Chapter Ten #3
“You are the Princess of Zaccaria,” he growled at her, and his hand shot out without his meaning to move it, to take hold of her elbow.
“You cannot abdicate. I don’t know what the law tells you, but I know this.
No member of the Zaccarian Royal Family has ever divorced.
And no member of the Zaccarian aristocracy, including the Royal Family, is permitted to marry without the Prince’s permission.
So it stands to reason that the Princess of Zaccaria cannot remove herself from the family without also gaining my permission.
” He angled himself toward her, his gaze heavy on hers. “It is denied.”
“There is more than one way to leave,” Aikaterini said softly. “The British are always hurling the press at each other. Why can’t I do the same?”
“I can’t believe what I’m hearing,” he said, and once again, that temper of his kicked at him, hard.
He fought to tamp it down. “And the only reason I can possibly imagine that you have decided to go from acting as the very soul of royal duty to making threats about leaving me in the press is that you’re trying to strike back at me for being honest about our situation. ”
“On the contrary,” she retorted, her gray eyes flashing.
“I’m simply being honest about my situation.
But since we’re talking about ours, and we’re throwing the word duty around so indiscriminately, let me remind you that I vowed to give you my love, my body, and my soul, before I knelt down and offered you my fealty.
” Her gaze seemed to turn him inside out.
“Where is our duty to those vows, Kyriakos? When do they come into play?”
He felt as if his head was cracking open.
Or maybe that was his chest, and this was an actual cardiac event.
He could see his father’s concerned expression.
He could hear his mother’s voice from long ago, leaning down to him when he’d been young and naughty, and talking to him from between her teeth.
Do not make yourself the center of attention, she had hissed at him.
It will only be negative. Do your duty and keep quiet.
Kyriakos might not always have been quiet.
But he had always done his duty.
How could Aikaterini suggest otherwise?
“You keep talking about self-determination as if that’s on offer,” he heard himself hurl back at her.
“The only thing we truly have is our duty, and you know this. We are pawns. The principality is the only thing that matters, not us. Not what we think or feel or believe. All we have to do is keep the line going, the end. There will be no paragraphs on any of our gravestones. There is only living up to the duties that were handed down to us.”
“That is grim and depressing,” she threw at him. “It’s also politics. The world will tear itself apart and put itself back together, and the principality will carry on as it always has and always will. You’re right when you say that it has nothing to do with us, but I think that makes us free.”
She moved closer then, and he thought his heart might tear itself out from behind his ribs, especially when she leaned over and put her hand directly over the place where it beat the hardest.
As if she knew it was trying to crack through his ribs.
As if she wanted it to do exactly that.
“Kyriakos,” she said, and there was expression in her gaze then that he couldn’t understand.
Maybe he didn’t want to understand it. “I think that you and I should get to decide who we are. They will tell us how to act. They will tell us where to stand, what expression to let show on our faces, what clothes to wear, whose hand to shake first. But between the two of us? It only matters what we think and what we feel and who we really are. Right here, when it is only us, we can be whoever we want.”
He shook his head, and his hand went up as if to take hers off of his body—but he couldn’t quite do it. Instead, he felt himself holding her hand there as if he couldn’t bear to let her go.
And she wasn’t finished. “I’m going to say it again, because once again, there’s only you and me here.”
She moved even closer. Then she went up on her toes and put herself right there. Right within reach. Like she knew exactly how much he wanted to hold her.
But couldn’t. He knew he couldn’t. He’d known it when he’d walked into her sitting room earlier today, and look what had happened.
“I love you,” she said, and this time, she said it with intention. She was looking directly at him—he had the feeling she could see straight through to his soul. That she could see the things even he could not bear to look at directly.
“Aikaterini—” he gritted out.
But she smiled at him. “I’m not confused. I like real sex, it turns out. And I’d like to have a whole lot more of it, with you. I like you, Kyriakos. But I refuse to pretend that my entire life is a game of chess. One that I will always lose. I won’t live like that.”
“Aikaterini,” he began again.
She leaned in closer.
He forgot what he’d been about to say.
And then she pressed her lips to his cheek, as if she knew it was that easy to make him crumble into little more than ash.
As if she was doing this deliberately.
And then she delivered the final blow, in a whisper. “What if your real duty as my husband is to love me back the way that I deserve?”