace attorneys had their own small complex on the east side of the palace.
He stalked in that direction, telling himself that he was simply annoyed that the Princess had decided to change the habits of a lifetime and make them late.
Or worse than merely late, he thought. Because he somehow had the feeling that she did not intend to keep their engagement tonight at all.
He was running through backup plans as he walked. It was luckily enough a small dinner with a few members of the aristocracy, because they all liked to have a little time with the Prince. And the Princess, for that matter.
Kyriakos and Aikaterini had at least one dinner a week that functioned as bragging rights for the aristocratic courtiers in question. It would be easy enough to send their excuses and claim that matters of state had intervened, but that would, of course, cause comment.
And the last thing Kyriakos ever wished to do was cause unnecessary comment at this point in his life. That was part of his past. This present and all of his future were dedicated to the principality.
He was focusing on that because it was far better than trying to speculate about what his wife was doing consulting attorneys all of a sudden.
When he reached the main door to the attorney complex, he threw the door open and strode inside.
The girl sitting at what he supposed was a reception desk, having never entered this building before, leaped to her feet at the sight of him. She also gaped.
“Your Serene Highness!” she blurted out, and dropped down into what might have been a comically low curtsy if Kyriakos had been in a different mood.
“Where is my wife?” he asked the top of the girl’s head, barely visible over the desk.
The girl rose—in a rather wobbly fashion—and pointed mutely down the hall. Kyriakos nodded his thanks, then strode off in that direction, lecturing himself with every step.
He could feel himself losing his cool with each step, and that was no good. That was a lesson he’d learned long ago.
There had been a reason, after all, that he and his friends had started up fight clubs and immersed themselves in disreputable activities when they were young. Angry young men were in some ways all the same, Kyriakos had often thought. The weight of expectations could be crushing.
It was no easy task to be told that your life would proceed in a form that had already been decided, it was not yours to choose or argue against, and you were expected to accept that and acquit yourself gracefully upon the world stage.
Immediately and always.
What he had learned about himself was that he could, if he wished, have a spectacularly filthy temper.
But he had spent all of these years mastering it.
Kyriakos would be damned if one gray-eyed Princess was the ruin of him. He would be utterly damned.
He almost walked past her, seated as she was in a glass enclosure that he realized only as he drew abreast of it must be some kind of meeting room. He tossed open the door once he realized she was inside and was only slightly disappointed when the glass didn’t shatter.
As if she’d sensed him coming from miles away and was deeply unimpressed with his appearance anyway, Aikaterini didn’t bother to look up from the piles of documents she was paging through. Not even when the door shut hard enough to make the glass wobble. Slightly.
“Perhaps you’ve lost track of time,” he said, as if he was trying to be conciliatory. When he was not.
There were no other people in this meeting room, but he’d been perfectly aware that this building was not empty.
He might not have seen the reams of lawyers he knew essentially lived here, given the volume of work they normally had before them thanks to the nature of the principality and the palace. But he knew they were there.
He told himself that their proximity was as good a harness for his temper as any.
“What I have lost track of,” Aikaterini said, still without looking up from her piles upon piles of documents and ancient-looking books, “is any interest in continuing to do my duty. After all, what profit is there in it?”
She looked up at him then, and he felt as if she was pinning him back to the glass behind him with all of that cool gray.
Her calm, cool voice was no easier on him. “After our discussion this afternoon I asked myself, why is it that Princesses in my position succumb to this life? Why did they all allow themselves to be passed about like party favors between Princes when it can be of no benefit to them?”
“Perhaps you missed the part where you are the Princess of Zaccaria.” It did him good to force himself to keep his tone so ruthlessly controlled. He was reminded that he should keep the rest of himself equally so, and ordered himself to relax. To stand there less stiffly.
“But who is the Princess of Zaccaria?” Aikaterini asked.
“She only has power if granted some by her Prince. Or, if a Prince dies and she happens to have already produced the next one.” She waved her hand at the documents before her.
“The kingdom is filled with examples of Princesses who attempted to grab power in other ways and were denied. Is that what it’s all about? Power?”
“Surely even you cannot be this naive.” Kyriakos sighed. “Of course it’s about power. It is only that some of us are raised to think of more than power. We try to concern ourselves with honor and integrity so that we understand what it is that we sacrifice our individuality for.”
But all Aikaterini did was roll her eyes. “I have not noticed, in my admittedly small sample of Princes, any loss of individuality whatsoever,” she pointed out. “Or are you under the impression that you would be confused for Venediktos? Or his father? Because you would not.”
Kyriakos would have been the first to say so himself, so there was no particular reason that should hit him like a slap. But it did.
“We are late for an engagement,” he told her, somewhat less calmly than he would have liked. “If you have business here with our attorneys, I feel certain that someone can come to the palace tomorrow and get you up-to-date on whatever it is you need to discuss.”
“Tomorrow won’t do.” Aikaterini was still looking at him in a way that he could only describe as challenging. He didn’t like it. But her sharp little smile was worse. “I’m looking for a way out, Kyriakos. As quickly as possible.”
“A way out?” He shook his head. “Have you taken leave of your senses? First it was love and now it’s an exit strategy? What will be next? Walking across the Aegean? Paragliding to the moon on the force of your good intentions?”
She folded her hands in front of her with more of that evident sharpness that was clearly and overtly aggressive, to his eye.
“I asked myself what the purpose of this was,” she told him, as if she was telling him a story.
And not one she expected that he would like.
“I understand in the old days why it made sense to pass the Princess from Prince to Prince. For one thing, there were far more warring clans who needed to be pacified during a regime change. For another, it’s all a bit of a show, isn’t it?
The successor must be the rightful Prince if he can claim the Princess who belonged to the man who came before him.
It’s a delightful little pageant, isn’t it.
But we do not live in antiquity, Kyriakos.
” She paused for a moment. Her gray eyes were locked on him. “Do we?”
He somehow doubted that was a question she wanted him to answer.
“You know the traditions of this country as well as I do,” he told her, not averting his gaze. “I suspect you might know them better, since I was only studying to become a spare, not a sovereign.”
She looked as if she was about to comment on that, but thought better of it.