“Yeah, but with sarcasm. Meaning you aren’t.”
“Then why didn’t you let me sit across the room from you?” he asked.
“Because this is more interesting. I don’t know if it’s fun, but it’s more interesting.”
“And the casino? That’s fun?”
She shrugged. “It’s different. Carefree.”
“And the men?”
She shrugged again. “I don’t even remember their names.”
His stomach tightened, but not with desire this time. “You find that sort of thing fun then?” Jealousy, hot, unreasonable, unfamiliar, surged in his veins. His muscles tightened, every male instinct telling him to act, to follow the emotion, to ignore the cerebral. To make her his. Only his.
He gritted his teeth, searching for his control. Counting on that dead rock in his chest that had encased his heart years ago to come to his rescue.
“What do you assume I did with them? I was in the high-roller room the whole time. They kissed my dice, but nothing else. Anyway, what I do in my private life is my own business.” She laughed, the sound strained. “Sorry, that was a bad joke. We both know I have no private life.”
A sense of relief flooded him, and he couldn’t stop it. Couldn’t pretend he felt nothing over her admission. “It’s the cost of being royal.”
“Right. So tell me, what’s in my file, Mak?”
A lot of things. Her attempted escapes, the fact that she was very likely to be matched with Prince Bastian Van Saant. That her grades in math were terrible and her writing and composition were above average. He had a list of things he knew about her, and he’d been content to imagine it meant that he had her pinned down. That he would be prepared to anticipate his charge’s every move.
He was starting to wonder if she was right. If he didn’t know her at all. She had a way of surprising him as no one else ever did.
“You have no major infractions listed in your file,” he said.
“Ah. No major infractions. I would think that encompasses threesomes with random strangers in full view of the public?”
“Yes. I imagine that would bear mentioning.”
She raised her cup and offered a sassy half smile. “I would take note of it.”
“As would a great many people.” His heart pounded harder. He had no interest in sharing her, so the specific topic was of no interest to him. But he had interest in her. And his thoughts had turned down streets they should not have.
She made him wish things could be different. Pointless. Futile. Wishing for that always was.
“Anything of interest?” she asked. “Or am I as dull on paper as my life has felt thus far?”
“Not dull,” he said. “I liked the bedsheets thing. Shows initiative.”
“I’m glad you appreciated it. No one else did.”
“I can imagine.”
“Is this the part where you defend my father and tell me that I’m being protected for my own good?”
He ignored the constricted feeling in his chest. Or tried to. “No. Because, as I said, this is a job to me. I am not on anyone’s side. And, were it not so easy to walk out the front door of my house late at night, when I was in my teens I would have very likely climbed out a window or two myself.”
Her left eyebrow arched up above her sunglasses. “You broke rules? I find that hard to believe.”
There was no ignoring the kick of emotion that hit him in the gut when she said that. “I did,” he said. “And I’ve broken a hell of a lot more than rules in my life.”
CHAPTER FIVE
MAK did keep his distance during the clothes-shopping portion of the trip, loitering near the entrance of a small shop while she tried on, and bought, several pairs of boots. Then, keeping at a distance as she trawled through a designer boutique and picked up a few new dresses.
When she emerged with her hands full of bags, Mak was standing outside the door, ready to take them from her.
“Are you about finished?” he asked.
“I should be.”
They wandered back up to the car and deposited her purchases in the trunk. “Are you ready to go back to the palace?”
No. No she wasn’t. Just the thought of it made her throat feel as if it was about to close up completely. She felt claustrophobic. Suffocated.
“No. I … can we go down to the beach?”
He took his sunglasses off and swept her up and down with his eyes. “Dressed like that?”
“I want to go. Just for a while.”
He nodded once in consent and they left the car in its place, walking down the boulevard to where the sidewalk ended and the sand began.
She bent and pulled her black pumps off, holding them in one hand as she walked down to water, letting the waves touch her toes.
She closed her eyes, heat washing through her, warming her skin but nothing else. She felt cold inside. Maybe it was all a bit dramatic, but she felt like a prisoner in some ways. In terms of what was expected of her, what was going to happen.
She had no idea what her father would do if she outright went against him and refused to marry. So she’d taken the coward’s way out. She’d tried to get the men to run away from her.
“Maybe I should just try and swim to freedom,” she said, sensing Mak behind her. She turned and looked at him, bubbles of amusement fizzing in her stomach at the sight of him in his black suit jacket, slacks and shiny shoes, standing on the shore.
“It’s a long swim to the next island or to mainland.”
“True. And anyway, my father would just send a helicopter to bring me back.”
“Would he?”
She turned to face him, their eyes clashing, the impact resonating through her body. “Honestly? I don’t know. I don’t know what he would do if I simply refused to marry the man he selects for me. But I … I don’t know that I really want to find out. See, the thing about using my reputation to get them to run from me … well, that way is about them. And I could … blame someone else.”
“Easier than doing it yourself.”
“Yes. I’m a coward.” She looked at his profile. “Soon to be a married coward, I suppose.”
“Marriage isn’t that bad,” he said, his voice rough.
“You don’t seem like you’d be a big endorser of the institution. Since you don’t believe in love and all.”
“I didn’t say I didn’t believe in it. I said I didn’t want it. Love is real, Eva. Very real, and it’s not rainbows and blue skies. If you love someone enough, it can cause the kind of pain you can only imagine. The kind of pain you wouldn’t wish on an enemy. You think you want love because you’ve read fairytales. Because you read until the happily ever after. Real life isn’t like that. You can’t just say, ‘This is it, this is the end and it will be all right.’ You don’t know if it will be.”
Eva felt the conviction in his words, felt it cut straight through her. Into her. She had a tendency to roll her eyes at advice, mainly because there was always someone telling her what to do. And half the time, it wasn’t so much to help her as it was to try and control her. She’d learned to tune it out.
But she couldn’t tune this out. This came from deep inside him. From a place of honesty.
“I … but is it so wrong to want more than a cold union based on … nothing more than political gain?”
Mak turned to her, his eyes searching her face. It felt like a caress. It felt intimate. “It’s not wrong. But you don’t know if it will be cold. Maybe you will grow to love him, at least in some respects.”
“I’ve met the front runner, and he … I don’t feel anything for him. Nothing … I’m not attracted to him.”
She was even more aware of that now. More aware of the fact that what she felt for Bastian was lukewarm at best. Mak, being near him, it was unlike anything she’d ever felt. It made her heart beat faster, made her limbs feel weak.
And she didn’t even like him.
Well, that wasn’t strictly true. At the moment, she almost liked him. More than that, she felt a sort of strange connection with him. She wasn’t certain where it came from. What he spoke of came from a place that was well beyond her experience.
“There’s more to marriage than sex,” he said, his tone flat.
“But it matters,” she said, her cheeks heating, her heart pounding in her temples. “In fact, I sort of thought it was one of the things that made marriage worth it.”
His expression was unreadable, his black eyes flat, emotionless. But something had changed, even if she couldn’t read what it was. The lines of his body had hardened, his posture getting straighter, every muscle tensing. “Are you ready to go back?”
“Yes.” No. She wasn’t, but she could sense that he was. And, since she could also sense it wasn’t because he was simply annoyed with her, it made her care.
She shouldn’t care. But she did.
“Bastian is coming tonight.” Stavros, her older brother and future king of Kyonos, poured himself a drink and sat in one of the white chairs she had positioned in her living area.
Three weeks after Mak had taken over as her bodyguard and she was completely on edge. His presence, constant, unnerving, had her blood pressure permanently spiked and her stomach perpetually tight. But having Stavros around always helped.