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She could see as each word hit its mark, she could see the way his face stretched with each statement. ‘I have lost everyone I ever cared for,’ he said finally, the words tight as though being dragged from him against his will. ‘I have no intention of losing you or Leo.’
Stupid, blind hope beat inside her, but she refused to answer it.
‘Tell me why,’ she said, her whole body attuned to every movement of his.
‘Tell you what?’ He was guarded again, cautious. ‘What do you want from me?’
She blinked thoughtfully. ‘Tell me why you’re so furious about this.’
‘You are my wife—he is my son...’
She shook her head. It wasn’t good enough. ‘You were prepared to marry someone else two months ago,’ she reminded him with steady determination. ‘If something happened to us, you could simply remarry. Have another child.’
‘Don’t,’ he ground out, and hope in her chest flared larger, brighter.
‘What? You’re a realist, remember? You can marry whomever you want and have as many children as you need. Why do you care about me and Leo?’
‘He is my son!’ The words were torn from him, and then he was dragging a hand through his hair, pulling at it, his eyes tortured, haunted, and she hated having to push him, but deep down she knew how essential it was.
‘Yes, and you can’t bear the thought of something happening to him, can you? It would kill you if he was hurt in any way?’
‘Of course!’ he roared. ‘Damn it, Frankie, I’m done losing people I—’
‘Say it,’ she demanded, crossing her arms over her chest.
‘I’m done losing people,’ he finished, stepping back from her, putting physical space between them as though that would defuse this.
Frankie wasn’t going to back down though. ‘I never expected you to take a coward’s response, Matthias.’
‘How dare you call me a coward?’ He laughed, but it was a sound of desperation—a dying man trying to grab a life raft.
‘I dare because I faced every single one of my fears when I married you. I married a man I love with all my heart, who claimed he’d never love me. I married you knowing I was relegating myself to a life of loneliness. I married you with only the smallest seed of hope that you might ever care for me how I needed you to. And now you won’t even admit that you love our son? When it’s the most natural thing in the world?’
He glared at her and her heart raced. ‘I love him, okay? I love him so much I am terrified of how I’ll live if anything ever happens to our child. I look at him and I see my brother—my brother as he was in the accident when I couldn’t even reach him, I couldn’t save him. I couldn’t save them, Frankie. My whole family died and I couldn’t do a damned thing. What if something happens to Leo?’ He waved a hand over his eyes, then blinked at her with despair. ‘What if something happens to you?’
She hated seeing him like this. She moved to him and put a hand on his shoulder but he stayed firm, unreceptive.
‘Don’t. I cannot ask you to reassure me, and I don’t want to lie to you. I made a choice that first night I met you that I wouldn’t love you, Frankie. I have made that choice all along, even when, yes—okay, fine—when every single cell in my body aches to say what you need to hear. Even when I know I probably fell in love with you the second we met.’
Frankie drew in a shaking breath.
‘But I chose not to act on that. I chose not to let that control my actions.’
He stood before h
er, a king of men, and she saw only the fifteen-year-old he’d been.
She shook her head, lifting up on tiptoe and brushing her lips to his. He stood rock-still.
‘I can’t do this,’ he said, but his hands lifted into her hair and held her where she was. He pressed his forehead to hers and she made a small sound, deep in her throat.
‘You can’t keep yourself shut off from life because of an accident,’ she said simply when his pain was complex and ran so deep. ‘Just like I can’t live in fear of rejection all my life because my birth parents chose not to raise me. We neither of us need to be defined by our past, Matt.’
‘When my family died—’ he spoke quietly but their faces were so close she heard his words as though they were being breathed into her soul ‘—I wanted to turn my back on the kingdom. I wished I’d died too, Frankie. I wanted to die.’
‘But you didn’t. You became the leader they needed you to be...’
‘Once. I did that once.’ He pressed a kiss to her cheek and she turned her head, capturing his lips with hers. ‘If anything ever happened to you and Leo, if I lost either of you, I don’t think I could do this again.’
