“I don’t have to do what you tell me to.” She shook her head, that dark, glossy hair swirling around her shoulders. “Your father would hardly have forced me into a marriage I didn’t want. He loved me. He wanted what was best for me.”
“This was what he thought was best,” Luca said. “I have documentation saying such. If you need to see it, I will have it sent to your quarters. Quarters that you inhabit, by the way, because my father cared so much for you. Because my father took an exceptional and unheard-of step in this country and treated a child he did not father as his own. He is giving you what he would have given to a daughter. A daughter of his blood. Selecting your husband, ensuring it is a man of impeccable pedigree, is what he would have done for his child. You are welcome to reject it if you wish. But I would think very deeply about what that means.”
* * *
Sophia didn’t have to think deeply about what it meant. She could feel it. Her heart was pounding so hard she thought she might pass out; small tremors running beneath the surface of her skin. Heat and ice pricking at her cheeks.
Oh, she wasn’t thinking of what this meant in the way that Luca had so imperiously demanded she do.
Luca.
Her beautiful, severe stepbrother who was much more king of a nation than he was family to her. Remote. Distant. His perfectly sculpted face only more desperately gorgeous to her now than it had been when she had met him at seventeen. He had been beautiful as a teenager. There was no question. But then, that angular bone structure had been overlaid by much softer skin, his coal-black eyes always formidable, but nothing quite so sharp as crushed obsidian as they were now. That soft skin, the skin of a boy, that was gone. Replaced by a more weathered texture. By rough, black whiskers that seemed ever present no matter how often he shaved his square jaw.
She had never in all of her life met a thing like him. A twelve-year-old girl, plucked up from obscurity, from a life of poverty and set down in this luxurious castle, had been utterly and completely at sea to begin with. And then there was him.
Everything in her had wanted to challenge him, to provoke a response from all of that granite strength, even then. Even before she had known why, or known what it meant that she craved his attention in whatever form it might come.
Gradually, it had all become clear.
And clearer still the first time she had gone to a ball and Luca had gone with another woman on his arm. That acrid, acidic curling sensation in her stomach could have only been one thing. Even at fourteen she had known that. Had known that the sweep of fever that had gone over her skin, that weak sensation that made it feel as though she was going to die, was jealousy. Jealousy because she wanted Luca to take her arm, wanted him to hold her close and dance with her.
Wanted to be the one he took back to his rooms and did all sorts of secret things with, things that she had not known about in great detail, but had yearned for all the same. Him. Everything to do with him.
As Luca had said not a moment before, he had never thought of her as a sister. He was never affectionate, never close or caring in a way that went beyond duty.
But she had never thought of him as a brother. She had thought of him in an entirely different fashion.
She wanted him.
And he was intent on marrying her off. As though it were nothing.
Not a single thing on earth could have spoken to the ambivalence that he felt toward her any stronger than this did.
He doesn’t want you.
Of course he didn’t. She wasn’t a great beauty; she was well aware of that. She was also absolutely and completely wrong for him in every way.
She didn’t excel at this royal existence the way that he did. He wore it just beneath his skin, as tailored and fitted to him as one of his bespoke suits. Born with it, as if his blood truly were a different color than that of the common people. As if he were a different creature entirely from the rest of the mere mortals.
She had done her best to put that royal mantle on, but much like every dress that had ever been made for her since coming to live at the palace, it wasn’t quite right. Oh, they could measure it all to fit, but it was clear that she wasn’t made for such things. That her exceedingly nonwaiflike figure was not for designer gowns and slinky handmade creations that would have hung fabulously off women who were more collar and hip bone than curves and love handles.
Oh, yes, she was well aware of how little she fit. And how impossible her feelings for Luca were.
And yet, they remained.
And knowing that nothing could ever happen with him, knowing it with deep certainty, had done nothing to excise it from her soul.
Did nothing to blunt the pain of this, of his words being ground into her chest like shards of glass.
Not only was he making it clear he didn’t want her, he was also using the memory of his father—the only man she had ever known as a father—to entice her to agree.
He was right. King Magnus had given her everything. Had given her mother a new lease on life, a real life. Something beyond existence, beyond struggle, which they had been mired in for all of Sophia’s life prior to her marriage to him.
He had met her when she was nothing more than a waitress at a royal event in the US, and had fallen deeply for her in the moment they met.
It was something out of a fairy tale, except there were two children to contend with. A child who had been terrified of being uprooted from her home in America and going to a foreign country to live in a fancy palace. And another child who had always clearly resented the invasion.
She had to give Luca credit for the fact that he seemed to have some measure of affection for her mother. He did not resent her presence in the way he resented Sophia’s.
She had often thought that life for Luca would have been perfect if he would have gotten her mother and his father, and she had been left out of the equation entirely.
Well, he was trying to offload her now, so she supposed that was proven to be true enough.
“That isn’t fair,” she said, when she could finally regain her powers of speech.
Luca’s impossibly dark eyes flickered up and met hers, and her stomach—traitorous fool—hollowed out in response. “It isn’t fair? Sophia, I have always known that you were ungrateful for the position that you have found yourself in your life, but you have just confirmed it in a rather stunning way. You find it unfair that my father wished to see you cared for? You find it unfair that I wish to do the same?”
“You forget,” she said, trying to regain her powers of thought. “I was not born into this life, Luca, I did not know people growing up who expected such things for their lives. I didn’t expect such a thing for mine. I spent the first twelve years of my life in poverty. But with the idea that if I worked hard enough I might be able to make whatever I wanted of myself. And then we were sort of swept up in this tidal wave of luxury. And strangely, I have found that though I have every resource at my disposal now, I cannot be what I want in the same way that I imagined I could when I was nothing but a poor child living in the United States.”
“That’s because you were a delusional child,” Luca said, his tone not cruel in any way, but somehow all the more stinging for the calm with which he spoke. “You never had the power to be whatever you wanted back then, Sophia, because no one has that power. There are a certain number of things set out before you that you might accomplish. You certainly might have improved your station. I’m not denying that. But the sky was never the limit, sorely not. Neither is it now. However, your limit is much more comfortable, you will find, than it would have been then.”
Her heart clenched tight, because she couldn’t deny that what he was saying was true. Bastard. With the maturity of adulthood she could acknowledge that. That