‘You’re him again, aren’t you?’ Inara’s voice was very quiet.
He examined the cut he’d made. ‘Him? What do you mean?’
‘You’re the King again.’
‘I’m always the King.’ He ignored the thread of what sounded like disappointment in her voice. ‘I don’t stop being him.’
‘But you never wanted to be. You told me your brother was welcome to the job. That you’d rather die than have it.’
He remembered that conversation, over a long and leisurely lunch at the townhouse she’d lived in before he’d ascended the throne. She’d asked him in her usual blunt, curious way about whether he was disappointed at being younger than his brother by a few minutes and whether he’d ever want to be King.
‘Caspian is welcome to it. Personally, I’d rather die than have the job.’
A throwaway comment. Such a careless remark, when a year later...
It should have been you. You’re the one who should have died. But you didn’t. It was your brother who took your place, the way he always did.
Everything in him went tight and sharp and hot, and before he could stop himself he said, ‘Yes, well, as it turned out it wasn’t me who died. Caspian took that honour and I got the job anyway.’
He hadn’t meant to sound so bitter and as soon as the words were out he wished he hadn’t said them. They revealed too much. But it was too late and he knew it.
In the echoing silence he could feel her looking at him. He didn’t look back, concentrating on the tree instead.
‘Why did you take it, Cassius?’
He didn’t want to talk about this, not when he had less than an hour before he had to be in his office. So he couldn’t understand why he answered her. ‘Because there was no one else.’
‘But didn’t you have a cousin somewhere? Couldn’t she have taken the throne?’
This had to stop.
He dropped the scissors and turned.
Inara was standing right next to him, her silvery hair loose down her back, and she was wearing his shirt from the night before. It was far too big for her, the sleeves rolled up hugely, the hem almost reaching her knees.
It should have looked ridiculous. Instead, she was so indescribably beautiful it made his chest hurt and that primitive, possessive thing inside him growl with satisfaction.
She wore his shirt and she smelled like him.
Yours.
Oh, yes, she was. Which made this battle with himself and his desires pointless, an old pattern of behaviour he didn’t need, not now. She was his wife; she was living with him; she’d be in his bed every night. Which meant that, while during the day he had to be the King, at night he didn’t. He could be himself. And it wasn’t losing self-control. It was only sex, only relaxing after a hard day’s work. After all, every other person on the planet did it; why couldn’t a king?
‘No,’ he said. ‘My cousin couldn’t take the throne because it was my responsibility.’ He put the scissors back on the shelf. ‘A throne isn’t like any other job, Inara. It’s a duty. You can’t just decide not to do it because it’s too hard or you don’t like the work. It’s not about you at all. It’s about the role, the responsibility you have to your subjects.’
Her brow wrinkled. She had her glasses on again and her luminous grey eyes seemed less red. Clearly the contacts she’d been wearing had irritated her eyes. He made a mental note to let the stylist know that the Queen preferred glasses. He should never have made her wear contacts.
‘But Aveiras didn’t want you,’ she pointed out bluntly. ‘You could have passed it on to someone else and they would have been fine with it.’
A formless anger simmered inside him, an anger he hadn’t been aware of before, and yet it tasted familiar. As if it had been there all this time.
‘Careful,’ he said. ‘Be very careful what you say.’
‘Why?’ She looked stubborn, determination glittering in her eyes. ‘Does no one ever talk to you about these things? Does no one ever question you?’
‘No, they don’t.’ The anger twined with the embers of his desire, creating something hotter, more demanding. ‘I’m the King.’
‘Actually,’ Inara said, ‘I’m beginning to wonder if you’re not so much a king as a world-class martyr.’