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Lykos opened his mouth.
‘Coffee?’ she asked. ‘I’m sure it’s absolutely the worst thing you should do after a migraine, but you don’t strike me as a hot water and lemon kind of man.’
It was on his tongue to ask what kind of man she found him, but thankfully he had a few working brain cells left to stop him. Instead, while his grunted response was far from eloquent, it did the job. She poured him a steaming cup of heaven and retreated to her side of the table that she had magicked onto the balcony. Without his notice.
In the last twelve hours, Lykos had shown more vulnerabilities to this one woman than he had to anyone in a lifetime. Bad enough that she’d seen his episode, but that he’d been so out of it that she had slept in the next room and had a table brought through the suite onto the balcony without him stirring?
Unacceptable.
He opened his mouth to speak, but again she cut him off and he barely resisted the urge to growl.
Marit was struggling to meet Lykos’s eye. She’d had a terrible night’s sleep, which had nothing whatsoever to do with the sofa. No. She’d tossed and turned the entire night because of him. Because of this thing. It was as if a switch had been flipped and now she couldn’t stop the...the...things.
Until at around four that morning she’d remembered what had happened before the migraine.
I know this may be hard for someone like you...
It wouldn’t take a rocket scientist to pick up on all the little hints and subtleties at his dislike of her status. The way he said ‘Princess’, his surprise when she hadn’t chosen the most expensive dress or train ticket, or the way he showed more deference to those with lower incomes. It had been strange at first for a billionaire, but what he’d said last night about his father, about growing up on the streets of Athens...
She passed him the cup of coffee she poured him and before she could stop herself she asked, ‘How did you get from the streets of Athens to here?’
He stood beside the table looking down at her, holding the small white cup, and the look on his face would have been comical if it hadn’t been full of a deep shock that made her wish a thousand times over to take it back. Her question was blunt, untimely and clearly in bad taste. But she hadn’t been able to stop herself. She’d spent the entire night tossing and turning, thinking of him as a man and then as a small child, vulnerable to his father’s demands...but what about his mother? And how had he ended up on the streets? The uncomfortable silence between them stretched several heartbeats, lasting much longer than she wanted to experience ever again.
‘Why, Princess, you’d like to hear my rags-to-riches story?’ he mocked. ‘You don’t believe such a thing can happen?’ His questions were bitter and resentful, and utterly justified.
The shame she felt coursing through her from her crass question burned through her, mocking the heat for him she’d felt last night. ‘Lykos, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that.’
‘Then how did you mean it, Princess? Because from where I’m standing—’
‘I want to know about you!’ The words ripped from her throat, angry and raw. Something changed then. She saw the question reframed in his eyes, the context of last night filtering through to the morning.
‘No, Marit. You don’t want to know about me.’
Anger, thick and fast, boiled into her bloodstream. How many times had she been told what she did and didn’t want? What she could and couldn’t do. As if she had no sense of herself, her wants, her desires. Her parents or her siblings, the tutors at university leading her dissertation into an area ‘safe’ for a princess, safe enough to secure the basic grade she was barely going to scrape.
Her fingers began to itch as her pulse tripped into three-four time. She knew better by now than to fight how people saw her. And she could only imagine how Lykos saw her. Spoiled little princess with no idea of how the world worked. Marit wasn’tthatnaïve. She knew there would always be parts of life and the world she would never experience, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t respect or empathise with those who had different experiences. It had been part of what she’d wanted to achieve with the youth orchestra project. Because one thing she did know was how it felt to not be able to speak of your emotions, feelings that were sometimes bigger than words, that were either impossible to say or would never be heard. But music? It had been a release for her. Through it she’d been able to channel that inexplicable sense of the chaos of her feelings. And she’d wanted so much to help children find that same way of expressing themselves.
Marit nodded, acknowledging Lykos’s dismissal, rejection building from a very deep place within her. It was as if someone had whisperedprestissimoto her body, the blood rushing through her veins as fast as possible. She left without another word, and he let her go.
She passed the sofa she had not slept a wink on, left his suite and swiped her card into hers. She closed the door behind her and resisted the urge to collapse back against it. Instead, she went to the suite’s control panel and brought up the sound system settings. She linked her phone to the programme and picked a playlist, turning the volume loud enough to be heard, in all likelihood, above and below. Marit finally didn’t care. Because it was also loud enough to drown out the voices that taunted and teased her heart into misery.
Lykos exhaled heavily when the music stopped blaring about three hours later. If he hadn’t already recovered from his migraine, the noise from her suite would definitely have brought it on. Any hope he’d had of getting some work done had been obliterated as a classical piece of music swept into a jazzy froth that transitioned into a sassy bluesy number which morphed into a soulful folk song. On the surface, all the pieces were different and had absolutely nothing in common. But Lykos recognised something slithering through each piece, something that spoke of hurt and hope and need, that pulled at his conscience for being too harsh on Marit. That same something that spoke of a complexity he knew Marit had, but he didn’t want to see.
He’d lashed out at her. Yes, her question had caught him by surprise and, yes, it had been blunt, but she hadn’t deserved his scorn. Yesterday, she hadn’t chosen the most expensive designer labels to fill her replacement wardrobe with, she’d chosen a small family-run boutique. She hadn’t gorged on every single ice cream in the park yesterday, she’d had one and bought the rest for a group of schoolchildren. The list of things she wanted to do before she returned—it wasn’t full of impossibly rich destinations and luxurious experiences—they were things that she would never get to do once she became second in line to the throne: once she became the female face of Svardian royalty. Once she became a wife, a mother.
Not that it mattered. She was, and always would be, a princess.
A princess he was stuck with for another four days.
His phone pinged again and this time he ignored it. Thinking back over her question, it was like an earworm, digging into his thoughts.
I want to know about you!
He felt the difference between Marit’s curiosity and the way that business associates had started to look at him since Kozlov had unearthed the facts of his childhood and started spreading rumours. Hers wasn’t the eager glee, poring over his poverty, abuse and betrayals as if they were a form of entertainment. But what Lykos couldn’t account for was the urge to tell her about it.
Before he could change his mind, he left the suite and knocked on the door to Marit’s. He spent so long imagining her response when she opened the door that it took him a moment to realise that shewasn’tthere.
Anger flashed through his entire body. The music, the volume—a ruse? She had run away again and he had fallen for it entirely. Her sweetness and innocence—it was all an act. Cursing, he returned to his suite, thankful that this time he could find his wallet and phone, and, refusing to wait for the lift, took the fire escape stairs all the way down to the ground floor, unwilling to lose another precious second.
