“Your parents came here together?”
“No. My father took lovers here. But I have had the house that he used razed to the ground. It has been under refurbishment for the past five years. This is the first time I have been here since.”
“I find that all comforting.”
“I thought you might. There is something quite distasteful about bringing your new bride into your father’s former den of sin.” His lip curled upward. “I find something distasteful about being in it myself. But as I said, none of that original structure remains.”
His words seemed oddly symbolic, and I let them settle there for a while, but he didn’t continue. Didn’t elaborate on it all.
“So here we are, on our honeymoon,” he said.
I shifted. “Yes. Here we are.”
“You are welcome to change your mind about your rules.”
Suddenly, my throat was dry. I felt parched, down to my soul, and he looked... Well, he looked like water. Like the only thing that might make me feel right.
“No,” I said, stumbling backward. The moment brought to mind the story of Joseph in the Bible. When his master’s wife had tried to seduce him, and he had run away, leaving his jacket behind.
I could imagine doing such a thing now. Running away and, if he grabbed hold of me, slipping out of my dress if I needed to.
But that only put me in mind of being naked with him, and that destroyed the point of the image in the first place. Which was to remind myself that sometimes the better part of valor was absolutely fleeing temptation.
“Then you will find your room at the end of the hall. Upstairs. You will not be bothered. It is perfectly fine for us to spend a week in solitude, I suppose.”
“We don’t have to be in solitude,” I said.
He looked at me, and the expression in his eyes left the soles of my feet scorched. “Believe me,” he said. “We do.”
* * *
Isolation was easy in theory, but not so much in practice. My room was beautiful, my view of the beach, the white sand stretching out empty and pristine as far as my eye could see. And the ocean beyond might have kept me mesmerized for days on end, but I itched to be out in it.
The fact was, we were the only two people on the island, and even given all the space, we couldn’t seem to stay away from each other.
Not quite.
We would pass each other on the stairs, down in the kitchen. The kitchen was the worst. Because there was something so unaccountably domestic about those familiar, everyday movements in a kitchen.
The opening and shutting of drawers, the clanging of silverware, and there was no way that familiarity and domesticity should be attached to a king, especially not a king like Hercules, and yet it was even more impacting than those moments when I had stood in awe of him and his power.
He was a human. He drank coffee.
He walked around in bare feet.
And I was fascinated by him even more than when he had been a man of my fantasies. Something immortal and untouchable. A god from Mount Olympus.
I was fascinated by the way he ate fruit in the morning, by the way he took his coffee.
But I was also afraid to let him know that.
I would look at him out of the corner of my eye and then I would scurry back to safety, to isolation.
I would call Lily and then take a walk on the beach.
On the third day, he found me down there, by the water.
“You do love the beach, don’t you?”
“I didn’t know anything else for years. And it was always where I would go to be by myself.”
“Until you met me.”
I took a breath to say something to set him back, but...it left me. Because he was right. Until him. Solitude had been my escape, and then I had met him down by the water, and he had become my escape instead.
“All right. Until you.”
“Tell me about Medland. Living on it.”
“Why?”
He looked at me as though he was helpless to come up with the answer. “You’re the mother of my child, and while we talked about a great many things, we avoided personal details. Someday it might come up in an interview.”
But I didn’t believe the answer.
“So quiet when no one was around. The people on the islands year-round don’t have stacks of money. Or status. It’s almost like a place set forty years back in time. Until the seasonal people come. And you know Medland is a high-end escape, for royalty such as yourself. Politicians. Actors. It moves from being the sleepiest, most down-to-earth little community you could possibly imagine into a strange collection of the world’s elite, if only for a couple of months at a time. It was a wonderful and strange place to grow up. And being my father’s daughter was... Well, I was homeschooled. I didn’t attend school with any of the other kids. And no one would have wanted to be my friend anyway, because... Well, no one wanted my father getting wind of anyone’s sins.”
“I did whatever I wanted,” he said. “Always. My father didn’t care about debauchery, but he did care that I was strong. He wanted to turn me into a weapon. Strong for him and...callous, I think. And he wanted me to be like him. To care about the quest for power more than anything else, to consolidate our bloodline. To make us richer while the people continued to get poorer. But that is not me. I knew at a young age that I had to defeat him. Not join him.”
“I don’t know very many boys who would have come to that conclusion on their own.”
“Surely it can’t be that uncommon.”
“I had to meet you to know that I could make another choice. That you discovered that on your own is... Well, it’s truly wonderful.”
I wanted to close the distance between us, because it felt right, out here on the sand with the ocean bearing witness, because it was something we’d done any number of times before. But not now. Not in this part of the lifetime.
“How did he try to make you tough?” I almost didn’t want to know, but I felt that I had to ask. I was so curious about this man. This man that I’d only gotten a piece of all those years ago. But it had felt like everything to me. Only now was I realizing that physical nudity just scratched the surface of intimacy.
And did I really want to court intimacy with him? After all my talk of keeping things simple between us...
It wasn’t sex. It was just talking.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said.
“Yes,” I said. “It does.”
“No,” he said, his tone decisive. “It doesn’t matter. Leave it alone.”
And then he turned and left me alone, which was what I had said that I wanted.
And now I found I bitterly regretted it.
CHAPTER TEN
Hercules
SHE WAS TEMPTATION. Temptation in a way I was not inured to. In truth, I had never much tested myself when it came to resisting what I might want.
My childhood had been a harsh landscape. My father had taught me to withstand torture. Starvation. Isolation.
And then he had told me that as a man I was free to indulge my appetites as long as I knew how to go without them.
It was a strang
e life. A firm, iron hand, combined with no discipline at all.
I knew how to go without certain things. Affection, food, water.
Apparently, I did not know how to go without Marissa when she was near.
She fascinated me. And I could tell that I fascinated her. When she approached me, it was often with the trepidation of a small mouse approaching a predator. Her hands were often clasped, just below her chest, her eyes bright as she would speak to me about something she liked—the food, the view, the way that the sun painted the sea with gold before it sank behind the horizon—and then she would scamper off as if she was afraid I might pounce on her at any moment.
She was not entirely wrong to be afraid.
I could not understand the point of resisting the thing between us, and yet she seemed to find it a moral necessity.
Except...I did understand. Why would she take a chance on a man like me?
I was not in the habit of talking to myself, but that had been happening more and more lately. As I questioned her, only to end up questioning myself.
All was running smoothly back in Pelion, at least as it had been reported to me. I received calls every day letting me know of the state of the nation. And I would take any necessary action that was required before going out of my office and into the rest of the house.
Going to Marissa.
To torture.
In many ways, Marissa was the perfect realization of what my father had raised me to endure. Indulgence and torture all rolled into one.
For I looked at her, and I was filled with desire, filled with lust, and I wanted her more than I had ever wanted anyone or anything.
And I constantly made sure that I was in her orbit, just to test my resolve. To test my strength. I wanted her.
I could not figure out why. I had never been able to.
It always came back to the way she had looked at me. To the fact she wanted to talk to me. Didn’t assume she knew what I thought about anything, but rather asked with an openness and innocence that shocked me.
I was distracted, thinking about Marissa when I should be thinking of the tasks ahead of me for the day, when the phone rang.