He refused to put weight to that. Refused to apply significance.
They ate their dinner as the sun set into the sea, and Andrei did his best to ignore her beauty, his reaction to it, how sore his chest felt.
He was not a man given to rumination. He knew his mission, he knew what he had to do. He had accepted a long time ago that there would be no love for him. No happy ending. No wife, no children. It was better that way. Better that he not continue with a poisonous bloodline. Better that he simply focus on serving Onyx and Emerald, being their protector, being everything that they needed him to be.
That was what he had chosen. It was the path that he walked. He couldn’t deviate from it now that Emerald was getting married.
He had always known this day would come. He hadn’t anticipated that he would have to watch it happen. That he would have to stand by and attend to her new life with her new husband. But he hadn’t anticipated her selling herself to a man who might be dangerous.
“I know you think you don’t want to meet anybody, but you might,” she said.
“I won’t,” he said, his voice flat. He looked at her profile, graceful and elegant. The swoop of her nose, the curve of those red lips. He had met someone. She was the only person that he would ever meet who did this to him. He had read once about courtly love. About knights who devoted themselves to ladies and accepted the fact that it would never be physical. That it would never be anything other than honor and protection. That was how this would be. Always.
“We’re going to go to Alabria, and who knows? The court might be filled with beautiful women.”
“I will not be part of the court. You and your brother do not observe protocol the way that everyone else in the world does. A bodyguard, even if he is the head of security, is not part of the royal family. Nor will he ever be.”
“I will insist that you are included.”
“And I am not asking that of you.”
“Well, I want you to be included. When there is a party, when our wedding celebration happens, I want you to be there as a guest.”
“I will be guarding the proceedings to make sure it isn’t a red wedding, so to speak.”
“You are so grim.”
“I’m paid to be grim. It is my job to be grim, and to be distrustful of the world.”
“Will you at least dance with me at my wedding?”
He felt like he had been punched in the stomach. “You know full well a queen cannot dance with a commoner. Ever. Least of all at her own wedding.”
“We danced before,” she said softly.
He looked at her, their eyes meeting, holding. The impossibility of her request revealing in so many ways. Revealing things he’d never allowed him to see. A mirror of his own heart.
Yes. He remembered that ill-fated event. Far too clearly. He chose never to think about it. Chose to keep that firmly locked away in the deep, dark recesses of his memory. It had been a mistake. She had been just eighteen, and it had been her birthday party. She’d asked him to dance, and then she’d taken his hand in hers. She was so soft. Her fingers slim, her frame petite, and as he pulled her body against his he had felt desire like he’d never known before.
Need that went beyond the physical.
He wanted her. He wanted to cup her face in his hands and kiss her, but he wanted more than that. He wanted to be close to her, not just skin to skin, but something deeper.
Something he wasn’t able to articulate or explain.
He could feel it echo inside him now.
“I don’t think we will dance at your wedding.”
“Then you should dance with me now,” she said.
She was pushing. There was an edge to her now, and it was cutting deeply into him.
He wanted to tell her no. He wanted to scold her. Why? The only reason to do that would be… For the shameful, secret reasons that he kept buried inside himself. As far as she was concerned, the dance on her eighteenth birthday had been innocent. He was the only one who knew that it wasn’t, and he would take that to his grave.
Why not? Why not take this one last chance to touch her? To hold her. Why not dance with her one last time?
He would not do it at her wedding. He would not do it when she was married to another man. He refused.
