He looked somehow…diminished though. As if the stuffing had been knocked out of him. Some vital spark dulled. She pushed down the urge to ask him if he was OK.
‘I’m going for a ride, Caius. Please see yourself out of the palace.’ She turned the horse to head out of the stableyard and only vaguely heard a curse behind her. She didn’t care. She was shaking now. Shaking with shock and adrenalin and something much more awful.Hope.
She was along the trail when she heard the sound of another horse behind her. She didn’t turn around. She knew it was him. They stayed like that for a while, Caius behind her, saying nothing, until they came to a clearing with a small pool. It was warm. Poppy knew the horses needed to rest and drink water.
She got off her horse and tied it off to a tree. And finally looked at Caius, who was securing his horse.
She faced him, hands on her hips. ‘Why are you following me, Caius?’
‘I’m sorry, Poppy, I never wanted to hurt you.’
Oh, God, he was here because he felt sorry for her. Poppy hitched up her chin. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Caius. In order to hurt me I’d have to have feelings for you and I couldn’t care less.’ The baby kicked her. Poppy ignored it. The little traitor.
‘Well, that’s good, because you shouldn’t care for me at all, because I have nothing to offer you except myself and that is a man who has avoided having to engage with anything emotional his entire life for fear of becoming his parents.
‘And,’ he went on, ‘for fear of letting anyone close enough to see that underneath all the smoke and mirrors was just an empty existence devoid of any meaning. My coronation day was the worst. I’d never felt like a bigger fraud.’
Poppy’s hands dropped from her hips, anger draining away. ‘Caius…you’re not a fraud.’
He smiled but it was sad. ‘You knew I was a fraud. You called me one, remember?’
But before Poppy could protest that she hadn’t meant it like that, he was saying, ‘But I don’t feel like a fraud when I’m with you. I feel real. Worth something, just from the way you look at me, like you see something no one else ever has…except maybe Cassie. She came to see me in New York.’
‘Cassie?’
He nodded. ‘She knows…how it was for us. She knew I’d done something to push you away because it’s hard for us to believe that we can find the kind of happiness we never experienced.’
Poppy swallowed. He was saying a lot but it still didn’t mean… ‘Why are you here, Caius?’
‘Because there’s nowhere else I want to be,’ he said simply. ‘Even before we had the scare with the baby, I knew I was fighting a losing battle trying to keep a lid on my emotions. You tried to talk to me about a future, that night…the night of the event, and I pretended I didn’t know what you were talking about, but of course I did, but I couldn’t even give such a suggestion air, because I would have had to admit I wanted more too, and I wasn’t ready to do that…’
His mouth thinned in self-disgust. ‘So I made love to you…any excuse to avoid opening up, and I wanted you so much… I was trying to fool myself that the sex was divorced from my emotions but of course it wasn’t…but then you—’ Caius stopped talking, going pale.
Poppy’s insides twisted. ‘Caius, you know it wasn’t the sex.’
He swallowed visibly. ‘Maybe I’ll fully believe that one day but—’
Poppy put up her hand. ‘Stop, right there.’ She walked towards Caius, stopping a couple of feet away. ‘You have to stop blaming yourself for something that had nothing to do with us having sex, or how much we want each other.’
Caius’s eyes widened. ‘You just said how much we want each other.’
‘I never stopped wanting you, Caius. I felt crazy that day at the polo, I wanted you so badly. But you could barely touch me.’
He shook his head. ‘I never stopped wanting you, Poppy. I will never stop wanting you. But it scares me, the depth of desire I feel, like it’ll be destructive.’
‘How can something that feels so good be destructive?’
‘Because the only passion I ever saw was dark, possessive, jealous and ruinous.’
‘That wasn’t passion, Caius, that was two broken people hurting each other.’
‘I think I know that… It’s just taken me a while to understand it because I never had to think about it before, until I met you and suddenly I was wanting and feeling so much and…terrified to let it out. I didn’t know how to handle it.’
Poppy said, ‘I’m scared too, Caius, scared of rejection and of everyone around me ignoring me and not seeing me because I’m not worth anything.’
‘I see you, Poppy, and you are worth everything.’
Somehow, without even knowing they’d moved, Poppy was in Caius’s arms, their gazes locked onto one another.
