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When Amalia only stared at her, Queen Esme waved a regal hand in the direction of the salon’s casement windows. “I think you may have underestimated how much your uncivilized Spaniard wants you, after all.”
And even though her heart kicked into gear then, pounding at her, Amalia felt as if she was trapped in some kind of iron grip that made it impossible to move. It slowed her down as she turned and headed toward those windows, making her feel as if she was fighting her way through some kind of quicksand. All she could hear was the drum of her own heart in her ears. She struggled to put one foot in front of the other when what she wanted was to run.
This particular salon was set up in the front of the palace, looking down over the ceremonial forecourt and beyond it, the grand square where the public could gather and often did.
But today, though the square was teeming with its usual number of tourists, stalls, and bored teenagers, there was a bit of a crowd at the gates.
Because a man was there.
And Amalia’s heart stopped in her chest, because the man was Joaquin.
Her Joaquin, here in Ile d’Montagne.
Her Joaquin, except it couldn’t be, becausethisJoaquin was on his knees.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
JOAQUINVARGASKNEELEDto nothing and no one.
But this was about Amalia.
And when it came to Amalia, there were no rules. There was only having her or not having her, and he had tried both. He’d had her without giving all of himself, which had resulted in not having her at all, which was worse.
The one thing he knew was that when all the usual things stopped working, it was time for innovation.
Innovation or surrender.
And he had come up with a thousand crazy schemes to bring her back to him. He could kidnap her. It was frowned upon in polite circles, but what did he care about such things aspolite circles.But he still nixed that idea, because he thought Amalia wouldn’t like it.
He was a remarkably wealthy man. He could hire his own army and storm the palace at Ile d’Montagne if it pleased him. But Amalia, again, was unlikely to support such an action.
Joaquin couldn’t risk it.
Because she had left him in London and he had gone cold. Bitter. He had spent the first few days after her departure storming around his home and his office, verbally beheading anyone foolish enough to cross his path.
It had failed to make him feel the least bit better.
And at the strangest moments, he kept thinking of Amalia. Not in the usual ways that haunted his dreams, but in her two exquisite acts of surrender, both of which had completely disarmed him.
Both of them on her knees.
And both times, he had felt the same wonder as he gazed upon her.
Because he would have thought that kneeling down like that was an act so shameful, so subservient, that it should have made her tremble that she did it so gracefully. Beautifully, even. It should have made her seem less, somehow, in his eyes.
Except when she did it, it didn’t seem like surrender.
More like its opposite.
Once that idea had taken hold, Joaquin hadn’t been able to get it out of his mind. Like all his obsessions, save one, he knew that the only way to get rid of it was to immerse himself within it.
He hadn’t known it was even possible to kneel down with no clear idea what might become of it. Even if he commanded them to bend, would his knees obey him?
He was Joaquin Vargas, who obeyed no one. He had built his entire identity on the fact that he alone walked alone. That he alone had always been alone.
That he was so powerful that the whole world ought to genuflect before him and often did, not the other way around.
But at some point, during another sleepless night in a cold and uncomfortable flat spanning three stories in a London that felt empty without one particular ex-princess, he faced the unpleasant, yet inescapable truth.
