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“I did not tell her that I was thinking of calling the wedding off,” he said, pushing on with this story as if it was the most critical thing in the world. But then, he thought perhaps it was. “I knew better than to mention such a thing to a woman who had built a whole life around the promise of that wedding. I also did not mention the other, significantly more drastic abdication option I’d come up with in my darkest moments that would end all of it whether she liked it or not. What I told her was that the closer we got to our wedding, the less I found myself easy with the nature of our relationship. I thought that surely, both of us would be happier if we hammered out some kind of friendship. Some kind of partnership, at any rate, that allowed us both to do what we wished to in these positions, rule the country, and be able to sleep at night. And do you know what she said?”

“If she is even half the person I have always thought she was, I can only imagine,” Aeryn said, a bit ruefully.

“She laughed,” Vesuvius told her. “Quite long and loud. And then she told me to go fuck myself, and she meant that.” He shook his head, thinking back to that gloomy morning that all the lights in the palace couldn’t seem to banish. And to Sintia, sitting there before him looking scornful, and outraged that he had dared to attempt to change anything between them. “To hear her tell it, marrying me was an act of charity on her part. She had no interest whatsoever in getting to know me better, hearing my whining, as she called it, or entertaining any notion that she should have to explain herself to me.”

What she’d said, with what he thought had been actual hatred in her eyes, was, If you wanted so badly to get to know me, you should have married me years ago and saved us all this drama. But you didn’t. You carried on and you had your fun, and now you get to suffer. I wouldn’t lift a single finger to change that. I want you miserable, Vesuvius.

But he thought that if he shared that with Aeryn, she would think he was making it up. Or exaggerating. Because it had seemed nearly cartoonishly vicious to him at the time. How would it sound now?

“That’s awful,” Aeryn said, frowning. “And honestly, not smart. Even if she truly felt that, why tell you that up front? Surely the better move would be to agree to whatever you said, figure out what exactly it was you were having hesitancy about, and just keep that in your back pocket. Maybe the two of you could build a friendship or maybe you wouldn’t, but either way, you always get more flies with honey. Everyone knows that.”

“I had much the same thought,” Vesuvius agreed. “It’s not even particularly high level diplomacy, just basic human relations. I will confess I found myself taken aback, after she left. But then I realized that she, like everyone else, was so certain that I would do my duty that they felt absolutely no need to cater to my feelings. She was so positive that there was nothing she could do or say that would keep me from marrying her, because I had promised to do it. If she was a monster, she was a monster I’d made with my own single-minded focus. And the longer I looked at it that way, the more it seems to me like an exercise in self-flagellation. Torture for the sake of it, and not toward any better purpose. So I began to look at the options more seriously.”

“Abdication, you mean.”

“I suspected that attempting to call off the wedding would cause more trouble than it was worth,” he told her, finding it more and more impossible to keep his hands from her. Though he managed it. Barely. “There would be too much focus on the feelings of the bride and she would play into that, naturally, and I doubt she would ever stop. It would cast a pall over the rest of my rule. She would make sure of it. Even now, the persona she’s built in the media always paints her as fragile, innocent. Completely unprepared for the pressures of a royal court and cruelly held at arm’s length by the man who should have protected her from the start. I’ll give her this, it’s a compelling narrative.”

“Only if you haven’t met her,” Aeryn said, looking as if she was trying her best not to make a face.

“I always forget that you actually met.” Vesuvius tried to picture it, and failed. “In my head, you have always been separated.”

“It was at the art gallery, of course,” she said. “You and I had already met, but that was it. All we’d done was meet.” He knew and she knew that everything had changed with that meeting, but no one else could possibly have understood that. He had been busy fighting against his own fascination back then, and failing. “It was the cocktail reception to celebrate the completion of the Marcellus Dano collection. You remember.”

He was finished with the lies, the half-truths. Always protecting things that could function just fine on their own. Instead of her. Or himself.

Vesuvius held her gaze. “The only thing I remember from that cocktail reception is you.”

Once again, Aeryn looked flustered, but she pushed on anyway. “Sintia had no reason to have any feelings about me one way or the other. I was nothing to you or the kingdom of Liandero except a visiting art historian who had helped complete a collection. A clerical worker, really.”

“That collection has helped bring to fruition a dream of mine,” Vesuvius said, more heatedly than perhaps he should have. “People travel from all over the world now to view the complete works of Marcellus Dano. My mother’s art gallery has an international reputation. This pleases me.”

“That pleases me too,” Aeryn said, and then looked away, as if she’d thought better of saying such a thing to him. “But your betrothed distinguished herself that night by being, quite possibly, the rudest woman I’ve ever met. She never changed her sour expression. She was haughty. She treated the caterers with great disdain. And while I am perfectly aware that art is subjective, I did feel that her commentary on the collection that we were gathered to celebrate was a bit unnecessary.”

Vesuvius remembered, then. Sintia letting loose on how little she could appreciate any of the paintings and how she was fairly certain that given a long afternoon and a bit of watercolor, she could produce something better. When she had never touched brush to paper in her life.

At the time, he had dismissed it and ignored her, because that was the way he handled her. And her behavior was not out of the ordinary. And, truly, he had been drawn to Aeryn in ways that had worried him, deeply.

“She was particularly vicious that night,” he agreed. He felt his mouth curve. “Because she knew it meant something to me.”

“Later,” Aeryn said quietly, as if making a confession, “when she had far more reason to dislike me, I would think back on that evening and feel not quite as bad about what I was doing as perhaps I should have.”

“Let’s be clear,” Vesuvius said then, sitting back slightly. “My promise to her was that I would marry her someday. She had no claim on me until that day and no reason to believe that I was even remotely faithful to her, ever. You were not sleeping with another woman’s man.” He saw the look on her face and sighed. “The only reason I kept you out of sight was to spare you from one of her excoriating treatments in the media. It was for your protection, not because I was sneaking around behind her back. I feel as if that was perhaps unclear.”

Aeryn didn’t answer, but he got the distinct impression that it had, in fact, been unclear. Yet one more failure on his part.

“For reference,” he said, “my grandfather broke up with his mistress—rather famously—on the way to his wedding to my grandmother. Who he was faithful to only until my father was born. At which point, he resumed his old ways. Without hiding it from anyone. As did my grandmother, lest you imagine a member of my family wasted away in silence. Political marriages are not the same as regular marriages. We only sometimes pretend they are.”

“In any case,” Aeryn said, quite obviously shifting the conversation away from what he realized, now, must have been a sore spot, “she was hideous to you. And you knew that if you broke up with her, or called off the wedding, she would be worse. But surely that wasn’t reason enough for you to leave the kingdom you’ve loved your whole life.”

“Of course not,” he said. “The reason was you.”

Aeryn let out a sound, a bit as if she had taken a hit to the stomach. “Stop saying things like that.”

“I’m not trying to put a weight upon you,” he clarified. “God, no. The last thing I would ever want is for you to feel crushed beneath the weight of expectations the way I’ve been. It was more the fact of you. The memory of you.”

Now he did shift forward and he slid his hands onto her thighs. Because he felt that he not only needed to touch her, perhaps she needed to feel his touch, too. She was still wearing that outrageously feminine gown of hers, belted away beneath a robe. And every moment he saw her, she seemed more beautiful to him than the last.

“I thought of how things were between us. You accepted me exactly as I was. You seemed to take joy in my presence and expected me only to treat you as well as I was able. This felt to me like a revolution. It was no wonder, looking back, that I had been in a fugue state since you left.” He let his thumbs move, dragging up and down, making a lazy pattern on her thighs. “As best I can describe it, you were a lighthouse.”