Chapter Eight
HER REACTION WAS not altogether unexpected, but Kyriakos could not say that he liked watching her cry.
It did something to him. Something that felt like the rearrangement of his organs, but he did not wish to think overmuch about such things.
If they weren’t physical possibilities, surely he could ignore them and they would go away.
Either way, he swept her up into his arms and cradled her against his chest as he walked them into the adjoining bathroom suite.
He set her down beside him, keeping one arm around her as he started the water in the bath.
He poured in some of the bath salts that were always left for him by the attentive staff, and he didn’t wait for the oversize tub to fill.
Instead, he picked her up again, stepped over the high rim, and then settled them both down in the water as it streamed and steamed out of the arching taps.
Kyriakos leaned against the high back of the tub and held her against him, her back to his front. She lifted her hands up to cover her face as she continued to shake with her sobs. And he did nothing but hold her while she did.
He had forgotten to turn the lights on when he’d walked in, so he gazed through the large, round window that had been cut into the thick stone to look out into the dark night.
He looked at the lanterns that always hung in the gardens, marking the pathways at any hour, and beyond them, the thick darkness that he knew was the sea and up above it, the fall night in a bright canopy of stars.
And he understood that whether he ignored what felt like organ failure or not, he was completely and utterly screwed.
Kyriakos didn’t want to poke his fingers into all the places where he felt astonishingly tender tonight. Not yet. Not when he wasn’t sure how he would respond, or if what he felt was fatal. Since that was how it felt.
So instead, he approached it as analytically as he could. He treated it like a known, predictable dilemma, the way he’d always approached financial issues when he’d still been a private citizen.
Not her crying. He didn’t analyze something that seemed like an outpouring of all the same, excessive emotions he very much feared were eating him alive from within. He simply held her. And waited for the warm water and his own heartbeat to calm her down.
But in the meantime, he had no choice but to consider the facts as he knew them.
Princess Aikaterini had been a virgin. That meant a great many things. One of the things it meant was that he was now the only man who had ever really touched her—and it shocked him how fierce and deep a response he had to that.
It was like looking into a mirror he hadn’t known existed. And reflected back was not the person he’d always thought he was, but some kind of caveman who wanted nothing more than to roar his triumph into the night sky.
That was confronting.
But there were other issues. The fact that she and his cousin had been left to their own devices and had spent five years doing nothing at all but kissing was so incredible to him that he kept trying to find reasons why she must have been mistaken about it all. Or he must have misunderstood.
When he knew that she wasn’t mistaken, and he’d understood perfectly. The truth about her previous marriage was right there in her body. In her responses. In the way that she had reacted to what had happened in the car earlier.
The fact that, unless Kyriakos was very much mistaken, and he did not believe that he was, she had likely never even pleasured herself, either.
He was shocked. There was no other word for it.
He was also something like furious. How was it possible that the people who should have been seeing to both Venediktos and Aikaterini across all these years had missed the mark like this?
What would have happened when they decided to try for children?
It didn’t sound as if they’d had the slightest idea how to go about it if they’d thought what they’d done was sex.
Would a doctor have managed to ask the right questions to get to the truth of the matter?
Had the fate of the principality truly hung on something that was, at heart, a misunderstanding based in innocence?
And yet instead of thinking that he should go out and knock some heads together, then demand that the palace staff as well as Aikaterini’s parents answer for this, what he felt most of all was protective.
Deeply, fiercely, even somewhat wildly protective.
She had said her wedding vows. She had sworn her fealty to the principality. She wore the ring that marked her as the property of the Prince of Zaccaria.
But Kyriakos understood, whether she did or not, that tonight was the night that she had become his. Completely, irrevocably, and inarguably his, ever after.
When he would have said that he had never been possessive in his life. Because he never had been. Ever.
In his branch of the family, possessiveness was a liability.
The only thing you need to do is stay healthy, his father had told him again and again throughout his youth.
No one cares what you think. No one cares what you do.
As long as it’s not too egregious, of course.
But as long as you are hale and hearty, everyone knows that the bloodline will continue, and that is the point of you.
It’s a tawdry little fate, isn’t it? Kyriakos had replied after one of these cozy fatherly chats.
He hadn’t been long out of university at that point. He had been disillusioned with his role at the palace, hanging about like a carrion crow looking for a meal.
Kyriakos had been determined that he would build himself his own life and his own fortune to match, just to see if he could. Just to see if there was anything more to him than a collection of spare parts that could be tossed into the role of sovereign when an understudy was called for.
His father, brother to the old Prince, and no stranger to the role his son now inhabited, had only raised a brow.
It is a gift to be forever defined by the life of another, he had said. It may not feel like a gift, but you will never know peace until you accept it as such. There is no weight to the things you do.
Kyriakos must have made a noise, or a face, because his father had studied him for a moment with something that had felt a bit like compassion.
And so on the one hand you can do anything, and on the other, you will only ever be a footnote in someone else’s story.
His father had made that sound…not terrible.
Not really. It is only as tawdry as you make it.
The key is in making it work for you, as whether or not it ever changes will always be out of your hands.
Kyriakos had therefore made certain that he felt no personal possessiveness over anything. Except, perhaps, his friends. Everything else was only his until such time as the principality needed him.
And he understood what his father had meant. There was a liberty in having no choices. There was a freedom in knowing, every step of the way, that whatever life he built for himself was an illusion.
It could all be swept away in a moment.
Just as, over a year ago, it had been.
Tonight he felt with a ferocity that he was quite certain he had never felt before, that no matter what happened to the principality or the world or every star in the sky, he had no intention of ever letting this woman go.
He knew it was dangerous. Yet having never experienced such a primal reaction before, he wasn’t quite sure what to do with it.
She had stopped crying. That was better. That was something he could focus on. The tub was nearly full and he leaned them both forward so he could turn off the water.
Then he sat back and held her where she was, letting the warm water, salts, and the steam work its quiet magic.
Kyriakos did not press her. He sat there with her as her body slowly softened once more against his. As her breathing became more regular.
When she twisted around in the bath to look at him, he held her gaze solemnly. And he reached up to smooth her hair back from her face, carefully tucking the tendrils teased by the steam behind her ears.
“I had no idea,” she said, her voice raw.
“I know,” he replied. “At first I could not understand how it possibly could have happened, but I’ve had a moment to think about it.
I know the way that both you and my cousin were raised, by vast committees.
In a way, it makes sense. They were so busy worrying about how everything looked that they forgot to make certain that you knew how everything worked. ”
She shook her head and looked away, but not before he could see something like anguish in her gaze. “It makes you wonder what would have become of us. If he had lived.”
There was nothing he could say to that, so he didn’t try.
And some while later, when they got out of the bath, Kyriakos took his time drying her, then himself.
He carried her out into the bedroom and lay down with her on the bed again, and was not particularly surprised that she fell asleep almost immediately, curling into him as if she was seeking out his heat.
But he did not sleep for a long while.
And in the morning, he expected her to retreat back into her typical reserve, but she didn’t.
They took their usual breakfast together, if slightly later than usual—because they’d opened all the doors between their rooms and finding clothing sufficient to appear before the staff had turned into something else entirely, down on the floor of her dressing room.
It was an odd sensation indeed to discover the world could keep turning the way it always did, when to him it seemed as if everything had changed. And as if that should have been immediately apparent.
He was certain the press would be able to sniff out the shift in their relationship. That people would point at them and demand answers. But they didn’t.