Читать книгу Wedding Party Collection: Marrying The Prince - Кейт Хьюит - Страница 12

CHAPTER FIVE

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.’

‘That’s a very formal apology.’

He bristled, instinctively, helplessly. ‘I don’t know any other way.’

She sighed. ‘It’s all right, Leo. I accept your apology.’ She hesitated, and he heard the gentle in and out of her breath, saw the rise and fall of her chest in the moonlight, her breasts barely covered by a scrap of silky negligee. Had she not packed any decent pyjamas?

Of course she hadn’t. This was their honeymoon, and they were meant to be wildly in love.

‘What now?’ she asked after a moment, and he watched as she picked at a thread in the linen sheet with slender, elegant fingers. ‘Do you think we can be friends?’

‘I can try,’ Leo answered, the words drawn from him reluctantly. He hated how weak he sounded. How...incapable. But the truth was trying was all he could do, and he didn’t even know if he could do that very well.

Alyse glanced up at him, blinking in the moonlit darkness, a small, wry smile curving her lips. ‘I can’t ask for more than that.’

‘I still want what I wanted before,’ Leo told her gruffly, the words a warning. ‘A business arrangement, a marriage of convenience.’

Her smile faltered slightly and she glanced away before she met his gaze once more. ‘Business arrangements don’t have to be cold-blooded. Emotionless.’

Oh yes, they did. For him. Because that was who he was, who he’d determined to be, how to act. Not to feel. Not to want. Not to be disappointed or hurt.

‘They can be friendly,’ Alyse continued, her voice holding a hint of humour, of hope. And he wondered just what she was hoping for. How much.

Sighing, he pulled his shirt off and reached for his pyjamas. He changed quickly, conscious of Alyse so close to him, and the fact that despite the rather abhorrent intimacy of their conversation, they still hadn’t been physically intimate yet. And, hell if he knew now when they would be. Sex and emotion did not go together. Yet after tonight he had a feeling Alyse wouldn’t be able to separate them. The last thing he needed was her wanting something more than friendship—something ridiculous, like love.

‘Look,’ he said as he slid between the sheets, knowing he needed to be completely clear, ‘I’m not going to love you. I don’t love anyone and I never have.’

She was silent for a long moment. ‘Is that what you’re worried about?’ she asked eventually. ‘That, in becoming friends, I might fall in love with you?’

‘You might convince yourself you are.’

‘You make me sound deluded.’

‘Anyone who believes in love is deluded,’ Leo said flatly, and he felt Alyse shift next to him, turning to face him.

‘Deluded? Why do you think that?’

‘Because love isn’t real,’ Leo stated. ‘It’s just a hormonal urge, a feeling that changes depending on your mood. It’s certainly nothing I’ve ever pursued or even believed in.’

She was silent for so long Leo, annoyingly, felt a little self-conscious, as if he’d said something he shouldn’t have. Revealed more about himself than he’d ever wanted to.

‘If you don’t think love is even real,’ Alyse finally said, ‘then you don’t need to worry about me feeling it, do you?’

He sighed, shifting away from her tempting warmth. ‘I just want to be clear about our expectations. I’m willing to try and be friends, of a sort, but that’s all.’

‘Of a sort?’ She was trying once more for humour but he heard the hurt underneath the wryness. ‘What sort is that, Leo?’

He stared up at the ceiling, the ocean breeze causing the palm fronds of the hut to rustle and sway. ‘I told you, I haven’t had many friends. I’ll do my best.’

She turned towards him, and he felt her breasts brush his shoulder. Instantly he was hard. ‘That’s all anybody can do, isn’t it? Your best.’

He breathed in the fresh, floral scent of her and his whole body pulsed with longing. As carefully as he could he moved away from her softness. Sex, he knew, was out of the question for tonight. But soon, damn it. Very soon. ‘As long as being friends—of a sort—is enough for you,’ he answered grudgingly and even through the darkness he saw and felt her sad smile.

‘I suppose it will have to be,’ she said, and then neither of them spoke again.