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‘You are always very casual about the things that matter to you,’ his friend said levelly. ‘I presume it is a way to distance yourself. Galen and I have noticed.’
Damn old friends. Damn old friends and their knowledge of you and your secrets.
Is he wrong?
No, he wasn’t, that was the thing. Freddie did matter. She was an excellent PA. She was organised, calm and insightful. She knew how to handle him in all his moods. She made things easy, never difficult.
He also had incredible chemistry with her and she was phenomenal in bed.
But does she matter apart from that? Apart from her carrying your child. You don’t know a thing about her.
The thought unsettled him. Because no, he didn’t know. She’d never spoken about her personal life, her life outside the job, not a single word. The only reason he knew she liked that tea he’d had delivered this morning to his sitting room was because she had it whenever they were working together and he ordered coffee.
Apart from that, though. Nothing.
‘Am I?’ He wasn’t really paying attention to Khalil now, his brain seizing on the topic of Freddie once again and worrying at it.
Khalil laughed, a soft sound from down the other end of the phone. ‘Goodbye, Gus,’ he said. ‘Sidonie and I will await our wedding invitation.’
After the call had ended, Augustine sat still in the study, staring at the wall opposite, where the formal portrait of his parents hung.
His mother sitting in an armchair in a beautiful blue gown, his father beside her, his hand on her shoulder. They both looked as if they were just about to smile.
He’d often wondered why Piero was so loving towards the son whose birth had essentially signed his mother’s death warrant, but Piero had told him that they’d decided together not to get treatment for her cancer, not wanting to risk him. They’d known the consequences and they’d chosen them.
You were loved, Augustine, his father had told him.And you were very much wanted. You were the heir, and precious, and we didn’t know if your mother could conceive again. We couldn’t risk it.
Before the accident, all he’d wanted was to make sure his mother’s sacrifice and his father’s grief for her hadn’t been for nothing. To be the best king, the best son, to make them proud.
His father had told him to make the most of his Oxford days and he had. He’d probably made the most of them a little too much, which his father hadn’t been all that happy about. But Augustine had always sworn he’d make up for it.
Then the accident had happened just after he’d left university.
An icy road and the car had slid. They’d hit a tree. Both their chauffeur and his father had died on impact, while he’d been badly injured.
He’d never make it up to his father now, just as he’d never be the king his father would have wanted him to be. A king worthy of his mother’s sacrifice.
You won’t be a worthy husband either.
His parents had had a wonderful marriage, or so his father had told him, and the grief Piero felt at his wife’s death had been intense. Augustine had always told himself that when the time came for him to marry, he too would make sure to be the kind of husband his father had been to his mother.
Except that would be yet another standard he’d never meet.
There was no love in the marriage he’d make with Freddie—they didn’t even know each other outside of their professional relationship, apart from sex—and there could be no possibility of love, either, not for him.
Perhaps if the accident hadn’t taken everything from him, he might have been able to love her. Yet it had.
Love brought such expectations with it, and it was so heavy to bear. He could barely move under the weight of his father’s love and the love his mother had felt for him too. The love that had ended up killing her.
Loving Freddie might end up crushing him completely.
Still, while he might not be a worthy husband in terms of loving her, he could try to be the kind of husband who’d never give her a moment’s regret. Who’d try to make her happy. That was at least one thing he could do.
Reaching into his desk and pulling out the bottle of fifty-year-old Scotch he kept in it, he found a glass on the desktop and poured himself a nip.
Then he lifted the glass towards the portrait in a toast.
‘You’ll get your perfect ruler eventually, Papa,’ he said softly. ‘You might just have to wait longer than you’d hoped.’
