Wedding Party Collection: Marrying The Prince: The Prince She Never Knew / His Bride for the Taking / A Queen for the Taking?

‘When you live your life under the microscope, genuine friendship isn’t easy to come by,’ he finally said, his voice brusque. When you lived your life in the spotlight. When the only time anyone was interested in affection or emotion was for the cameras...

He wasn’t about to explain all that. How could he? He’d hated the glare of the spotlight, yet he’d chosen it for himself and his marriage. Willingly...because at least then he was in control.

Yet he didn’t feel much in control at the moment. He felt as if it had been slipping away from him ever since he’d stood next to Alyse in the cathedral and said those vows.

‘Even so,’ she said, and he heard damnable pity in her voice. ‘I would have thought there would be someone—’

‘I haven’t lived in complete isolation.’ He cut her off, his voice coming out in something close to a snap. ‘I’ve had acquaintances, servants, staff...’

‘It’s not the same.’

‘Probably not. But you don’t miss what you’ve never had.’ Except he’d had it, and he knew he would miss it if he let himself—which he never did.

Alyse was silent for a long moment. Her expression had turned thoughtful, her head tilted to one side as her quiet gaze swept over him. Leo felt as if he were under a searchlight. ‘Do you think,’ she finally asked, ‘you might be willing to try with me?’

‘Try what?’

‘Being my friend. Letting me be yours.’

Leo felt his jaw bunch harder and he wiped a hand over his face. ‘Next we’ll be painting each other’s nails and doing—what was it?—macramé?’

A tiny smile hovered on Alyse’s lush mouth and despite all the wretched emotion between them Leo felt his libido kick in hard. ‘I promise, no weaving. Or nail varnish.’

‘Right.’ He tried to smile in response but somehow he couldn’t. He couldn’t take any more of this: not the emotion, not the honesty, not the damn intimacy. He felt as if he was going to burst out of his skin.

He turned resolutely back to his meal. ‘Snorkelling sounds like a plan,’ he said gruffly. Just as Alyse had said, you couldn’t talk with a tube in your mouth. And, from the way her mouth turned down at the corners, Leo had a feeling she’d guessed the exact nature of his thoughts.

CHAPTER FIVE (#u868a45cb-b13c-511b-ac2c-67cadacd9a70)

AS SOON AS they’d finished eating, Leo excused himself to go for a walk. Alyse watched him head down the beach into the darkness with a tired sigh. She didn’t ask to join him, knew he’d had enough. Their conversation tonight had been more honest and intimate than anything they’d shared in the last six years, yet it just made her realise how little they actually had. How little they knew each other.

And yet she loved him. How could you love someone you barely knew, someone who purposely kept himself hidden from you and everyone?

It was a question she’d asked herself many times, and with no real answer, and yet she’d never been able to deny or suppress the hopeless longing he made her feel, and had done from the moment he’d come to her eighteenth birthday party. How the sight of one of his rare smiles had made her heart soar, and the barest brush of his fingers had made it leap. She didn’t understand why, but she recognized the signs. Just like her parents had.

Love at first sight, and she wouldn’t wish it on anyone—at least not when it wasn’t returned.

Sighing again, she headed back to their hut. It was the middle of the night in Maldinian time, and she was utterly exhausted.

Yet as she lay between the cool linen sheets and waited for Leo to return, listening to the waves washing onto the sound and the soothing chirrup of the cicadas, sleep continued to elude her. Her body still felt tense, her mind still racing as it replayed tonight’s conversation with Leo.

I’ve never really had a friend before.

Had he meant that literally? How was it possible? Yet if he’d spoken the truth—which she believed he had—then it explained so much. His cool containment, his preference for his own company. His lack of desire for anything intimate, honest or real.

Her own childhood had, in a way, been similarly lonely. She was an only child of parents who had been rather rapturously wrapped up in each other. She’d been tutored by a taciturn governess and then sent to a boarding school where she’d been too shy ever to feel as if she really fit in. At university she’d made friends, at least—and look where that had led her.

And then of course the last six years in the public eye... Sometimes the connection she’d experienced with the people who thronged the streets to greet her felt like the most real, honest human interaction in her life, which certainly said something about the lack of real intimacy in her own life.

Strange to think both she and Leo had experienced such loneliness, yet they’d reacted to it in completely different ways. He embraced isolation; she craved closeness.

She wondered if they would ever find a way to compromise, and if such a thing could satisfy either of them.

* * *

Leo walked as far down the beach as he could, before a jagged outcropping of rocks stopped his path. He stopped and let out a weary sigh. After the excruciating intimacy of his conversation with Alyse, he’d needed space. Escape. But, standing here looking at the rocky barrier, he knew he couldn’t outrun his thoughts.

She was asking for something so little, he knew. Something so reasonable: friendship. Friendship wasn’t meant to be threatening or scary. It could, in fact, make things easier, just as she’d said. Certainly getting along with one another was better than existing in cold silence, and yet...

His whole life had been about cold silence. About work and duty and doing, because those things didn’t let you down. Didn’t hurt you. They were steady, safe.

And friendship might seem innocent, innocuous, but Leo knew how opening your heart just a little could still allow the pain and need to rush in. And, in any case, he didn’t even know how to be a friend. Maybe it seemed incredible and, yes, pathetic, but it was the truth.

He’d lived a solitary life for so long and he didn’t want to change.

Yet already, inexorably, impossibly, he felt himself changing. Already he was wondering just how badly he’d hurt her feelings tonight, and hating that he had. Hating even more that he cared that he had.

That’s not what this marriage was meant to be about.

Cursing under his breath, he whirled around and began to stride back to the hut.

By the time he returned Alyse was in bed, her slight form draped with the linen sheet. She lay flat on her back, staring at the ceiling and not moving at all.

Leo came in and sat on the edge of the bed. He felt almost unbearably tired, not just from the long flight and the jet lag but from the unexpected roller coaster of emotions they’d both ridden on since their wedding, all of it too much, more than he’d felt in years.

‘Are you awake?’ he asked quietly and he heard Alyse exhale.

‘Funnily enough, I can’t get to sleep.’

He half-turned towards her, trying to make out her expression in the moonlit darkness and unable to. ‘It’s not just an out-of-sync body clock, I suppose?’

She let out a little huff that almost sounded like a laugh and amazingly, absurdly, Leo felt his heart lighten. ‘Unfortunately not.’

She shifted in the bed, and he saw the slinky strap of her nightgown fall from one shoulder. His gaze was drawn inexorably to the smooth skin of her neck, her shoulder, and then downwards to the warm curve of her breast. Despite the tension that still vibrated between them, he felt the insistent stirring of arousal. He forced himself to look up into her eyes, and saw she was watching him with a wary expectation.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

‘For what, exactly?’ He heard a thread of humour in her voice and to his surprise he found himself matching it.

‘It must be really bad, if there are options. Have you compiled a list?’

‘That sounds like something you would do.’

He let out a tired huff of laughter and raked his hand through his hair. ‘Yours is probably a lot longer than mine.’

‘Maybe not,’ she said softly, and something in him twisted. Yearned.

‘I’m sorry for the way I handled our conversation,’ he clarified gruffly, pushing away that strange yearning. ‘And the unkind things I said to you. They were neither appropriate nor necessary.’