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But as the Prince of Pelion, I did not have to heed warnings. The world rearranged itself around my desires, so denying myself the diversion never crossed my mind.
My first mistake, and one that I would come to understand as a weakness.
The kind of weakness that my father worked to train out of me from the time I was a boy.
A man, in my father’s opinion, had to be able to withstand anything. Any pain, any betrayal, without a hint of emotion. If his child was to be tortured in order for an enemy to gain secrets, the man must not bend then.
He had done his best to ensure that I could withstand any physical torture.
Even if he’d had to be the one to test me.
And he had.
But in my father’s view of the world, that same man could not put shackles on his excess. It was balance, he had told me, that a man be the hardest, cruelest of weapons when the time came, and that he indulged his baser urges when it was not a time of war.
Well-fed appetites for drink and women contributed to strength in lean times, or so he’d said.
Weakness in himself was the only thing that a ruler need fear. My father ruled Pelion with an iron fist, and he ruled his life the same way.
He ruled his children in that manner as well. Making sure that from infancy I was fit to take the throne when he passed on. If he could have taken on the Roman practice of leaving his issue out in the dirt overnight to see if it was strong enough to survive, I knew he would have done so.
Being the son of King Xerxes was not for the faint of heart. Or mind or body.
But one petite brunette that I met on the shores of a deserted ocean could hardly be a threat. That was what I told myself.
My heart had been forged in fire, covered in iron from the time I was a child. I excelled at playing a part. The international playboy who cared for nothing.
But in truth, behind the scenes, I was always ensuring that my father did no damage to the country. Did no damage to my mother.
For her part, she removed herself from the palace whenever she could.
I had been hurt by that, as a boy. Left to my father’s particular brand of care, which included torture and time spent in solitary confinement.
I’d ached for my mother then.
But there was no point in regretting anything.
My father had made me a weapon. One intent on being turned around on him.
And I would have engaged in a more open rebellion in the beginning if I had not known it would come back tenfold on my much younger sister and the Queen.
There was no place in my life for softness, nor any place for a commoner who would endanger the plans that I had carefully put in place.
The Council of Pelion and I worked together to find an existing precedent for change of leadership. Once the current ruler surpassed his seventieth birthday, if the successor had produced an heir, he could take control.
It was a complicated process, and as I did not want to create a Civil War, I knew I had to play my cards right.
My father was nothing if not a self-preservationist. And I knew that I would have to do everything in my power to have the full favor of the people. And that meant, of course, marrying a woman from Pelion, one who came from the high echelons of society and who was well loved by many.
And I had done my part. I had managed to gain an agreement from my father that he would allow this, once his birthday passed and I had fulfilled my obligations.
One of which was marrying a woman he found suitable.
But in my foolishness, I had begun to negotiate in my own mind, as one summer with Marissa turned to two. And then it became three, and the heat of passion had burned between us, so hot and bright it obliterated the memory of any woman who had come before her.
I had to leave, had to return to Pelion to make a case for why this woman was worth upending the existing agreement that I had with the daughter of a politician.
But when I returned to Medland she was gone. Nowhere to be found at all. Her father simply opened the door with a stony face and said she had gone.
And I wondered if she had gone off on the mission trip she had spoken of all that time ago, but it had seemed to me that her devotion had rather turned to the worship of me and my body rather than a deity.
I was not content with that. I sent my security detail out on a search for her, engaged the resources of the palace, and still, it turned up nothing.
She had abandoned me.
The woman that I had been willing to risk an agreement over was gone.
No one had ever dared to defy me before.
That she would felt like a near unendurable blow, one that had left a great crack inside my chest.
But I had repaired that. Let it go.
Still, as I stood there, looking at her and her shocked face, I knew that it wasn’t fully repaired. No. But it had changed.
It had been pain at first—a shock to me, as I had no idea I was capable of such fine feelings. But then it had changed, shifted into a deep, raging fury that had propelled me on. Had cemented my motives.
I had allowed myself to become distracted, and that was unacceptable.
I had gone back to Pelion, reaffirmed my commitment to my future marriage.
And now, five years on, it was set to take place. It had all been put on hold until my fiancée, Vanessa, was ready, and I had been happy enough to wait, as I knew that I could not rush something like this, so poised on the knife’s edge.
Once, once I had been impatient. Once I had nearly ruined everything. It would not happen again.
Except, I forgot why in the moment that I stared at Marissa.
But there came a point where I began avoiding any and all others. And then she did what she had done that first day, the very first time I saw her.
She turned and she ran away.
I spared a glance at the woman by my side. “I have business to attend to.”
“What is it?” she asked, only half-interested.
She was more interested in taking in the surroundings at the country club’s deck. And the people who were there. Not so she could see them so much as she could know who had seen her. Vanessa was accustomed to status and luxury. It was one thing I valued in her.
Vanessa and I had an arrangement that centered squarely on politics and personal gain. She was not interested in my comings and goings, not any more than I was interested in hers.
She tucked her blond hair behind her ear, and her ring glittered in the light. “If I don’t return soon, have security detail escort you back to the house.”
“Very thoughtful of you,” she responded, smiling at me, ever conscious of the fact that we might be photographed at a given moment.
A good thing she remembered, because I could not spare a thought for it. I charged away from the deck, going back the way that Marissa had gone. And I saw just enough to see which direction she fled, rounding a corner down one of the quaint streets.
I wondered if she was going to her parents’ house, though I had checked periodically for months with palace security, and they swore she had not gone to her parents’ home.
But she was here, so clearl
y something had changed.
It occurred to me suddenly that I should perhaps feel like a fool, chasing down the footsteps of a ghost from my past wearing a custom-made suit on the night of my engagement party. But I was a man who was accustomed to his word being law, and the matter felt as if it bore more importance than it did.
So I felt it. So it was.
And I ignored the slight kick in my gut that told me it was a shade too close to something my father might think.
I didn’t know why I was going after her. I’d had countless lovers before her, and countless sins stained my soul.
I didn’t know why she mattered.
Because she got beneath the armor. That was why. Because she had done something to me that no one else had ever done. Not before, not since. Because she had made me question my primary goal in life. Had made me question the very foundation that it had been built upon.
Because of her, I nearly put the plan to rescue my nation in jeopardy.
I would have chanced marrying a commoner, a woman unapproved, who could add nothing to the throne, ensuring that my father stayed seated for years longer than he might have otherwise.
My father was too mean to die. Far too cruel to do anything quite so prosaic as give up the ghost.
And she had walked away from me. It was not I who had come to my good senses, no.
It both incensed and fascinated me even still, and that was why—I told myself—I was now chasing after her through the streets of Medland.
Her family home was small, a classic saltbox house with shingled siding like every other house on the street. I crossed the lawn, prepared to walk in without knocking, because princes did not knock, when I realized that it was probably for the best if I attempted to open with a small modicum of courtesy, as I had no idea if her parents still lived there, or if it was the home she had in fact gone into.
I rapped on the door and waited.
It opened wide, to reveal an older woman with the same color eyes as Marissa. She swung the door just wide enough that I caught sight of Marissa standing behind her. Marissa quickly retreated into the kitchen. The older woman looked behind her. “Can I help you?”
