Billionaires: The Royal. Оливия Гейтс

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СКАЧАТЬ made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.”

      His heart expanded, a sense of fullness pervading his chest. He could hardly breathe. “You’re very brave, Tabitha. I never fully appreciated that.”

      She looked down, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. “I don’t know if I’m especially brave. I was just more afraid of repeating the same life I’d already had as a child than I was of striking out on my own and failing.”

      “I’ve heard it said that courage isn’t the absence of fear.”

      “No. Without fear we would not move very fast.”

      “Is that why you were running from me?”

      She frowned, turning away from him and continuing on down the beach. For some reason that action pushed a long-ignored memory to the front of his mind.

      * * *

      “Don’t go.” He was twelve years old. He might as well be a man. He never cried. And yet, he could feel emotion closing down hard on his throat, strange prickling feeling pushing at the backs of his eyes.

      The hall was empty except for him and his mother. He knew that she wasn’t simply going out for a walk. She didn’t have anything in her hand beyond her purse. But still, he knew. As certain as if she had announced it, he knew that this was the last time he would ever see her.

      “Stay here, Kairos,” she said, her voice steady. If there was any regret inside of her, she certainly wasn’t showing it.

      “You can’t go,” he said, calling on his most commanding tone. Of course, his voice chose that exact moment to crack in two, as it had been doing with increasing frequency lately. “I am the prince,” he continued, drawing strength from deep within him. “I forbid you.”

      She paused, turning to face him, the expression in her eyes unfathomably sad. “It will end eventually, whether I leave now or not. Do you think I have anything your father wanted? No. But he wanted you. He wanted Andres. In that way, I didn’t fail. Remind him of that when he’s raging about this tomorrow.”

      She turned away from him again, continuing down the long hallway. And he forgot to be brave. Forgot that he was supposed to be a man.

      A cry escaped his lips and he ran after her, wrapping his arms around her, pressing his head against her back and inhaling the familiar scent of her. Honey and tuberose, mixed with the powder she applied to her face.

      His cheeks were wet, tears falling easily now. “Don’t go. I won’t give you orders again. I’m begging you, please don’t leave. Mom, please.”

      She rested her hands against his forearms, then curled her fingers around his wrist. She pushed down hard, extricating herself from his hold. “I have to.”

      And then she walked away from him. At the palace door.

      And he never saw her again.

      * * *

      He was breathing hard, his chest burning, his brain swimming with memories he usually kept locked down deep.

      And then he looked at Tabitha.

      He was treading on dangerous ground with her. He wasn’t neutral. And this wasn’t strictly sexual. It never had been.

      Dammit. He had to get it together. He needed this time to convince her to stay with him. But he would never, ever be...that again. Never again would he allow himself to feel so much for someone that the loss of them would break him.

      Never again would he be reduced to shameful begging in his own home to keep a woman with him.

      He was different now. Harder. He was the man his father had commanded him to be. Not the boy who’d clung to a woman who felt nothing for him and wept as though his heart were breaking.

      “I didn’t work years to improve my position in life only to settle for an existence that makes me unhappy.”

      “What does happiness have to do with anything?” Kairos asked. “Happiness is just a socially acceptable word for selfishness. We all talk about how we need to be happy. About how our happiness must come first. In which case, leaving her husband and children isn’t abominable. It’s brave. Because you were only preserving your own happiness, am I right?”

      “That isn’t true.”

      Anger fired through his blood, the memory of his mother walking away still at the forefront of his mind, superimposing itself over this moment. Over this woman. “Of course it is. You can wander off into the far reaches of the world and eat, pray, love to your heart’s content regardless of who you leave behind because you’re on a journey to your essential truth and damn anyone else’s.”

      “That isn’t what I’m doing. We were both drowning in that marriage, don’t pretend we weren’t.”

      “I have a feeling we might have drowned either way,” he said.

      “I’m trying. I said I would try. Must you make this unpleasant?”

      He had a feeling that he must. Fighting with her did something to ease the swollen feeling in his chest. And he found he was much more comfortable with anger than he was with anything tender or painful.

      There was nothing wrong with attempting to forge a stronger physical connection between the two of them. But he needed to remember who he was. What his responsibilities were. And what they wanted. He could not afford to be preoccupied with her in any emotional sense.

      He had to maintain control while making her lose it.

      Had to find a way to convince her to stay with him while maintaining the distance he required.

      He had imagined that global distance would be beneficial. That it would prevent his wife from leaving him. He had been wrong. He needed distance. She had to need him.

      “My apologies, agape,” he said. “I’m much more useful when it comes to interacting with heads of state than I am with making pleasant conversation.”

      “I’m not sure I have very much practice with casual conversation myself.”

      “That could be a problem. I’m given to understand that children like to make conversation about very small things. Such as insects and the shapes of clouds.”

      A strange, soft expression passed over her face and had made his heart clench tight. “Well, I have very little to say on the subject of insects. But I do think that cloud looks like a unicorn.”

      He moved so that he was standing beside her, oriented so that he was facing the same direction she was. “I don’t see it.”

      “What do you see?”

      “A war horse. With a lance growing out of his forehead.”

      “That’s a unicorn.”

      “Clearly, we have different perspectives on things.”

      Then she smiled, and he thought that he must be doing something right. As long as he continued on, insulating himself СКАЧАТЬ