Jennifer Hayward – Marrying Her Royal Enemy (страница 8)
He pursed his lips. Eyed her. “It’s been a trying two weeks. We’ve both been analyzed beyond endurance. Most of the Carnelians seem ready to welcome you, but some are reluctant to embrace a foreigner. Tonight is the night you must prove to them you belong. You wouldn’t be human if you weren’t feeling the pressure.”
Remarkably spot-on. “I’ve been brought up in the media glare. I can handle it.”
He inclined his head. “Regardless, I appreciate how you’ve risen to the occasion.”
She had no smart comeback for that, so she left it alone. He flicked his gaze around the elaborately furnished, if exceedingly dark, suite. “How are you settling in?”
“Fine. Except honestly, Kostas, you were right. It’s like you’re caught in the Dark Ages here. Everything is cold, unforgiving stone. There’s no warmth to the rooms, no life. How in the world do you live like this?”
“It’s remained untouched since my mother died. My father refused to make changes. I agree, though, it needs massive renovations. It’s hardly the kind of place I want to bring our children up.”
There it was again. Children. An heir. She wished they could just forget about it for a while.
“What was it like?” she asked to distract herself. “Growing up here?”
“Lonely,” he said matter-of-factly. “Cold. I’ve been told the life went out of the castle when my mother died. Some say that’s when it left my father, too, and he became the dictator that he was.”
“He loved her a great deal?”
“Too much, by all accounts.”
Beauty and the Beast. She tipped her head to the side. “Was he really the man he was portrayed as?”
“A tyrant, you mean?” His mouth twisted. “It depended on which iteration of him you encountered. He was charming, charismatic and warm when he wanted to be, self-centered, compassionless and sadistic during his dark moods. A chameleon. A compulsive liar—to himself and others.”
Sadistic. Thee mou. A chill went through her. “And to you, his son, what was he like?”
“I was his protégé from age five on. It was about learning the role, following in his footsteps. It was never a father-and-son relationship.”
And what about the childhood, the innocence, he should have been allowed? She recalled a photo she’d seen in one of the hallways of the castle of Kostas and his father inspecting a military guard when the prince must have been just five or six, surrounded by hundreds of thousands of people. He had looked so lost...so bewildered.
The only man who could stand alone in the middle of a crowd. Kostas had been built that way, conditioned to stand alone, created by a man notorious for his lack of humanity. Her chest tightened. “Did he discipline you?”
“Beat me, you mean? Yes. It was part of his modus operandi. Fear and intimidation—the devices he used to control everyone around him. Sometimes it was physical, sometimes mental. He was a master at both.”
“Please tell me you had someone, a grandmother, a godmother, someone you could go to?”
“My yaya. My grandmother on my father’s side, Queen Cliantha. She died when I was twelve. But by then I was in school. It was an escape for me, a break from the brainwashing, the conditioning. I was lucky my father felt it necessary to present a civilized front to the world.”
It may have been a break from the conditioning, but Kostas hadn’t made many friends in school. By Athamos’s account, he had always been the loner in the British boarding school they’d attended, the aloof presence that had been hard to get close to even though the Constantinides boys had tried to befriend him, having their own painful knowledge of a larger-than-life father.
Where had he drawn his strength? His belief in his vision? From some unshakable core inside of him?
She sank her teeth into her lip. “What happened when you developed a mind of your own? When it became apparent your philosophies differed from your father’s?”
“I tried to keep them inside in the beginning. My grandmother said it was better that way. But eventually, as I gained in confidence, as I acquired external validation of my ideas, they came out. I was considered a threat then. A competitor. Anyone who questioned my father’s practices was, and was suitably disposed of, but I, of course, posed the biggest threat of all—the blood heir who wanted a different way for his country. I wasn’t so easy to contain.”
“How could you coexist like that?”
“Uneasily. I made it clear to my father I would bide my time until it was my turn. In the meantime, I did the official engagements he couldn’t manage, presented a civilized facade to the world, attempted to keep the internal workings of the country moving while he obsessed about taking Akathinia. But with the onset of his dementia, with his increasingly erratic behavior, it became harder and harder to talk sense into him—to stand back and do nothing.”
Given how passionate Kostas had always been about his beliefs, it must have been crippling for him. A gnawing feeling took root in her stomach. A feeling that she had been vastly unfair. “Things escalated before you left.”
“Yes. There were those who wanted my father replaced, those who supported me and my democratic ideas and those who fought any decentralization of power that would strip them of theirs. It was a...tenuous situation threatening to implode at any minute.”
With him squarely in the middle of it—loathe to turn on his own flesh and blood no matter how wrong his father’s actions. Surrounded on all sides. The man in the middle of the storm.
The uneasy sensation in her gut intensified. She lifted her gaze to his. “Was that why you raced Athamos that night? Because you were frustrated? Because you weren’t in your right head?
“It was...complicated.”
Clearly, from the myriad of emotions consuming those dark eyes of his. The pieces of what had happened the night she’d lost her brother started to come together, beyond what Kostas had told her. She didn’t like the doubt that invaded her head as they did. The gray zone it put her in with the man she needed to have zero feelings for.
Confused was not how she needed to enter this evening.
Kostas straightened away from the dresser. “I should get dressed.” He handed her the sheaf of papers he was holding. “The final guest list. You should look it over.”
She curled her fingers around the papers, glad for something to do rather than feel things for this man she shouldn’t be feeling. “Anyone interesting coming out to play?”
“General Houlis and his two key lieutenants. You will stay away from them.”
“Why?”
“Because they are dangerous men. You may think you are a dragon slayer, Stella, and no doubt you are, but this side of things you will not involve yourself in. Devote yourself to getting to know the people I’ve highlighted. They are key social, business and political figures who will be valuable to you.”
She nodded. She would do that and get to know General Houlis, Kostas’s biggest foe, because he would be her enemy, too.
Kostas headed for the door. Halfway there, he turned. “What are you wearing, by the way?”
“That will be a surprise.”
His mouth tipped up at one corner. “I’m quite sure there will be enough of those tonight, but have it your way.”
He left. Page returned to finish her hair. Stella immersed herself in the guest list, going over each key name and title, committing them to memory. Thank goodness hers was photographic.
When she’d made it to the L’s, her eyes widened. Cassandra Liatos is attending? The guest of Captain Mena, one of General Houlis’s disciples, according to the list.
The woman Athamos had lost his life over. The woman her fiancé had most likely bedded.
Her pulse picked up into a steady thrum, blood pounding in her ears. An unimportant detail Kostas had forgotten to mention?
“WE ARE LATE, Your Highness.”
Kostas was well aware of that fact as he waited for Stella in the foyer of the castle, the arrival of their first guests imminent. The crowds, he had been told, were in the tens of thousands in the courtyard, all of them waiting for a glimpse of their king and future queen.
The global media was also impatiently waiting for them, three rows deep behind the red stanchions, cameras at the ready. The need to greet both the people and the media before their guests began arriving weighed heavily on his mind, along with the speech he was about to give, perhaps the most important of his career. He did not have time for a recalcitrant princess making yet another expression of protest.
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