by Dani Collins
She savored a prawn before smiling at him, because she wanted to. “My favorite.”
“I know.”
“How?” she asked curiously, pretty sure she hadn’t mentioned this weakness to him.
“A man reading your comings, goings and habits for the past ten years can learn a great deal if he wants to.” And would be a fool not to, his tone implied.
After all the deep dives into someone else’s life she’d done for Demyan, as well as the one she’d done on Nikolai, it felt strange to know that a king had spent so much time not only reading up on her but interpreting the very mundane details recorded by those who had watched her over the past decade. “And you wanted to?”
“Can you doubt it?”
“It just seems like overkill for you to pay such close attention.”
“Does it? Didn’t you do the same?”
“Not really, no. I only looked at certain areas of your life for the past couple of years.” She’d been interested in patterns that would reveal behaviors she could not live with.
Nataliya had been content to learn his likes, dislikes and views through the more regular method of simply getting to know him.
“Believe me, after my first marriage, I had no desire to be surprised by any aspect of your life or nature.” He made it sound like his first marriage had offered up some unpleasant surprises.
Remembering the way he’d been with his Queen, Nataliya found that difficult to believe.
But then, who looking at her family would ever have guessed her father was the violent man he had been with her and Mama?
“Doesn’t that take some of the mystique out of it?” As she asked the question, Nataliya realized how foolish it was.
That kind of mystique belonged in romance, but their relationship was not based on anything so emotive.
His look said he was surprised by the question. “I do not think a marriage for a sovereign needs to have mystique.”
“I would say you do not have a romantic bone in your body,” she teased, covering her own embarrassment at the knowledge that very thing wasn’t what they were about. “But this whole scenario says otherwise.”
Which was no less than the truth, so maybe, he could take a little bit of the blame for how hard she found it to remember this courtship wasn’t about romance.
“You deserve to be treated as the special woman you are, but that does not make me romantic,” he said decisively.
Warmth unfurled inside her at his words, despite how surprised she was by his claim.
“You don’t consider yourself romantic?” she asked, startled.
The man had been nothing but romantic in his courtship of her, despite the fact it was based on all sorts of things besides romance.
“Romance is based on illusion and I have no illusions left.”
Okay. No question. His marriage had not been the perfect union she had always assumed, unless he’d had a relationship she didn’t know about since Tiana’s death.
“You sound so cynical, but that is not how you treat me.” And she was glad.
“There is nothing about you which to be cynical about,” he said with some satisfaction.
“I’m not perfect.” Not even a paragon. She was after all the woman who had embarked on the first dates article in order to get Konstantin to back out of the contract when her King refused to renegotiate its terms to leave her out of it.
“No, but your integrity is bone-deep and your understanding of duty uncommon in the current age.”
She found it interesting he believed so strongly in her honesty, knowing how she’d sought to manipulate his brother. But then she hadn’t done anything wrong in her efforts to get out of the contract. Maybe more than anything, that revealed how much this King did not believe in the double standard of fidelity so many men in positions of power seemed hampered by.
Nevertheless, she reminded him, “We’ve had this discussion.”
“Yes. You have promised that if it came between our children’s happiness and duty, you would choose their happiness. That is not a deterrent to me.”
“Apparently it’s not.” But she didn’t understand how it wasn’t. Did he think she’d give in when it came down to it?
He would learn differently if the situation ever arose.
“We share the knowledge that more than our own happiness rests on our shoulders, but the well-being of an entire country. That does not mean we will both not make every effort to see our children happy that we can.”
That was good to hear, but too practically put to justify the squishy warmth inside her right now.
Doing her best to ignore those feelings, she acknowledged, “I was raised to understand my place in the world and that it was not the same place as Jenna’s, or the other normal people like her.”
Nataliya had done her best to have a normal life, but she belonged to the royal family of Volyarus and always would do.
He nodded. “Jenna, while a good friend, does not have the welfare of a country to consider when she decides how she spends her time.”
“You’re saying I do.” Despite her ever-present knowledge of her place in the world, Nataliya had never really thought that she took that into account in everything she did, but she wasn’t sure she could deny it either.
“You always have.”
When she’d been little, Nataliya had known she could not talk about what happened in her home, not only because of the shame she and her mom felt, but because a lady did not tell tales. And she had known she was Lady Nataliya since she knew her own name.
As she’d grown older, that knowledge of who she was had continued to influence her. When she’d been tempted to test her hacking skills at the university in ways others did, she’d stopped herself, knowing if she got caught it could bring embarrassment to the royal family.
One of the reasons she was so good was that she’d had to be positive she could not be traced or trapped when she tried a hack. Her absolute need not to be caught had made her better.
Nataliya hadn’t been born a princess, but she had been born into the royal family.
Because her father had been such an embarrassment to the throne, she and Mama had been forced to make choices for the good of Volyarus even other nobility of their country would not be required to make.
While those choices had hurt, Nataliya had never denied they were necessary.
The way the exile had been handled by King and Queen? That had not been okay.
The way she and Mama had been made into pariahs right along with her father? That had not been okay.
The fact that her mother’s exile had never been lifted? That had not been okay either.
But Nataliya did not resent her place in the world or what it required of her to fill it.
“If it had been up to you, would you have left my mother living in exile for all these years?” she asked him as their soup course was laid.
“You mean, if I had been in your uncle’s position? I should hope that I would show more concern for one of my subjects, much less a woman as close to me as a sister. It is true that in life we are sometimes called to pay the price for another’s sin, but it is not my habit to dismiss that cost to others.”
“Have you ever been faced with a similar situation?”
“Yes, I have.” But he did not elaborate and then Nikolai frowned. “However, in a very real way, it was up to me. I did not pressure my brother into fulfilling the terms of the contract.”
“Why not?”
“I was allowed to choose my wife.”
“And you felt guilty that he had not.”
“Yes.” He paused, considered, like he was deciding how much he wanted to say. “That was part of it certainly.”
“What was the other part?”
He approved the wine for the soup course and then met her gaze
, his mysterious and dark. “When you were a teenager, you used to watch me like I was a football star.”
“You knew about my crush?” She should have been embarrassed, but somehow she wasn’t.
She wasn’t ashamed of the feelings she’d once had for him, even if she never wanted to be that emotionally vulnerable again.
That crush had turned into unrequited love that she had not managed to stifle despite her best efforts until he’d lost his wife and his grief acted as a barrier to her heart she’d never been able to erect on her own.
“I did and I felt it was unfair on you both to press forward a marriage that would cause you both discomfort if not pain under those circumstances.”
She’d never thought he’d noticed her obsession with him. Nataliya gave Nikolai a self-deprecating smile. “I thought I was so good at hiding it.”
“Who of us as teenagers is that good at hiding anything?” he asked with some amusement.
“I’m pretty sure that even as a teenager, you were an expert at hiding any feelings you did not want to share.”
“I had posters of...” He named a popular American film star. “All over my side of the room at boarding school.”
“But she would have been old enough to be your mother!” Nataliya exclaimed, laughing.
“I thought she was everything sexy.”
“And now?” Nataliya asked, wondering if he had another secret celebrity crush.
Nikolai gave her a sultry look. “My tastes have refined. I’m turned on by sexy computer hackers who forget dates.”
“I didn’t forget—I was late.”
“Because you forgot.”
How did a woman forget a date with a king? She didn’t, but the first week of his courtship, Nataliya had gotten caught up in her work to the extent that Jenna’s frantic phone call wondering where she was had been necessary.
“You weren’t angry you had to wait.”
“Naturally not. I find it admirable that you take your work so seriously.”
“The duty thing again?” She sighed and knew she owed him the truth. “It’s not about focusing so seriously on my job—it’s that I really get lost in it and have no awareness of time passing or even people coming in and out of the room with me.”
“I find that charming.” His heated look said he found it something else too. Hot.
How? She didn’t know, but she was glad. “Here’s hoping that doesn’t change because I’m unlikely to. It’s a personality trait.”
“You’re very blunt.”
Her mouth twisted in consternation. “Not a great trait for a diplomat, I know.”
“For a princess who is a diplomat by role rather than career, I do not agree. I believe that your ability to be forthright will be a benefit to our House.”
She laughed. Couldn’t help doing so. “You’re the only one who has ever considered that flaw a strength.” Even her beloved mother found Nataliya’s blunt manner something to censure.
“Honesty is not a flaw.”
“Even when I say truths I shouldn’t?”
“I have never heard you say anything you shouldn’t,” he claimed.
“Um, are you practicing selective memory, or lying?” she asked.
“Neither.”
“But I offended your father and your brother during that little tribunal at the Volyarussian palace.”
“And their attitude to you offended me.”
“It did?” She thought about how Nikolai had responded in that confrontation. “It did.”
“Yes. Nothing you said that day should not have been said,” he repeated with an approving smile. “So, you too saw it as a tribunal?”
“What else? My so-called uncle and your father, not to mention your brother, were determined to put me on trial.”
“And instead they found themselves on the wrong side of having to defend their own actions and attitudes.”
Looking back, she realized that was true. No one had expected her to take them to task, but she had. And Nikolai, without condemning his own brother, had backed her up.
So had Oxana and Mama, in their own ways.
They ate in companionable silence for a few minutes before she said, “I’ve been thinking about what I would like to do careerwise if I were to become The Princess of Mirrus.”
Subtle tension filled his body, like he had gone on alert. “Yes?”
“I would like to continue what I do for Demyan...” she trailed off when that subtle tension went overt.
His jaw went hard, his body going ramrod straight, but all he said was, “Yes?”
“I like what I do, but I wasn’t sure there was a place for me at Mirrus Global.”
The tension drained out of Nikolai and his smile was blinding. “You want to use your powers for my company rather than Yurkovich-Tanner?” His delight at the idea was unmistakable.
She grinned. “Yes, but only part-time.”
“Because you understand that to be my Princess is in itself a job that requires time and attention? I could not have chosen a better lady to stand at my side if I had searched the world over.”
The compliment was over-the-top, but she got the distinct impression he meant every word and that did things to her heart she didn’t want to examine too closely. “You really are something special, you know that?”
“Because I like the idea of headhunting my own wife from my rival?” he asked, in full arrogant-guy mode.
She rolled her eyes at him. “Yurkovich-Tanner is not your rival. You are business partners.”
“But I have been jealous of Demyan’s hacker for years.”
“You didn’t know it was me.” She didn’t make it a question.
Nataliya and Demyan had done an excellent job of hiding her true role at Yurkovich-Tanner since she’d been hired on and he discovered her abilities as a hacker.
She was the one who had discovered the Crown Princess’s pregnancy after Gillian and Maks broke up. Demyan had used Nataliya on the most delicate matters. Only now did she realize that was because he had always seen her as family, and he trusted her implicitly.
“I did not.” Nikolai winked. “Once we found out at the tribunal I was worried you would want to continue working for your cousin.”
That’s why Nikolai had gone all tense just now? He’d been thinking about it even then?
“When I marry, my loyalty will belong first and foremost to my husband.” She was still talking in couched terms, but it needed to be said.
“That is a great boon coming from a woman with such a formidable sense of loyalty.”
She shrugged, a little embarrassed. “You’re always so complimentary.”
“I think very highly of you. I would have thought you would have realized that by now.”
Coming from the man she admired above all others, that was kind of an amazing thing to hear. More than amazing, it touched Nataliya’s heart in that uncomfortable way all over again and even filled it.
Everything around her went into sharp focus as something she had simply not allowed herself to see became glaringly obvious. This one man touched her emotions in a way no one else did, and with a simple compliment, because he lived in her heart.
She still loved him.
She’d never stopped, though she’d done a good job of pretending to herself for the sake of her own sense of honor.
She’d felt bad for loving a married man, and like a monster when he’d lost the wife he’d loved. Nataliya had also realized it was not fair to love one brother and marry another.
So, she’d convinced herself that her crush was over, that her feelings for Nikolai were nothing more than teenage hormones.
But this feeling inside her was so big, she could barely contain it. She adored the man who had always been her hero.
At first, she’d just had an alm
ighty crush on the man, but she’d learned to respect so much about him from early on. Yes, he’d taken over as King for the sake of his father’s health, but Nikolai had done so with a fully developed agenda that put the people of Mirrus first. He was a staunch conservationist and environmentalist which wasn’t easy to manage with the economic needs of his country, but he did it.
He was respectful to others, didn’t lose his temper or throw around his weight just because he could and he was loyal to his family. Loyal like her own uncle only pretended to be.
Had he been the reason she’d been so determined to end that contract? Had her subconscious finally realized that she simply could not marry his brother?
She couldn’t be sure that it played no part and she wasn’t sure how that made her feel.
Because her integrity was important to her.
“I think I still have a crush on you,” she blurted. And while that was blunt it wasn’t the whole truth, but telling the man who had made it clear he did not and never would love her that he owned her heart was not on.
He smiled at her, the expression unguarded for just a moment so she saw the difference between his normal smiles and this one. “I really like your honesty, kiska.”
Everything inside her seized with the need to claim this man. “I’ll marry you.”
His smile fell away, but he didn’t look unhappy, just really serious.
Silently, he stood up from his seat, and then he moved around the table to take one of her hands to pull her to feet, as well. “Will you marry me, Lady Nataliya?”
She stared at him in confusion. She’d just said she would. Then she realized what he was doing. Giving her the proposal.
And something else clicked. He’d always planned to propose tonight. That little trinket box had been a hint, but he had not intended for it to be the question.
She liked knowing that. A lot. She’d told him she wanted a proposal and because it was something he could give her, he had done. “Yes, Your Highness, I would be honored to be your Princess.”
Then he kissed her, despite there being bodyguards all around. It wasn’t a chaste kiss either.
His mouth claimed hers, his tongue sliding between her parted lips to tangle with hers. It was like the other night, but not.