Page 9 of Vows to a King
She sighed and then seemed to come to some kind of decision. “Adamos…changed in the last year. He was always polite and reserved. But the last year, he was angry and…struggling. With what, I don’t know. He’d barely see your mother even. When I brought it up, begging him to seek help or advice, he snarled at me. For what it’s worth, I even asked him to reach out to you.”
“What did he say?” Adonis asked, eager for some small thread of light in the darkness that seemed to surround him from all sides.
“He said the last thing he could do is pull you back into this…pit of vipers. That after everything you went through to break away, you had earned your freedom.”
Finally, his knees gave way and Adonis half stumbled and half fell into the window seat. Leaning his head against the wall, he looked out into the courtyard, tears filling his eyes.
There was the palace wing he had once set fire to, then the highest parapet where he’d hidden after smashing some incestuous ancestor’s marble bust, and there was the room up in the most desolate wing of the palace in which he had been locked after he’d been caught debauching the wife of a crown council member when he’d been eighteen—and where Adamos had brought him food four times a day and kept him company.
Every time Adonis had enraged their father, Adamos had come to his rescue. Protected him from their father’s wrath, either by owning up to the mischief himself or by begging for leniency on Adonis’s behalf.
And then six years ago, during the mighty row between Adonis and his father, Adamos had tried his best to keep the peace. While he hadn’t been happy about Adonis’s decision to leave Thalassos, he hadn’t stopped him.
Now, he would never have a chance to tell his brother how much he had appreciated him, how much he had adored him for loving him just as he was. And he wished Adamos had reached out to him, had let him for once be the one to offer support.
Adonis blinked and darkness descended onto the courtyard, blurring and smudging all the memories fraught with ache and joy. Without his brother, there was only the former now.
When he left the past and came back to the present, Jemima was sitting at the opposite end of the window seat, her knees tucked up against her chest and her arms wrapped around them. Her amber eyes held sympathy and regret and…something more. Like she saw his grief and his loss and despite their strange relationship, could hold space for it.
She silently extended him a bottle, the amber glass nothing against the color of her eyes.
He cocked an eyebrow and took it. When he took a sip, the smooth whiskey burned his throat and lit a fire in his empty stomach. It also loosened the band of tightness that had been constricting his chest for days.
He rubbed a hand over his mouth, and her gaze followed the movement before it skidded away.
“You drink whiskey incognito. What is this? Perfect Jemima’s dirty secret?”
“One of my two vices,” she said, reaching a hand between them for the bottle. With the sun fully set, the light in the room shifted, draping her in shadows and light.
“I didn’t know what Adamos had become in the last few years. I’m sorry that he treated you with—”
“Don’t.My relationship with Adamos is not your burden. I made my peace with it a long time ago as I shall with ours, if we have one.”
“I don’t want to marry you,” he bit out. When she flinched at his abrupt tone, shame burned in his chest. Christos, was there any emotion that hadn’t touched him today? The innate fairness his mother had taught him reminded him that he was taking his frustration out on the wrong person. Whether she was as innocent as she claimed or not, Jemima Nasar owed him nothing. And yet, once again, she had seen his pain, his confusion and shown him kindness.
He clarified. “I don’t want to marry anyone.”
She snorted, spraying them both with the whiskey. “And you think I wish to marry you? You…you…think I wish to saddle myself with a man who’s so hauntingly beautiful that the world will makeBeauty and the Beastmemes of us? You think I wish to be trapped in marriage with a man who thinks I’m a grubby social climber? Who has never committed to a woman for more than a weekend?”
He laughed then and it was the first liberating emotion he’d felt in days. It burst free from deep in his stomach, burning up through his chest, filling his throat with a cleansing fire.
Jemima shot to her feet, her movements as ungainly as a duckling flapping in its mother’s wake. Hand on one hip, looking thoroughly un-queen-like, she rolled her eyes.
And that strict, schoolmarm expression set him off a little more.
He grinned up at her. “You’re something else, Ms. Nasar.”
“I can appreciate your ability to find humor in a horrible situation, Prince Adonis,” she said with a long sigh. “Except I have a feeling you’re laughing at me. As will the world when it learns of this…new partnership.”
“I’m laughing atus,” Adonis corrected, wiping the combination of tears and whiskey from his mouth. “At how fate catches us all in the end. Although I must admit that only you could make me laugh at a time like this.”
“I can get a T-shirt made that saysKing’s Jesterthen,” she quipped, warmth filling her eyes. And just like that, Adonis could see the beauty in her, making her glow from inside.
Then there was the realization that he was thoroughly enjoying sparring with her. Just enjoying himself in the very place that he had always been so very unhappy.
He didn’t trust that this lightness she brought out in him would last forever but it would make the next few months at least interesting.
“I think you’ll be too busy keeping me in line and being my queen,ne?” he said, accepting the inevitable.
