No man had ever said anything like that to her before. The nuns recognized that she was intelligent. But her father hadn’t. Her brothers hadn’t. If her mother had, she would never have said.
She had to resist the urge to feel pleased with her kidnapper.
“I could have been smart, or I could have been defeated growing up in the palace like I did. But my options were limited. It really was one or the other.”
“You have a room prepared for you at the palace.” She stared at him. “I was not going to force you into my bed.”
She felt her face getting even hotter. “I didn’t say that you were.” Now she was reassuring her kidnapper? What was the matter with her? “I didn’t accuse you of anything, but I wanted to make my stance clear.”
“Are you a nun?”
“No. Though maybe I would like the chance to decide if I want to be one. Maybe I want the chance to decide if I want to be a pole dancer. Maybe I just want the chance. The choice.”
“What a sweet, modern idea. Choices are rarely actually available. And even when they are, they’re generally an illusion.”
“That’s not true,” she said.
“You challenge me?” he asked, clearly shocked.
She was used to men like him, though. It was true that in the space of only a few hours he’d shown her more respect than her father had in years, but that was more of a commentary on her father than on him.
But he didn’t intimidate her—maybe he should. But what would he do? Hurt her and start a war? He wanted her for diplomacy and the truth was, he needed her.
In many ways, she’d probably never been safer.
It made her want to laugh except it wasn’t funny.
“Yes. I do challenge you, because no one ever has, clearly, and they should. You men love to tell yourself you have no choice when in fact it simply means you take whatever it is you want. Saying there is no choice is an attempt at insulating yourself from argument. You didn’t accidentally take the throne back over from an evil dictatorship. You had a choice, and you made your choice.”
He laughed. Hard. Low. Rolling. It didn’t make her feel amused, no. It chilled her. All the way down to her bones.
“Fernanda—” he used her name for the first time “—I bled for this. I fought my way up from nothing, for this. Perhaps, as yousay, there was a choice, but as far as I’m concerned this was a mandate created in my very bones.”
She gazed back up at him, and swallowed hard. “That is spoken like a man. You believe that you’re the only one in the world who can accomplish this, but you need to use me? I’m just an accessory to your goal, and as long as you say that there’s no choice it justifies it?”
“You think that your happiness is more important than that of an entire country?”
“I have spent my entire life being told that I’m inconsequential. I cannot be nothing to my father, a thing to be manipulated and moved around at will, and yet essential to this.”
“I never said you were inconsequential, and the truth is your father doesn’t believe you are either. If he did, he never would have hidden you away at the convent. He would never have used you as a bargaining chip in the first place. This much you can know for certain. I have certainly never said you had no value. I would not have run you down on my horse if you didn’t.”
“Perhaps,” she said, still making eye contact with him. “And if you had any sense of fairness you would have tried to capture me in a foot race so that we were evenly matched.”
He nearly laughed; she was glad that he didn’t. Because the sound of his voice, his laughter, was in no way pleasant. “Little one, I was not striving for fairness. I was intending to win. Rules and warfare are for other men. The stakes in this are too high for me to leave anything up to chance. For now, we have an agreement.”
“And how am I supposed to know you’ll honor it?”
He looked her up and down again, like she was a mere object. “You don’t. You can only choose to take my word or not. But at the end of the day, any negotiating we have done is out of thegoodness of my heart. You are my captive. And you will take what I give you.”
Anger spiked in her blood, and she took a step forward, forcing herself to continue to look into those fathomless blue eyes. “You see how far you get if you have to drag me kicking and screaming off this plane. You see how well your plan works if your bride is a captive for all the world to see.”
“You have to trust me,” he said. “I have given you my word. I’m not your father. And I am not the man who held this position before me. I am the rightful king, and my only aim was to restore this country to its former glory, and then some. If you cannot trust in the goodness that may or may not lurk in my heart, trust in that. I do not care if it is you or any other woman who is by my side in my later years. I do not care if you are the one to give me an heir. All I care about is this. This moment. This agreement.”
Whether she should or not, she believed that. Those callous words that might have wounded her if she cared even a little bit. But it was to her advantage that he didn’t have any designs on her. To her advantage that he didn’t care about her one way or the other. Specifically.
There had never been a silver lining to being a political pawn. There was now.
He stood tall, and held out his arm, and she looked at him for a moment before realizing what she was intended to do. Then she took a step toward him, and placed her hand over his forearm, and allowed him to escort her from the room.
