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CHAPTER NINE
RODOLFOHADBARELYshifted his weight from Valentina before she was rolling out from beneath him, pulling the voluminous skirt of her dress with her as she climbed to her feet. He found he couldn’t help but smile. She was so unsteady on her feet that she had to reach out and grab hold of the nearby chair to keep from sagging to the ground.
He was male enough to find that markedly satisfying.
“You are even beautiful turned away from me,” he told her without meaning to speak. It was not, generally, his practice to traffic in flattery. Mostly because it was never required. But it was the simple truth as far as Valentina was concerned. Not empty flattery at all.
She shivered slightly, as if in reaction to his words, but that was all. She didn’t glance back at him. She was pulling her dress back into place, shaking back her hair that had long since tumbled from its once sleek chignon. And all Rodolfo wanted to do was pull her back down to him. He wanted to indulge himself and take a whole lot more time with her. He wanted to strip her completely and make sure he learned every last inch of her sweet body by heart.
He was more than a little delighted at the prospect of a long life together to do exactly that.
Rodolfo zipped himself up and rolled to a sitting position, aware that he felt lighter than he had in a long time. Years.
Since Felipe died.
Because the truth was, he’d never wanted his brother’s responsibilities. He’d wanted his brother. Funny, irreverent, remarkably warm Felipe had been Rodolfo’s favorite person for the whole of his life, and then he’d died. So suddenly. So needlessly. He’d locked himself in his rooms to sleep through what he’d assumed was a flu, and he’d been gone within the week. There was a part of Rodolfo that would never accept that. That never had. That would grieve his older brother forever.
But Rodolfo was the Crown Prince of Tissely now no matter how he grieved his brother, and that meant he should have had all of the attendant responsibilities whether he liked it or not. His father had felt otherwise. And every year the king failed to let Rodolfo take Felipe’s place in his court and his government was like a slap in the face all over again, of course. It was a very public, very deliberate rebuke.
More than that, it confirmed what Rodolfo had always known to be true. He could not fill Felipe’s shoes. He could not come anywhere close and that would never change. There was no hope.
Until now, he’d assumed that was simply how it would be. His father would die at some point, having allowed Rodolfo no chance at all to figure out his role as king. Rodolfo would have to do it on the fly, which was a terrific way to plunge a country straight into chaos. It was one of the reasons he’d dedicated himself to the sort of sports that required a man figure out how to remain calm no matter what was coming at him. Sharks. The earth, many thousands of feet below, at great speed. Assorted impossible mountain peaks that had killed many men before him. He figured it was all good practice for the little gift his father planned to leave him, since he suspected the old man was doing his level best to ensure that all his dire predictions about the kind of king Rodolfo would be would come true within days of his own death.
This engagement was a test, nothing more. Rodolfo had no doubt that his father expected him to fail, somehow, at an arranged marriage that literally required nothing of him save that he show up. And perhaps he’d played into that, by continuing to see other women and doing nothing to keep that discreet.
But everything was different now. Valentina was his. And their marriage would be the kind of real union Rodolfo had always craved. Without even meaning to, Rodolfo had beaten his father at the old man’s own cynical little game.
And it was more than that. Rodolfo had to believe that if he could make the very dutiful princess his the way he had tonight, if he could take a bloodless royal arrangement and make it a wildfire of a marriage, he could do anything. Even convince his dour father to see him as more than just an unwelcome replacement for his beloved lost son.
For the first time in a long, long while, Rodolfo felt very nearlyhopeful.
“Princess,” he began, reaching out to wrap a hand around her hip and tug her toward him, because she was still showing him her back and he wanted her lovely face, “you must—”
“Stop calling me that!” she burst out, sounding raw. And something like wild.
She twisted out of his grasp. And he was so surprised by her outburst that he let her go.
Valentina didn’t stop moving until she’d cleared the vast glass table set before the couch, and then she stood there on the other side, her chest heaving as if she’d run an uphill mile to get there.
His princess did not look anything likehopeful.If anything, she looked... Wounded. Destroyed. Rodolfo couldn’t make any sense out of it. Her green eyes were dark and that sweet, soft mouth of hers trembled as if the hurt inside her was on the verge of pouring out even as she stood there before him.
“I can’t believe I let this happen...” she whispered, and her eyes looked full. Almost blank with an anguish Rodolfo couldn’t begin to understand.
Rodolfo wanted to stand, to go to her, to offer her what comfort he could—but something stopped him. How many times would she do this back and forth in one way or another? How many ways would she find to pull the rug out from under him—and as he thought that, it was not lost on Rodolfo that unlike every other woman he’d ever known, he cared a little too deeply about what this one was about. All this melodrama and for what? There was no stopping their wedding or the long, public, political marriage that would follow. It was like a train bearing down on them and it always had been.
From the moment Felipe had died and Rodolfo had been sat down and told that in addition to losing his best friend he now had a different life to live than the one he’d imagined he would, there had been no deviating from the path set before them. Princess Valentina had already been his—entirely his—before he’d laid a single finger on her. What had happened here only confirmed what had always been true, not that there had been any doubt. Not for him, anyway.
The only surprise was how much he wanted her. Again, now, despite the fact he’d only just had her. She made him...thirsty in a way he’d never experienced before in his life.
But it wouldn’t have mattered if she’d stayed the same pale, distant ghost he’d met at their engagement celebration. The end result—their marriage and all the politics involved—would have been the same.
He didn’t like to see her upset. He didn’t like it at all. It made his jaw clench tight and every muscle in his body go much too taut. But Rodolfo remained where he was.
“If you mean what happened right here—” and he nodded at the pillow beside him as if could play back the last hour in vivid color “—then I feel I must tell you that it was always going to happen. It was only a question of when. Before the wedding or after it. Or did you imagine heirs to royal kingdoms were delivered by stork?”
But it was as if she couldn’t hear him. “Why didn’t you let me leave the gala alone?”
He shrugged, settling back against the pillows as if he was entirely at his ease, though he was not. Not at all. “I assume that was a rhetorical question, as that was never going to happen. You can blame the unfortunate optics if you must. But there was no possibility that my fiancée was ever going to sneak out of a very public event on her own, leaving me behind. How does that suit our narrative?”
