A FEW DAYS LATER, Amalia returned from a long late afternoon walk to find one of the few members of staff on the island waiting for her at the top of the private path that led to the dungeon villa.
“If you would like to change for dinner,” the woman said deferentially, “Señor Vargas waits for you on the lower patio.”
“Are you sure?” Amalia asked in surprise. Then flushed a bit when the woman shot her a quizzical look. She knew better than to make personal remarks to people who could not, by virtue of their position, respond in kind. Friendly does not mean friends, Esme had drilled into her. “I mean, of course. Thank you. I’ll get there as soon as I can.”
She hurried down the path, pulling open the heavy front door that always made her shiver a bit for those who’d been locked up behind it, and half expected him to be inside. No doubt laughing at whatever joke this was, or waiting to pounce and examine her every last facial expression to see if he could discern her actual feelings. Then demolish them.
But the villa was empty. Amalia hurried through her shower, realizing as she soaped herself up and rinsed it all away that she couldn’t recall the last time she’d taken a shower by herself. Normally, it was only one more venue to experiment with all that just sex they were having.
After he’d left her in the rain the way he had, she had not faced the prospect he’d laid out before her with anything approaching equanimity.
On the contrary, she had cried.
A lot.
Her tears had been indistinguishable from the rain and she’d taken that as a kind of blessing. But she’d still slid all the way down to the base of that palm tree, cradled her head in her arms, and cried.
Because everything in her life had been taken away from her and it didn’t matter whether she’d wanted those things or not. She’d spent twenty-five years believing they were hers.
Her mother being one of them.
And yet all the commentary—whether from so-called news sources, or the Queen’s inner circle of courtiers and aides, or even Joaquin—all seemed to be in agreement on one thing. That this was all somehow her fault.
As if she, at three days old, had set out to usurp a throne located halfway across the planet.
As if, a voice had whispered inside her while the rain poured down, your entire goal during your first summer here was to hurt Joaquin as much as you could.
When the reality was, she had been so naive that it had never occurred to her to guard herself against him. She had fallen so fast and so hard that it had been all over in a single glance. And the only reason she’d managed to force herself to do what had to be done in the end was because she had been so besotted with Joaquin that she couldn’t bear the thought of the alternative.
Which was Queen Esme doing what she could not.
She might have channeled her mother when she’d spoken to him, but she had still been far kinder to him than Esme would have been. Yet how could she explain that to him?
Amalia had been the Crown Princess of a pretty little island that most people treated as if it was a real-life fairy tale. No one would believe, ever, that she hadn’t known what she was doing. That she hadn’t been fully in control of everything that had happened here.
Deep down, she suspected Joaquin still thought that, too.
And that day in the rainstorm, the injustice of it all had left her heaving with sobs she usually kept locked away deep inside.
She’d cried and cried.
But then, eventually, the sobs had stopped.
Amalia had let the rain wash her face clean. She’d sat there, letting the storm pound into her, and she’d let go of the injustice. The unfairness.
Maybe, she’d whispered to herself, this is what you deserve.
Because she hadn’t always been a good person, had she? She’d let her mother guide her too completely. Any enemy of Esme’s had been an enemy of hers, that went without saying. Esme’s opinions, on everything and anything, had been her guide. Even when she’d had the opportunity to act any way she pleased, in a situation Esme knew nothing about and could never know anything about, she’d defaulted to cruelty.
How could Amalia blame Joaquin for refusing to engage with her now when she’d treated him that way back then? Surely if she had half the heart she liked to pretend she did, she would not have been capable of saying the things she’d said to him then.
It didn’t matter that she’d hurt herself, too.
Maybe what she really needed to accept was that she’d come here, not because she was after freedom. But because she needed forgiveness.
And maybe the only path to forgiveness available to her wasn’t the one she wanted. Maybe she and Joaquin really would throw themselves headfirst into this passion until there was none left, and it would all dissolve into indifference.
Maybe, at the end of the day, that was the best version of forgiveness she was going to get.
That was why she’d gone to find him in the shower that day. That was why she’d simply accepted everything he’d said to her.
And in the days since, she hadn’t attempted to provoke him. To poke or to prod for answers she liked, or to get him to admit that the intensity between them meant something. Because even if it did, he didn’t want it to.
She supposed after the way she’d treated him, she deserved that, too.
Tonight, when she was out of the shower, she took her time with her toilette. She didn’t often get the opportunity to dress here, and she’d missed it. Carelessly romping about in the Spanish sun was all very well, but she also liked the sultry lick of bold lipstick across her lips. The slick of mascara on her lashes.
Amalia knew he didn’t like her chignon, so she gathered her hair up in something much looser and more inviting on the top of her head, letting tendrils fall where they would. Then she slipped into a shimmering column of a dress that she had bought on a whim but had never worn to any official function, because it was cut much too high on the thigh, and had no back to speak of.
Queen Esme would not have approved.
And only when Amalia approved of her reflection from every angle did she make her way back up the path. She crossed through the lobby, then headed down again on the other side of the old fortress, heading toward the patio that sat on a cliff out on the edge of the island, offering captivating views of the sea beyond.
They claimed Barcelona was visible on a clear day if conditions were right, though she’d never seen it. Then again, it was possible she’d never looked. She had always been far more focused on what was on the island than what might be around it.
She passed the patio where she’d met Joaquin for the first time, long ago, nestled far closer to the hotel. Seeing it made her smile as she kept going down the path, enjoying the soft evening air as she moved. The pathway was lit with small lanterns throwing off just enough light to make it from one to the next, leading her down a gentle slope toward the cliff’s edge.
When she got there, Joaquin was waiting.
He, too, had dressed for the evening, and looked nothing short of commanding as he stood there at the rail at the edge of the cliffs. He was gazing at her as if he’d known the exact moment she would appear.
And as she crossed the patio to his side, Amalia couldn’t help imagining what that look on his face might have meant, if they were other people...
As if she needed help to break her own heart.
“I’m surprised you wanted to eat together,” she said when he took her hand in one of his and, astonishingly, lifted it to his lips. Her heart flipped over inside her chest, though she tried to ignore it. “I would have thought that doesn’t go along with your...stated aims.”
“You are here, are you not? I might as well enjoy your company.”
But his tone was gruff. His eyes were too green. And something in her chest seem to clutch around the notion that this, somehow, was an apology.
The only one she was likely to get from this proud, hard man.
Amalia cautioned herself not to read too much into it as he led her over to a table that had been exultantly, meticulously prepared for an intimate party of two. It sat beneath a pretty canopy that blocked the breeze and any curious eyes from back at the fortress. Joaquin helped her into her seat, then took his own. And for a moment, she could confuse the odd butterflies in her stomach with the bustle of his staff around them as they poured out the wine, then served a first course, a small whimsy from the chef.
But when they melted off into the shadows again, she was left with Joaquin. And the sea. And the quiet all around them, as if this was the sort of date they’d indulged in that first summer, when sex had only been a part of what was happening between them.
That silly, fluttery reaction inside of her kept rolling around inside her, because this was the first time they had sat at a table like civilized adults since she’d arrived here. She understood that it was deliberate. Looking back, she should have known that from day one. He was keeping everything about sex and happenstance on purpose, when she knew perfectly well that he was capable of providing any experience that might take his fancy.
Five-star dining on a cliff above the sea on a whim, for example.
But somehow, even though she tried what was on the plate before her, she could hardly make sense of it. The only thing she could seem to concentrate on was the turmoil inside her.
Possibly because, here, dressed in the sort of armor she had always used to her advantage before, what was happening inside her seemed far more obvious. Because all the rest of the time they spent together, the only thing she could focus on was that greedy passion that she was certain was the ruin of her.
It had already ruined her. She’d known that for years already.
But she couldn’t handle the way he seemed so content to sit there and brood at her.
“I think a lot these days about the sorts of things I take for granted that I never would have known if I’d stayed where I belonged,” she said. For something to say that cut through all that dark green brooding. She waved her hand over the formal place setting before her. “Take something as simple as plates and utensils. I somehow think that place settings like this do not feature heavily on a Kansas farm.” Amalia smiled as she said it. “Though in truth, I have no idea. For all I know, the woman who gave birth to me speaks of nothing, night and day, but appropriate table manners for all occasions.”
“Table manners are nothing but a gateway,” Joaquin said, as if he was handing down judgment.
He lounged there across from her, toying with his glass of wine, and his green eyes seemed to burn straight through her. “There’s nothing the upper class enjoys more than the hoops it creates to keep upstarts and commoners out of its ranks.”
“I tried a similar argument with one of my governesses when I was small.” Amalia lifted her own wine to her lips to taste it, not at all surprised to find it was spectacular. “She was unmoved. And made me sit with a heavy book on my head to improve my posture while thinking about the error of my ways.”
“I took a relatively high-class lover after I made my first fortune,” Joaquin told her, as if this was the sort of thing they discussed all the time. So casual. So sophisticated. His lovers. She took a rather larger gulp of her wine. “She was a mistake for many reasons.”
“Oh, by all means, enlighten me,” Amalia replied as nonchalantly as possible, because she was certain this was some kind of a test. She had romantic feelings for him, as they had both agreed she wouldn’t, and so, surely, she would react badly to details of his legions of other women. And in truth, it felt a lot like tearing off a scab to lean forward and smile encouragingly at him, as if what she really wanted was a close, personal tour through all the women he had loved before her.
She had to hope that love in this context was nothing but a euphemism. Not that it really made her feel all that much better to imagine Joaquin involved in the kind of wild, passionate acts they’d experienced together—but with someone else. With a great many someone elses.
But he was studying her face far too closely, and Amalia would throw herself off the cliff in front of them before she’d give him the satisfaction of seeing how this hurt her.
“She was like most of these high-class girls,” he said with a certain casual disregard that set her teeth on edge. By design, she was certain. “You know how they are. Wholly unaware of how lucky they were to have been born into their position. Always so bored, for some reason, when the whole world is right there at their disposal. And, of course, deeply selfish in bed.”
She had been prepared to be quietly outraged and outwardly impassive. But Amalia found herself frowning at him instead. “I don’t think I know what that means.”
His green eyes gleamed. “Do you not?”
“As you pointed out, so memorably, you are the only lover I’ve ever had. Am I selfish? Are you? How would I know?”
His gaze grew more intense and he leaned forward, reaching over to take her hand in his. And even that made her pulse leap. Even that made her body shiver into readiness, because she was so attuned to him now that all he needed to do was look at her in a certain way and she would simply ignite.
“One of the things that astonishes me about you, Princess, is that no matter your cruelty when it suits you, you are anything but selfish,” he told her in that roughly stirring way of his. “Particularly in bed. And that is what many people do not understand. Good sex has nothing to do with tricks or positions. It is about pleasure. And a certain generosity of intent.”
Amalia felt herself get warm. Everywhere. “I had no idea you were such a...master of the form.”
She saw a flash of his teeth, that hint of a smile that made her feel almost embarrassingly giddy. “I think, Amalia, that you know very well that I am.”
He let go of her hand to sit back in his chair again, still smiling while she turned pink all over. And stayed that warm, despite herself, when he kept telling his story.
“She was very boring, of course, this heiress,” Joaquin said, as if that was obvious. As if heiresses in his experience were expected to be boring unless they proved themselves otherwise. “But useful. Like many of her ilk, her primary purpose in life was to irritate her father. And like most of them, she is now married to the tedious man her father chose for her, but only after having tortured her whole family with her terrible choices. Like me.” He smiled, but this smile had more of a razor’s edge. “She used me for her own ends. I used her for polish. Everyone likes a diamond in the rough, Amalia. But only because it is a diamond. It is not the rough that appeals.”
“You seem so...unabashed,” she replied, still warmer than she ought to have been, given the subject matter. “I was under the impression that most people at least pretend that the heart is what leads them.”
“Some pay for school. Some have tutors.” He shrugged. “I chose my lovers wisely.”
“Not everyone can be so wise,” she said, and realized she sounded far more wistful than she should have.
“Queen Esme did not make a list of marriageable suitors for you because she liked them.” And there was that steel in his voice again, then. “Or because she thought you would. All of her choices were strategic, always. For the benefit of Ile d’Montagne, not you.”
Amalia felt a bit less warm and pink, then. “Yes, but I was—”
“The heir to the kingdom. I am aware. I did not have the good fortune to be born so well situated.” He didn’t say that with his usual dark undercurrent. Perhaps that was progress. “I did not intend to allow myself to be locked out of anywhere I wished to go. Or anything I wished to do. If I have a secret weapon, as my enemies are so certain I do, it is this. As soon as I identify something I need to learn, I dedicate myself to learning it. My adversaries will always think they have one upon me, with their fancy schools and their pedigrees and their silver spoon friendships from the cradle.” Another shrug. “I certainly don’t need to give them ammunition because I don’t know which fork to use.”
She mulled that over as the staff returned, taking away her untouched plate, and replacing it with another one, heaped with another demonstration of the chef’s prowess. But still, she wasn’t hungry. She watched instead as Joaquin picked up what was inarguably the correct fork, and dug in.
Really, she ought to do the same. “What happens when you’ve conquered all the things that need conquering,” she asked him instead. “Do you even have a plan? Or are you simply trying to own as many things as it is possible to own before you die?”
“Only people who have never had to worry about money,” Joaquin said, very quietly, “imagine that gathering it is not an end in itself.”
“I suppose this is where, like all the lovers you had and disdain, I should apologize for the accident of my birth. Or rather, the proximity of my birth to that of the actual heir to the kingdom of Ile d’Montagne. An accident twice over, it seems.”
“But that is the trouble with apologies, Amalia.” She was caught, again, in that flash of impossible green. “Who is it that they really serve?”
He returned his attention to the meal before him as if he had merely commented on the weather. Amalia did the same, staring down at her plate and then eating the food there—also with the correct utensils—though she could not have said what it was.
Because what was clear to her, finally, was that there was no forgiveness to be found here. She suspected he might even know that was what she wanted. What was obvious to her, at last, was that he had no intention of providing it.
This was a man who had dated women he didn’t like so he could learn table manners.
Really, what had she expected?
Amalia suddenly felt remarkably old, then. Exhausted, perhaps. Because she had loved him and lost him once, and that had changed her life. She had gone on as she always had, because that was what had been required of her.
But she had never been the same.
She had spent a lot less time wishing she could be normal, whatever that was. She had focused much more intently on living up to her mother’s expectations, partly because she had known—even if Esme had not—that Amalia had already let her down. But also because she had left Joaquin to be what her mother expected her to be. She had left him, and badly, so that she could be the most perfect Crown Princess the island had ever seen.
Having lost so much, how could she possibly give the life she’d chosen anything but her all?
Now she’d lost that life, too. And she still couldn’t have him. Not the way she wanted him. He would never forgive her. Never.
And Amalia did not think she had it in her to be nothing but a cautionary tale he would tell someday, about his lovers.
“This was not my finest idea,” he said over coffee, when their meal was done. Done, though Amalia had hardly tasted a thing. “I’m too used to having you. Looking at you across a table is torture.”
Because the only thing between them was sex, as far as he was concerned. Why couldn’t she accept that? Why did she keep imagining it could be different? Joaquin wasn’t the problem. He had been perfectly clear.
She was the problem.
And even knowing that, she wanted him.
In any way she could have him.
“There are many kinds of torture,” she said, which was perhaps unwise. She made herself smile when his dark brows rose. “Look at where we sleep every night. It’s a wonder we can rest at all, with all the things that must have occurred within those walls. You do know they call it the Spanish Inquisition, do you not? That’s for a reason.”
He laughed, surprising her, when everything within her felt dire and fraught. “And here I thought you slept untroubled by anything. I blame myself. I must dedicate myself to tiring you out.”
Sex, she thought again. Always sex.
It was really almost funny. Amalia had spent all those years dreaming of things like this each night. And now that she had him a thousand ways a day, she wanted...something else. Something more.
Not because the sex wasn’t good. The trouble was that it was earth-shattering. Life-altering.
But he pretended it wasn’t. He pretended it meant nothing.
When she could still remember too well how it had felt when he had openly adored her. When she had been so heedlessly, so recklessly in love with him and he had treated her as if she was rare and precious to him.
And there had been a little too much nothing in her life lately. Finding out she was nothing, for example. Then being treated like she was nothing by the entire world.
Now, this. More nothing.
Amalia wanted, more than anything, to be something. To be someone.
It didn’t matter who. She just wanted to be someone, at last. And important in some small way to someone else.
And when she let herself think that, it seemed to take hold of her. It seemed to roll through her, marking her, shifting things around inside her. It made her understand, for better or worse, that it might be the one thing she wanted more than him.
“You’re looking at me strangely,” Joaquin said, and she wondered how long she’d been sitting like this. Staring at him and wishing things could be different. “It is as I thought. We are not meant to sit about making conversation, you and I. We have better things to do.”
“What if I set you a challenge?” Amalia set her delicate coffee cup down, with a decisive click of the cup against its saucer. “Just a small challenge.”
“To what end?” he asked, because he was always the businessman. He was all about angles and inroads, and the best possible way to get the most while giving very little.
She supposed she had always known that, too.
“There’s no end, Joaquin.”
She paused a moment, because she felt as if she was poised on a precipice, and not because this patio sat on the top of a cliff. Not because she could hear the sea against the rocks down below. But because of him.
He might think the time they’d spent together was a physical release, nothing more. Weeks upon weeks of it.
But she knew him. In ways she had never known another human being.
And she understood the world in a different way now, too. All the things she’d watched, or read, or heard talked about. All the ways that people interacted with each other, where sex infused everything. Looking forward to having it, wishing they had it, missing when they’d had it before. The world spun around and around the axis of sex, and it was impossible to think about it at all without realizing how profoundly it affected everyone who partook.
And yet men like Joaquin wanted to stand about and claim it meant nothing. That it was like going to the gym and getting a sweat going, if that.
Amalia fully comprehended that this was little more than a distancing attempt on his part. She even understood why. She had hurt him. He wanted to hurt her, and even better, keep from feeling anything for her again.
But she was here. She was taking part in all of this meaningless physical release with him. Joaquin might have thought that he could hide himself there. He couldn’t.
The fact was, physical intimacy was intimacy whether he liked it or not.
Bodies couldn’t keep up this kind of sustained connection without forming other connections, too. She wasn’t as naive as she’d been when she was twenty, thanks to him. So she knew that just because it was intimacy—emotional as well as physical, after all this time—that didn’t mean he was going to admit that they were having the relationship they were having.
It also didn’t mean she was required to pretend they weren’t.
“What if we didn’t have sex?” She threw that out there with remarkable calm, when inside, she shook. “For a week. Or even a day. Just to see what happens.”
He looked at her for a long moment. Too long. She saw a kind of knowledge in his green eyes that she didn’t want to admit was there. As if he knew exactly why she was asking this question. And more, what it would mean to her if he agreed.
“Why would we do that?” Joaquin asked with a soft menace she desperately wanted to mistake for something else. But couldn’t. “Sex is the only reason we are both here, Amalia. As well you know.”
There was a finality to that. A certainty that she’d missed before. Or maybe she just hadn’t been able to take it on board, too concerned with her own shortcomings. Too worried about whether or not he would ever forgive her.
He wouldn’t. Because he didn’t want to. And that was that.
At long last, Amalia let that settle in on her. She let it take root. And she had been through a whole gauntlet of discovery over the past few months. Mostly she’d discovered that she was nothing and nobody, despite having been raised to be a very specific somebody, fulfilling a very precise role.
This was different.
How could she willingly, knowingly subject herself to life without any hint of love when she was suddenly free to have any life she wanted? What was wrong with her that she wanted to stay here with a man who actively and only wanted, if not to hurt her, then to make certain she never, ever felt comfortable with him? A man who had made it clear in a thousand ways that because of what happened before, she could never deserve any better from him?
Why, after everything she’d gone through, was she signing up for this already long-lost battle?
I wanted you to know that I love you, too. And I missed you when you were gone, Catherine Clark had said in that voice mail.
Across space and time, she was loved. As she was not loved here. And maybe it was time Amalia went and looked for love where it was offered.
It sounded so simple. Maybe all these games of princesses and billionaires had confused the issue. It was time for cornfields, ruby slippers, and the one person on this earth who didn’t seem to have the slightest bit of trouble claiming she loved Amalia.
She didn’t know why she’d waited so long.
“You don’t have to do it, of course,” she said now. She met his gaze and held it. She did not whimper. Or cry. “But I’m tired of sex, Joaquin. I’m tired of physical releases and nothing else.” And you, she wanted to say, though she wasn’t that brave. Because it wasn’t precisely true. Like everything involving Joaquin, it was more complicated than that. “I’m going to Kansas.”