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‘If you sign this, then you are a madman.’
‘Perhaps. If I had any intention of actually going through with the wedding.’
Theo turned to find both Sebastian and his sister, Maria, staring up at him in confusion. He wished they could have seen what they looked like, frozen in a tableau of shock. He nearly laughed. He had momentarily forgotten that Maria was there too, but he knew that Sebastian would never have kept his charade from her.
‘Theo, what are you doing?’
‘I am doing what I had always intended to do,’ he said, watching Sebastian with heavy-lidded eyes. ‘I am going to ensure that Sofia knows what it feels like to wait. To stand there and wonder, and doubt. To feel the humiliation, to have it marked upon her indelibly. I want her to wait there in front of her wedding guests, her country, at the church alone. To realise that I am not there and that I am not coming. I want her to suffer the consequences of her actions, as my mother and I suffered.’
‘So, you don’t love her?’ Maria’s quiet voice cut through the silence of the room.
‘I could never love that woman.’ Not again.
‘Have you really thought this through?’ Sebastian enquired.
‘Every day for ten years.’
‘What happens afterwards?’
‘I’ll release a statement saying that I could not force her into a loveless marriage. The press will lap it up. I will be saving her from herself and a marriage that would have broken her. I’ll come out a hero.’
‘That is cynical, even for you, my friend.’
Cynical maybe, but necessary. It was time that Sofia de Loria learned that there were consequences to her actions.
* * *
It had been years since Sofia had seen the palace’s ballroom draped in such finery and filled with so many people. Her father’s deterioration had consigned much of her small family’s lives to brief external visits, rarely allowing for the opening of the palace, for outward glances to turn inward upon them. Sofia thought that the last time the ballroom had looked like this might have been her fifteenth birthday, before she’d been sent to boarding school and met the man that had brought this down upon her.
This evening was costing the country money it barely had, but lord knew, everyone loved a royal wedding. It was an investment—for the future of her country. She had to see it as such or she’d curl into a ball in her room and never come out.
She resisted the urge to soothe her brow where the beginnings of a tension headache the size of the San Andreas fault line was gathering. She hated the fact that Theo had blackmailed her, hated that there was no confidant, no friend that she could turn to. Her entire life since leaving that school had been about training, learning the tools that she would need to put the country first. She’d had no time for friends, for people her own age. The last friend she’d thought she had was... Theo. With him, she’d been utterly herself.
It could have been so different, she thought. She’d once dreamed of it being different. The same man, yes. But this? No.
However, part of the future she was securing for her country required children. That thought sent sparks of fire and ice across her skin and down her spine. They hadn’t yet discussed that. But she’d made sure to put it into the prenuptial agreement. She could be just as sneaky as he. She’d thought with some small pleasure at how shocked he might be to read the clause that required his contribution to IVF treatment. She had absolutely no intention of sharing her bed with him. And even as she’d had that thought, her inner voice cried liar. It brought to mind memories of their kiss...the way her body had sung, had clung to him as desire moved like wildfire through her veins, as her body and soul had yearned for more.
The sudden and shocking thoughts raised a painful blush to her overly heated cheeks, and, cutting off her thoughts, she glanced again at the clock, placing the practised smile on her features to satisfy the eager curiosity of various visiting dignitaries. Where the hell was Theo? Perhaps he had seen the clause in the agreement and had decided to punish her temerity.
But that thought was completely overridden by the sense of unease beginning to build. Her father was set to make a royal appearance for only a short allotted time. It was needed for publicity, to soothe potentially ruffled feathers on the Iondorran council for the inappropriateness of her chosen fiancé. Theo didn’t need to know that at least two whole weeks had been spent in tense negotiations as she’d lied and cajoled her father’s old cronies into accepting Theo. She had extolled his virtues, instead of parading his vices, argued the strength of a true love match, even as the lies had caught in her throat. Unconsciously she had repeated the same pleas she had once made to her father, ten years before as he had tried to extricate her from the boarding school.
She’d been surprised how readily they came to her lips, how easily the same fidelity, emotion, desperation had come to her aid. And the privy council had believed it in a way that her father never had.
A
nd now, when she needed Theo by her side, he was keeping her waiting, keeping her father waiting. His medication was working for the moment, but she knew better than most how quickly that could change. Once again, she absentmindedly rubbed her forearm, feeling the phantom ache where the accident—as she thought of it now—had fractured the bone there and bruised the ribs beneath. From across the room her mother had caught the unconscious action, and she sent her a reassuring look.
When she finally saw Theo at the top of the grand sixteenth-century staircase, her breath caught in her throat. In the back of her mind she was a little jealous—surely this was the princess’s moment, to stand atop the staircase and be admired? But this was no fantasy, and Theo was certainly no prince. Yet admired? Yes. He was.
He stood in between Sebastian Rohan de Luen and a young woman so like him that she must have been his sister. Sofia caught the exiled duke’s eye, his gaze held just the fraction of a moment, and she saw something more than speculation towards the woman who was to marry his friend...something foreboding.
Theo’s powerful frame unfolded down the stairs into a jog, an actual jog, towards her. Sofia’s head almost whipped around to search for the long-ago voice calling in her mind—No running in the Grand Room, Sofia!
He came towards her so fast, she had no time to react, the expression of joy across his features so shocking to her that she didn’t prevent the hands that came to her cheeks and took her face in a warm caress as he placed his lips gently against hers. Instantly he enveloped her senses, the soft, earthy smell of him, the traces of electricity that sparkled beneath the pads of his fingertips against her skin, the heat of his lips and the way her body unconsciously rose to meet him...all gone as suddenly as it came.
‘Kardiá mou, my tardiness in unforgivable,’ he said against her mouth, loudly enough for all about her to hear. Sighs rose up about her from the women and indulgent smiles painted the faces of Iondorra’s staunchest male dignitaries.
For a moment, the space of a heartbeat, Sofia had been fooled, had been transported back to a time when his kisses seemed to be her whole world. The way she wanted to sink into the pleasure, the comfort, the... Before her mind could finish the thought, she remembered. Remembered it all. The blackmail, the darkness behind his actions, the belief he held that she had set him up...and in a rash and defiant act, she nipped at his bottom lip with her teeth, quick and hard. He pulled back his head in surprise.
