“I’m so sorry I didn’t return your calls,” I say. “You have every right to be upset.”
She sizes me up with a deliberate coolness.
“I owe you the truth,” I declare. “Several truths.”
She pulls up a chair and plonks herself into it. “Go ahead.”
I sit down by her side and tell her about Mount Evor and myself. I show her pictures and videos in my phone, and watch her face slowly change from disbelief to cautious acceptance.
“That explains a lot about your weird behavior,” she says. “And about Kurt’s.”
She doesn’t seem overly impressed by my title. I’m not sure why, but I love it.
“Will you forgive me?” I ask.
“For what?”
“For keeping you in the dark.”
“Raison d’état,” she says with a shrug. “I don’t blame you for it.”
That was easy!“Also, for leaving you.”
She cocks her head. “Tell me, what happened? Trouble with the fiancée? Existential crisis?”
Right.She won’t make it too easy for me. But then, why would she?
“There was never a fiancée,” I say. “But there was a woman, an Evorian count’s daughter. I was going to propose to her.”
“But you had a change of heart?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
I search her face. “You see, I used to think that bloodlines matter, that families and titles matter.”
“And now you don’t?”
“I realized something today.”
She plunges her hazel gaze into mine, waiting.
I collect my thoughts. “I’d settled on this idea that for me marriage would be no more than a mutually beneficial transaction.”
“How bleak!”
“Yeah, but that’s how I viewed my lot in life. I’m a crown prince with a pedigree to maintain, but I’m also an ugly motherfucker. I never hoped for something real.”
“And now?”
“Now I think life is too short, and fate is too brutal, to turn one’s back to love.”
She stares at me, her lips parting.
Encouraged by that, I scoot closer and take her hand. “I want you in my life, Elise. By my side, in my world. In Pombrio.”
“What, at the château?”
