It was her own naïveté in not realizing how busy his life was. In not understanding that Andreas could never truly belong to anyone. After the storm of the first couple of weeks, she finally had a moment to breathe. And her own plans to make, so she shut up that internal voice that said nothing had changed and threw herself into her work.
Only it wasn’t that simple. Going up against Andreas and his will, she should’ve known, would never be simple. She wanted to learn more of Drakon, she needed to be more than an accessorized, haute-couture figurehead.
The first wake-up call came in the third week, when she’d decided to visit a woman’s shelter in the capital city.
Petra had relayed the answer. His Highness feels that such a visit would not be wise in the current time.
Somehow, Ariana had kept her cool.
Then, she had decided to scout for premises near the palace where she could set up her legal offices. Before she could set a foot out of the palace, security had waylaid her.
His Highness has ordered an apartment to be cleared for Mrs. Drakos’s use in the South Wing of the palace.
A mansion of a wing, attached to a team of lawyers who would do the grunt work while bearing the stamp of her name.
Somehow, she had kept her temper.
Next, she’d been drafted, without her agreement, to an afternoon tea with a host of powerful patronesses of charities from Drakon. Ariana had managed to not choke on the tea.
Next, the interview she’d given to a press member about her background in law dealing with domestic disputes and her aspirations to start a legal aid agency in Drakon had been sanitized until Ariana had sounded like a mouthpiece for the palace and a colorful accessory that belonged on Andreas’s arm.
The last straw came when she’d learned, through a slip by Petra, that all the calls she’d been receiving from her friend Rhonda, whose divorce case had been pulled up on the calendar, had been rerouted without a word to her.
Ariana had had enough.
It had taken him mere weeks to revert back to type. To relegate her to a small part of his life. To turn her into nothing but a figurehead. Thee mou, if all he’d wanted was a placeholder, why had he gone to the lengths of kidnapping her? Why make her those promises?
God, she was a fool to have ever believed him, a fool to hope that they could make this work, even without love complicating matters.
But this time, she would not run away, she told herself walking the perimeter back into the royal wing. If he wasn’t going to come to her, she would go to him. She knew he’d returned from his trip almost a day ago. And she was done waiting.
She pushed her way through the small corridor off her lounge and barged into the other master suite that was connected to hers through it.
She snarled at a sleekly dressed bodyguard when he blocked her in front of the massive double doors. “His Highness does not let anyone enter his private suite.” When she raised a brow, the guard shrugged. “Not even his brother or sister.”
“Did the Crown Prince have a wife before?” Ariana demanded in a soft, utterly privileged voice that would have surprised even her father.
After what seemed an eternity, the guard nodded, threw open the massive doors and moved aside.
Ariana stepped inside, blinked and came to a still. A faint thread of sandalwood and something so intrinsically Andreas curled through her muscles.
From the wide French doors on the side to the huge high windows, everything was covered with light-blocking blinds. She rubbed her arms. The room was cool.
Dark mahogany wood, almost black furniture dotted around the vast semi-circular room. A wide desk sat next to the French doors, which would open to a view of the mountain range in the distance, she knew. Not a single pen or paper was out of place on the gleaming wood yet there were reams of paperwork on it.
In the center, the room retreated farther back. Darker and quieter than the rest. Did it lead to his bedroom?
Pulse zigzagging, Ariana forced herself to look away.
One whole wall behind her was floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. She didn’t need to go close to see they would be books mostly on the history of Drakon, and the history of the world, neatly filed in alphabetical order.
Moving on feet that felt no reticence, she went to the bookshelf. Her fingers, she noted, were trembling as she ran them over the spines of some familiar titles. Warmth filled her limbs, the books greeting her like old friends.
They were, in a way. All the months he’d spent at the fishing village, these books had been in the library of the Drakos estate. She’d gotten so used to seeing him carry them around, she had one day asked him to talk about them.
A whole new side of the Crown Prince had been revealed to her when he spoke of history with passion, wonder, a love in his voice that she’d never thought him capable of.
She moved along the shelves, sometimes smiling at a familiar title, sometimes frowning. Until a title hit her like an invisible punch.
Dragon Captured: A New Look at the Ancient Lore of Drakon, by Andreas Titus Drakos.
Ariana plucked it from the shelf, heart thumping hard against her rib cage. The book he’d been writing when he’d taken the sabbatical.
Why had he lied?
The gilded spine, the crisply expensive paper told its own story. It was a customized collector’s edition. It had been his dream to share his love for the history of his country with the world.
That rich, new-book scent stole into Ari’s blood as she slowly flicked the thick jacket open. She traced the title and his name on the inside with shaking fingers. Turned another page and her heart jumped into her throat.
For the girl who loved me.
The book fell from Ari’s hands and landed on the thick carpet with a muffled thump. She fell to her knees, tears making big splotches on the thick paper. A silent sob falling from her mouth, she picked up the picture that had fallen out of the book when it landed.
It was her. She didn’t even remember when it was taken. Her body was turned away from the camera, her hands full with a tray of dark coffee and a slice of oozing baklava.
The same thing that Andreas had ordered every day for months in the café.
But her face was turned toward the camera, that big, goofy, wide grin curving her mouth. Her hip jutting out at a cocky angle, her entire body screamed a sultry invitation, and her eyes were warm and sparkling.
Thee mou, she’d been audacious, teasing and taunting the Crown Prince like that. She’d been bold and brave, grabbing what she wanted from life. Something she’d forgotten. She folded her legs under her and sat on the thick carpet, the picture in her hands, the book sprawled open in her lap.
She read a few pages here and there and smiled, hearing his passion in his words. She traced the lines of her own face in the picture, worn-out and fading, a startling contrast among the crisp, new pages of the book.
Had Andreas looked at that picture again and again? Her mind raced, aided by her heart, raring to jump to all sorts of conclusions.
Like a leaf in a storm, she sat there. Guilt and hope vied. There it was, the proof that maybe Andreas had cared. A little. At least after he’d thought she’d died, said a bitter voice, the voice that wanted to keep her safe.
No, this was proof that his heart had not been carved from the same rock on which his palace sat. Something that had hardened in her chest loosened. The guilt that she had carried along for so long...it thawed at the sight of that rumpled picture.
She replaced the picture in the book and the book on the shelf. On legs that felt like jelly, she ventured deeper into the suite.
The room was cavernous, with soaring ceilings that seemed like they could touch the sky. The huge skylight had dark shades.
The king-sized bed with a cream upholstered headboard and pristine white sheets beckoned to her. Andreas slept on his stomach on one side of the bed, the sheets up to his waist. Leanly muscled, his bare back was strikingly dark against the white sheets.
A smile broke through her at the sight of his large feet peeping out of the sheets. No couch or bed or sheets were ever tall enough for Andreas. Her sheets had looked like a child’s blankets on him.
Ariana moved to the head of the bed, pulled by an urge she couldn’t understand, much less fight. He had left her to fume and he was sleeping?
Then it came to her. He was used to not sleeping for days, went into that intense focus mode when an important matter came up and then he would crash, sleep through the day and night.
His face was to the side on the pillow, his arms under it. Even in the dark, she could make out those distinctive features. Impossibly long lashes fanned toward the slope of his cheekbones. His mouth, a rigid, stiff line, was relaxed into a soft curve. She ran a finger over the impossibly sharp bridge of his nose, traced the wing of his eyebrows, the defined line of his jaw.
Something fluid and desperate, a twisted longing rose through her. For weeks now, she’d been racking her mind as to why she’d run away like that, why she’d had to take her guardian’s help, whom she had never liked, to flee Andreas.
Why hadn’t she just stayed and made him understand what he’d been doing to her?
Now she knew. A part of her was always going to be weak when it came to him. A part of her was always going to be that eighteen-year-old who’d fallen in love with him. A part of her was always going to hope that maybe, just maybe, he would love her a little.
She needed to walk out of here and think, she—
Long fingers wrapped around her wrist, arresting her, half prostrate over him and the bed. She slapped a hand over her mouth, but it was too late. Black eyes, that shouldn’t have been shining in the dark, stared at her, sleep diluting the usual forbidding expression.