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“As you pointed out, so memorably, you are the only lover I’ve ever had. Am I selfish? Are you? How would I know?”
His gaze grew more intense and he leaned forward, reaching over to take her hand in his. And even that made her pulse leap. Even that made her body shiver into readiness, because she was so attuned to him now that all he needed to do was look at her in a certain way and she would simplyignite.
“One of the things that astonishes me about you, Princess, is that no matter your cruelty when it suits you, you are anything but selfish,” he told her in that roughly stirring way of his. “Particularly in bed. And that is what many people do not understand. Good sex has nothing to do with tricks or positions. It is about pleasure. And a certain generosity of intent.”
Amalia felt herself get warm. Everywhere. “I had no idea you were such a...master of the form.”
She saw a flash of his teeth, that hint of a smile that made her feel almost embarrassingly giddy. “I think, Amalia, that you know very well that I am.”
He let go of her hand to sit back in his chair again, still smiling while she turned pink all over. And stayed that warm, despite herself, when he kept telling his story.
“She was very boring, of course, this heiress,” Joaquin said, as if that was obvious. As if heiresses in his experience were expected to be boring unless they proved themselves otherwise. “But useful. Like many of her ilk, her primary purpose in life was to irritate her father. And like most of them, she is now married to the tedious man her father chose for her, but only after having tortured her whole family with her terrible choices. Like me.” He smiled, but this smile had more of a razor’s edge. “She used me for her own ends. I used her for polish. Everyone likes a diamond in the rough, Amalia. But only because it is a diamond. It is not the rough that appeals.”
“You seem so...unabashed,” she replied, still warmer than she ought to have been, given the subject matter. “I was under the impression that most people at leastpretendthat the heart is what leads them.”
“Some pay for school. Some have tutors.” He shrugged. “I chose my lovers wisely.”
“Not everyone can be so wise,” she said, and realized she sounded far more wistful than she should have.
“Queen Esme did not make a list of marriageable suitors for you because she liked them.” And there was that steel in his voice again, then. “Or because she thought you would. All of her choices were strategic, always. For the benefit of Ile d’Montagne, not you.”
Amalia felt a bit less warm and pink, then. “Yes, but I was—”
“The heir to the kingdom. I am aware. I did not have the good fortune to be born so well situated.” He didn’t say that with his usual dark undercurrent. Perhaps that was progress. “I did not intend to allow myself to be locked out of anywhere I wished to go. Or anything I wished to do. If I have a secret weapon, as my enemies are so certain I do, it is this. As soon as I identify something I need to learn, I dedicate myself to learning it. My adversaries will always think they have one upon me, with their fancy schools and their pedigrees and their silver spoon friendships from the cradle.” Another shrug. “I certainly don’t need to give them ammunition because I don’t know which fork to use.”
She mulled that over as the staff returned, taking away her untouched plate, and replacing it with another one, heaped with another demonstration of the chef’s prowess. But still, she wasn’t hungry. She watched instead as Joaquin picked up what was inarguably the correct fork, and dug in.
Really, she ought to do the same. “What happens when you’ve conquered all the things that need conquering,” she asked him instead. “Do you even have a plan? Or are you simply trying to own as many things as it is possible to own before you die?”
“Only people who have never had to worry about money,” Joaquin said, very quietly, “imagine that gathering it is not an end in itself.”
“I suppose this is where, like all the lovers you had and disdain, I should apologize for the accident of my birth. Or rather, the proximity of my birth to that of the actual heir to the kingdom of Ile d’Montagne. An accident twice over, it seems.”
“But that is the trouble with apologies, Amalia.” She was caught, again, in that flash of impossible green. “Who is it that they really serve?”
He returned his attention to the meal before him as if he had merely commented on the weather. Amalia did the same, staring down at her plate and then eating the food there—also with the correct utensils—though she could not have said what it was.
Because what was clear to her, finally, was that there was no forgiveness to be found here. She suspected he might even know that was what she wanted. What was obvious to her, at last, was that he had no intention of providing it.
This was a man who had dated women he didn’t like so he could learntable manners.
Really, what had she expected?
Amalia suddenly felt remarkably old, then. Exhausted, perhaps. Because she had loved him and lost him once, and that had changed her life. She had gone on as she always had, because that was what had been required of her.
But she had never been the same.
She had spent a lot less time wishing she could be normal, whatever that was. She had focused much more intently on living up to her mother’s expectations, partly because she had known—even if Esme had not—that Amalia had already let her down. But also because she had left Joaquin to be what her mother expected her to be. She had left him, and badly, so that she could be the most perfect Crown Princess the island had ever seen.
Having lost so much, how could she possibly give the life she’d chosen anything but her all?
Now she’d lost that life, too. And she still couldn’t have him. Not the way she wanted him. He would never forgive her. Never.
And Amalia did not think she had it in her to be nothing but a cautionary tale he would tell someday, about hislovers.
“This was not my finest idea,” he said over coffee, when their meal was done. Done, though Amalia had hardly tasted a thing. “I’m too used to having you. Looking at you across a table is torture.”
Because the only thing between them was sex, as far as he was concerned. Why couldn’t she accept that? Why did she keep imagining it could be different? Joaquin wasn’t the problem. He had been perfectly clear.
