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“All that waiting and you just thought,Enough’s enough, after a night at a ball.”
“With the woman I am to marry,” Orion said, with tremendous patience and another hint of laughter. “When if not now? It wasn’t marriage I was saving myself for, Calista. I’m not a young girl with a hope chest. I simply wished to make certain that I would not repeat my father’s mistakes.”
“But—”
He moved then, hooking his hand around her neck and tugging her gently to him, so she fell against his chest. And the curse of it was, she liked it there. She fit him too well, and she had to close her eyes against the surge of unfortunate sensation that stirred up in her.
“This is an arranged marriage,” she said crossly. “This is supposed to be distant and remote and chilly. Not...this.”
“I think we’ll muddle through, Calista. Somehow.”
There was something about the way he said her name, then. It had changed. Or she had changed. There was that dark richness to it, now. There were levels of meaning in it, shades and complications.
Or maybe that was just her poor, battered, traitorous heart.
She didn’t argue with him any further. She didn’t tell him thatof courseshe worried, and he should worry, too. That nothing good could come of this. That whatever she might feel, she was still her father’s daughter.
That her father would destroy them both, and her sister, without a second thought, and neither one of them could prevent it—or they already would have, surely.
That they were doomed.
But it was as if he heard her arguments all the same. He smoothed a hand over her hair, and that stern mouth of his even softened in the corners.
“Don’t worry,” Orion said, but to her, it sounded like a curse. And then he made it worse. “I trust you.”
CHAPTER NINE
DECEMBERWOREON, drawing ever closer to the twenty-third and the board meeting Calista still had every intention of disrupting.
Her father might have removed her from the office, but that didn’t change all the things she’d spent years putting into motion. She told herself it was better that she was away from the company these last, critical days—because she was sure it would have been impossible to keep herself under control and seemingly subservient, the way she needed to do until it was done.
Calista spent these weeks in the palace rather than directly under her father’s thumb. Not that she felt free of him, with the daily messages and calls demanding she provide him with dirt on Orion. Instead of spending her days at Skyros Media, fighting tooth and nail in meetings and building up her position behind her father’s back, she found herself at the mercy of the king’s private secretaries. She got a crash course in the Idyllian Crown and the duties of the king’s consort, and spent hour after hour learning all the various facts they thought she needed to know—and they thought she needed to know just about everything.
In many ways, it reminded her of being back at university in Paris, sitting in endless lectures. But instead of producing essays out of café nights and too much red wine, she had to sit there and prove to them that she’d internalized their teachings on everything from international diplomacy to proper correspondence, all while fending off her father’s demands.
Hour after hour after hour. Until she thought that if the whole queen thing didn’t work out, she could easily become a professional historian. With a focus on Idyllian royals throughout the ages.
She should have been crawling out of her skin. She should have been beside herself, and she...wasn’t. Or not in the way she’d expected she ought to have been, anyway.
Her days were spent immersed in history. But her nights... Her nights were filled with Orion, and she almost couldn’t bear to let herself think about what that meant.
“I don’t understand how you never...” she’d whispered one night when they both lay panting before the fire in her bedchamber. “I don’t understand anything about you.”
“I made a vow,” he’d replied lazily, turning her over on her belly and applying himself to the line of her back, turning her to jelly.
“You broke that vow, then.”
She’d felt his smile against her skin and had shuddered. “I vowed I would only indulge in the pleasures of the flesh with my queen, Calista. I have broken no vows. Nor shall I.”
And even now, weeks later, she almost couldn’t bear to think about such moments, because thinking about them would mean analyzing them. Making decisions. And inevitably ruining these oddly bright weeks carved out in the darkest part of the year—and her life.
These weeks that made no sense. These weeks that made her doubt herself, her purpose, and everything she’d ever known.
All lit up and threaded through with Orion, as if the king was his own holiday light and she glowed straight through. With him.
“Maybe you just like him,” her sister said drily, a week before Christmas Eve. “Maybe he’s likable. Maybe someday I’ll actually get to meet him and decide for myself.”
“You’ve met him.”
