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CHAPTER ELEVEN
AFEWSHORThours before the wedding, Rodolfo strode through the castle looking for his princess bride, because the things he wanted to say to her needed to be said in person.
He’d followed one servant and bribed another, and that was how he finally found his way to the princess’s private rooms. He nodded briskly to the attendants who gaped at him when he entered, and then he strode deeper into her suite as if he knew where he was headed. He passed an empty media center and an office, a dining area and a cheerful salon, and then pushed his way through yet another door to find himself in her bedroom at last.
To find Valentina herself sitting on the end of the grand four-poster bed that dominated the space as if she’d been waiting for him.
She was not dressed in her wedding clothes. In fact, she was wearing the very antithesis of wedding clothes: a pair of very skinny jeans, ballet flats and a slouchy sort of T-shirt. There was an apricot-colored scarf wrapped around her neck several times, her hair was piled haphazardly on the top of her head and she’d anchored the great copper mess of it with a pair of oversize sunglasses. He stopped as the door shut behind him and could do nothing but stare at her.
This was the sort of outfit a woman wore to wander down to a café for a few hours. It was not, by any possible definition, an appropriate bridal ensemble for a woman who was due to make her way down the aisle of a cathedral to take part in a royal wedding.
“You appear to be somewhat underdressed for the wedding,” he pointed out, aware he sounded more than a little gruff. Deadly, even. “Excuse me. I meanourwedding.”
There was something deeply infuriating about the bland way she sat there and did nothing at all but stare back at him. As if she was deliberately slipping back into that old way she’d acted around him. As if he’d managed to push her too far away from him for her to ever come back and this was the only way she could think to show it.
But Rodolfo was finished feeling sorry for himself. He was finished living down to expectations, including his own. He was no ghost, in his life or anyone else’s. After their conversation in Tissely, Ferdinand had appointed Rodolfo to his cabinet. He’d called it a wedding gift, but Rodolfo knew what it was: a new beginning. If he could manage it with his father after all these years and all the pain they’d doled out to each other, this had to be easier.
He’d convinced himself that it had to be.
“I am sorry, princess,” he said, because that was where it needed to start, and it didn’t seem to matter that he couldn’t recall the last time he’d said those words. It was Valentina, so they flowed. Because he meant them with every part of himself. “You must know that above all else.”
She straightened on the bed, though her gaze flicked away from his as she did. It seemed to take her a long time to look back at him.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I am sorry,” he said again. There was too much in his head, then. Felipe. His father. Even his mother, who had refused to interrupt her solitude for a wedding, and no matter that it was the only wedding a child of hers would ever have. She’d been immovable. He took another step toward Valentina, then stopped, opening up his hands at his sides. “I spent so long angrily not being my brother that I think I forgot how to be me. Until you. You challenged me. You stood up to me. You made me want to be a better man.”
He heard what he assumed were her wedding attendants in the next room, but Valentina only regarded him, her green eyes almost supernaturally calm. So calm he wondered if perhaps she’d taken something to settle her nerves. But he forgot that when she smiled, serene and easy, and settled back on the bed.
“Go on,” she murmured, with a regal little nod.
“In my head, you were perfect,” he told her, drifting another step or so in her direction. “I thought that if I could win you, I could fix my life. I could make my father treat me with respect. I could clean up my reputation. I could make myself the Prince I always wanted to be, but couldn’t, because I wasn’t my brother and never could be.” He shook his head. “And then at the first hint that you weren’t exactly who I wanted you to be, I lost it. If you weren’t perfect, then how could you save me?”
That was what it was, he understood. It had taken him too long to recognize it. Why else would he have been so furious with her? So deeply, personally wounded? He was an adult man who risked death for amusement. Who was he to judge the games other people played? Normally, he wouldn’t. But then, he’d spent his whole life pretending to be normal. Pretending he wasn’t looking for someone to save him. Fix him. Grant him peace.
No wonder he’d been destroyed by the idea that the only person who’d ever seemed the least bit capable of doing that had been deliberately deceiving him.
“I don’t need you to save me,” he told her now. “I believe you already have. I want you to marry me.”
Again, the sounds of her staff while again, she only watched him with no apparent reaction. He told herself he’d earned her distrust. He made himself keep going.
“I want to love you and enjoy you and taste you, everywhere. I do not want a grim march through our contractual responsibilities for the benefit of a fickle press. I want noheir and spare,I want to have babies. I want to find out what our life is like when neither one of us is pretending anything. We can do that, princess, can we not?”
She only gazed back at him, a faint smile flirting with the edge of her lips. Then she sat up, folding her hands very nicely, very neatly in her lap.
“I’m moved by all of this, of course,” she said in a voice that made it sound as if she wasn’t the least bit moved. It rubbed at him, making all the raw places inside him...ache. But he told himself to stand up straight and take it like a man. He’d earned it. Which wasn’t to say he wouldn’t fight for her, of course. No matter what she said. Even if she was who he had to fight. “But you think I’m a raving madwoman, do you not?”
And that was the crux of it. There was what he knew was possible, and there was Valentina. And if this was what Rodolfo had to do to have her, he was willing to do it. Because he didn’t want their marriage to be like his parents’. The fake smiles and churning fury beneath it. The bitterness that had filled the spaces between them. The sharp silences and the barbed comments.
He didn’t want any of that, so brittle and empty. He wanted to live.
After all this time being barely alive when he hadn’t felt he deserved to be, when everyone thought he should have died in Felipe’s place and he’d agreed, Rodolfo wanted tolive.
“I do not know how to trust anyone,” he told her now, holding her gaze with his, “but I want to trust you. I want to be the man you see when you look at me. If that means you want me to believe that there are two of you, I will accept that.” His voice was quiet, but he meant every word. “I will try.”
Still, she didn’t say anything, and he had to fight back the temper that kicked in him.
“Am I too late, Valentina? Is this—” He cut himself off and studied her clothes again. He stood before her in a morning coat and she was in jeans. “Are you planning to run out on this wedding? Now? The guests have already started arriving. You will have to pass them on your way out. Is that what you planned?”
