AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Joaquin knew all too well what it was like to be cast out, mocked and ridiculed, but no one had dared treat him in such a fashion in a long while. It was true that he had taken no small pleasure in the notion that she—so unprepared for these things, so insulated by a lifetime of imagining herself so high and mighty—must face them all the same.
Perhaps that made him as petty as he was sometimes accused of being. Though he noticed that those who called him such things were always the same people who reaped what they, themselves, had sown.
When he’d found that she actually dared return to Cap Morat, he had felt the way he often did when the world arranged itself to suit him. That all was as it should be. That all was right and good.
He had anticipated wanting her, for who would not want her? Amalia’s beauty was exquisite and inarguable. Much had been made her whole life of the delicacy of her features, the stunning blue of her eyes, her innate grace.
All of which, it turned out, came courtesy of a cornfield. Not the royal heritage that was supposed to have produced it.
He had anticipated enjoying all of that, as he always had, because he had been captivated by her beauty once before. And enjoying more, perhaps, that all along, they’d been commoners together here. Despite her attempts to put him in his place.
Now the only difference between them was that he’d earned his money. Hers was a parting gift from the Queen—not her mother—who simply wanted the inconvenient farm girl she’d raised as her daughter and heir to go away. That tidbit had not made the papers yet, but it would. In the meantime, his sources had come through for him.
Joaquin had expected to enjoy that part, particularly.
What he had not anticipated was thepunchof her.
Even though he knew better this time. Even though he would never be so foolish as to love her again.
The attraction between them was outsize and astonishing, still. He hadn’t expected the electricity of it to shock him the way it did. He hadn’t expected that merely meeting her gaze would make him feel winded.
He had decided long ago that none of the things he’d thought he felt here, with her, were real. How could they be? He had lost her and he was Joaquin Vargas. He did not lose.
It had not occurred to him that she could be stripped of all the things that had made her who she was and yet still have her own power to spare.
Worse, that she would still have that same power over him.
When he had allowed no one else that kind of leverage. Ever.
Even so, he had expected it would work itself out. He had come to humble her, and he assumed it would be easily done. He would order her to kneel, she would refuse, and he would have the great pleasure of throwing her off his island.
Instead, she had knelt.
He was not sure that he had actually used the brain in his head between that moment and this. Indeed, he knew he had not.
So he stood still. He watched the moon and the sea. And he despaired of himself.
“You look appropriately ferocious for a man who lives in a dungeon half beneath the sea,” came her silvery voice from his bed. “Even from behind.”
Joaquin did not respond. Perhaps he could not. He heard a whisper of sound and then she came to stand beside him, wrapped up in the sheet from his bed. Making a sheet he had given little thought to, ever, look like the finest garment ever made to caress a woman’s form. It looked as if it had been created to pour all over her like that, as if the moonlight had spun itself into silk.
“I’m going to be honest with you about something, though I probably shouldn’t,” she told him softly, as if this room had become a confessional.
Her gaze was directed out toward the sea, and his chest felt tight, because she looked almost...troubled. The frown he remembered but had not seen in years, in her press appearances or here today, had insinuated itself between her brows again. Her black hair tumbled down her back, looking anything but smooth. For a moment, it was like looking back through time.
Back to the meat of that summer, before she’d turned into a statue. Before she’d acted as if nothing about him or them concerned her at all. For a moment, he could see once more the bright chaos of the younger Amalia he’d known. Not the measured creature, the Crown Princess, who seemed to know too well that anything she said or did could be used against her.
It was unfair, he knew, when that was what he wanted from her. Anything and everything that he could use to do to her what she had done to him.
“Is honesty a factor here?” he asked, his voice hardly seeming like his own. He blamed the moon. “It was not before.”
The moon he was busy blaming for his weakness had captured his attention, so he sensed her reproachful look more than saw it.
“I was nothing but honest with you, Joaquin. All summer long, and then at the end, too. Could I have tempered my words? Certainly, and I wish I had. But the message was still the same. There was no possibility that Queen Esme would permit any relationship between us. At the end of the day, what could possibly have prettied that up?”
Joaquin didn’t want to touch that. Or maybe the real truth was, he wanted nothing but to touch it. To tear it apart with his fingers. To bellow out the five years’ worth of wounded pride and all those other shattered things inside him he refused to accept were there.
Herefused. “Was this the honesty you meant? I could do without it.”
