Page 22 of Awakened On Her Royal Wedding Night
“You don’t know that.” On the inside she was Swiss cheese, nothing but holes. She suspected it was caused by the loss of her mother at such a young age, but she had suffered this sense of missing pieces of herself for a long time. The pageants hadn’t helped. They skewed her self-image into only focusing on the external view of herself. Who was she beneath the superficial surface? Who did she want to be? A nurse? A teacher? Swedish? American?
“If you lack the confidence to recognize your own mental strength, I will build that up along with providing anything else that you lack. Including a dog, if you insist.”
“Now you’re just mocking me.” She folded her arms. “It’s not immature for me to want to marry someone whocaresabout me.”
“To what degree? I care about you enough not to leave you half-dead on a beach. I care about how this—” he tapped next to the pages she had written “—will play out and affect you. You have to stop thinking of marriage in the terms that were sold to you by greeting cards and ads for diamond rings. I’m hiring you for a position, Claudine. You’ve devoted yourself to pageants as a career, have you not? Those organizers ask you to uphold a certain image and discourage you from having relationships that could cast you in an unflattering light, no? They tell you what to eat and where to stand and you are compensated accordingly. This is much the same.”
“The position you’re trying to fill is sex work and surrogacy.”
“I plan to do the work,cara mia,” he shot back. “The sex will be all pleasure on your side. Our kiss earlier was a promise on that front, was it not?” The flare of light behind his eyes dared her to deny it.
Her voice stalled in her throat. She blushed and looked away.
The sheer power he radiated made her quiver deep inside, in a place that was frighteningly vulnerable. At the same time, there was a craving in her, a pull. It was edged with the most primal needs she possessed. She wanted to be closer to that force. To him. She wanted his touch on her, his lips. Him.
“I was under the impression you wanted children,” he said gruffly. “Am I wrong?”
“I do,” she admitted huskily. It was part of that blank space in her life. Neither of her mothers had family and her surviving mother was facing a life that could be cut short if she didn’t receive the help she needed. Claudine’s only other family connection was that nascent one to a man who had twice walked into a clinic.
Or she could make a family of her own.
“You’re asking me to accept a life sentence in a loveless marriage,” she said, torn between her mother’s future and her own. “How is that different from the way Queen Giulia was imprisoned here?”
His cheek ticked.
“Five years, then,” he said after a moment of thought, teeth gritted. “Give me five years of honest effort at conceiving at least two children. If you wish to divorce and look for your soul mate after that, we can do so. I’ll ensure you have a home and everything you need for a good life here.”
For some perverse reason, she found his willingness to get divorced very disappointing.
“What about our children? Would I have custody after that?”
“They will have to be raised here in Nazarine, but they will always be our children. Not mine. Not yours.Ours.You will have as much influence over their upbringing as I do.”
All her objections to this bizarre suggestion of his were being neatly removed.
In casting for another reason to refuse him, her gaze snagged on the pages she’d written. She had offered that to him with supreme dread of the ordeal it promised, but she hadn’t seen any other way to get herself home.
“What about...?” She nodded at the papers.
“It remains your decision if and when to come forward. I will absolutely protect you to the best of my ability when you do. In the short term, it’s a powerful bargaining chip with my father.” He picked up the papers and tapped their folded edge on the table. “To ensure he approves our marriage.”
Her heart gave a swoop in her chest. “I—” Was she agreeing to this?
“I’m offering you the care your mother needs and a good life for you and your children. As an added bonus, you will have bested my brother in a way that he could not have foreseen when he thought he could assault you without consequence.”
His grim tone made her catch her breath. He really was the darker prince.
He had to be, she realized with a chill in her heart. Otherwise, he would have lost to Francois long ago.
No. Not darker. Harder. He wore a sheen of titanium armor. What he had said about never experiencing love kept echoing in her ears. In her chest. What would that do to a person except force them to form an impermeable shell?
Let me in, she couldn’t help thinking.
Foolish. She knew that. There was no changing someone who didn’t want to be changed.
Would she want him to change, though? She was enthralled with him exactly as he was.
“There’s no one else I can trust the way I can trust you, Claudine,” he urged in a low voice. “You’re not giving up power by agreeing. You’re exercising the power you have in this moment.”
