But it wasn’t supposed to be this way.
He’d been so sure, when he’d first come up with his great plan, that with Rachel he’d be immune. He’d had ten years of inoculation, after all. How could he possibly fall in love with her after all that time together? How could he barely keep his hands off her, when for an entire decade he hadn’t even considered touching her?
How had everything changed since their vows had been spoken, most of all himself? Because loving Rachel felt both as natural as breathing, as terrifying as deliberately stepping off a cliff.
He was already in free fall, because he knew it was too late. He already loved her. He’d been fighting it for weeks now, fighting it and revelling in it at the same time, to his own confusion and despair.
He knew Rachel saw the struggle in him, just as he knew she was patiently waiting for him to resolve it. He saw the hope in her eyes when she looked at him, and that made everything worse, because he knew he was going to disappoint her, no matter what.
‘Your Highness.’
He’d stopped listening to the conversation again. Irritated with himself beyond all measure, Mateo made himself focus on the minister again, only to realise he wasn’t the one speaking.
A guard who had entered the stateroom was, and Mateo suddenly felt as if he’d been plunged underwater, as if everything were at a distance and he could only hear every third word. Bazaar...bomb...wounded.
He lurched up from the table, panic icing his insides, making it hard to breathe. Impossible to think. Rachel was in danger...and it was his fault. He’d been here before. He knew exactly how this felt.
‘Is she alive?’ he rasped.
‘She’s being taken to the hospital—’
‘Get me there,’ Mateo commanded, and he strode out of the room.
Half an hour later he was at the Royal Hospital on the outskirts of the city, the wintry fog obscuring the view of the terracotta roofs and onion domes of his city, his kingdom, so all was grey.
On the way there Rachel’s security team had briefed him on what had happened—a clumsy, homemade bomb thrown into the bazaar; the explosion had hurled Rachel in the air and she’d hit her head on a concrete kerb. Two other people had received non-life-threatening injuries, including her personal bodyguard, Matthias; they were both being treated.
‘And the Queen?’ Mateo demanded. ‘How is she?’
‘She sustained an injury to the head,’ the doctor, an olive-skinned man with kind eyes, was telling him, although Mateo found it hard to listen to a word he said. His mind kept skittering back to other doctors, other sterile rooms, the awful surreal sensation of hearing what had happened and knowing he was to blame. Just him.
There was nothing we could do...so sorry...by the time she made it to the hospital, it was too late.
‘Is she in a coma?’ Mateo asked brusquely. ‘Is there...brain damage?’
The doctor looked at him strangely and Mateo gritted his teeth. He couldn’t bear not knowing. He couldn’t bear being in the same place, knowing the life of the woman he loved was hanging in the balance, and it was all because of him. ‘Well?’ he demanded in a throaty rasp.
‘She is conscious, Your Highness,’ the doctor said, looking unnerved by his sovereign’s unprecedented display of emotion. ‘She regained consciousness almost immediately.’ Mateo stared at him, not comprehending. Not possibly being able to understand what this meant. ‘She needed to have six stitches to a cut on her forehead,’ the doctor continued, ‘but other than that she is fine.’
‘Stitches?’ Mateo repeated dumbly.
‘She might have a small scar by her left eyebrow,’ the doctor said in an apologetic tone, and Mateo just stared.
Stitches? Her eyebrow?
‘She’s...?’ He found he could barely speak. ‘She’s not...?’
The doctor smiled then, seeming to understand the nature of Mateo’s fear. ‘She’s fine. I will take you to her, if you like.’
Mateo found he could only nod.
A few minutes later he walked into a private room where Rachel was sitting up in bed, looking tired and a bit exasperated.
‘I’m quite sure I don’t need to stay overnight,’ she was telling one of the nurses who fussed around her. ‘Den... Chei... Efharisto...’
He almost smiled at her halting attempts at Greek, which the nurses resolutely ignored with cheerful smiles, but he felt too emotional to manage it. He stood in the doorway and simply drank her in, his heart beating hard from the adrenalin rush of believing, of being so certain, she was in danger. Of thinking he was to blame.
Rachel turned and caught sight of him, smiling wryly. ‘No one seems to be listening to me,’ she said with a little shrug of her shoulders. Her gaze clouded as she caught the look on his face, although Mateo didn’t even know what it was. ‘Mateo...’