by Maisey Yates
That she didn’t need to be a queen or even a princess.
“I don’t need to be turned into a robot. I want whoever I marry to marry me, not some elegant lie.” she said. “This is ridiculous.”
“Now,” he said, his voice stern. “That isn’t terribly polite, considering Madame Dansforth makes a living at this ridiculousness. It is her life’s work.”
Tinley turned to her instructor. “I didn’t mean your life’s work is ridiculous.” She turned back to Alex. “What I meant is it’s ridiculous to try to make me into something I’m not. I’m never going to be able to maintain anything like this.” She held her foot out, displaying the impractical high heel she was wearing. “I’m not going to be swanning around my house wearing things like this. So if I managed to impress a man, it’s going to be based on nothing but a lie that I will never be able to keep up for more than a few hours.”
“Best foot forward.”
She wiggled her toes. “Clumsy foot.”
She hated this. Because it reminded her so much of what it was like to be a clumsy, sad girl who couldn’t do anything right as far as her mother was concerned.
She took in a long, slow breath. And it caught, somewhere in the center of her chest, as her eyes met his.
“I am supposed to find a husband for you,” he said. “And I will do it by the means that I consider to be best.”
“And you never question your opinions?”
“I question them often,” he said. “Any leader should.” And she felt something bloom there at the center of her chest. Hot and reckless and strange. Irritation. Because it could be nothing more.
Because she resented him. Resented him, and the fact that he lived and breathed and stood there disapproving of her while his brother was gone.
That he had taken her here and manipulated the connection she still had to this family, to this place, against her.
That isn’t fair. You chose this. You chose this because you’re afraid to do anything else. Because you want to show your mother...
She shut that thought down.
Along with the reckless heat inside of her.
“How is dancing coming along?” he asked, not directing the question to her at all.
“We haven’t begun,” Madame Dansforth said.
“Then we will begin now.”
“The girl has not managed to walk across the room with the book on her head,” the madam snapped.
“Will she be walking across the ballroom with a book on her head?” Alex asked, his tone dry. “Because she will be dancing. So it is perhaps in her best interest if she practices one above the other.”
Madame Dansforth looked exasperated. “I have a method, and you did hire me to use it.”
“Yes,” he said. “But I’m still the King. And I’m overriding you now.”
There was a pause and if Tinley wasn’t mistaken, a hint of frost in the air. But the good madam knew better than to argue with a king.
“As you wish, Your Majesty,” the woman said.
It really was amazing how people deferred to him, even if they were irritated, as Madame Dansforth visibly was. It was only that no one dared say it to his face. That he was being high-handed. That he was overstepping. When he so clearly was.
When the music started, Alex turned to her.
“Dance,” he said. He extended his hand, and she looked at it, having the feeling that he had offered her a live spider.
“With you?”
“Yes,” he said. “I will be dancing with you the night of the ball. It is my job to present you.”
“That seems a little bit much.”
“It’s a dance,” he said. “Not a siege against your person.”
But for some reason, as she reached out to take his hand, slowly, ever so slowly, she felt as if they might be the same thing.
She thought of another moment. Another time.
She’d been nearly eighteen and standing against the wall during a ball. Dionysus had danced with two other women then slipped off to get drunk. She felt numb and she’d tried to tell herself it was only that he hadn’t known how she felt. That their relationship had not yet become a romantic one, not for him. Still, it had hurt.
She hadn’t known quite what to do with herself and Alexius had come over to her, dark eyes alight with black fire.
We will dance.
Oh, no I’m fine.
It wasn’t a request.
And she’d found herself swept up into strong arms that had made her feel small, fragile and safe, all at once.
His hand on her waist had burned and she’d been able to think of nothing else the whole time he’d twirled her around the dance floor. She’d been holding her breath and the relief she’d felt when he’d released her had been beyond words.
Because she hated him.
Because he hadn’t done it for any reason other than because he was Alex, and when it came to duty he’d do it whether he wanted to or not.
But in the present, when their fingers connected, something shot through her midsection, down between her thighs.
And it made her wonder if what she’d felt back then had been hate at all.
It reminded her of a time she had gone on a hike when she’d been at college. They had gone up to the very top of a ridge, and she had stood on the edge, looking down, and she felt it. That kind of terror. That resonated in her core. In her teeth.
Fear. That’s what this was. She feared him.
The Lion of the Dark Wood.
Except, to her, he would always be entangled in the wolves that had eaten his brother.
Somehow, to her, they had become one in the same. This forbidding older brother whose job it was to protect an entire country, but somehow hadn’t protected his blood.
He had become the villain of the story. And she couldn’t quite figure out why. Because of course it wasn’t his responsibility to monitor every movement of his younger brother. It was even more ridiculous than the blame he took from the public, for being a boy, a small boy, who had failed to supervise another child. There should have been nannies. There should have been guards. His parents. Why was Alex the one who seemed to take the unequal weight in all of this?
And yet, she tended to think of him in that way as well. As the responsible party for something that had gone wrong.
And maybe it was because of everything that had come before, more than legends and curses. Because in her memory, the palace had been wonderful. And Dionysus had been wonderful. But Alex had never approved, and it had been transparent, at least to her.
Alex had always felt like their villain.
He had that way of stealing her rose colored glasses.
It made her feel raw and wounded and fragile. Because her advocates were gone. And it was he who remained.
And then, it wasn’t only her fingertips that touched his. His large hand enveloped hers, and he pulled her against his body. She stumbled in the high heels, falling against that hard, broad chest. With her free hand, she braced herself, and then removed it as if she had been scalded.
“Dance,” he repeated.
Then he swept her into his arms, and he took the lead.
He was strong, and steady, but her heart was beating at some erratic, ridiculous clip, and she could not manage to keep her feet beneath her. She kept slipping, tripping, trembling.
Madame Dansforth was shouting out instructions, and Tinley could feel herself failing. Alarmingly off rhythm.
She hated it. Hated this. It reminded her of being at home. Her mother had tried to get her dancing lessons and she’d failed. She’d been awful at piano. Her mother had placed coins on the backs of her hands to get her to play with her hands held just so, and they’d always clattered onto the floor. She’d had her sit in a dining chair with a scarf tied around her shoulders to improve h
er posture.
Even dinner had to be a lesson, because she couldn’t even eat right.
She couldn’t do this right, and Alex’s disapproval burned even deeper.
“Leave us,” Alex shouted.
They stopped moving, and his voice echoed over the music. Madame Dansforth looked at him, her expression blank. “Leave you?”
“I do not think my order was ambiguous.”
The woman paused. “Of course it wasn’t.”
“Good.”
She left them, leaving them alone. And Tinley simply stood, standing in front of Alex, feeling small and inadequate and angry.
“Dance again,” he commanded.
“You’ve dismissed the instructor.”
“She wasn’t helping you. I am your instructor now.”
“You don’t know that she wasn’t helping. You don’t know me.”
“I do know you,” he said. “You are the girl that my father matched up with my brother simply because he thought the world of your father. It had nothing to do with you. It had nothing to do with him.”
“How dare you?”
“It is the truth,” he said. “I’m sorry if you find it inconvenient.”
“I didn’t ask for this. Not any of it.”
“And yet, there are hoops we all must jump through in order to fulfill our destinies, are there not? What is my life but a public performance? But a show. And it is not the most important thing that I am. For a show will not run a country. I must do that. I must keep the people secure. Keep them safe. I must fulfill the destiny of the nation. I must do it while instilling confidence in myself as a leader.”
“Difficult to do. You’re a walking PR problem.”
He smiled. A predator’s smile.
Lion or wolf, it didn’t matter.
It was still all the better to eat her with.
“Dance.”
“On my terms.” She kicked her shoes off, which was not the power move she had hoped, since that put her directly in the line of sight of the center of his chest. And then, in a state of rage, she grabbed hold of the band that held her hair in place, and pulled it free. “Now I’ll dance. As me. Not as this...trussed up turkey on stilts.”
She found herself back in his arms, and this time, when he began to lead, his strong arms nearly lifted her off the ground.
They moved in time with the music. Rough. Angry. Intense. But she didn’t feel off rhythm now. For she moved with him. As if their rage had twined together, flowing through them both.
Her every move was now in time with his. Her heart thundered, her body quaking as they did. She had never been this close to a man before. She had danced light and carefree at parties. The way that young people did. Holding hands, and not inviting any intimacy.
She had danced with Dionysus and he had kept that sort of distance. Out of deference to her father and her age.
He had treated her as a perfect gentleman.
And Alexius was as well. He certainly wasn’t taking liberties. It was simply a dance. But her breasts were crushed against his chest, and it felt like a sin. And the most disturbing thing was she had a feeling that sensation of sinning came from inside her own body. And the expression on his face sharpened, turned to stone.
It wasn’t disapproving anymore.
It was something else. Something she couldn’t pin a name on. But it echoed inside of her. She knew, somehow, that it matched. That it matched the reckless feeling that was riding through her like a rhythm all its own. One that overrode the music. One that sounded a call to a different kind of dance.
You know.
Something inside of her whispered that. From a place deep and hidden.
And she felt horribly exposed. Bright and sensitive, and like exactly what he thought she was. Something untamed and coarse and unworthy.
A woman who had kicked her shoes off in his presence, and unbound her hair.
And yet, he held her. Yet, he didn’t let her go. It was an anomaly. One she could not put a name to. They twirled around the ballroom floor, and while the thick, leaden sensation that was so foreign to her pooled in her stomach, created alchemy and heat inside of her, she didn’t notice she had been lifted off the floor. That she was spun so her back pressed against the wall, and even more hard and unyielding than the marble behind her, was the man at her front.
His dark eyes blazed down into hers, and she lost the ability to breathe.
But he didn’t move. A sense of wretched desperation filled her. But it could not be. It could not be that this quickening of her heart, that the sensitivity she felt in her breasts, down between her legs was anything like desire.
Desire for this man who was wrapped in the most painful memories she possessed.
The brother of the man she’d been so certain she loved.
And he wouldn’t answer the question of what this dark, terrible beast inside her wanted. He wouldn’t do anything to ease her suffering.
Had he moved away from her, or had he closed the distance, she might have found some clarity. But he refused to do either. He held them both there, frozen, poised as if on the edge of a knife.
“Learn to dance in shoes,” he said finally. And then he moved away from her.
And he left her feeling...cold. Bereft of something that she would have denied she wanted unto death.
And she was helpless to do anything but stare as she watched him walk out of the ballroom.
She leaned against the wall, collapsed, sliding down to the floor. And she stared at the book she had been balancing on her head only moments ago, lying in the center of the room discarded.
What had she done? Or worse still, what hadn’t she done, that a piece of her seemed to want.
“This is the problem,” she whispered. “Yarn and cats can only take you so far. And loving a dead man doesn’t do much for pent up physical desire.”
She had always thought that maybe... That maybe her desire was low. That maybe she didn’t have all that much. She had found Dionysus beautiful, but she had been young.
She hadn’t had...fantasies about him.
But she had felt comfortable with him, and she had liked him. She’d told herself that made their feelings pure, for it wasn’t clouded by anything base.
She hadn’t felt that great weight of discomfort in his presence like she had done with Alexius. But tonight that discomfort had twisted into something else, and she despised it.
She despised herself.
She needed to untangle it, but she didn’t want to.
And the truly terrible thing was that she was quite stuck with the man for a bit of time yet.
“It’s nothing,” she whispered.
And she whispered it again when she was shut up in her room, lying on the bed and scratching Algernon behind the ears.
Restlessness rolled through her. She got up off the bed and walked over to her little pet cages. Offering both Peregrine and the hedgehogs a treat. She felt a deep, enduring sadness. And she couldn’t pinpoint quite why.
It was an ache that started around her heart and spread, affecting her breathing.
You’re lonely.
She was. Lonely and a coward, and it was all kind of sad.
If she left here...if she left Alex...
The idea made her feel devastated and she didn’t know why.
“But if I get married, I won’t be lonely,” she whispered into the room.
Except she knew that wasn’t necessarily true. And the weight of that truth filled her with a sadness so profound she found it difficult to breathe past it.
CHAPTER FIVE
ALEXIUS WAS IN his office the next day when she appeared unannounced.
The sight of her was like a physical punch straight to his gut.
She wasn’t dressed up. She had no makeup on, her freckle
s in full view. She had on a pair of jeans, and a soft-looking T-shirt that molded itself to her full breasts. Her hair was in a state, and he found himself wishing he could sink his fingers deep into those tresses.
He gritted his teeth. He had very nearly made a mistake with her when they had danced in the ballroom.
He was not accustomed to this. To this feeling.
The sort of reckless, out-of-control sensation.
Temptation.
In his world there was no temptation.
He did not act in a way that might endanger Liri, and if he did want something, and it did not endanger the future of his country, then he set about getting it.
He was a man who conducted his business in matter-of-fact ways.
But Tinley lived in an astonishing gray area.
Having her would cause an endless stream of problems. An array of issues that would echo throughout his life. The first issue being that her father would likely come back from the dead and haunt him. The second being... He could not marry her. Neither did he want to. He had arrangements made. She had been his brother’s fiancée, and the optics of taking her as a wife...
The entire country had perceived the match between Tinley and Dionysus as a love match. To take his dead brother’s future wife, particularly when his own failures were mixed in to the cause of his brother’s demise...
No matter what he thought about her ability to fulfill the role as Queen, it was something that simply could not be borne.
And there would be no touching her without a commitment.
Except you could. She wants you. You could, and no one would know.
No. Only his conscience. Only his honor.
Walking that line was why he remained.
And he would continue to walk it still.
Atonement for past sins that could never truly be forgiven.
“What is it you want?” he asked.
“I want to discuss the logistics of this ball.”
“There is nothing to discuss. It will happen. A husband for you will be found.”
“Who is doing the choosing?”
Frustration shot through him like an arrow.