Are you an idiot?
She was. She had been the entire time. An idiot for him. An idiot to believe that love and beauty existed somewhere in this world in light of everything that she had experienced.
Ever since he devastated her, she had looked at it as a flaw. Had taken stock of her life and asked herself why in the world she thought miracles could happen.
And many of them had. She was a queen, after all. And how many maids went from cleaning the palace to living in it?
Maybe more in history than she knew about.
But it had felt like too much to imagine that they could be more. That she could have more.
He was so difficult. The only time she had ever seen emotion in him was the night of his wife’s funeral. Or rage. It was only those two things. Passion. Anger.
Choose passion.
It felt so dangerous.
And yet, right then, it was also the only thing that made sense.
She cast her snorkeling equipment to the side, as she walked up out of the water, and moved toward him. And she wasn’t the one who had to close the distance between them, because he did it.
He went toward her, wrapped his arm around her waist and drew her against his body. “I don’t understand what it is you do to me.”
He sounded angry. Well, that was right on track. She had plenty of his anger. Just like she’d had his passion. Maybe now she would get them both. Maybe now she would get them together, she would take that.
She was yearning for something. For everything, maybe. To be loved, to be cherished, to be queen, to be free. It was too much. Too much for a simple girl to hope for, but so many girls had. For so many years. All she wanted was everything. Why not?
She was already pregnant with the king’s baby.
And she was tired. She was tired of not having everything.
Maybe this would hurt. Maybe her mistake was believing that she could find a way to exist without pain. That she could gather up all the good, and it would cancel out the bad.
Maybe what she needed to do was accept that there would always be danger.
Yes. There would always be danger.
She reached up and touched his face, traced the line of his high cheekbones, all the way down to his sculpted jaw.
He was so beautiful.
Her king.
Her husband.
She wasn’t common, and neither were they. But they also were. And there was something beautiful in that. Just two people at the mercy of this intense need. She had to believe that he felt it too.
She had done a good job of convincing herself that for him, it had never been this. For him it had never been this driving, intense need, but rather it had been his need to escape the grief that he was drowning in.
She knew that wasn’t true now.
He was sad about his wife. He grieved her, as one did any young life lost.
But it hadn’t been grief borne out of passion.
It had been something else. He had been reaching out for connection, and she would take that.
She would.
