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But he couldn’t tell her that.

Because if he told her that he remembered everything, the look on her face would change again. Everything would change. And it turned out that he was the same coward he had always been, because he could not bear to see it right there on that face that he had finally touched again, finally tasted again.

Kissing her had brought him back to life. To his life. And he did not wish to leave her, not again. Not yet.

There was only one way to stay, and that was him not knowing exactly who he was. Which meant, despite all of the promises he’d made himself on that long flight away from the royal life that had been slowly choking the life out of him, he was going to have to lie.

“No blurry vision,” he told her, which was true. “The headache is not worse, exactly. But I think I had better lie down.”

And he congratulated himself for dancing along that line. Not quite lying with his words, only in his omissions.

Damning himself, in other words, with his own faint praise.

“Of course you should lie down,” she said at once. If he wasn’t mistaken, she looked almost guilty at that. Or ashamed, perhaps.

If he had to guess, she was beating herself up for falling into his arms again. Or possibly remembering that he wasn’t supposed to know what it felt like to kiss her like that, so perhaps she thought she’d somehow taken advantage of him.

Vesuvius couldn’t quite understand how he managed to find himself in this position. His objectives had been clear when he’d left Liandero. He’d felt that sense of purpose all throughout the flight.

Well. There had been a snowstorm. He hadn’t expected that.

Aeryn stood up, and though there was more color on her cheeks than there had been before—and it showed no sign of diminishing—she moved briskly, as if she intended to ignore what had happened.

“I’ll get you settled in the room you showered in before,” she told him as she went. “Do you think you’re well enough to walk up the stairs?”

His cock was under the impression that he was well enough to keep them both awake for the next week as the two of them reacquainted themselves with the pure glory of the way he fit when he was as far inside of her as he could go, but he couldn’t say that. He found himself gritting his teeth and ordering himself to smile instead.

Pitifully, perhaps.

It was that or continue to look at photographs of the baby girl he’d signed away when she was a concept he’d imagined he could ignore. He’d been wrong about that, too.

“I’ll manage,” he gritted out when Aeryn looked back at him. Perhaps a little too darkly, because though he wouldn’t describe the way she looked at him as suspicious—exactly—he thought she was perhaps a bit more on to him than he wanted her to be at the moment.

It wasn’t difficult to climb a flight of stairs. She walked ahead of him, demonstrating that lithe, clever manner of moving that had entranced him from the start. It wasn’t difficult to follow after her, really, but there was no denying that he could feel every ache and pain in his body again. He was just lucky that he’d dropped that plane down low when he’d hit that storm. Too low, according to flight control, but the weather had been horrific. He should have turned back much earlier.

But he hadn’t. Not because he had a death wish, as he knew someone would accuse him. Quite the opposite. It had been worth it to him to risk it. That was how much he’d wanted to see Aeryn again. That was how determined he was to make it to her.

He was lucky that what had happened out there had been less of a crash and rather more of an unfortunate skidding kind of landing. The crash part had not been him plummeting from the sky above, which was why he was still in one piece. It had been the plane stopping short with an unpleasant crunch when it hit the snowbanks on shore.

It had been luck all around, because without all of those things happening in concert, he would be dead.

He would have been dead and the world would have heard of his death later with no context, no explanation. The tabloids would make nasty suggestions that he’d been running from something in Liandero, or claim that he was suicidal, or make up some or other outrageous claim to justify the death of a freshly abdicated king so far from home. Perhaps they would have created a conspiracy theory starring his sister and Saviero, his closest friend and highest minister.

Meanwhile, Aeryn would have had to wonder what he was doing solo piloting a plane across the Atlantic and over Lake Michigan only to fall at the final hurdle, so close to her home. If she had done the same thing, dying within reach of the palace when she shouldn’t have been there at all, he would have been haunted by that for the rest of his life.

He told himself it was a good thing that he’d managed to land that damn plane, however bumpily, and that the hard, snowy stop was a blessing too. No matter the bruises he’d sustained or the blood he’d spilled.

She led him into the guest room again and this time, turned on all the lights. Clearly more concerned with his comfort this time around. He had barely looked at his surroundings before, too worried about that white noise in his head and too focused on the one thing he could recall—her—but without any helpful details.

Now he took in the details. A cozy bed, neatly made, flanked by mahogany dressers. The floor was hardwood, but there were area rugs set down to keep the cold at bay. On the dressers, there were more photographs. Aeryn and the baby. The baby in the arms of two older people he knew, from pictures she’d shown him years ago, were her parents. The baby in various absurdly cute poses, showing off her wide, gummy smile and what had to be the happiest disposition of all time.

Not the baby. His baby.

His daughter.

His throat felt tight. Stuck. He jerked his gaze away from the damned photos and took in the art on the walls. As only to be expected in the home of a career art historian, it was clever and beguiling, the early work of a now highly regarded artist. More than met the eye, and yet pleasant to look at if a person knew nothing about art.

And now he could remember every passionate discussion—the closest to arguing they’d ever gotten—about art. It wasn’t as painful as looking at the daughter he’d effectively abandoned, but it hurt all the same.