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“We should probably go somewhere else.”
Chevalier didn’t reply immediately. He turned a page of his book, and I drew circles on his chest, wondering once again how he could read when we were cuddling like this. I hadn’t even tried. My book sat untouched next to us on the sofa, and it would return to the palace without me making any progress in it at all. And I was okay with that. I could sneak in a few minutes of reading much more easily than I could steal a few minutes with Chevalier during our normally busy days. We never got to spend this much time together.
That poisoning attempt had its benefits.
“Are you afraid you won't be able to control yourself much longer?” he asked. I jerked my head off his shoulders to pout at his arrogant smirk.
“Chevalier.” I poked his chest and drilled my finger into his jacket. “I was only thinking of you, because, as I recall, you are the one who has difficulty controlling yourself around me.”
He closed his book without marking his place and set it aside. With his memory, he didn’t need bookmarks.
“Is that a challenge?”
The butterflies skipped a beat with my heart. He leaned back against the sofa, one hand resting lazily on my waist, the other draped across the backrest. Arrogant, smug, and annoyingly handsome. His pose said I could stay on his lap, or I could leave, and he didn’t care either way.
Liar.
“You’re playing with fire,” I told him, struggling to hold my pout. “This is your bedroom. We’ve pretty well established that bedrooms are danger zones for us.”
“I’m not the one who’s blushing right now.”
“I blush easily.”
“Which only proves you can’t control yourself.”
That smirk and those mischievous crystal blue eyes would be the death of me someday. But not today. Today, I resolved to fight fire with fire and play the game as unfairly as he did, because he was asking for it.
I shrugged. “Fine. If you want a challenge, I’ll give you one.” I leaned against his shoulder and traced the gold cord that tied the edges of his cloak together from one gold button to the other, lingering on the tiger crest engraved on each one. “But I get to choose the topic of discussion.”
I glanced up at his face briefly. Interest flickered in his eyes. “Go ahead.”
“Well,” I said, shifting closer and noting with pleasure the way his loose fingers at my waist tightened, “you told me yesterday about when you first realized you had feelings for me, and now it’s my turn. That won’t be a problem for you, will it? Since you’re so confident in your ability to resist my charms.”
He chuckled and settled his hand on the outside of my thigh. I knew he’d play dirty.
“Actually, I’m going easy on you,” I continued, sliding my fingers down his chest to trace each gold fastening of his jacket. “My side isn’t as fun as yours was. I was in denial most of the time, and it took a lot for me to admit the truth to myself.”
Which meant I’d better enjoy this while I could. There wouldn’t be much fun in my accounting after Jack entered the picture, and that episode was a pivotal point in my relationship with Chevalier. There was no avoiding it. So I sighed, and I dragged my teeth across my bottom lip, knowing without looking up that Chevalier was watching me closely. He loved it when I bit my lip. It was an easy way to get him to kiss me when we were alone.
Most of the time.
“Hm, where to start…” I mused, mildly disappointed he resisted that tease. “Well, you made a terrible first impression. You were rude, arrogant, and frightening, and I wouldn’t have come back to work the second day if I’d had other options. Better options,” I corrected myself, distracted by his hand rubbing my thigh. The flutter of butterflies in my stomach apparently didn’t care about the challenge. “And then I realized you were testing and teasing me, and I didn’t know what to think of you.”
He caught my wrist and brought my fingers to his lips. I yanked them away before he’d finished kissing each digit.
“And you’re still a hopeless tease,” I said pointedly. “But I started to enjoy our back and forth. And I started to feel comfortable with you. Which was a mistake,” I added, slapping his hand when it slid up to my hip. I sat up straight and pouted at him again. “Do you want to hear this or not?”
“Is there a problem?” he asked teasingly. But when I realized his smirk didn’t reach his crystal blue eyes, my pout slipped into a genuine frown.
“You don’t really want me to talk about this, do you?” I asked softly. When he didn’t reply, I draped my arms around his neck, interlacing my fingers on his far shoulder. “There’s some bad stuff in the middle, but I promise there’s a happy ending.”
He sighed and leaned in to kiss my forehead. “I know. Go on.”
I took a deep breath to give myself courage. The fun was over, and this wasn’t something I wanted to say, either. I’d rehearsed it multiple times as I lay in bed last night, hoping that would make this a little easier. It didn’t.
“Um…when Jack…I didn’t want you to find out. I thought you’d mock me and tell me it was my fault, and…I didn’t know how to react when you didn’t do that. When you told me it wasn't my fault, and it never had been. When you…cared.”
I’d dropped my gaze as I spoke without realizing it, but I forced myself to meet his eyes again with the last word. His smirk was gone, his eyes intense.21Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡE3KN6d8EIJ
“I’d never told anybody before,” I said in a small voice. “I always felt so dirty after he…but you didn’t make me feel dirty. You made me feel safe.” I gave a harsh, self-deprecating laugh and looked down at my lap. “And I still didn’t know why you did that until Mother pointed it out to me.”
“And then I broke your trust a few days later,” he said, his voice laced with bitterness.
“No - well,” I said, faltering, thrown off balance by the unexpected comment. “You were only trying to scare me, and what you did wasn’t nearly as bad as what ended up happening to me because I wouldn’t let you scare me away. And you didn’t do it right, anyway.”
I glanced nervously up at him and saw his jaw flex. “What do you mean?”
“If you’d really meant to…hurt me, you didn’t do it right,” I repeated. I bit my lip and looked back down at my lap, trying to find the right words. His hands were still on my thigh and my waist, holding me in place while obeying the invisible boundary lines I’d set for him, and I realized that was it. Jack had obeyed no rules. He hadn’t asked, and when fear overwhelmed me to the point of tears, he’d laughed at me. Chevalier had to force himself to tiptoe across the line to the safest possible location, and he’d retreated quickly, unable to continue frightening me.
“I dealt with Jack for five years. I know…you just didn’t do it right,” I said, unable to say more than that. He could piece it together well enough on his own. “And you didn’t break my trust. Not really. I couldn’t have stayed if I didn’t trust you. I certainly couldn’t have yelled at you like that if I didn’t trust you. It’s not like I ever yelled at Jack. Yes, it hurt - a lot - and you know that.”
I took a deep breath and lifted my head to meet his eyes. There was a line between his brows and a flurry of complex emotions behind the blue. “But I’m supposed to be telling you about when I realized I had feelings for you, and that wasn’t when that happened, although it should have been. You couldn’t have broken my heart if I didn’t already love you. But I wouldn’t even let myself admit I liked you as anything more than a friend until a few days later, after Clavis’ party. When you hugged me. Well, later that night, actually. I couldn’t sleep, and I sat outside, crying, wishing…wishing you were there to hold me.”
My cheeks had been getting warmer as this went on, and the heat was unbearable now. I bit my lip again and dropped my gaze to my fingers clenched in my skirt. It was silly, in retrospect. I’d had feelings for him well before then. But it took a chaotic, stressful day at work, followed by a chaotic, stressful evening at home, for me to break down enough to realize I even liked him. And I’d still refused to go further than that in my mind.
That was the night Gilbert saw me for the first time. Crying in the dark on a riverbank. No wonder he thought so little of me.
Chevalier wouldn’t have thought any less of me if he’d seen that. He’d seen worse. Before and since.
“But I didn’t know I loved you until the first night of the gala,” I continued softly. “It hurt so badly when you kissed me, and when you said my name for the first time, and then I knew. I…I’d already decided I was leaving, after Mother…I thought, if I left before either of us could say it, then we’d both forget.”
Chevalier’s hand left my thigh to catch my chin, coaxing me to look up at him. The complex swirl of emotions in his eyes had settled to just one: frustration.
“Stop talking.”
“One…one last thing. You can blame Mother for making me realize it was okay for me to love you, and it was okay for me to stay.” I took a deep breath and said, “There. I’m done. I was in denial, and I probably fell in love with you the day you saved me from Jack, but-”
His lips crashed against mine with a sudden intensity that took my breath away. There was an urgency as his tongue forced my lips open and wound around mine that made my mind go blank. His hands tangled in my hair, cradling the back of my head as he pushed me back onto the sofa, and I clutched desperately at his shirt as his heated kisses continued, strong emotions mixing with physical attraction to create a flaming passion hotter than the heat of summer.
But somewhere in the fog, I knew something was wrong.
“Ch-chevalier,” I gasped as he pulled back for a breath, the fire in his eyes brighter than I’d ever seen it before.
“Don’t make me stop, Ivetta,” he breathed, and then he was kissing my neck, his hands wandering from my back to my waist to my hips.
I didn’t want to. That was the problem. There was something so good and right about his touch, his kisses, the feel of his body against mine, that it would have been so easy to ignore the feeling that there was something wrong - not with this, but with him. He hadn’t wanted me to talk about this subject, and he’d gotten more upset the more I said. I knew that, and it still took everything in me to push him away. I fled to the open window and clutched at the frame, the cool breeze hitting my flushed cheeks and helping to clear the scattered thoughts in my mind.
We really should have returned to the gardens. Or gone to another room. I’d asked to see his bedroom because I knew it had to be as beautiful and extravagant as everything else about this place, and the wall-to-wall bookcases containing the overflow of books from his collection at the palace did not disappoint, but we should have left after I browsed the shelves. Just because there was a point I physically couldn’t pass didn’t mean we needed to flirt with danger. The challenge was a bad idea. It hurt both of us when the panic hit me.
But that wasn’t the problem this time. I wasn’t the problem this time.
“Chevalier,” I started, still panting slightly. “What’s wrong?”
Four heartbeats before he replied. Four long heartbeats.
“I would think that should be obvious.”
His voice didn’t even sound right. It sounded tight, cold. He didn’t use that tone with me. He used it with others when he wanted to be left alone. When he wanted to end a conversation.
I turned to look at him, sitting rigid on the sofa with his book in his hands again. I knew better than to believe he was reading. And I knew better than to think that was simply a temporary loss of control due to attraction. That was an excuse to hide the real reason for his discomfort.
“You know you can tell me anything, Chevalier,” I said quietly.
His jaw flexed, but he didn’t reply, and he didn’t look at me. I returned to the sofa and sat beside him, taking the book from his hands and setting it aside.
“Avoiding a problem doesn’t make it go away,” I said quietly. “You’ve shown me that.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
I hesitated. Pushing him wouldn’t help. It never did for me. He’d always had to wait until I was ready to talk, and I needed to respect his boundaries, as much as I expected him to respect mine.
“Well, I’d say I won that challenge,” I said brightly. “Which means I deserve a prize. So…”
I scooted away from him, toward the armrest, and patted my lap. He sighed and turned to look at me with a frown.
“Really?”
“Yes, really.”
He sighed again and lay on his back, resting his head on my lap and stretching out across the sofa. I combed his pale blonde fringe back from his face, and he closed his eyes, probably more to avoid looking at me than out of a sense of enjoyment.
“The other topic I wanted to discuss with you is the twins’ mother, which I’m guessing you already figured out. Nokto told me about her when his fever got too high. Or we can talk about Gilbert and why you’re handing expatriated Obsidianites over to him for punishment. It’s up to you.”
“Or you could just be quiet.”
Stubborn man. Too bad for him that I was stubborn, too.
“No, that isn’t really an option,” I said, pausing from stroking his hair to smooth the line between his brow with a finger. “We have too many things to talk about. Like…our wedding. We probably should talk about when that’s going to happen. Or honeymoon locations. Silvio offered me that private island again.”
The hint of a smile graced Chevalier’s lips.
“You don’t want to go there.”
“No, I don’t. Not for our honeymoon, anyway. I’m afraid I haven’t yet accustomed myself to the opulence the rest of you spoiled royals take for granted. I’d be just fine with staying in a little cottage in the middle of nowhere and playing house for a few days, but I know that won’t happen. Not for the king and queen of Rhodolite.” I sighed heavily, and then I said, “What does the queen do, anyway?”
“Beyond producing an heir to the throne, you mean? Very little.”
“Hm. Well, I guess Rhodolite will have to get used to a different kind of queen, because attending tea parties and birthing children isn’t my idea of a happy, fulfilling life.”
He chuckled and opened his eyes, which lit up with his smile. “I expected as much from you."21Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡp3UWjSDROP
