“Even if you have to live the rest of your life with me?”
Her heart sped up, then stuttered to a halt, sinking down into her stomach. “I can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“Because you wanting me isn’t enough. You marrying me isn’t enough. I need...”
“I love you,” he said, the words coming out rushed, intense. “I love you, Zara. I have not said that to anyone in more years than I can count. I have not once admitted to myself that I desperately wanted someone to love me since my mother.”
“Your mother...”
“I wanted her to love me, but it was always out of my reach. Better to have her gone. I told myself that. And I hated myself for it, but it was easier than admitting that...that I wanted very much to love someone and for them to love me back. That it destroyed me that I could not be what she wanted me to be. So it was easier to stop trying than to keep on and to fail. But I’m admitting it now. Because I’m more afraid of life without you than I am of making myself vulnerable. And that is a first.”
“You love me,” she repeated.
“Yes.” He held her close, his eyes intent on hers. “I do. Almost from the first moment I met you. But I couldn’t admit it. Do you think I routinely wash women’s hair?”
“I imagine you probably don’t.”
“Never.” He kissed her lips lightly. “And you imagine I am often captivated by small, burrowing creatures?”
“I am not a creature.”
“If you are, you are a creature I love very much. You are unlike any woman, anyone, I have ever known. You wanted to know me. Not the man I pretended to be. You wouldn’t allow me to be false with you. You have stripped my defenses, and that is why you are so dangerous to me. That is why I ran from you. Why I had to push you away. But as I stood there today, outside the church, alone, realizing you wouldn’t be there, I wanted to take it all back. I’ve never wanted to take back one of my actions more in all of my life. Not what I did when my mother left, not what I did to my brother. Your loss. Yours. That was the one I could not survive.”
“Andres.” She said his name because she could think of nothing else to say. She leaned in and kissed him. In that kiss she poured every word she couldn’t speak, every feeling she couldn’t fully identify. Everything she wanted him to understand.
When they parted, they were both breathing heavily.
“Marry me,” he said. “Not because you have to. Not because I have to. But because you want to. Because I would be lost without you.”
“Yes,” she said. “Yes.”
“You are the best Christmas present I could ever have received. But I don’t want to own you. I simply want to love you. So, as you were given to me, I give myself to you.”
“I accept,” she said. “And I couldn’t ask for anything better. I love you, Andres. Now and forever. If I had every choice in the entire world open up to me, I would still choose you. Every time.”
“And I you.”
“I do hope, though, that this isn’t the only Christmas present I get.”
“Really? What else do you want?”
“I was thinking maybe a fruit basket.”
He let his head fall back, a smile crossing his face, his laughter genuine and perfect and everything she had ever wanted. “That can be arranged. I think, also, that while it might be too late for us to get married with the entire country present, we can still have a Christmas wedding.”
EPILOGUE
DARKNESS HAD FALLEN by the time Princess Zara, now of Petras—still not heiress to a throne, but feeling quite happy about the whims of one particular man—walked across the courtyard in her lace gown that glittered like the snow, toward her groom. Her dark hair was left loose and wild, swirling around her in the wind, gold paint dotting her forehead, and beneath her eyes. Only family and close friends of Andres and Kairos were there, but no one mattered to Zara or Andres but each other.
Soft light was filtering through the stained-glass window in the church, shining out onto the snow, casting colors around their feet. More flakes were falling softly around them, catching in Andres’s dark hair, on his black suit jacket.