Twin Heirs to His Throne(28)

The letter ended, no signature, no closing, just this ominous pledge. The whole message sounded like...like a...

No. No. No.

Then it erupted in her mind. A memory. A realization. Of the only place he could be. Had to be. One with significance only to him, where he’d taken her and the girls, saying it had been his favorite spot when he’d been a child. The one memory he had of his parents, where they’d taken him right before they died.

Crying out for Fedor to find it, knowing just a name and a description, it felt like forever before Fedor found out where it was. All that time terror hacked at her, that she might have pushed him into doing something drastic.

Then they were there...and...so was Leonid.

He stood in the distance, looking over the frozen lake where his parents had taken him skating for the first, and last, time. A colossus among the snow, looking desolate, defeated.

“Leonid!”

He jerked so hard at her shriek. He must have been so lost in thought that he hadn’t heard the car’s approach. He almost lost his balance as he swung around. Then he gaped.

She knew how she must look to him. Maniacal, her elaborate wedding gown tearing in places, hair falling all over out of its chignon, eyes reddened and bleeding mascara, the rest of her makeup streaked down her swollen face.

She only cared that she’d found him. That she’d give her life to make it up to him, that she still had the chance to.

When she was a few dozen feet away, he started talking, voice hoarse and even deeper than usual with bleakness. “You shouldn’t have come, Kassandra. I meant every word, that only your happiness and peace of mind matter to me.”

She would have closed those final feet between them in a flying leap that landed her against him. The old Leonid would have caught her midair as easily as a pro basketball player caught a ball. But as it was, she could knock him off his feet or even injure him. She’d done enough of that, and she’d die before she hurt him again.

“I don’t want you to feel bad,” he choked. “It’s not your fault...”

And she wrapped her arms around as much of his bulk as she could, squeezed him until she felt her arms would break off.

Stiffening as if with insupportable pain in her arms, he groaned in protest again. “Don’t, Kassandra. Don’t let your tender heart overrule your best interests again. I don’t matter...”

“Only you ever mattered.” She shut him up when he attempted to protest, surging for his precious lips, taking them in wrenching kisses, pouring her love and agony into him. Then she told him what she’d learned that day from Anya, and how it had set off the chain reaction of uncertainty.

“I’ve lived with the demons of doubt tormenting me for so long,” she sobbed in between desperate kisses. “And they overwhelmed my reason. I was terrified you couldn’t possibly love me as totally as I love you, that I couldn’t be your one and only choice, and that you were only struggling to accommodate my emotions to make the best of a less-than-ideal situation for all involved. And once I thought that, I couldn’t do this to you, couldn’t bear having you on those terms.” Tears poured thicker, sobs coming harder as she mashed her lips against his. “Please forgive me, my love, forgive me for letting malignant insecurity drive me insane enough to commit the unforgivable crime of doubting you again.”

As he started to push away, to get a word in, she clung harder, sobs dismantling her soul as she rushed on to confess her original sin.

“I should have never walked away when you asked me to. I knew you were at your lowest, knew you couldn’t be in your right mind. Your decision to push me away for my own good was wrong. But the blame for everything that happened is mine, for not insisting on staying, taking anything from you, until you realized I’d a million times rather be miserable with you than at peace without you. I’m the one who made us all suffer.”

“Now, wait a minute here...”

She cut across his protest. “No more waiting. And no more doubts or distance of any sort, ever again. I’m never leaving your side again. And I’m not letting you relinquish the crown.”

“Kassandra, listen to me...”

“No, you listen. I’m not letting you even think of abandoning something this enormous and imperative, your duty to the land only you can rule.”

“If you’ll just let me get a word in here...”

“What word would that be? If it’s not yes to everything I’ve just said, don’t bother. Zorya needs you as much as I and the girls do.” She stopped, grimaced. Every cell hurt with loving him so much, finding him so damned beautiful. “Okay, so that’s not true. Anyone else, even the girls, can live without you. I can’t. And I never will. I need you to believe this, my love, and understand it as a fundamental fact of my being. For the girls, my family and work, I can exist, appear to be functioning, for a lifetime if need be. But to live, to know joy and ecstasy and peace, I need you. Only you.”

Anguish and insecurity evaporating slowly in his eyes under the flames of her fervor, he caressed her face with trembling hands, the love in his gaze so fierce it seared her to her soul, the raggedness in his deep, velvet voice heart wrenching.

“It was so easy to fall prey to my own demons as soon as I felt your withdrawal. They convinced me I repelled you, and the kingdom’s duties and dangers oppressed you. And I would rather die a thousand deaths than inflict a moment’s unhappiness on you. But without you fueling my will to be, nothing else mattered. Leaving everything behind became the only thing I could do, and my one desire.”

Before she could lament a protest, his lips shook in a smile of reassurance. “But Olga will make a fine queen. And with you by my side again, I can again function, can serve Zorya as her advisor, as a businessman and politician. But it is better for our family that I step down now.”

“If you’re referring to those moronic fears I had at the start, please forget I ever said anything so stupid. Whatever hardships will be involved in reestablishing the monarchy, this is your destiny. I will eagerly and proudly share in all its tests and burdens, and be the happiest woman on earth, because I will do it all with you, and will have the honor and delight of being your succor and support through it all.”

And she felt it, the exact moment he let go of the last traces of reluctance and doubt and hesitation. Then she was in the only home she ever wanted, his embrace, crushed and cherished and contained.

“You’ve got one thing wrong, dorogaya. The crown isn’t my destiny. You are. You and our girls.” Suddenly he groaned. “But how can I now go back and demand to be crowned? After I left the whole kingdom in the lurch?”

Caressing his chiseled cheek dreamily, she sighed. “Don’t you worry. Everything about you is the stuff of fairy tales, and when I’m finished playing the media, the whole world will be raving about the king who started his rule with a romantic gesture for the ages. Bet you will go down history as a legend to rival that of the goddesses or even Cinderella and Prince Charming.”

His breathtaking smile singed her to her toes. “You mean we will. Even though the roles were embarrassingly reversed here, and it was the big, lethal hero who ran away.”

A laugh bubbled from her depths. “Leaving me a priceless letter instead of a glass slipper.”

His eyes glowed with so much love it caused a literal pain in her gut. “And you didn’t send people to look for me, but cast out your love like a net to find me.”

Suddenly a storm of honking erupted, jogging them out of their complete absorption with one another.

Swinging around in shock, they found their whole wedding party, six-hundred-plus strong, descending from a fleet of limos. Fedor must have reported their position. Or her testosterone tribe had followed her GPS signal. Or her friends had had their Triumvirate comb the planet for them.

Whatever had really happened, they’d found them and were advancing on them en masse. In the first line of the approaching army were her parents, each with a girl yelling for Kassandra and Leonid in their arms.

Before they reached them, she looked up at Leonid, her soul in human form, the source of every towering emotion she’d ever experienced and the fuel for every ambition and passion and delight for the rest of her life. He was looking back at her, so hungrily, so adoringly, she again wondered how she could have ever doubted his feelings. But never again.

Heart soaring with all the endless possibilities and promises of a lifetime with him, she suddenly grinned at him.

“How about you demonstrate one of your unique abilities to the good people who came trudging through the snow after us?”

His eyes filled with the mischief that had started appearing in his eyes in those short days of bliss, the bliss that would now be their status quo.

“The Voronov Vacuum Maneuver?”

Devouring his lips once again, she caressed his chiseled cheek. “Right the first time.”

Laughing, the most delightful sound in heaven or on earth, he opened his arms wide.

The girls launched themselves there, and stuck.

As she explained the property he and the girls, the pieces of her soul, shared, everyone laughed. Then their interrupted wedding guests inundated them with a hundred questions about what was going on.