When she had first entered the room at Heron Tower she had been filled with energy, determination. It had vibrated under her skin, lending it a rosy colour that alluded to life, to fire and passion. But now... Now she was somewhere in between. The cool pallor of her skin was nothing like the fine white marble that filled the halls of the palace in Farrehed, but it was also something very different from the soft and smooth warm silk he knew she could feel like.
It was as if she had lost something—withdrawn from him somehow—and he didn’t like it. Odir hated silence at the best of times, but right now it reminded him of the shroud that had descended over the palace after his mother’s death. As if all the life and the energy of the country had died with her.
‘The press conference will happen at eight a.m.,’ he said, even though they both knew when it was. He would have said almost anything to break the silence between them.
She nodded.
‘Then we will travel back to Farrehed for the state funeral.’
She nodded again.
‘I’ll be incredibly busy over the next few months, and I want you to know that it’s not because of you. It is because of what my country needs.’
‘I understand.’
Her quiet acceptance only frustrated him more. Especially as it was delivered in such a way that made it sound as if he were delivering a punishment rather than an order of events.
‘When all this settles down I promise you we will find a way to bring your friend to Farrehed and we will find peace...between us.’
‘I understand,’ she repeated, still looking out of the window at the streets of London as they twisted and turned down the roads that would lead them to the embassy.
Something like panic gripped him—concern that maybe she wasn’t well.
‘Are you okay?’
‘Yes, perfectly.’
‘You must be tired. You’ve been awake since seven a.m. yesterday.’
‘Has it been that long?’
The detached tone of her voice, so very different from the sounds made by the woman who had cried his name only two hours before, pierced him somewhere within his chest.
‘Time waits for no woman,’ she said, turning to him with a small smile. ‘Not even a queen.’
Odir released his hold on the overhead handrail before he broke it. He considered kissing her again. He was desperate to do something—anything—to bring back the heat, the fire that had been there earlier that evening.
It had reminded him of when he had first met Eloise. She’d been so full of light... But on reflection he could see now that that light had been reserved for the times when her father hadn’t been there.
Odir had taken her acceptance of his proposal for granted—as a side effect of their fathers’ close relationship. He’d somehow managed to convince himself it was what she wanted. But now, in his mind, he ran over their conversations during their engagement—what he’d taken for shared confidences—and saw only polite exchanges, not really digging deeper into the woman he had desired with a need that had almost undone him, undone his country.
He’d told himself his absence from her was due to the fact that he hadn’t had any time, and he’d clung to that in desperation—because if it wasn’t that, then it was because he had been hiding from his wife. That he had been a coward. Too much of a coward to take what he’d wanted...what he’d felt simmering beneath the surface of their every interaction.
Looking back on endless nights spent in the furthest reaches of the palace, separated from her by empty rooms and duty, he knew his wife had become a source of impossible temptation and censure.
In public she was perfect. Poised, but sensitive. Kind and caring, but regal. In private she had become an ache, a thorn in his side—one that now whispered across the months of time, Why don’t you want me? The thought pierced his deepest secrets, sounding so very much like himself as a child, looking to his father, wanting to know why he wasn’t enough to spare the man pain.
And suddenly every action, every sacrifice Eloise had made during their brief marriage, became overlaid by his own attempts to reach out to a man too distant, too emotionally shut off to love him.
An arrow of pain sliced through Odir and he wondered whether he had made a sound—because Eloise’s eyes were suddenly on him and full of concern. His heart started to pound beneath his chest, and in his mind, just for a second, he wanted to call it all off. He wanted to send her away from the questions and needs that he wasn’t sure he could answer.
The limousine turned left and pulled to a stop before wrought-iron gates. A small crowd had begun to gather in front of the embassy, backed by several news trucks. Figures huddled in the dark, sipping from plastic cups with wisps of steam curling into the night air, throwing cigarette ends into the street away from the pavement, their badges flashing into the night proclaiming them world-renowned news crews.
Before they could move through the gates a couple of flashbulbs burst through the tinted windows, highlighting Eloise’s drawn features. But the quiet growl of the powerful engine beneath them glided them forward through the iron gates and into the embassy courtyard.
Men dressed in black flanked the side entrance to the building, two moving to open the doors to the town car, and Odir regretted it. Some ancient sense of inbuilt propriety had him wanting to open Eloise’s door himself and lead her out into the night air.
* * *
Eloise’s heeled feet nearly slipped on the cobbles, and she clung to Malik’s arm like a lifeline. She took a deep breath and steeled
