‘Help your mother? Help your friend? After helping my brother?’
He bit back the curse that came so easily to his tongue. A tongue laced with the taste of bitterness and fury.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ he demanded.
He thought of all the things he could have done to help—all of the ways he could have made it easier for Eloise.
‘Because you had a country to run.’
It hurt that she was right.
‘Because I didn’t know if you would even care. In spite of the closeness we had before our wedding, and the tentative relationship we built, I didn’t know if it was strong enough for the truth. And all the while I could never know what my father would do if he found out. If he had made good on the threat of the gagging order then my trust fund would have been gone and I wouldn’t have been able to help anyone. If the truth had come out the promise I made to my mother to protect her, to keep my family’s secret, would have burnt away to nothing. As sad as it sounds, Odir, I never had my father’s love. But to lose my mother’s would have been—’
He hadn’t realised it, but he’d put his hands up to ward off her words. To prevent them from coming out of her mouth and hitting him like the bullets they were. Because, of all people, he knew what it was to lose a mother’s love. He knew the deep, searing pain that, once felt, changed a heart irrevocably.
But to lose it by choice—to have someone choose a husband over a child, a secret over the truth—that was a different kind of pain all together. His mother’s death had taken away that love for him, but that had not been a choice she had made.
‘Right now, Odir, I’m trusting that you will say nothing of this to anyone, will do nothing—because it will put Natalia at risk. Put my mother at risk.’
Odir couldn’t stand the weight of Eloise’s gaze, full of expectation and hope, he realised reluctantly. His mind was hurtling over all this information and it was changing his thoughts of her, refocusing the image he had carried with him over the last six months. One that had changed that fateful night he’d found her beneath Jarhan’s kiss.
Now the memory was reforming into something new. His image of her slight frame, one that he had once thought weak and inconsequential, was now, he realised, of the strongest steel. One that had borne his awful accusations—one that had suffered so much at the hands of the people who were meant to protect her and care for her: her father, her mother...even her husband.
She had borne so much and never once buckled. She’d done what she had needed to do and he admired that. He respected that. It was a strength that he had not seen in anyone else around him.
She had trusted him with her secrets. Within him he could feel this new image of her shifting the synapses in his brain, bringing new weight to his feelings for her. And suddenly to have her trust felt like a burden greater than any he’d ever carried before. Not his kingdom, not his people, but this slip of a woman and her trust were threatening to undo him.
‘I have money that I would willingly have given you to protect your mother and your friend.’
‘But would you have listened to me six months ago? When you thought me someone who could sleep with your brother? Would you have listened to me six hours ago, when you believed me a gold-digger out for a marriage of convenience to a prince?’
* * *
His silence spoke volumes, and it hurt her more than Eloise could have anticipated. She turned away, unable and unwilling to bear the weight of it any more, and almost stumbled over the cushioned bench beside the heater that Odir’s guard had lit earlier.
No, the silence seemed to say to her. They both knew that it would have been impossible before. It had all been such a mess. And all because of their fathers. They might have been very different types of tyrants, but it had still been tyranny.
Either way, Eloise realised, there was no peace to be had from either man. Odir’s father was dead, and her father would not change. He would not suddenly become a kind man who would sacrifice his own wants for his family. He would not suddenly become a loving man who would protect her mother, or even her. Money, reputation, social standing—that was everything to him. And to admit to his wife’s addiction...it just wouldn’t happen.
She felt Odir sit down heavily beside her. There they were. Two people stripped of everything—not King nor Queen, not a son, nor a daughter. It was just the two of them, looking out at the distance, lost in their own thoughts under the night sky.
And she wanted to be lost. She wanted to feel anything other than what was warring within her heart. She hated all this talk of the past, all the dirty little secrets that had kept them locked away from each other, making it almost impossible for them to be together.
She could feel the warmth from his skin across the small distance between them. The scent so uniquely his that she could have recognised it anywhere hit her in waves. She inhaled it, holding it within her lungs, trapping it
