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‘If we’re going to marry, then we need to clear the air. We... I need to tell you about that night.’
Nothing in him moved, not a muscle or a flicker of his eyes. Brooding and powerful. She’d always sensed that ability in him, latent, shimmering beneath the surface, but now? Now it had exploded in a technicolour aura that even the most obtuse would be able to identify. The alpha.
‘Would you like to sit?’ she said, gesturing to one of the two chairs framing yet another large set of windows.
‘I’ll stand.’
She nodded, returning her gaze to the panes of glass, but instead only seeing his reflection appearing behind her. Somehow she had always felt his presence, waiting, hovering over her shoulder.
‘It may not surprise you to know that I was a wilful child. Stubborn and mischievous. My parents despaired of me. I managed to outwit at least three of the most professional nannies and au pairs Europe had to offer. Two were more than happy to sign non-disclosure agreements protecting their reputations as much as my family’s. The last, instead, chose a change in her career path. I believe she is now working with horses.’ She paused, taking a breath. Steeling herself against what she was to say. ‘It’s hard to explain what life was like growing up the only child to two parents whose first and last duty is to their country. Especially when one’s own nature seems to run contrary to that sense of duty and self-sacrifice.
‘When my parents agreed to enter me at the boarding school with my mother’s maiden name, it was excused as being for my protection,’ she said, with an absent laugh. ‘It may have even been to protect the royal name, in case my wildness ruined that too.’
‘In case?’ Theo queried, as if the thought of her being anything other than the reckless, wayward teenager was impossible.
‘But for me it was my one chance. Not to be seen as a royal, not to be the woman who would one day rule a country from beneath her father’s long shadow, he the perfect king, and me the improper princess. In truth, we’re quite minor royals in the grand scheme of Europe’s nobility. It was surprisingly easy, especially given the infamy of many of the other students at the school.
‘And at first it was easy. Creating the lies that kept my identity secret. They gave me protection from having to join many of the friendship groups my parents thought would help iron out my unsuitable behaviours. It allowed for me to be seen as me. And you were such a breath of fresh air to me, and I... I relished it. You didn’t treat me as if I would break, or as if I was a disappointment, a failure. You just saw...me. You laughed with me, teased me and I couldn’t get enough.
‘Rather than bowing and bending to the rules of the school, I struggled against them, seeing it only as another form of constraint, another cage I would eventually swap with a crown.’ Sofia took a deep sigh, sore and hurting for the child she had been. ‘Much of my behaviour then was selfish and, yes, without thought for the consequences of my actions. I am sorry that I lied to you about who I was but... at the time it was my only comfort. The only light I felt within a bound and trapped existence.’
She watched as Theo shook his head against her words. ‘You may excuse your lies as much as you want, but you knew what you were doing, knew that it was impossible for you to run away with me as you begged me to.’
She shrugged her shoulders helplessly. ‘I think... I think that I believed the story I had told. I wanted so much to go with you, to run away from the school, from my responsibilities, from my future. The hours we spent talking about how it would be, where we would go, they had painted a future so firm in my mind that I...’ She had thought she would die if she did not live it. ‘Honestly, Theo—of all things, believe that what we shared was what was in my heart. I had no intention of making you take the fall for the prank on the headmaster’s car. I had no intention of you being expelled.’
‘Then what happened?’ he demanded.
‘I’d been furious with the headmaster. In design class, I and three others had been assigned a group project, but Anna—one of the group—had needed to return home and failed to pass on her part of the project and the remaining three of us were given detentions by the headmaster for not fulfilling the brief. It seems so petty now, but...then? It had seemed like a great injustice. So we hatched the prank to end all pranks. He loved his Mini Cooper. It was the most precious thing he owned, I think. We realised that if we could put two long planks up against the side of the sports hall, we could get the car onto the roof. Between us, the weight of the car wasn’t too much, but the sharp edge of the wheel arch hurt, so I used your scarf to protect my hands and... I must have left it behind.
‘I had arranged to meet you, to tell you about it. That was my surprise. I had...been showing off, I suppose. But an hour before I was supposed to meet you that night, there was a knock at my door. When I saw my parents standing there, I thought that they had discovered my part of the prank, I thought that they might have discovered my relationship with you. I was frightened then. For you, for me... So I was confused when...’
And now she began to pick and choose her words. She couldn’t reveal her father’s diagnosis. They were not yet married, the risk to the country still too great. Perhaps if somehow they managed to pull this marriage off then she could finally unburden herself of her secrets. But not yet. She had already prepared this speech, spent hours of each night in the last month, since he’d forced her hand, trying to work out the best possible threads to share, to unearth, to expose...
‘They told me they had come to take me home. Iondorra was in a delicate state politically. There was a trend at the time for the smaller European countries to exchange royal rule for political governance, but our parliament was neither old nor strong enough to assume control. But there was enough talk within the parliament to force my father’s hand and have me return in order to assume responsibilities much sooner than intended.’
He had still not moved, and she was still ensnared in his predatory gaze, as if his eyes were gently pressing against her words to find the truth of them.
‘That night it was agreed that I would return to the palace, and begin learning what I would need.’
She had thought that at the very least she’d have two years before she would even have to start thinking of assuming royal duties. Two years in which maybe she could come to an understanding with her father...and if her father could just meet Theo—see what she saw in him—maybe she could somehow get him to recognise their marriage. Even now, her thoughts showed just how naïve she had truly been then.
In a rush she had told her parents about him. Explained that she was in love, begged and pleaded with them not to do this. Not to take her away from him. She remembered the way she had pulled on her father’s lapels with white-knuckl
ed hands, the way her mother had looked at her with both sympathy and pity.
But, as had been made painstakingly clear to her that night, she was their country’s future and could no longer entertain a dalliance with ‘that Greek’, as her father had called him, her father’s fear and frustration severing the softness of his affection for her and the freedom he had so often before encouraged.
‘Could you not have come to me? Could you not have explained? Could you not have told me so that when the headmaster discovered me I could defend myself? So that I could make him believe my innocence?’ His words were quietly spoken, but nonetheless whip-quick and just as painful, and Sofia resisted her body’s urge to flinch.
‘No and no,’ she said sadly, because in truth—she still could not. She knew that the excuses she had presented to him, while very much real, were not the whole story. And she counted on his anger as much as her hope for his understanding—because if he was angry he might not see the gaping holes in what she had told him.
‘Would you make the same decision again?’
He almost wished he could recall the words the moment that they left his lips. But he knew he needed to hear her answer as much as he needed her to say them. If she said no, then he might try to find a way out of this, to extricate himself from his path of revenge. It was as if there was a tide between them, pushing one way and pulling another. He felt like a man drowning, knowing that one push of the ocean would take him to the depths, one pull could see him back to shore, to safety, to a future he could have only prayed for.
As if Sofia felt that same tide, that same sense of the precipice before them, she turned to him, finally facing him, drawing herself up to her full height, her chin angled up as if to meet an oncoming army.
‘There was never a choice. For my country, for my duty, yes. I would do it again in a heartbeat.’
