“Go back to sleep.” His words were stilted and brittle, tin men in the face of the raw honesty she offered.
“You’re leaving.”
She didn’t say it as a question, and for some reason that rankled him more.
“I have work to do.”
“At this hour?”
“At all hours. A king is never off duty,” he snapped.
“Typically, it requires a national emergency to force the King into working in the wee hours. Unless I missed an emergency, I can’t imagine what is calling you.”
This time when he snapped, it wasn’t just his voice. “Tonight was an emergency, Mina. An enormous disaster. What’s ‘calling me’ is the need to get my head out of whateverthisis—” he gestured toward her and the bed “—and back into my work. Unlike you, Mina, people depend on my ability to do my job well.”
She winced, her fists tightening on the sheets, but didn’t break eye contact with him. “There’s no reason to be nasty.”
But she was wrong. There was every reason. He had made a fool of himself, and therefore a fool of Cyrano. And all over her.
“There is every reason to be nasty. I swore to myself I would not make the same mistakes my father made—that I would never put my own feelings before the health and safety of my country.”
“I don’t see how tonight—” she began.
But he cut her off. “Of course you don’t see. You may be brilliant, Mina, but don’t kid yourself. You’re no political mind. Tonight was a travesty, and it was all because I couldn’t keep my head together.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
Her obvious desire to soothe him only added fuel to the fire.
“You, Mina. I’m talking aboutyou. When you’re around I lose control, and that’s something a king can’t afford. I’m not willing to put the kingdom at risk because I’m in love with you, Mina.”
The words shot out—an accusation even more than a confession.
They hung in the air between them, heavy, throbbing, raw.
She searched his face, capturing his gaze with her green and golden stare before asking. “You’re in love with me?”
The air whooshed out of him silently, as if he’d been punched in the gut. Still the words hung suspended in air, almost visible, seeming so tangible. She waited for him to answer, and there was grace rooted in her quiet steel. She waited for the truth.
He nodded.
When he did not offer more, she frowned. Then she nodded too, the movement a communication with herself rather than a response to his gesture. It was sinking in—what he was saying to her.
Finally, after the silence had stretched between them and gone past comfortable, she asked, “And you think that’s a threat to national security? So you’re leaving me, in secret, in the middle of the night?”
Looking deep into the clear sage of her eyes, noting their growing sheen, he pinched off the voice inside him that said he could forge a new path—a stronger path—with the woman he loved at his side, and instead he answered her, “Yes.”
He saw his words strike her, saw the gutted agony flash across her gaze and even felt it in himself. He wrenched at it, writhing even as he stood motionless, watching her collapse inside herself. And, unable to bear witness to the havoc he was wreaking, he turned on his heel and walked out.
He walked through the twisting corridors all the way to his office, where he locked himself in on the pretense that he needed to begin developing damage control strategies with Farden.
Six drinks later he’d spent no time thinking about Farden. Alone in his office, and drunker than he typically allowed himself to get, the reins on his mind turned invariably to Mina. Always Mina.
The sharp, raw edges of that hole inside him offered clarity at least. He needed to get away from her. He couldn’t go to the summer palace. Not now. Not after the time they’d spent there. Her memory would be everywhere. It would be like surrounding himself with potent traces of the woman he couldn’t shake off.
He needed to get away from her—and sooner rather than later. Only time and distance would be sufficient to suffocate the thing that had taken root inside him.
He arrived in Paris through a private airport just before three a.m. A driver took him from there to the apartment his family kept on the Champs-Élysées, and he watched the dark streets of the City of Lights pass by through his window. The cobblestoned streets and sidewalks were deserted this deep into the night, eacharrondissementat quiet rest in preparation for another day of making up the city of Paris.