Chapter Nine
Livia tried to calm her breathing as she walked once again down the steps toward the bedroom. She had let her emotions overrule any sense of strategy, and desire had been building between them since this afternoon on the beach. But right now, everything was tinged with anger and revenge.
Mine.
The word wouldn’t leave her alone, both the temptation it stoked and the threat that lurked behind it. How did she reconcile the destruction he was bent on—her own destruction—with the pleasure and intimacy she found in their connection?
Livia’s entire body was restless and needy.
Her breasts were heavy, and her skin felt alive.
Everything felt alive. And they were both still dressed.
All through the afternoon she had tried to focus, but the need that has been building inside her was reaching a fever pitch.
Her nipples pressed against the silky material of her dress, teasing her.
Gustav looked like sex incarnate as he sank onto the bed and took off his shoes.
His feet were bare, his trousers outlined the thick muscle of his thighs and the shirt hinted at the muscles of his chest. He looked like some sort of god, and she was ready to worship.
The scene would have been the most pleasurable tease if her future was not at stake.
“Make yourself comfortable,” he said as he slowly unbuttoned his shirt.
Livia found herself mesmerized by the movement of his long, capable fingers. He shrugged off his shirt, revealing a thin, perfectly tailored T-shirt that outlined his biceps and the flat planes of his chest. He glanced at her, catching her as she drank in his body, and he gave her a smug smile.
“I’m just fine the way I am,” she said.
His gaze dipped to the revealing neckline of her dress. “On that we agree.”
She sat on the other side of the bed and removed her heels.
She had expected him to strip down to his underwear or possibly even more, and she couldn’t help but feel a slight pang of disappointment when he remained fully clothed.
He arranged the mounds of pillows into an intimate circle for the two of them to recline against.
Gustav climbed onto the bed and leant back, stretching out his long legs and resting his arm on the shelf of the built-in headboard.
He was indulgence personified, with that hard body, that too long hair.
More pirate than prince. His stubborn jaw and well-cut cheekbones seemed more pronounced in the evening light, as was the gleam in his gray eyes.
“Come join me,” he said, tilting his chin toward the spot he had created next to him.
Then she climbed onto the bed and arranged herself on the pillows, sitting mermaid style and letting her dress flow out around her.
Other women had survived this before, she told herself, weaving tales to avoid the beheading that was destined to follow.
She would need to carefully weave a version of the truth, something that would sway him without making her sister vulnerable.
She couldn’t give away anything that he could use his advantage.
Instead, she needed to soften his will, entice him, warm him to her enough to bend his will of steel.
But she felt the danger in this plan growing stronger.
Unlike the most famous of bedroom storytellers, Livia could sit next to this man on a bed—their bed—for one thousand and one nights and not fall in love herself.
She couldn’t love him, she told herself.
“I am ready to be enchanted by your stories,” he said, looking like the least likely man in the world to want bedtime tales.
“Where should I start?”
“At the beginning.”
The beginning didn’t conjure images of Edvin.
To her, the beginning was years before, when she stole through the familiar dark path of the forest to her favorite rock to be alone.
But as she gazed into the moving waters, searching for an answer, a boy appeared with his white shirttails out and a moody frown slashed across his beautiful face.
“The beginning? All the way back to when you demanded to know why I was following you to the river?” she asked with a polite raise of an eyebrow. When the corners of his sensual mouth twitched up in a smile, she added, “Back then, I wrote it off as an outsized sense of importance.”
“And now?”
She pretended to consider the question, then shrugged. “About the same.”
Gustav gave a derisive laugh. “You could find many people who agreed with you.”
“I don’t doubt it, but on that day, I was right.” She lifted her chin. “Maybe, with all your complicated revenge plots, you don’t remember?”
The hint of a smile stayed on his lips. “Of course I remember. You told me that if you were following me, you would have done a lot better job of hiding yourself.”
“I knew that forest better than anyone in the world besides my father,” she said, and suddenly she was back there—the crisp night air against her skin, the rush of waters that was muted by the canopy, the soft ground of the forest. “And I pointed out that you stumbled on me, not the other way around.”
“The assessment was reasonable. Women have arranged for all sorts of ‘accidental’ meetings.”
Livia rolled her eyes. “Yes, yes. The burdens of being royalty.”
“Which you now share.” He gave her a pointed glance.
But she was too distracted by the flood of memories of the past to reply.
The way his brooding frown shifted to a smile when she taunted him.
The way his eyes softened when she told him she felt like a fish not at home in her own water.
Yes, exactly, he had said. And even though it turned out that they were two very different fish living in vastly two different bodies of water, at that moment, their connection had been real.
And so had the soft, tentative kiss that had followed.
“I want to know why you dropped out of college,” he said, his voice gruff and demanding, pulling her out of her memories.
“Why do you want to talk about that?” she asked, her voice too defensive.
“Because it sounds like the last thing you’d choose,” he said, and there was no judgement in his tone. “What happened?”
Livia wished they were outside again, where the world opened up on all sides.
But here, in the quiet bedroom cabin, so close to him on this bed, there was nowhere else to look.
Gustav was there in a way that she couldn’t ignore.
Even during her sister’s lowest points, Livia had never spoken directly of this period, only mumbled excuses about a “family emergency” to her roommates.
She had told herself that this secrecy was for the sake of Adele’s privacy, but the truth was that Adele was the least private about her lowest points of anyone in the family.
Years later, it was easier to see that, at the time, speaking about it was just one more thing that made her feel different. On the outside.
Maybe she and Gustav weren’t so different. Despite all of the nights they had sat by the river talking, she had never told him any of the things that mattered the most to her. And when he had divulged his own secret, she hadn’t taken it well. She could see that now, in retrospect.
What would it feel like to give him a little glimpse at this part of her past?
She would need to be careful, of course, not to tie it to any of her decisions now, but this was Gustav.
Maybe it would feel good to tell him. Maybe a new path would open if she was honest. There were no guarantees, but she could feel the hope that should have been exhausted long ago. So, she told him.
“I completed one semester of college, but when I came home for winter break, my sister wasn’t doing well.
Then, when I left for the spring term, she had an unfortunate encounter with a bottle of sleeping pills that she almost didn’t survive.
So I left school to be with her and just…
never went back.” The bedroom was so silent and still, and she could feel her own discomfort building.
Why did she think it was a good idea to bring this up?
She took a deep breath and added, “Not the conversational turn you thought you were in for, right?”
Her voice wobbled a little too much to make the comment sound funny.
When she glanced up, Gustav’s expression was unreadable, but then his hand was on her cheek, so soft.
It was the smallest gesture, and there was no reason for her to be moved by it.
She took an unsteady breath. Gustav moved closer, and she let herself want that closeness.
She allowed herself to lean toward him, just for a moment, but then he was pulling her into his arms, and she found herself resting on the flat planes of his chest muscles.
It felt as if her body was melting into his, and though desire hummed through her, there was something else that she felt herself softening to.
His lips brushed against the top of her head, and in that moment, she let herself tentatively touch her sorest spots, the ones she had buried deepest inside.
She knew she would cry if she pressed too hard, and she definitely could not cry—not here, in this bed with Gustav.
But for the moment, she let a little more of the past leak in.
“I’m so sorry, Livia,” he whispered, his breath warming her. “That must have been awful.”
Livia swallowed back another surge of emotions.
It was so much easier to push him away when she focused on his arrogance.
His betrayal. But compassion was something harder to distance herself from.
In the years between then and now, she had pushed away memories of this side of Gustav.
The way he used to stroke her hair when she was mad at the world.
The way he didn’t make her defend her anger back then, just accepted it.
She inhaled his scent, both familiar and new, and tried to hold herself together.