‘I must say, I’m impressed,’ he said into the air just above her head. For all the world they would look like a couple very much in love as she tilted her face towards his. Only he could read the confusion in her eyes. ‘One could be forgiven for thinking that this was an engagement party rather than an opportunity for you to network. But so far I have seen you organise at least three potential trade agreements with all the panache of a seasoned CEO.’
‘Don’t think I didn’t miss the mention of your precious wine whilst you were talking to Georges. He was practically begging you for shares in your company once he realised that his wife, along with half the world, would seek out the magical wine blend that tasted just like me. It was a nice touch, by the way.’
‘It was, wasn’t it?’ The pleasure was evident in his voice. ‘You’ll have to add it to the cover story your council made so hastily. Really, Sofia? You thought that the world would believe we had been introduced by a mutual friend? That’s akin to saying we met on Tinder. But, as you know well, the best lies always have a hint of the truth.’
He waited until he had caught her gaze once more. ‘Why did you not tell them we had met at school? Worried they would dig up my expulsion?’ He wanted to look in her eyes as she answered his question. Wanted to see the truth she had somehow been able to hide from him. ‘Or were you just worried about the world’s press uncovering my low upbringing?’
‘I never thought that of you, Theo. You were the only one who did,’ she said in softly spoken words, and it was not an accusation, but he felt it as such.
Theo scoffed. ‘You really have no idea, do you?’ It took nothing to bring to mind a childhood that had felt like death by a thousand cuts, a thousand stares, snide comments and a fair few beatings when his mother wasn’t looking. ‘Up there, the little princess in the ivory tower.’ He jerked his head up through the floors above the grand ballroom towards an unseen turret. ‘Did you really not see the stares, or hear the words whispered by teachers and students alike? Do you really not know how the world works, Sofia? How the powerful turn on the weak in any attempt to guard their pedestal of superior wealth or position? Is it an accident of your birth, or wilful ignorance? I honestly can’t tell any more. Because you were, are, many things, Sofia, but I didn’t think that naïve was one of them.’
Her eyes turned the dark blue of an electrical storm. ‘Naïve? You know nothing of what I have sacrificed—’
‘What have you ever sacrificed, Sofia?’
You, the thought screamed silently in her mind. Anger rode her pulse to impossible speeds, her chest heaving against the low cut of her dress. An anger so much like desire—the fire in her blood quick to make the leap from one to the other. She felt the breadth of his shoulders expand beside her, and the way he stood proprietorially seemed to encase her, preventing her from seeing beyond the wall of the toned muscles of his chest, cutting her off from the room beyond. It was too much, the closeness of their bodies, the heat pulsating between them, the way her own body seemed to lean towards him as if wanting to pull rather than push him away.
‘I didn’t think so,’ Theo said in the space of her silence. ‘I look around the room, this party, this palace and see numbers. Because after I returned to Greece with my mother, it was all about numbers. The number of universities that retracted their scholarship offers after my expulsion. The number of family members that turned their backs on us, the single digit representing the one person willing to help. The number of euros begged and borrowed to buy that first plot of land, the number of times my mother and I went without food, the number of sleepless nights that wrecked us both as we plunged everything we had into that first grape harvest. The number of bottles we were first able to sell, after the number of failed attempts that preceded it. But do you know what doesn’t have a number? How hard it was.’
She watched him with large, round eyes, and he imagined the pity there, surely. The way her eyes glinted with compassion just a remnant of what he wanted to see.
‘I’m so sorry. Truly. I wish I could have helped.’
‘Helped?’ he demanded, the word almost getting stuck behind his outrage. ‘I’m not talking about the work. I would do that every day for the rest of my life and still be happy. What was hard was the belief that I had done this to my mother. That I had brought this upon the one person in my life who had ever loved me. That, had I not fallen for your pretty lies, then I would have graduated at the top of my class, I would have attended one of the finest universities in the world with a scholarship. My future and my mother’s would have not been filled with struggle and numbers of loss... I could have given her the world. For years I felt the weight of that on my shoulders. Until I realised that I was wr
ong. It wasn’t my fault, it was yours. You laid a trail of pretty little lies like breadcrumbs for me to follow all the way to my destitution. And I believed those lies.
‘How ironic that we survived the abandonment of my father, only to be cut down at the knees by a pampered princess. One that, no matter how exhausted I was, how many hours I worked in the dust, the mud, the earth, no matter how much I sweated, gained or lost...was the only thing I could think of each and every night. You.’
But his words had come out wrong. He felt the way they tasted on his tongue, heard the way they hit the air between them. He had meant it as a castigation, as an explanation or excuse for what he felt he had to do, all the things that Sofia didn’t yet know of. But even to his own ears it had sounded more like a plea. A plea that he could not allow for, so he pressed on with the cruel taunt he knew would drive his desire for her away like no other.
‘Until you married someone else.’
* * *
The last blow was too much for Sofia to bear. Each word, each statement filling in the blanks in her knowledge of him, changing and reforming what she had imagined for him in the years since that night ten years ago, had twisted the knife deeper in her breast. Until that final mention of Antoine. Her fingers reached for the comfort of the wedding band that was no longer there. Instead they scraped against the cold cut of the diamond that had been delivered to the palace two weeks before, the unfamiliar shape beneath the tips of her fingers cold and harsh. Another ring, worn from duty rather than desire or love.
She knew that she should tell him what had happened that night, knew that she should explain how she hadn’t set him up to take the fall for her foolish actions, make him understand that she’d had no choice that night, or any since. Desperately she wanted to tell him that she had meant every word, every hope she’d ever shared with him, but what would it achieve? One part knew he’d not believe her and the other part knew she could not even if he might. The reason she had left that night was bound in secrecy and desperation, to protect her family from what was now only just around the corner. Did it really matter what he thought of her? Only to Sofia. It didn’t change anything. Didn’t change the fact she needed to be married, needed to no longer be the Widow Princess when the time came for her to assume the throne.
‘I simply cannot fathom why you would have married a man who—’
‘What, Theo? Wasn’t you?’ she demanded, cutting into his sentence before he could cause even more pain by maligning Antoine. ‘For all this talk of vengeance and needing to teach me the consequences of my actions—yes, I was paying attention in Paris—what is it really? That I dared to marry another man? Is your ego really that significant to you?’
His head reared back as if he’d been slapped and the thin shred of satisfaction at the sight made her feel both jubilant and petty at the same time.
‘What would make you feel better, Theo? To hear that I didn’t love him? Well, I did. He was a good, kind man who understood me, understood what I needed. Who also understood what my position meant in a way that you never will. I am truly sorry that you’ve faced such hardships, Theo. I am sorry that you feel responsible for them, I am also sorry that you believe that I caused that, that I did that to you. But if that’s what you need to do, then so be it.
‘And if you need to hear that Antoine and I didn’t have the chemistry you seem to effortlessly taunt me with, then fine. We didn’t. Does it please you to know that he took lovers? That it shamed him as much as me? Would that help? Do you need to know that each and every touch left me cold and more alone than I can possibly describe? Because the only person whose touch I had ever craved was you? The only person I had ever imagined sharing that part of myself with, was you? Would that ease your ego?’
Shame and misery sobbed in her chest, and tears that had formed without her knowledge or permission gathered behind the lids of her eyes, casting both Theo and the room about them in a blurry haze. She couldn’t stand it any more, couldn’t stand here knowing that he had drawn from her a secret that she had shared with no other.
So she fled her engagement party, turning her back on the gathered guests, picking up the skirts of her dress as she almost ran from the ballroom.
* * *
There were very few times in his life that Theo could remember being shocked into silence, and each and every one of them involved Sofia. But none of them had hit him with the power of a tsunami. Waves of something he did not want to put a name to crashed against him as he followed in her wake. He didn’t care if he drew the curious glances of strangers as he left the ballroom with determined steps. He didn’t care if they would have to come up with yet another story to define or excuse their actions and their engagement.
All he cared about was what Sofia had revealed to him, and if it made him want to beat his chest with pride and need, and ego, then so be it, even if it made him a bastard. His pulse raged and he felt the burn in his thighs as he took several steps at once towards her suite, feelings that he relished as he ate up the distance she had tried to put between them.