up to here, Kairos? I’ve never been accused of being the smart one. You have to spell things out.”
“You may very well be responsible for producing the next in line to the throne. That means you need to marry. You need to marry royalty. Princess Zara is, in fact, royalty.”
“You expect me to exit bachelorhood and start producing babies on such short notice?”
Kairos waved a hand. “Don’t be so dramatic about it. Just because you marry doesn’t mean you have to change your behavior entirely. Certainly you will have to be more discreet.”
His brother suggesting something as shocking as carrying on extramarital affairs was surprising, and was almost as shocking as the fact that Kairos was essentially marrying him off. “Are you unfaithful to your wife?”
A muscle in Kairos’s jaw jumped. “No. I’m simply telling you that things don’t have to change all that much. Obviously your marriage will be one of convenience, and as long as you treat her with respect, I don’t see why you should have to pledge your fidelity to her.”
“I have no practice with fidelity. I would hardly stake my life on it.”
“You knew the day would come when you would have to take some responsibility for the nation. That day is now. It’s this. Father may have expected you to amount to nothing, but I certainly expect you to carry your weight.”
“I had no idea that as the spare, I was required to carry any weight unless you died.”
“Unhappily for you, that is not the case. I need you for political reasons, and practical reasons.”
Andres looked down at his brother’s dark, furious eyes. “If things are so terrible with Tabitha, why don’t you divorce her and find a woman who can give you the children you need?”
Kairos laughed, a hollow, bitter sound. “There are certainly some things you will have to learn if you’re to be a husband. I can no more cast off my wife because she can’t produce children than give a speech in front of foreign dignitaries without clothes on. I would be crucified by the press. I made vows to her, and I intend to keep them.” He didn’t sound happy about it, and certainly his devotion to her had nothing to do with love. That much was clear. “It’s time to atone for your sins, little brother.”
Andres was usually quite content in his sins, with no desire to atone for them at all. Except for Francesca. That he would take back a hundred times over if he could. Particularly now, with the stark reality of Kairos’s marriage to Tabitha laid out in front of him, he could hardly defend those actions.
“You’re overlooking a very important piece of the equation,” Andres said.
“And that is?”
“She does not want to marry me. That much was clear when I encountered her in my bedroom. We’re holding a kidnapped woman.”
“She has very few alternatives,” Kairos said. “I get the sense that if she goes back to Tirimia she’ll be in danger. For all that their government is playing nicely with us now, things are far too tentative for me to stake her life on presumed decency. She is safest here.”
“She’s feral. What do you expect me to do with her?”
“You’re a legendary playboy. The last thing you need from me is advice on how to deal with women.”
“She is not a woman. She’s a creature.”
He thought of that wild dark hair, her glittering, angry eyes. Somehow they were supposed to make a royal couple? He would need a woman twice as tame as Tabitha to convince the public of a change in him.
A woman such as her wouldn’t make his reinvention easy.
Kairos laughed, an even rarer occurrence than a smile. “I’m a married man, but even I noticed there was enough to recommend her. She’s beautiful, though, I confess not overly sophisticated.”
“I was too busy being surprised by her presence in my bedroom to notice her beauty.” A lie. He was not blind to her curves, her full, sensual lips. Despite the fact that, for all he knew, she might attack him if he approached her, she was a lush little package.
“My word is law,” Kairos said, his tone uncompromising. “And you owe me, brother. You will obey me on this. Tame her, train her, seduce her, I don’t really care, but by God you will marry her.”
Andres clenched his teeth together. He would find the moment more surreal if he hadn’t long suspected that it was coming. That someday he would stand before his brother and be informed of his fate. He was a prince, the second born to an old royal family. He had never imagined he would escape marriage, children. It had always only been a matter of time. And his time, it seemed, was up.
“Anything else, Your Highness?” Andres asked, his tone dry.
“Don’t take too long.”
PRINCESS ZARA STOICA, heiress to no throne at all, was tired of waiting on the whims of men. It was because of men that she had been uprooted from the palace as a child, sent out to live in the deep, dark woods with the nomadic people who inhabited them, kept safe thanks to centuries-old traditions of honor and hospitality. It was men who had stolen her from her safe haven fifteen years later, and elected to use her as a pawn to further political unions with neighboring nations. Of course, it had also been a man sitting on the throne here in Petras who had decided it was perfectly acceptable to keep her and pawn her off on his brother as a sort of postwar bride.
As a result, it was not a terrible surprise that it was a man who clearly owned this room, and who had burst in close to an hour ago, nearly terrifying the life out of her.
It occurred to her that it was entirely possible she had been installed in Prince Andres’s room. The man she was supposed to marry. The very idea made her shiver down to her bones.
Worse than fear was the restlessness starting to run through her veins. She was growing bored, closed up here in the bedroom.
There was a view of the city from a small window by the bed. She found no comfort in such a view. Houses clustered together tightly, high-rise buildings beyond that. Cars cluttering up the roads like a line of dizzy ants desperately seeking food. She preferred the crisp, clean air of the mountains. The silence held close around her by thick evergreens.
She had a difficult time marking passing hours while shut up in vast castles with nothing but man-made architecture sprawled out before her.
She flopped backward onto the bed, sinking deeply into the down-filled blankets and soft mattress.
It was shocking, being exposed to such comfort.
Her years spent living in caravans with her caregivers had been cozy, and not uncomfortable, but it had certainly been nothing like this. And when the new political leaders of Tirimia had brought her back to the old palace, they certainly hadn’t installed her in anything half as luxurious.
She looked up at the ceiling, at the ornate molding, the large chandelier that hung from the center of the room. She could not recall ever having been in a bedchamber with a chandelier. Tirimia was
