Helios Crowns His Mistress(29)

She was here now, though. A short interlude. Two lovers snatching a few minutes together to watch the sunset. One final sweet goodbye.

‘I have done my duty by my grandfather today. And, matakia mou, he would want me to be here with you.’

‘He would?’

‘My grandfather was a great believer in two things—duty and love.’

Her heart gave a little skip at his words, a skip she tried frantically to dampen.

‘Please, Helios, don’t say things like that. It isn’t fair.’

He caught her chin and turned her face to look at him. ‘How can the truth not be fair? You are my whole world. I love you.’

‘Please, stop,’ she beseeched, clutching at his shirt. ‘Don’t speak of love to me when you will be marrying Catalina—’

‘I’m not marrying Catalina,’ Helios interrupted, castigating himself for being foolish enough to believe Amy was a mind reader who would have known the truth from the minute she’d seen him from her plane window. ‘The wedding is off.’

Her eyes widened into huge round orbs. ‘It is? Since when?’

‘Since about three hours ago, when I realised I couldn’t live another day without you. Catalina and I had a talk.’ Knowing Amy would be concerned for the Princess, he took pains to reassure her. ‘She will be fine. She’s as good a woman as you always told me, and I promise you we have her blessing.’

‘But...’ Nothing else came. Her mouth was opening and closing as if her tongue had forgotten how to form words.

He pressed his lips to hers, inhaling the warm, sweet breath he had believed he would never taste again.

‘I love you,’ he repeated, looking at her shocked face. ‘It’s you I want to marry. Just you. Only you.’

‘I want that too. More than anything in the world.’

‘Then why do you look so sad?’

‘Because I know it can never be. You aren’t allowed to marry a commoner.’

He took hold of her hand and pressed it to his chest. ‘Listen to my heart,’ he said quietly. ‘I knew I had to find a wife when my grandfather was given his diagnosis, but I put it off and put it off because deep down I knew it would mean losing you. My heart has been beating for you from the very start.’

Her breath gave a tiny hitch.

‘You asked me what I would have been if I hadn’t been born heir to the throne and I had no good answer for you, because it wasn’t something I had ever allowed myself to think about. The throne, my country...they were my life. I didn’t expect love. My only hope for marriage was that it would be better than what my parents had. However it panned out I would do my duty and I would respect my wife. That was the most I hoped for. I didn’t want love. I saw the way my father abused the power of my mother’s love and I never wanted to have the power to inflict such hurt on a woman. That’s why Catalina seemed so perfect—I thought she was emotionally cold.’

Amy shivered.

Helios tightened his hold and gently kissed her. ‘I know I have the power to hurt you, matakia mou, and I swear on everything holy that I will never abuse it. But you need to understand one thing.’

‘What’s that?’ she whispered.

‘You have equal power to hurt me.’

‘I do?’

‘Living without you... It’s been like living in an emotional dungeon. Cold and dark and without hope.’ He brushed his thumb over her soft cheek. ‘If spending the rest of my life with you means I have to relinquish the throne, then that’s the price I’ll pay and I’ll pay it gladly.’

Her hold on his shirt tightening, her eyes wide and fearful, she said, ‘But what about the throne? What will happen to it?’

‘I don’t know.’ He laughed ruefully. ‘Theseus is next in line. That’s one of the things that struck me earlier—my grandparents raised three princes. It doesn’t have to be me. We’re all capable and worthy of taking the throne. Except Talos,’ he added as an afterthought. ‘Never mind that he’s marrying a commoner too. He can be particularly fierce. He’ll probably scare more people away from our country than attract them.’

She managed a painful chortle at his attempt at humour. ‘But what if Theseus doesn’t want it?’

‘He probably won’t want it,’ he answered honestly. ‘But he understands what it’s like to be without the one you love. His fiancée has royal blood in her. It should be enough.’

‘And if it isn’t?’

‘Then we will work something out. Whatever happens, I swear to you that we will be together until we take our dying breaths and that the Agon monarchy will remain intact. Have faith, matakia mou. And to prove it...’

Disentangling himself from her arms, he dug into his pocket and pulled out the object Pedro had set about retrieving a few short hours ago.

Dumbstruck, she simply stared at it as he displayed it to her.

‘This, my love, belongs to you.’ He took her trembling left hand, slid the ring onto her engagement finger, then kissed it. ‘One day the eldest of our children will inherit it, and in turn they will pass it to the eldest of their children—either to wear themselves upon marriage or for their wives to wear.’

‘Our children?’

‘You do want them, don’t you?’ he asked, suddenly anxious that he might have made one assumption too many. ‘If you don’t we can pass the ring to Theseus...’

‘No, no—I do want your children,’ she said. And then, like a cloud moving away from the sun, the fear left her eyes and a smile as wide as the sunset before them spread across her cheeks, lighting up her whole face. ‘We’re really going to be together?’

‘Until death us do part.’

Such was the weight of her joy that when she threw herself into him he fell back onto the grass, taking her with him, and her overjoyed kisses as she straddled him filled him with more happiness than he had ever thought possible.

She was his. He was hers.

And as they lay on the grass, watching the orange sun make its final descent through the pink sky, he knew in his heart that the rest of his life would be filled with the glorious colours of this most beautiful of sunsets.





EPILOGUE

Six months later

THE RED DOME of the Aghia Sophia, the cathedral located in the exact central point between the Agon palace and the capital, Resina, gleamed as if it were burnt liquid gold under the autumn sky.

As Amy was taken through the cheering crowds on a horse-drawn carriage she turned her face upwards, letting the sun’s rays warm her face, and sighed with contentment. Unlike many brides on their big day, she had no fear or apprehension whatsoever.

Beside her sat her father, who would be walking her down the aisle, and little Toby, proud as Punch to have been given the important role of ring bearer. In the carriage ahead of them sat her three bridesmaids: her soon-to-be sisters-in-law, Amalie and Jo, and Greta. Ahead of them were seven mounted military guards, in all their ceremonial attire, with the front rider holding the Kalliakis Royal Standard. More guards rode alongside the carriages, and there were a dozen at the rear.

It was pure pageantry at its finest. Triple the number of military guards were scheduled for a fortnight’s time, when she and Helios would return to the cathedral to be crowned King and Queen of Agon.

In the sky were dozens of helicopters, sent from news outlets across the world to film the event.

Unbelievably she, Amy Green—a woman abandoned as a two-week-old baby by her birth mother, a woman who had never been quite sure of her place in the world—was going to be Queen of Agon.

Helios would be King. And it was the woman who’d abandoned her who’d made it all possible.

According to Helios, Theseus had turned the colour of puce when he’d sat his two brothers down and explained the situation to them. As Helios had suspected, Theseus had reluctantly agreed he would take the throne but only if all other avenues had first been explored.

Constitutional experts had been put on the case, to no avail, until Talos had come up with the bright idea of changing the constitution, rightly pointing out it had been changed numerous times before.

A meeting with the Agon senate had been arranged, and there the president, who, like all the members of the senate, was sympathetic to the Crown Prince’s plight, had murmured about how much easier it would be to bring about the constitutional change if the bride were of Agon blood...

A referendum had taken place. Of the ninety per cent turnout, ninety-three per cent had voted for changing the constitution to allow a person of non-royal blood to marry into the royal family, provided that she was of Agon blood.

And now, as the carriage pulled up at the front of the cathedral, where the cheers from the crowd were deafening, Amy was helped down. She stepped carefully, so as not to trip over the fifteen-foot train of her ivory silk dress, handmade by Queen Rhea’s personal designer, Natalia.

How she loved her dress, with its spaghetti straps and the rounded neck that skimmed her cleavage, the flared skirt that was as far from the traditional meringue shape as could be. Simpler in form and design than both Queen Rhea’s dress and Helios’s mother’s dress, it was utterly perfect for her. And it was lucky she had insisted on something simpler considering they’d had to expand the waistline at the last fitting, to take into account the swelling of her stomach...