Pretender to the Throne(30)
She nodded slowly. “Some. Where the grafts are.”
“Some of this is a graft?”
“Yes. Not...nothing more than was necessary because I couldn’t bear for them to add more scars to my body and...it would never have looked normal anyway. As it is, it’s kind of Frankenstein’s monster.”
“You’re hardly a monster,” he said.
“Flattery won’t get you your way,” she said, her tone guarded, hard.
He dropped his hand back to his side. “I don’t need flattery. You must see that this is going to be a challenge. We were going to marry, we wanted to marry.”
“A lifetime ago. A face ago.”
“Your face doesn’t matter to me.”
She laughed, a bitter sound. “For God’s sake, Xander, don’t lie. It insults us both.”
“It doesn’t matter. I won’t be coy with you, Layna. I have to take a wife someday and when I do it will be because she specifically brings a benefit to my position and to Kyonos as a country. At the moment I think you’re the most beneficial wife for me. My personal feelings for you as an individual, or for your looks, have no bearing on anything. I doubt I should be faithful to any woman I marry, so I don’t see how wild attraction is an issue, either.”
She jerked back as though he’d slapped her. “You’re asking me to marry you, knowing you don’t truly want me, and admitting to me that you will sleep with other women?”
“I’m being honest with you. It’s how I would treat any marriage to any woman.”
“And why is it you won’t be faithful?”
“Does it matter if you aren’t truly vying for the position?”
“Pretend I’m considering it,” she said, “indulge my curiosities.”
He shrugged, a vague sense of shame washing over him as he looked at the woman he would have promised his life to years ago and spoke of planned faithlessness. As he realized that, had he married her as a beauty queen, he would have been unfaithful to her even then.
He’d been young. In lust, not in love. The center of his own universe. Certain of his absolute entitlement.
The moment he’d gotten hard for another woman he would have had her without a thought, no matter the vows he’d made to Layna, because that was the manner of man he’d been. Now...he had no practice in restraint. In turning away from the various and sundry pleasures of the flesh. He’d spent their years apart bathing in them because if he couldn’t get clean, then he would at least cover his transgressions in new layers of sin and hope that people never looked deeper. Hoped that he never had to look deeper.
“I have no practice at being with one woman,” he said. “I can’t imagine a lifetime with the same person in my bed, and I have low expectations of myself in that regard.”
“Especially if your wife is ugly,” she said.
“It doesn’t matter. It’s how things are, it’s how I am.”
“I thought you were changing.”
He shook his head, taking a deep breath. “I came back because it was right, not because I have any burning conviction about the rightness of it. I can’t condemn Stavros and Eva to a life they don’t want when I was the one who was raised for it from the cradle. And it’s one thing to walk away and ignore responsibilities when actually having to rule the country is years in the future. But with the way things are now...with the way Stavros’s marriage turned out and the fact that the heir will be up to Eva without me. The fact that my father could die at any moment and a decision had to be made, that changed things. But it didn’t change me. The one thing I can give for sure is honesty, so I’m giving that. Or would you rather have lies?”