AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Behind her on the bed in a pool of deep blue silk was the gown she was supposed to wear tomorrow night to the ball where her engagement to Matias would be formally announced.
She couldn’t even look at it. Every time she did, all she could see was her future laid out before her. Her future as the wife of a man who didn’t love her and whom she didn’t love. Her future as the virtuous Queen of Santa Castelia.
A future that felt like the bars of a cage closing slowly around her.
It was him. He was the problem. He was the reason she couldn’t bear that future now and she didn’t know what to do about it. Not that there was anything to be done.
She was the Crown Princess. She’d been promised to Matias since she was a child and her role was set in stone. Her father had always been very clear that after the excesses of King Carlos’s rule Santa Castelia needed a firm and steady hand. Matias would be that hand and she his steadying influence.
Together they would steer Santa Castelia out of the storms of scandal and greed and corruption, and into calmer waters.
She was her parents’ late-in-life child. Their IVF miracle. Much loved and much wanted, and she shouldn’t complain, especially when some children never got to be loved at all.
But sometimes the weight of all that expectation was a burden. Miracles were supposed to do wondrous things and her parents had certainly expected wonders from her. She would be a queen because of the work her father had put into negotiating a betrothal with Matias, not to mention all the effort her mother had put into schooling her behaviour and moulding her into the perfect choice of a royal bride.
They expected all their hard work to pay off and she couldn’t let them down.
Yet tonight was a night when she didn’t feel like a miracle. Where she felt weighed down by all the expectations placed on her, crushed beneath them, and the ache in her heart, the longing that wouldn’t leave her no matter how hard she tried to ignore it. The desperate and confusing desire for a man she could never, ever have, not when only one man was permitted to her.
She turned and stared at the gown, the anger she always tried so hard to keep control of licking up inside her.
Anger at her parents and what they expected of her.
Anger at herself for wanting what she couldn’t have.
Anger at him because every night for the past two weeks she’d waited in her father’s study the way she always did, expecting him to arrive. And he never did. And she didn’t know why.
She should know better than to give in to her anger, but tonight it felt like too much. She wanted to do something, wanted to hurt him the way he was hurting her. Get rid of this terrible ache inside her somehow.
A sheltered girl, he’d called her at their last meeting, his silver eyes burning with an emotion she didn’t understand. She’d been furious with him, wanting to deny it, but naturally she couldn’t.
Shewassheltered.
Was that why he hadn’t come back? Because she was sheltered? Because she was too innocent? Too well bred? And if so, why did that matter to him?
Her anger tightened into a hard knot.
Well, perhaps she’d show him just how sheltered she really was.
The palace was quiet as she stepped out into the corridors, most people asleep. It was so very late and the corridors were dim. She hadn’t been to the private wing where the royal family had their rooms very often, but she thought she knew the way.
The guards knew her and let her through, and so she’d crept down yet more dark hallways until she found Matias’s door.
There was no physical attraction between them. They were more friends than anything else, but tonight she would change that.
It was Matias she needed to be thinking about. Matias she should want. Matias, not Rafael. And there was only one way she could think of to get rid of these inappropriate desires.
She would forget Rafael in the arms of her husband-to-be.
The room beyond was in darkness, but she didn’t turn on the light. She couldn’t risk him sending her away. Instead, she found the bed, let her robe fall and slipped naked between the sheets.
The male figure in the bed stiffened in shock as she touched him, waking him up. She heard him take a breath to speak, but in the dark she found his mouth and laid a finger over it. It was soft beneath her touch.
‘Don’t talk,’ she whispered, staring at the shape of the man next to her. ‘It’s only me. Please, I know it’s wrong to be here, but... I need you.’
Matias didn’t say anything, staying still for a long moment. Then he grabbed her and kissed her like a man possessed.
And as soon as his mouth covered hers, her brain finally caught up with what her body had already recognised.
