Pretender to the Throne(37)

                She blinked. “No.”

                “Then I shall have your measurements done and that will be taken care of as quickly as possible.”

                “What about your father?” she asked.

                “I should go and visit him alone.”

                Except she had a feeling that he shouldn’t. She wasn’t sure why. And moreover, she wasn’t sure why she should care. Why his pain should interest her or concern her in any way, and yet over the course of the past few seconds she found that it did.

                “I’ll go with you. It will help solidify your plans. When you announce your engagement... I think your father felt very bad about what happened to me,” she said.

                “He did?”

                “He was consumed by his own grief.”

                “Yes,” Xander said, “I know.”

                “But he came to see me once. I...I didn’t want to talk to him so I pretended to be asleep, but I knew he came.”

                “Why didn’t you want to talk to him?”

                “I was just starting to realize, really realize, that nothing in my life was ever going to be the same. That my face wasn’t going back to normal. That...that I had maybe twenty surgeries ahead of me.”

                “Twenty?” he asked.

                “It ended up being twenty-one. Skin grafts and reconstruction. Some of the grafts didn’t take and...anyway. I knew that I had all kinds of hell ahead and that everything I knew was behind me. I didn’t...it was hard to face people. That way you looked at me at the convent, when you realized it was me...it was ten times worse than that every time someone saw me right after the attack happened. I looked like something from a bad zombie movie. And the press said that. More than once. I hardly looked real at all. And it made my mother cry. It made my father sick. I got tired of seeing the expressions so I would close my eyes when visitors would come. And then it was just easier to keep them that way.”

                “Then of course you can come,” he said, his tone light, as though he was content to skip over the graveness of the subject matter. And that suited her just fine. Being with him had forced her to relive her past more than she was comfortable with. “I’m sure my father will be happy to see you.”

                “I’m sure he’ll be overjoyed to see you.”

                That smile again. That fake smile. “I wouldn’t bet on it. But it will be nice to have you there to take some of the focus off of me.”

                * * *

                Xander kept finding reasons to put off visiting his father, although, Layna was hardly going to judge him for avoidance since she was a pro at it.

                Not that she could blame him. She imagined he was hardly going to have the fatted calf slaughtered in his oldest son’s honor when he learned of Xander’s return.

                The engagement had been announced. On that he hadn’t procrastinated. And the date of the ball had been set.

                In spite of the fact that he was being hammered by the press, he was soldiering forward.

                Prince Stavros and his wife, Jessica, and Princess Eva and her husband, Mak, were set to attend. Which would make for an interesting evening, Layna was sure. She imagined that things wouldn’t be easy between Xander and his brother.