Konstantin felt heat climb his neck. “Yes.”
“But while we were together you didn’t think it was so special.” She left unsaid that if he had, he would not have broken up with her.
“Please try to understand. I was not raised to consider my feelings, my emotions as any kind of valid basis for making choices. Our parents were loving toward us, but if they loved each other, I never knew it. They loved Mirrus and its people. Their actions were driven by that love and duty.”
“Duty they taught you to revere.”
“Yes.” Could she understand?
A woman raised to honor her parents, but without the weight of royal duty he had known from his first memory.
“I can’t say that makes the past okay, but I think I’m starting to understand what drove your actions then and now.”
That was something. “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For listening. For trying to understand a perspective very different from your own. We should all aspire to be so open to those we don’t understand.”
“That’s a great attitude even if you are kind of overblowing my virtues.”
She was so humble, maybe too humble. “Not at all. I have it on the best authority, our son’s if you are wondering, that you are the best.”
“And I thought it was only your praises he was singing to me.”
“Oh, no. That child has plans and I’m not sure either of us is going to be able to stand against them.”
“According to you, you don’t want to.”
“True.” And maybe she didn’t want to so much either any longer.
Emma’s smile went straight to his groin.
He offered a promise that he thought she might need, and even if she didn’t, he needed to give.
“I don’t know if you will ever forgive me those other women, but I promise you that if you marry me, there will never be another.” Even if Emma never agreed to marry him, Konstantin doubted he could ever settle for empty sex again.
“You think I need to forgive you for sleeping around after we broke up?” she asked.
“Yes.” Emma might not realize it, but Konstantin was sure of it.
She was his. He was hers. Even if they had not been together. He had betrayed that in an attempt to prove that he didn’t need her and had only succeeded in proving to himself that no other woman could ever replace her in his life.
Even if he’d followed through on that damn contract.
“If Nataliya and I had actually made it to the wedding, I would have left her waiting at the altar. And I’m not proud of that,” he admitted.
But even now, even after everything, he could tell Emma things he would never admit to another living soul.
“You wouldn’t have,” Emma said, sounding very sure.
“I would. I could never have spoken the vows to her. They would have been a lie.”
“That sounds an awful lot like you loved me.”
Konstantin felt those words like an ice pick to his soul. “Love? No. Emma, I know you think you need me to love you to marry me, but consider, I am offering a companionship that few ever experience, sexual compatibility that is very special and fidelity in both body and mind.”
“But not love?” she sounded more musing than upset by that.