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She let out a halfhearted chuckle. “One of the queen’s maids—well, I suppose she’s my maid now—isn’t the keenest when it comes to discretion. Or even logic.”
Teryn looked relieved that she’d freed him from the burden of having to explain. Perhaps she should free him from the rest of his burdens too. They might as well get this over with.
Turning back toward the edge of the cliff and the bright meadow beyond, she said, “I know why you’re here, and I know what you came to say. What you came to ask me. I agreed to an alliance with Menah, one that will be solidified in a peace pact at the end of the month. Its terms include a betrothal to Menah’s prince and will result in an official marriage one year from now. But there’s been a change of groom. Now I must be engaged to you to secure trust with my allies. Marrying you is the only way my brother’s council will recognize me as his heir. Until Dimetreus remarries and has children of his own, I’m the only heir he has. Which makes our engagement necessary on all fronts.”
Teryn was silent for a moment. Then he came up beside her. She could feel his gaze burning into her profile, but she refused to meet his eyes.
“You don’t have to marry me, Cora,” he said, voice low, somber. “You have a choice. Should you wish to refuse me, I’ll convince Verdian of some other way to secure trust. I promise.”
She let out a humorless laugh. “Have you learned nothing about the folly of making empty promises? King Verdian is your queen’s father. He’s threatened to take my brother’s birthright away if I so much as step out of line. You can’t go up against him.”
“Try me.”
Cora couldn’t help but look at him then. His expression held no jest. She didn’t dare open her senses to him, to feel the intensity hidden behind his words.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said, forcing her composure to remain cool. Calm. Disconnected from emotion. “My answer is yes.”
“It is?” When she gave him nothing but a curt nod in reply, he lowered his head and pinched the bridge of his nose between his fingers. “This isn’t going how I’d imagined.”
“Were you expecting me to say no?” She clenched her jaw, a flash of fury sparking in her veins. “Do you…want me to say no?”
“It’s not that. I just thought…I thought this would be a bigger deal to you.”
“Well, it’s not. You’re giving too much weight to a small matter. You didn’t need to come here, Teryn. You could have written this all in a letter—”
“I didn’t want to write it in a letter,” he said, voice rising. “I came so there’d be no mistaking my intentions…and yet of course you’re mistaking them anyway because I’m a blundering fool…”
His words dissolved into a string of muttered curses. With a sigh, he ran a hand over his face and looked out at the meadow. Cora’s brow furrowed as she took in his tense shoulders, the fist planted on one hip, the sharp rise and fall of his chest. She wasn’t sure she’d ever seen him so flustered.
“You may be content to agree to a cold, loveless betrothal,” he said, opening and closing one hand as if he didn’t know what to do with it. “If that’s what you prefer, I’ll respect that, but I don’t want you agreeing to a thing until you understand my side of things.”
“What’s your side?” she asked, almost terrified of the answer.
Slowly, his eyes returned to hers and he held her gaze without falter. His voice came out slow, broken only by the slightest tremor. “When last we spoke, you said you’d thought my mother had meant for you to marry me when she conveyed my proposal.”
Cora shrank back, wishing she could disappear entirely. Her cheeks flooded with heat. “I…that’s not—”
“Itwassupposed to be me. It had always been me.”
Cora’s breaths grew sharp, her pulse rioting. “I don’t understand.”
He took a step closer. “I told my mother of my idea to forge a marriage alliance between Khero and Menah, but that was all I’d said. She had no right to take my proposal and offer it to you before she fully understood—no, that’s giving her too much credit. She did understand my heart and interfered on purpose. She never should have done that. It was supposed to be you and me from the start.”
Teryn’s words did strange things to her chest, her stomach, threatening to upend the balance of the entire world. She felt a flicker of hope—one that had proven traitorous before.
Shoving aside all warm feelings, she latched onto steely logic instead. “That’s impossible,” she said, voice calm. “You couldn’t have meant to marry me from the start. Not until you found out about whatever scandal befell Mareleau and your brother. You were engaged to her. Had you rejected her without due cause—”
He stepped even closer. “I wasn’t thinking about her. Not for a moment. I was only thinking about you. About us.”
Us. There was that word again.
A corner of his mouth quirked up. “Thankfully, my unwanted fiancée had secrets that aided my own.”
Her gaze lingered on his lips, on that crooked smile. On the mouth that just confessed he’d wanted her from the start. That he’d intended to choose her over the woman he’d been promised to.
Again, that flicker of hope tried to spark into a blaze, but she breathed it away. She crossed her arms over her chest and lifted her chin in defiance. “You’ve tricked me before. Used my own emotions against me.”
His smirk stretched wider, revealing the depths of his amusement. “Are you talking about our kiss?”
