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“Wow. So you’re insulting me on top of everything.”
“My aim is not to insult you. My aim is to tell you that you have reached inside of me into a place no one ever has before. Do you realize, I have never actually had to contend with a woman after I’ve had sex with her?”
She gritted her teeth. “None of that is especially flattering.”
“I don’t know how to flatter you.”
“That’s a lie. You’re a renowned playboy, surely you must know how to flatter a woman.”
“But that’s just it. You aren’t like any other woman. Whether that makes sense or not, it is true. You are not like other women, and I don’t know how to manage this thing that roars to life inside of me whenever you’re near. And it has never been more important that I have control. Never. You were supposed to bring balance to my life, you were not supposed to upend it.”
“Honestly,” she said, feeling very flat. “I cannot deal with your issues while trying to… I have been uprooted from my home. From everything that I’ve ever known. You’re the first man that I’ve ever slept with. And we can’t even figure out how to work things out between us like we would if… If we were two normal people. What if we had been two normal people who had sex up there on the mountain? Wasn’t that what you wanted? To just be normal.”
“Of course it’s what I wanted. But that doesn’t mean that it’s what I get. What I get is to be king. What you get, is to be the Princess. And that is what we have.”
“And us?”
“We have to learn to fit us around our responsibilities. It is something my mother couldn’t do. It is the thing…” He shook his head. “My father couldn’t do it either. Regardless of his intentions, and I believe that they were good. He wanted to show our country that he was stable, but he lost an important piece of who he was.”
“And you don’t want to lose yourself.”
“No,” he said. “Because I have not even begun to find myself as a leader.”
Seeing him look uncertain, even for a moment, was an out-of-body experience. She had seen him lying in a pool of his own blood, very nearly lost to the world, and it still hadn’t been this.
And she realized that she wasn’t going to be able to…reach him here. This way.
She was more interested in exploring the relationship between them than she was in royal etiquette. And he was going to insist that royal duty be the thing that drove them.
It wasn’t really fair of her. He had asked her to be his princess, and by default that made her his wife, but that had not been the thing he was primarily interested in. That much was clear.
She let out a long sigh. “What does that mean for us, though?”
“We will be married. As we planned.”
“I don’t…” She realized right then, she had a choice. She could let him continue to flounder separate from her, she could continue trying to protect herself or she could dive right in.
It was terrifying. Because he wasn’t offering her any reassurance that her emotion would be met with emotion. In fact, he was basically promising the opposite. But she didn’t know if she was in love with him, or if she was just entranced by the heat between them. She didn’t know anything but…that she wanted him. That she was unhappy when they were separate. Happier when they were together.
She loved to talk to him. To dance with him. To touch him. She loved being near him, even when it was fraught.
So she took a chance, and she closed the distance between them. She stretched up on her toes, and she kissed his mouth.
He went stiff for a moment, and then, he surrendered.
But it was her who found herself on the receiving end of demands next. He captured the back of her head, deepening the kiss. And she was dizzy with it. Completely consumed by her need for him.
“I can’t give you any more than this,” he growled.
“I didn’t ask for anything more.” That was the promise that she made herself, and her heart.
He was giving her all of this. And she wanted to feel physically close to him. She wasn’t going to trick herself into believing that for him that meant love. And she wasn’t going to let herself believe that it was anything quite so simple either.
But she was desperate to feel close.
And she was committing to taking him at face value. Because the truth was…she had been so lost in her own pain, and her desire to feel special, and she hadn’t given any thought to his.
His mother’s abandonment was clearly what drove him.