Virgin Princess's Marriage Debt

‘Never,’ he bit out.

Her sigh was stolen by the wind, and he stalked the length of the deck, hoping that she would leave the conversation alone. But his hopes were in vain.

‘I do. I thought I hadn’t, but... I was just lying to myself. I did. Especially in those first few months. I’d wake up expecting to see you beside me, expecting to find my reality a dream, and my dream a reality.’ The wistfulness in her voice cut him deep and he tried to ignore it, especially as she stood and made her way towards the side of the yacht. ‘But perhaps,’ she pressed on, ‘it wouldn’t have worked. It was a childhood fantasy. We couldn’t have lived off dreams and desire. Reality would have always been waiting around the corner.’

‘We would have made it work,’ he said despite himself, finally looking back at her to find her standing at the side of the yacht, looking out at the sea.

‘Really? The princess and...’

‘The pauper,’ he replied.

‘You were never a pauper to me.’

‘You were always a princess to me.’

The wind cracked the sail, lines creaking and groaning under the sway of the boat. The boom started to move, and terror raced through his veins. He shouted a warning to Sofia, but it was too late—she didn’t hear him and, facing the sea, was ignorant of the oncoming danger. As the large wooden boom swung round with speed and weight he launched himself towards her, but was too far away. Sofia turned just in time to raise her hands to take the brunt of the hit, but not enough to avoid it. It caught her across the shoulder and thrust her into the sea.

CHAPTER EIGHT

THEO HATED HOSPITALS. He felt as if the sterile scent of them carried on the air entered his bloodstream and scratched at him from the inside out. He hadn’t been back to this one since he had mortgaged his life to the hilt to fund his mother’s operation, and he couldn’t stop pacing, desperate to escape its walls, but unable to leave.

Lyssandros, the doctor who had become his personal physician of sorts, had kicked him out of Sofia’s room for his assessment. Fear. It was a feral, living thing within him. Had he reached her in time? She hadn’t been under the water more than five seconds before he’d dived in to reach her. He’d pulled her out, hauled her onto the deck and secured her as quickly as possible, before he dropped the sail and used the motor to get them back to land, breaking every maritime speed law around the world. A helicopter had met them at the marina, and staff had dealt with the vessel as he and Sofia were brought to the hospital.

He’d fought with Lyssandros not to leave her side, and even during the MRI scan he’d been in the small booth with the older man, ignoring the quiet discussions and assessments going on around him as he’d been unable to take his eyes from Sofia’s small frame.

She’d been in and out of consciousness, babbling strange words that had scared him. She seemed to have been having an argument with someone about not wanting to leave. It had taken him a few rounds of the repeated conversation to realise that she wasn’t imagining herself on the yacht with him, but at some long-ago point in time as she begged and pleaded to stay. He’d been able to do nothing but soothe and promise her that he wouldn’t make her leave, but he doubted Sofia had heard him.

A sound at the door to her private room alerted him, and he spun round to find Lyssandros saying something to a nurse and dismissing her. Finally the older man turned to him.

‘She is going to be okay.’

Breath whooshed out of Theo’s lungs, and he pinched the bridge of his nose as if it were the only thing holding him together. Dóxa to Theó.

‘She has a concussion, unsurprisingly, so I want to keep her in overnight at least. Given her...status, it’s possible that her people might want to move her—’

‘They don’t know about it yet.’

‘Theo,’ the doctor admonished. ‘She’s a princess, so her people, family, even her country, will want to know about this.’

‘I’m not keeping it from them, but she needed this time away and—’

‘Okay. It’s your call, but if I’m asked—I had no idea who she was, other than your fiancée.’

‘That’s very ethical of you.’

Lyssandros smiled ruefully, though there was a hint of something in the other man’s eyes that made Theo pause.

‘What’s wrong? You said she was okay,’ Theo practically growled.

‘She is, Theo. She is,’ he said, placing a large hand on Theo’s shoulder. ‘But...look, I really shouldn’t be saying anything, and I wouldn’t...but it did give me some concern. It wouldn’t have been picked up in a normal assessment, but you asked for every test under the sun, and I did them.’ Lyssandros led Theo a little further away from the nurses’ station of the private wing Sofia had been brought to.

‘I don’t know what happened, only Sofia will be able to tell you that, but I’ve noticed a few injuries that would seem...unusual for a...for someone of her status.’

Theo frowned. ‘Injuries? She usually has the reflexes of a cat.’ Or at least she had done when they were at school. She had to have had, to get the headmaster’s car on top of the sports hall. Except when she was distracted, as she had been on the yacht.

‘It looks to have happened about a year, maybe a year and a half, ago, from the healing patterns, but around that time she took what must have been a pretty hard hit.’

‘A hit from what?’