“Do. Please do.” She said, desperation tugging at her.
“No. Because you want love. You deserve love and I can’t.” The words sounded broken, torn from him.
“I don’t love Bastian, so what difference does it make?”
“Every difference. He wants you. I don’t.”
She looked at him, at his cold, dark eyes. And she knew he was lying. She also knew she couldn’t drag the truth from him. This man, the love of her life. The man who had been a virgin at twenty-nine because he had chosen loyalty, strength, over any physical desire. And she knew he wouldn’t break now.
“But I love you,” she said. “And I don’t love him.”
Mak barely moved when she said the words, but she could tell they’d hit him. Hard. “All the more reason for me to walk away.”
He turned. “Don’t walk too far,” she said. He looked back at her. “Aren’t you doing security for my wedding?”
She watched a muscle in his jaw tick. “That’s right. I’ll see you then.”
He turned away, cold as ice, composed as ever.
And every piece of her heart shattered, raining down like ash as it settled in her stomach. Nausea pervaded her body. She put a hand to her stomach, trying to fight the urge to vomit.
She looked down at the black silk tie, still in her hand. She felt as though she’d been left holding the glass slipper. Except she knew who it belonged to. She knew her perfect fit.
She walked over to the expansive grass lawn around the circular drive. She sat down, letting her dress fan out around her, and pressed the tie to her chest. Moisture seeped from the grass through her dress. She didn’t care.
“Princess Evangelina?” One of the security guards approached her. “Are you all right?”
“I just need to think,” she said. “Just a minute.”
Do it for you.
Suddenly reality crashed in. She’d been unhappy for a long time, and she’d fought her fate like a rebellious teenager. By acting out, by causing a scene. And never once had she stood before her father and told him what she wanted from life. Never once taken a stand.
Because she’d been afraid. Afraid to take a definitive stance. To say what she really wanted for fear of it being rejected. For fear of having herself rejected, really and truly.
“Well, it’s sort of do or die now,” she said.
She stood and brushed herself off. This gown didn’t have a hope of being salvaged, not after all the action it had seen tonight. The thought brought an ache to her chest and a sad smile to her lips.
Too bad she hadn’t done it sooner. Too bad she hadn’t grown up a bit sooner.
She turned to look at the place Mak had last stood. Empty now.
“I’ll do it for me,” she said, not caring that the security guard probably thought she was losing it. Maybe she was, but it felt a whole lot more like she was finally getting it. “Thank you, Mak.”
She headed back into the palace, a sense of triumph coming to help ease some of the ache in her body. Right now, she wouldn’t think about what she’d lost. Later—she would grieve for it later.
Because right now she had to go and talk to her father.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THERE was no happiness in the bottom of a bottle of alcohol. Mak knew that for a fact. He also knew there was nothing more than a hole in his chest where his heart should be. Eva had his heart.
He paced the length of his hotel room. He’d gotten a room in town, for the quietness. For a chance to think. He was still tied to this place. To this job.
To Eva. Honor, seeing his commitments through, that was just a thin veil. A facade to give him an excuse to stay where Eva was. To avoid leaving the country, making the ties feel severed permanently.
He walked to the mirror, braced his hands on the edges of the vanity. He looked at his reflection, and he hated the man he saw. “Coward,” he said. “You are a coward.”
The worst kind. He had let himself believe that all of his fear was for Eva, that he was afraid he would take too much from her. But he’d realized something in the twenty-four hours since he’d left her. That the love he felt for her had only ever given to both of them.
So his fear, the fear he had professed to feeling, was a lie, masking the real thing he was afraid of.