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‘Doing unbecoming things as a king has never bothered you before.’
Another statement that he wasn’t expecting. Another observation that caught him off guard. He gritted his teeth. ‘No. Because the press loves the unbecoming things I do. You know this, Freddie.’
‘You do other things as well, though. It’s not all about scandals. What about the network of shelters you set up last year for the homeless? Or the new women’s hospital you funded from your own private coffers?’
He wanted to shrug, as if neither of those things mattered, wanted to make a joke, because those projects were small things. Drops in the bucket of his father’s expectations. Expectations that he would never meet.
But he knew that if he said something casual or dismissive, she’d again know exactly how much those things had mattered to him.
‘What about them?’ he asked instead.
‘You don’t make a big deal of those.’
‘No, I don’t. Because they weren’t a big deal.’
She frowned. ‘Of course they were. They were a big deal to the people affected by them? Why do you keep dismissing them?’
His chest tightened. ‘My father overhauled the entire public health system so that good healthcare could be accessed by anyone,’ he said. ‘Thatwas a big deal.’
She was silent, her dark eyes surveying him. Then she said, ‘He had such high standards, didn’t he?’
Something in him froze solid. ‘What makes you say that?’
‘Just from what I’ve read.’
‘He had high standards because he was the king and he wanted what was best for people.’
‘I didn’t say that was a bad thing,’ she said quietly.
Augustine found himself biting back all the defensive statements he wanted to say, that of course his father had high standards. Kings had to be the most responsible since they were leaders of entire nations. They held lives in their hands, so naturally they had to be held to high standards.
And you don’t measure up. Not anymore.
‘Yes, well.’ He forced the thought away. ‘It’s not.’
There was a small crease between her brows as she looked at him, as if she was trying to figure something out, and it made him want to stroke it away with his thumb, perhaps distract her from this conversation with something that would make them feel so much better.
Except then she said, ‘You hold yourself to those high standards too, don’t you?’
He laughed, the sound coming out bitter and forced. ‘Me? You’re joking. Of course I don’t have those high standards. I don’t have any standards at all.’
‘Don’t do that. Don’t pretend with me.’ She rose, coming around the side of the desk and he found he’d taken a couple of steps back before he could stop himself.
She halted, the crease between her brows deepening. ‘You don’t trust me do you?’
The question somehow cut him somewhere deep inside and he didn’t know what to say. Because of anyone in his life, she was the one he could trust and yet...something in him didn’t want her near him or want to talk to her about his father, still less his mother.
She already knows how broken you are.
No, she didn’t. She saw a king who couldn’t do things but who was ultimately in charge. A king who dealt with everything that came his way without a problem. Who was charming and laid-back, whom everyone loved.
She didn’t see the man who had no patience and whose grip on his temper was thin. Who was short with people and terse, who scared people, who could barely control himself.
A man who was barely surviving.
A man who was going to struggle to be a father let alone a husband, no matter how many times he told himself that he was going try.
How could he show her that man? She might refuse to marry him, and he couldn’t bear that.
