CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Adonis was always a demanding lover, but last night he had kept her up the entire night.
She decided to convalesce in the library, feeling sore and a bit raw. But really, that wasn’t about the sex. It was about the fact that she had told him that she loved him, and he had said nothing at all in return.
It was very lowering.
She was trying to give to him. She was trying to understand him.
But it was difficult. He had been petulant last night, almost. Like a moody child.
But she could see that his desperation to unlock the mystery of her love was very real.
She frowned, as she looked down into her tea. Did he really not understand why somebody might love him? Had his life really been that lonely? That…barren? Perhaps it had been. Perhaps he had never really been…cared for.
His father was…distant. She found that she quite liked him. But she wondered if he had been not the most loving father. At least outwardly. She understood that. Her own father had done his best, but he had been lost in his grief.
At midday, she decided to stop feeling sorry for herself, and she wandered around the palace. Her sisters were in various rooms, reading, watching movies, playing games. She looked into one of the sitting rooms and saw her father, sitting with the King.
She paused in the doorway. They were talking with each other. Her heart squeezed tight.
Both of those men had been very hurt by love and loss. Even if in different ways.
And they had passed that pain down to their children, even though they hadn’t meant to. It didn’t mean she didn’t love her father. She did. But he had stopped functioning when her mother had died. And now, even with the best of intentions…
He was dying. His own behavior had sent him to his deathbed. That was a difficult pill to swallow.
Very difficult indeed.
She knew that it was probably the same for Adonis. He clearly respected his father greatly, or he wouldn’t wish so badly to make him proud, to rule the kingdom in a way that would do his legacy proud. But, there was also a lot of anger surrounding his mother, and he couldn’t fully believe that his mother had been entirely at fault. Adonis was too smart. He had been sent off to the nanny because he had been unruly…
He had definitely been lacking in meaningful connections. That much was so abundantly clear.
She wanted to protect him. The boy that he’d been.
The man he was now.
She felt all the complexity inside of her, the strange affection for the men in front of her, along with her disappointment that they hadn’t been able to do better by their children.
It was such a strange thing, that she and this Prince had been born a world apart, so many layers of wealth apart. Many years apart, and yet, they had been through so many of the same things.
She moved away from the door, her heart pounding.
She went into the dining room, and found that a table with a lunch spread had been set out, made for any of them to grab their own plates, and so she began to make herself sandwiches, and then went and sat at the foot of the table.
She was chewing rather contemplatively when Adonis came in.
“There you are,” he said. “I had to ask around with the staff to ascertain your whereabouts.”
“I’ve been having a bit of a lazy day.”
“Good. Does that make you happy?”
“Yes. Thank you. And also, my sisters being so well cared for. Our fathers sitting and having a conversation.”
He raised a brow. “Are they really?”
“Yes. You know, I was thinking about our discussion last night. And I think the thing that you’re discounting is fate. Because what were the odds? What were the odds that you and I met at that airport? That you hadn’t managed to snap your princely fingers and come up with an even better alternative to getting to your wedding than using my plane. I think that’s an impossibility. And it’s the thing that you can’t reason.”
“I don’t believe in fate.”
“Why not?”
He shook his head. “Because it takes the choice out of it.”
“I don’t think that accepting that fate can have a hand in something takes the choice out of everything. If you take fate out of the equation, then you take out magic.”
“Maybe I don’t believe in magic.”
“Okay. You, the Prince do not believe in magic. You have a literal castle, and have, so I’ve heard, had an endless number of lovers, and also been many places. Which I suspect feels quite a lot like magic.”
“Was it fate, then, for my mother to abandon me?”
“We need to contend with that,” she said. “What are you going to do about your mother’s abandonment?”
“Excuse me?”
“You need to do something about it, Adonis. Either have a confrontation with her or let it go. What are you going to do? Create scandal after scandal for the rest of your life? After the sensation of our wedding fades, then what? Am I going to have to look forward to you doing something abominable in order to get back in the headlines when you’re feeling unwell about it?”
“Have I done anything of the kind since we met?”
“No. But you… Yes, when I met you my first impression of you was that you were a very powerful man. And you are. But you’re also a walking raw wound. And I think that I might be the same. I understand that. I hid mine underneath layers of practicality. Under an inability to let people get close to me, to show any vulnerability. But I’m letting myself feel it now. Some of the anger. My father didn’t do the right thing by me. And I love him. I can acknowledge the complication of that. It’s difficult. It’s okay to be hurt, and still love somebody.”
“Yes. I have already acknowledged that tension with my mother, thank you.”
“Have you spoken to her?”
“Of course not. Why would I speak to the person who abandoned me?”
“Because. Because you either have to let her go completely, or you have to deal with it, because if you don’t it’s going to eat you alive.”
“Maybe I want to be eaten alive. Maybe I want the reminder.”
“But it’s why you can’t love me. And I had to start dealing with the reason that I couldn’t love you.”
“Maybe I just don’t love you.”
His gaze was cruel then, and it hurt, but she knew that it wasn’t because what he had said was true. That was how he was handling his own pain. She let out a long, slow breath.
“I don’t think that’s true. Because you were very worried about catching feelings for me, so I don’t actually think that you actually don’t have feelings at all.”
“You know, we have a country to run, and these are small, petty things.”
“It isn’t petty. I don’t want to just be the Princess, I want to be your wife. And I was trying to accept the fact that it couldn’t be that way, but now I question why. Because I was a regular girl who met a prince. And that’s miraculous in and of itself. But you know what else is miraculous? The two of us meeting. The two of us finding each other. It’s an extremely unlikely twist of events. And maybe you don’t want to call it fate, but dammit all, make a choice with this gift that’s been given to us.”
He looked like he wanted to say something, but then he didn’t. Instead, he turned and walked from the room, and left her there with her sandwich.
* * *
He was his father. The hard, harsh realization of that was like a gut punch.
He was his father. He was consigning her to a miserable life where she couldn’t get what she needed. And she would stay. That had been bearable before he had known that she loved him. But realizing that he was imprisoning her, separating her from the feelings that she wanted, that was what made it untenable.
Sending her away would hurt her. And he hated that. Keeping her here would destroy her, it would quite literally clip her wings. And that was the thing he could not endure. Yes, he had promised her to his people. But she had saved his life. And he owed her.
He didn’t believe in fate. But he believed that people could make terrible choices that resulted in collateral damage.
His mother had done it, his father had done it. He wasn’t absolving his mother by acknowledging that his father had been a bad match for her, but… He didn’t want to create the same situation. To repeat the same cycle. He couldn’t bear it.
Or perhaps you’re afraid…
No. He wasn’t afraid.
He was simply… He was trying to protect her. That was all. He was trying to do the right thing.
But he would… He would make sure that she was taken care of. He was not holding luxury hostage. He would never do that. He would make sure that her sisters were always cared for. That she had a soft life. That she had a library. But she would be free to find another man. To have a garden. To fly a plane. She could be Stevie, as he had met her, but better, instead of Stevie, squeezing to fit into a box that she never asked to be in, in the first place, and loving a man who couldn’t give her what she wanted in return. Maybe she was right. Maybe it would be better for him if he could forgive his mother, let her go, have a confrontation with her, but he didn’t want to change. Because the way that he was, the things that he was, kept him…safe.
She had saved his life. He owed her nothing less in return.
She’d caused him pain, dressing his wound. Sometimes pain was a kindness. As it saved you from greater catastrophe. It would be so with this.
* * *
But when he walked into the library and found her there, and she looked up at him with a glowing expression on her face, he faltered. He didn’t want to be the one to take that glow away.
But he would be. Over years. As she tried and tried to fit into a life that wasn’t for her.
A life that he knew didn’t expand to fit those who were in it.
“Stevie, I must speak with you.”
“Okay, it’s a good start, because you’re talking.”
“I’ve been thinking. And I do not come to this conclusion with any great relish. But I think… I think I made a mistake. In asking you to be my princess.”
He was right. The expression on her face was like being shot. He would go down in a plane one hundred times, have his leg cut clean through, to avoid experiencing this ever again. That meant he was doing the right thing, though. It had to. Because it was self-sacrificial. Because it was so painful. It had to be. It had to be.
“What are you talking about?”
“This isn’t the life for you. You do well with the people, but the rest of it… It will not work. This is how it was with my mother, and in the end, it only caused pain. For all involved. I have realized that I am more my father than I initially thought, and I do not think—”
“I don’t believe you. I think you’re pushing me away because you need to protect yourself. Because you don’t like that I said I loved you. Because you are bound and determined to turn that into an insurmountable hill. One you can’t climb.”
“This is exactly why it won’t work. You cannot even listen to me when I speak.”
“Because you lied. To yourself as much as anybody. You lie. I know what we have together. How can you say all of these things?”
“Because… Because it is true. Because maybe if we were just two people who were in a plane crash together, who met on the side of a mountain, this would be different, but it’s not, and neither are we. We are nothing more or less than what we were born to be. You’re a pilot. A good one. You’re a caregiver. And astonishingly worthy one. I am a prince. And the role that my princess will play is a prescriptive one. Ask my mother, who felt hampered by it for those years. It is not an easy life to ask someone to live.”
“Maybe not. Maybe not, but isn’t… Isn’t it reasonable to think that if you have enough love it will become easier? Because I’ve lived a life that couldn’t be described as easy. But I had my family. I had love. And that’s why I do it. That’s why I do any of it.”
“But someone should do something for you.”
“This isn’t for me, Adonis. You’re doing it for you. I told you that you needed to figure out how to heal, but you would rather wound yourself all over again. It’s like if you continued to stick a log into that cut in your leg. How are you supposed to heal? You won’t let it. It does a disservice to you. To me. To us.”
“All right, then. Maybe that’s it. Maybe it’s as simple as that. You need someone who will heal. And I don’t know how. And so, this cannot be. It cannot. Don’t worry, I have purchased a house for your family…”
“We have a house,” she said. “We were never charity cases, we were never asking to be.”
“Let me,” he said. “Let me, please. Because this is… Because I want to fix it. Because I don’t want to have given your sisters a taste of this life and then take it away. That’s not what I’m trying to do.”
“You want to be the hero of the story,” she said. “Heroes are brave, Adonis. And you are a coward. It’s as simple as that. You cannot redeem it. Not when you’re so patently making the wrong choice.”
“You think that I have the capability to love. Perhaps I don’t. In the same way that I don’t have the capability to heal. Did it ever occur to you?”
“No. Because the man I met on the hill, Clem, I was pretty sure that man could survive anything. Once you were here, once you had all this baggage, once you had to be you, that’s when I saw your difficulty. But it’s all hiding. Out of habit. I don’t hide. So maybe you’re right. Maybe this can’t be. Maybe we can’t be.
“But I love you all the same, and I want to make sure you know that. Because you haven’t had enough people in your life tell you that they love you, at least I don’t think so. Because I’m not even sure you know what it is. So if you are lying in bed at night, with one of your many, many lovers, years after I’m gone, and you wish that you knew what it felt like to be loved, I want you to remember that once you did. But you weren’t brave enough to let yourself have it.”
It was Stevie who stormed out. She did not have to be thrown out. And he was the one who felt small and fractured. And yet resolute all the same.
She thought that there was another way.
There wasn’t.
She was only a pilot. And he was a prince. Eventually, she would understand. Eventually, she would thank him.