Chapter Nine
ONCE AGAIN, ROUTINE was Aikaterini’s savior.
Kyriakos had blown her life apart, but she didn’t have the luxury of breaking down or even sitting with that.
She had too many engagements. Because the end of the year was approaching, and the holiday season always meant an uptick in appearances, she had even less time to nurse her feelings than she might have otherwise.
And whatever small amount of free time the two of them had, they spent together. Because it turned out that actual sex was something like addictive.
Aikaterini found the whole thing a shivery sort of wonder.
She was convinced that everyone ought to be able to see it all over her with a glance at her face, all the decadent things that he did to her.
All the marvelous things he taught her to do in return.
All the thrilling new explorations she made, following nothing but heat and pleasure to see where they might lead.
As far as she could tell, Kyriakos did not have one ounce of shame in his beautiful body. And he certainly allowed no room for anything like shame in her, either.
She had no idea that her body could do all the things he showed her it could do. She had no idea that one person could feel this much.
Or that every single part of her could be sensual. Her fingertips. Her ears. There was no end to it.
It took her several weeks of doing very little besides existing between engagements and stolen moments with Kyriakos to finally access herself again.
Herself, her mind, and that wealth of grief she didn’t want to look at. Not at all.
It was easier to channel everything inside her into all the wicked and gloriously sinful things Kyriakos liked to do. And better yet, liked her to do in return.
So it was not until she found herself in the third week of November, unexpectedly on her own in the palace one late morning, that reality seemed to hit.
With unfortunate and unerring accuracy, it seemed.
Aikaterini had spent the morning speaking to a ladies’ group in the city. It had been a happy sort of charity event, and it had been a true pleasure to meet the powerful women who used their strength to help others. When she’d told them they were an inspiration, she had meant it.
Then she’d come back to the palace and had settled into her office to tackle the piles on her desk, but despite her desire to bury herself in work, it had proved to be a remarkably light day.
Somehow, she found herself wandering about aimlessly, the way she had done often during her year of mourning, when the palace had been closed for all but necessary business.
When she had felt like a ghost herself, though she’d supposedly still been alive.
It was as if that same old grief—if shaped a bit differently, now—carved out her steps for her and led her on the same path she’d trod that year.
It was perhaps unsurprising that she found herself in Venediktos’s favorite room in the palace.
They had taken most of his things away, packed them up or donated them to various museums or charities. She had been in full support.
But the solarium had been where Venediktos went when he wished to be alone. He had attended to his flowers and had spoken to no one.
She hadn’t been able to set foot in the place since his death.
Today, however, she found herself walking into that newer wing that had been built at the start of the twentieth century, all glass ceilings and glass walls to bring the garden in. She’d always stopped before she’d gotten this far.
But today she made it all the way out into the solarium at last.
Outside, it was one of those gloomy, stormy days, because they were now in the rainy season that made the island so lush and green the rest of the year.
Inside, it was obvious that the staff had seen to the flowers, she saw at once.
The lilies were resplendent. The orchids were spectacular.
There were towering, climbing plants he had tended since he was a boy.
They were all blooming merrily, and she thought that Venediktos would have loved to see it.
She crossed over to one of the benches and sank down on it, then she sat there for a long while, staring at all the bright, happy flowers without seeing them. Or the rain streaking the windows outside.
It was as if she had suddenly found out she was an imposter in her own life, and Aikaterini didn’t know what to do with it.
She kept turning over the reality of sex, and her first marriage, and all the things she’d held as unassailable truths in her head.
Again and again, though she couldn’t seem to get herself to say anything about those things.
What was there to say? She hardly knew how to get her head around what she’d thought her first marriage had been, not when Kyriakos had flipped everything upside down and turned her inside out. He did that every day.
So how could she find the right words to address how fundamentally stupid she and Venediktos had been? How unpardonably clueless?
“Did you know?” she whispered into the room, but there were only flowers here, and no answers. “Were we both naive or was it only me?”
But no matter how long she sat there, she could not find her way to any peace. Or even a quiet word or two with Venediktos’s ghost.
She left the solarium and picked her way listlessly through the palace again.
There were so many rooms with names, a remnant of the island’s storied past, and history in every corner.
She found herself in the grand lobby, where there were paintings of all the Princes from the past. And though she looked at all of them in turn, even Venediktos’s, she didn’t stop.
Aikaterini kept going until she found herself upstairs again, in her own sitting room on the far side of her bedchamber. They hadn’t confiscated her photographs, not from this room, though she suspected they’d wanted to.
It is customary at the end of the mourning. To make ready the palace for the new Prince’s era, one of her aides had told her. Earnestly.
I will decide what I keep in my space, no matter what era we are in, Aikaterini had replied. With less equanimity than she might have wished.
Now she went and sat in her favorite seat on a sofa near the windows and picked up the photograph that sat on the side table.
It was of her and Venediktos when they were quite young. She thought perhaps she was ten. That would make him twelve, and they were standing side by side in clothing that indicated they were at some party. She couldn’t remember which one.
We look like twins, she thought. They were both angular, especially at those ages. They both had the Zaccarian black hair. And in this picture, they were both trying their hardest to keep from laughing.
She always liked it, because it showed how she’d always thought their relationship actually felt. And in later years, they’d been too well trained to get caught almost laughing.
This photo was more representative of how they’d been on their own.
The various things Kyriakos had said spooled around in her head, always there whether she wanted them to be or not. The suggestion that Venediktos had perhaps been gay, for example.
But she didn’t think so.
It galled her that this was something that she could not possibly have understood before Kyriakos. And, in fact, would never have understood if it weren’t for Kyriakos.
But she didn’t think that Venediktos had carried that kind of hunger in him.
She didn’t think it had mattered to him one way or the other—if they rolled around kissing or not. She had never seen a hint of passion in him in all the years she’d known him.
Aikaterini knew that Kyriakos thought that the two of them had been almost unbearably innocent, fumbling around the way they had.
She suspected he thought the whole of the principality had been at risk.
But she was certain that when it had been time, they would have done the appropriate study of procreation methods—instead of passively watching things in movies—and figured out what needed to be done.
But even if they had, she understood now, it would have been nothing at all like what she and Kyriakos did.
No matter how it pained her to think such things, she knew it was true. Venediktos had never had that kind of fire in him at all, and she hadn’t known she was meant to have it.
They would have done their duty, she was sure of it. Then they would have gotten back to the parts they both quite liked—the cuddling together. The reading next to each other. The sharing of all those thoughts and moments that they’d never been able to share with anyone else.
If it hadn’t been for Kyriakos, Aikaterini would never have known that she had a whole reservoir of hunger and need, passion and desire, just waiting to burst free.
She had always thought that Venediktos and she were exactly the same. Because in so many ways, they had been. They had been a matched set.
It never would have crossed her mind that there was anything more than what they had. She never would have looked for more.
Maybe, she thought then, holding the picture in her lap, that was the part she really had to come to terms with.
She had spent the year of her mourning cursing the unfairness of it all. Bemoaning the fact that she’d lost him so soon. And worse, knowing that she was to be handed off like the spoils of war to the next Prince.
But what she hadn’t done was really say goodbye.
And it had all become very complicated now, hadn’t it?
Because she’d spent only a couple of months with Kyriakos, but it had made more than just sex clear to her.
He brought out parts of her that no one else ever had. She couldn’t remember a single time that she and Venediktos had disagreed on anything. She wasn’t sure she’d ever frowned in his direction. They had been like one, pleasant, agreeable mind in two bodies.
She and Kyriakos…were not.
And as much as she tried to convince herself that the tension she could always feel between them was a bad thing, the truth was, she found it exciting.
More, she found him exciting.