CHAPTER SIX
SHE HAD BEEN silent the rest of the ride back the palace. He supposed that it was probably a no, but he wasn’t going to let her get away with not giving an answer. In his mind, it just meant he had to change hers.
“I’m tired,” she said, once they reached the entryway of the palace. “I’m going to my room.”
“I shall accompany you.”
“No, you shall not,” she said, starting to walk away from him, down an empty corridor, away from where the servants were bustling around.
“Then we will speak here.”
“No, we won’t.”
He went to stand in front of her and she stopped and backed up quickly, her back making contact with the wall. “Yes,” he said, advancing on her. “We will.”
He studied her face, really studied it, for the first time since that day at the convent. It was a shame what had been done to her beauty. She’d been uncommon. He could remember her clearly. Those full pink lips, smooth skin, perfectly arched brows. Oh, he had wanted her badly. He could still remember that.
Being twenty-one and wanting his fiancée with a ferocity that he could scarcely understand. He’d been no virgin, even then, but she’d made him feel like one. And his father had made it clear Xander wasn’t allowed to touch her, at least not until closer to the wedding. Something about respect and honor. About preserving the people’s vision of their future queen.
So he had obeyed.
But they never would have made it that long. The chemistry had been too potent.
He’d nearly kissed her once. He remembered because it had happened the day before his mother’s death. The day before the revelation about who he really was.
After that, he hadn’t seen her.
He lifted his hand and put his fingertips on her scar-roughened cheek, drawing them down her neck. He could imagine the attack clearly, how it had made these particular scars. A hard hit to her cheek, spray over her nose, eye and forehead, down one side of her neck.
The other side of her face was virtually untouched, but it made her scars all the more shocking. It gave them contrast. A living, breathing before-and-after shot.
“Can you feel that?” he asked.
She nodded slowly. “Some. Where the grafts are.”
“Some of this is a graft?”
“Yes. Not...nothing more than was necessary because I couldn’t bear for them to add more scars to my body and...it would never have looked normal anyway. As it is, it’s kind of Frankenstein’s monster.”
“You’re hardly a monster,” he said.
“Flattery won’t get you your way,” she said, her tone guarded, hard.
He dropped his hand back to his side. “I don’t need flattery. You must see that this is going to be a challenge. We were going to marry, we wanted to marry.”
“A lifetime ago. A face ago.”
“Your face doesn’t matter to me.”
She laughed, a bitter sound. “For God’s sake, Xander, don’t lie. It insults us both.”
“It doesn’t matter. I won’t be coy with you, Layna. I have to take a wife someday and when I do it will be because she specifically brings a benefit to my position and to Kyonos as a country. At the moment I think you’re the most beneficial wife for me. My personal feelings for you as an individual, or for your looks, have no bearing on anything. I doubt I should be faithful to any woman I marry, so I don’t see how wild attraction is an issue, either.”
She jerked back as though he’d slapped her. “You’re asking me to marry you, knowing you don’t truly want me, and admitting to me that you will sleep with other women?”
“I’m being honest with you. It’s how I would treat any marriage to any woman.”
“And why is it you won’t be faithful?”
“Does it matter if you aren’t truly vying for the position?”
“Pretend I’m considering it,” she said, “indulge my curiosities.”
He shrugged, a vague sense of shame washing over him as he looked at the woman he would have promised his life to years ago and spoke of planned faithlessness. As he realized that, had he married her as a beauty queen, he would have been unfaithful to her even then.
He’d been young. In lust, not in love. The center of his own universe. Certain of his absolute entitlement.
The moment he’d gotten hard for another woman he would have had her without a thought, no matter the vows he’d made to Layna, because that was the manner of man he’d been. Now...he had no practice in restraint. In turning away from the various and sundry pleasures of the flesh. He’d spent their years apart bathing in them because if he couldn’t get clean, then he would at least cover his transgressions in new layers of sin and hope that people never looked deeper. Hoped that he never had to look deeper.