“Of course. This is why we will succeed.”
He nodded his head and left the study, and Emerald found herself sitting there by herself. The same room where she had first told her brother that she was going to marry Lucian. The same room where all of this had begun.
She did not feel determined at all right now. She felt defeated.
She had created this problem. Fixing it would be ugly, and Andrei wouldn’t like it, That much she knew.
But one thing she also knew about herself was that she was strong enough to do it.
She had loved Andrei Ardelean for all these years. She wouldn’t give up on them now.
Chapter Fifteen
THEY MANAGED TOmostly avoid each other in the lead-up to the wedding. It was for the best.
Andrei found that the ache he felt for Emerald never fully went away. He would learn to live with it. To make the pain part of breathing. The ache a part of himself.
They had made their decisions, and they were the right ones.
There was difficulty between himself and Onyx, and that was all the challenging emotion he could handle right now.
The truth was, he had to figure out how to be a father, when the one thing he knew was that he couldn’t be his own. His own feelings for his father were so complicated, so tinged by trauma and loss, by who his father was, that it was difficult for him to figure out exactly what that meant.
If he hated his father it would be so much easier.
He was trying to find his way to that.
The door opened behind him, and he turned. Emerald was standing there, looking at him, her expression tentative. “Can I come in?”
“Of course. This is your room as much as it is mine.”
Except they were like that. They didn’t have that intimacy.
“It can’t be like this for our entire marriage,” she said.
“What exactly do you mean?”
“You know that it can’t be. We aren’t going to be able to resist each other. Not for the rest of our lives. It simply… It’s going to end up making more problems than solutions. That’s all.”
“Emerald, this is dangerous.” Everything in him was shouting to run away. After what had happened between them the last time they were together, the monster that had been awakened inside him…
“No,” she said. “What’s dangerous is us denying ourselves. Look where it got us. It almost started a war, and it certainly started one between the two of us. But we’ve…we’ve created a friendship since then. We need to trust ourselves.”
Her hands were shaking, her eyes hopeful. If he denied her now, he would hurt her.
And the truth was, he didn’t want to deny her.
He burned for her. His entire body shook with the need to touch her, hold her, take her, whenever she was near, and yet he knew he couldn’t risk it.
This was a war he’d wage all his life, but the resistance of it would be the proof that he could be better.
Stronger.
“I can’t see a future where neither of us ever wants a lover,” she said.
Never.
There would never be anyone but her.
