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Matteo.
They stopped moving then, and he gripped her chin, holding her face steady as he kissed her harder, deeper.
It was as if the room around them had faded into nothing, the people around them dissolving along with it. Because nothing mattered but this. This moment.
Don’t get caught up in it. You have to remember.
You have to remember.
“My brother tells me that he has made contact with Violet King.”
“Oh?” Livia knew exactly who Violet King was. A makeup mogul, famous in the United States, and indeed the world over.
“Yes. She’s my fiancée.”
“What?” Her heart slammed against her breastbone.
“The woman that I have been promised to marry all this time, Violet King.”
Livia felt her mouth drop open and close, and realized that she must resemble an indignant guppy and the last thing she needed was that kind of comparison floating around. She was already called a rodent half of her days. She didn’t need to be a flopping fish. But she felt like one. Gasping and dry drowning in the air.
“Violet King is your fiancée?” The woman was younger than Livia. It was... Insulting.
Right. Because Violet King is a self-made billionaire and you are...?
A street urchin.
A street mouse.
Never, ever to be deemed appropriate to touch the sainted hem of Matteo’s robe, let alone his body. Let alone... What did she even think? These fantasies that she had been so unsuccessful in staving off over the years.
But the problem was sometimes it was so easy to believe that they almost were an old married couple. One that didn’t exchange endearments or physical contact, but they were downright domestic at times. Except that he was filled with arrogance and she with acerbic comebacks for his nonsense. So yes. That was a type of domestic, or at least, she assumed so.
But sometimes it felt like...like their lives were theirs. Like nobody else truly shared time with Matteo the way that she did. She saw him in the morning, she saw him before he went to bed. Sometimes she saw him after. She saw him barefoot, which was a decidedly intimate thing, she had determined. For he was a king, and she saw him without his formality draped around him. Saw him wandering his bedroom shirtless, wearing nothing but a pair of black trousers, his beautiful, muscled body shifting and rippling each time he moved.
She had seen him brush his teeth.
This man, who was nearly immortal. She had literally stood in his hotel suite while he stood at the bathroom sink and brushed his teeth.
Violet King had never seen him brush his teeth.
And Livia may not have so much as kissed him, touched him, but surely she was the only one who truly knew the man.
And what kind of unfairness was this?
A twenty-one-year-old socialite? Who did... Internet posts for her job.
And yes, made makeup. So, it was a real thing. And Livia was just being bitter. But she felt entitled to her bitterness. To her disappointment.
You knew it was coming. You always did.He made no secret of the fact that he was promised to another woman.
Why it should gall so much that it was an American, a young one, she didn’t know.
You don’t know? Of course you do.Because he is yours, and this is your country. Because it isn’t even Violet’s country. She has no loyalty or allegiance to the throne, to the crown, not in the way that you do.
Even all that didn’t really matter, because the real issue was Violet didn’t love him. Not like Livia did. She couldn’t.
But you’re a fool, because he doesn’t love you, and he has never pretended to. He has never loved you. He has never acted like he did. He has never so much as put a hand on you other than to teach you to dance.
