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‘Because you need a secretary!’ she screeched, reaching the last thread of the very frayed edge of the thinnest tether in the world. ‘Your Ma—’ She cut herself off with a sharp exhale. Sheknewthat he had an inordinate amount of work at the moment. He was only four months on the throne and the world was watching for his first mistake. To know that, to feel that every second of his actions and every single one of his decisions were being watched at all times—she couldn’t imagine such a thing. ‘Aleksander, youreallyneed a secretary,’ she said gently.
‘I know that,’ he said through gritted teeth as frustration seeped into his bones. Hedidneed a secretary. ‘I just don’t have time to train someone up,’ he concluded, evading his reluctance to place his trust in yet another person who might let him down. And Henna was here. ‘Can’t you just—’ He stopped with the realisation that he was about to beg. And he didn’t beg.What on earth was this woman doing to him?
‘Find the time, Aleksander. And find a secretary,’ she said and turned away from him.
‘But you could do it much more quickly,’ he called after her, only to have her spear him with a raised eyebrow he would never have accepted from anyone else under any circumstances. ‘You could use your secret secretarial cabal to find me someone.’
‘We prefer “personal assistant” these days.’
‘Henna, you could be called God’s gift for all I care. I just need—’ He cut himself off before finishing the sentence.
‘You can say it, you know. It’s not a sign of weakness.’
‘I will do no such thing,’ he said, offended. He’d not asked for help in more than ten years. He’d not had to since he’d started to engineer situations that achieved his preferred outcome. But for some reason it was, in thissoleinstance, not working. What it boiled down to was that he simply couldn’t trust anyone to handle his affairs in the way in which he needed them handled. And as for Henna—he already relied on her far too much for his liking.
‘What are you doing here anyway?’ he asked, irritated that he had to resort to such a blunt about-turn in the conversation to move away from the subject altogether.
‘I wastryingto clear my head,’ she said as her short strides closed the distance to the Palace maze.
‘I meant whynow?’ he said, falling into step with her, belatedly realising that his words revealed he knew that every night after she finished work she would take this walk. He’d first seen her from his office window three years before and somehow it had become part of his daily routine too. He’d told himself that it was her regular evening walk that coincided with his after-hours whisky because it simply couldn’t be the other way round.
‘I needed to clear my headmorethan usual.’ She hitched her shawl up around her shoulders an inch but it only drew his attention to the curve of her neck and a little mole he’d never noticed just in the hollow beneath her earlobe. ‘What about your three meetings?’ she asked as he kept pace with her.
He threw his hand to the side, still distracted by the contraction in his body that was, irrefutably, arousal. ‘I need to clear my head,’ he said, disliking that he had such little control over his body around her.
The corner of her lips lifted and he’d let Anita Bergqvist wait for another hour just for the sight of that alone. The strange silence between them settled into something expectant; the crunch of their shoes on the gravel felt like a slowly turning screw, tightening everything in him. So what Henna said next came like a bucket of water in the face.
‘When my father got ill...when he realisedhowill he was, we started this. Taking a walk every day while he still could.’ There was a tone to Henna’s voice that was soft and warm. Yes, grief was there, but it was tempered by love. ‘He’d ask me so many questions, but always the first was, “What was one thing today that made you smile?” He was fascinated by what made me happy.’
A quick trio of fists punched deep into his heart. The first was for Henna and what she had lost. The second was a reminder that his own wouldn’t care at all if he were happy—only that he was doing the best for Svardia. And the third...was a phantom, a could-have-been, and just the thought of it stole the air from his lungs even now. ‘That is the sign of a wonderful father,’ he said the ache in his chest.
‘He was,’ she said, love shining ever so brightly in her eyes. ‘He didn’t have to give up his job and his company to raise me, but he did. And I had nine precious years knowing that I was loved utterly and completely and nothing, not even grief, would have me take that back.’
The ferocity and brightness of her love was something Aleksander couldn’t understand. It was there, swirling around her in bright warm colours, and he envied her that. But at the same time he took her words as a line in the sand between them. A clear indication of what Henna wanted from her life—as if he hadn’t known already. She was soft and good and kind and deserved nothing less than a future with exactly that kind of love.
‘He would have been proud of you,’ he told her, offering her nothing but the truth.
She huffed a small laugh. ‘Really?’
‘Yes. You’ve travelled the world—’
‘With Freya,’ she interjected.
‘And you’ve bent French Ambassadors to your will.’
Her smile exploded into full bloom and it was marvellous for him to see.
‘That I have,’ she said with pride, arriving at the entrance to the maze. She looked to the ground and when she gazed back up at him her eyes were unreadable. ‘Have you found a suitable...candidate?’
Aleksander knew she wasn’t talking about the personal assistant role now and his mind flew to Tuva Paulin. They’d found themselves in the same social circle on occasion and he’d detected a reasonable amount of interest on both their parts. She was savvy, intelligent and poised. As the daughter of two prominent actors, she was media aware, well-liked and respected. She was also, in person, as cold as he needed her to be and therefore completely safe.
‘Yes. We are having dinner tomorrow night.’
Henna nodded and once again he was frustrated that he couldn’t tell what she thought or how she felt about it. And then he became thoroughly irritated with himself because he shouldn’t give a damn what she thought or how she felt.
He took his leave then with a swift nod, heading to the first meeting of the afternoon, which he would give only half of his considerable attention to, while the other was spent leashing his body’s reaction to his sister’s best friend.
Henna hadn’t stopped thinking about what Aleksander had said the day before, that her father would have been proud of her. Would he have been? Had she achieved all that he’d imagined for his daughter? Whether it was the shifting nature of her feelings for Aleksander or the second email from Veronique about the job offer making her question things, she wasn’t sure. But the HR director had replied to Henna’s request for more time with a bit more information about the role. And it sounded too good to be true.
