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It couldn’t have been more different from what he shared with Delaney, but something about his mother wedged its way beneath his armor, too.
He jerked his eyes away from hers, focused once more on his bride, and somehow controlled the pulse of impatience inside him. For he had come too far to fall now.
When it was time, Cayetano kissed her.
His wife. His Queen.
His.
And he had intended to set the necessary wheels in motion immediately, but something in the way she looked at him stopped him. Or maybe it was that blazing flame of possessiveness that moved in him. He didn’t want to leave her.
It should have horrified him to think such a thing. It did.
“Everyone is dancing,” she said, and he could see the delight on her face as she turned back toward the crowd.
And he didn’t have it in him to stamp it out.
She looked around, lit up with wonder. Because the people were dancing, right where they stood. He took her hand, and led her to the courtyard, where the crowd cried and stamped, danced and cheered around them. Then he led her up onto the ramparts, so she could look out and see all the people lined up outside the castle. The flags waving, the cheers seeming to well up from the valley itself to scrape the sky above.
“You have not merely married me today,” he told her. With a fierceness he should not have allowed. “You have set us free.”
And once again she proved herself, because she took his hands in hers, fixed her gaze on his, and did not shrug the moment away. “I will do my best to be the Queen you told me I could be. A bridge between the royal family and this valley. Never a barrier.”
And for a moment, standing there high above the valley, while his people danced out their jubilation and Delaney was still only his, something in him turned over.
He almost let himself wonder what would happen if he...put it off a day. This revolution that no one knew was coming. These announcements no one awaited. What if he pushed it back another week, maybe three? Surely everyone deserved a honeymoon, even the true King of a contested throne.
Especially when he’d already won. Everything now was the bitter details.
He saw his mother’s face again, her eyes still so bright with resentment. The embodiment of bitterness when once upon a time, she had burned with a different kind of zealotry.
He would not succumb to the same temptations. He would not become the very thing he loathed.
But he couldn’t seem to say the words. Not when Delaney was gazing at him the way she was now, her face so soft and yet her eyes so fierce. Not when everything in him clamored to wait. To hold her here. To sink into this moment.
To live for something else, if only for the night.
The treachery of that thought appalled him. He might as well be his parents all over again, giving lip service to the cause but in the end, only truly dedicated to their own selfishness. Was that what he wanted?
When he had come so far? When he had made vows to himself that he would never, ever risk his people in this way?
When he had been so sure that he would be better?
His own weakness sickened him.
“I must leave you,” he told Delaney abruptly. Sternly, as if she’d tried to stop him. “There’s much to do.”
She looked startled. “Now? We have not been married an hour.”
“My people have waited for centuries,” he told her, sounding all the more disapproving because he felt much the same. “Surely they need not wait another moment.”
His own gut twisted at that, because she didn’t look angry. She looked hurt. But she looked away for a moment, and when she looked back her gaze was clear.
And he told himself that he had imagined it, that was all. For his Delaney was nothing if not practical.
“Of course,” she said in her usual calm way. “You must do what is necessary, Cayetano. I understand.”
And he didn’t like how hard it was to walk away. He didn’t like that when he found his ministers and they gathered together to begin this much-planned and plotted-out endgame, no small part of him wanted to turn around and go back.
