There were no ways he didn’t want her.
“I don’t know what you have planned for today,” he said.
Her gray eyes were soft and bright as she looked up at him. “I’m very busy, actually. I plan to lounge about, pretending to work, for several hours. After which I will very officiously go seat myself somewhere, open up the laptop, and type very studiously. I won’t be working, of course. I’ll be checking email and scrolling through things I don’t care about on the internet, which is a very important part of my process. After several hours of that, I will write a single sentence, which will be so exhausting that I will instantly need to send for snacks. I plan to repeat this several times throughout the day, until I can break for an early dinner, and pretend none of it ever happened. And you?”
And that was the part Ares couldn’t understand. He found her...entertaining.
He didn’t understand it, but he liked it. True, he’d never seen anything like her before, anywhere in the royal family, or, for that matter, in any of the dreary noble houses of Europe. Everything was duty and history. Ancestral obligation and debts paid in to the future. Marriages were solemn contracts for the production of heirs, and everyone in those marriages worked hard to appear studiously joyless—if his own parents were any guide.
But the woman he would reign with was entertaining. She smiled, laughed. She even dared tease him. Ares chose to see it as a gift.
He went down before her, on the traditional single knee. Then he reached into his pocket, pulling out a small box with great flourish. He cracked it open, looking up to find Pia with her hands over her mouth and her gray eyes wide.
“I do not know if you recognize this ring,” he said. “It has a legend attached to it. It was handed down through my family for generations, and each woman who wears it is said to be the queen the country deserves. Good, kind. It was my grandmother’s. She left it for me when she died, that I might put it on the hand of my own queen one day. Will you take it?”
And he found that something in him was tense and tight until she let out a breath, nodded once, jerkily, and extended her hand that he might slide the ring into place.
Together, they stared down at the collection of three perfect sapphires, ringed with diamonds. Taken together the stones created the sense of something bigger than the sum of its parts. The ring itself was history. But on Pia, it looked like art.
“Thank you,” she whispered, her voice catching. “It’s so beautiful.”
“I was hoping you would think so.”
He helped her to her feet, aware that it was harder for her to rise these days. He swept his eye over the dress she wore, white and flowing, and making her look very nearly ethereal. He reached down to the table and picked up one of the flowers that sat there in a small vase, then tucked it into the top of her braid.
She was breathing loud enough that he could hear it. And her eyes were glassy when he was done with the flower. He wanted to lean down and kiss her, claim her—
But kissing Pia was no quick affair. It required time because Ares never stopped at one kiss. How could he?
“Come with me,” he said.
And Pia held out her hand, because Pia always held out her hand. She trusted him enough to follow him into the unknown, and that was a responsibility Ares took seriously. More than seriously. He felt the weight of it move through him, and he vowed as he led her through the palace that he would honor it. Care for it.
And her.
Always her.
He hadn’t planned for any of this. And he hadn’t known, until that day in his father’s study, how best to handle his impending fatherhood.
But now it was all so beautifully clear.
“What are we doing?” Pia asked, as he led her through the great salons and out to the wide terrace overlooking the steepest part of the rocky cliffs below. The ocean stretched itself in the sun, rambling out to the horizon. And there, beneath the makeshift canopy he’d had his staff prepare from sweet-smelling vines and bright flowers, a priest waited.
He felt her hand shake in his.
“Is this...?”
“This is our wedding, Pia,” he said, looking down at her. Another tension gripping him because she could still balk. She could demand the cathedral on the Northern Island. She could refuse him. She could still refuse him. “Here, now.”
“But...”
Ares took her hands in his. And he thought that he could lose himself forever in all that gleaming gray. He intended to. “Do you trust me?”
“I... I don’t...”
“It’s a simple question. You either trust me, or you do not.”
“I trust you,” she whispered.
“Then why wait?” he asked. “You know as well as I do what a royal wedding will be like. The pomp and circumstance, all in aid of a future throne. We can do this here. You and me, no one else. And our babies.”