She moved closer to him and took his hands in hers. And without asking why, without asking for an account of his sins, she held his hand up. “I don’t see any.”
“It’s there.”
“Tell me,” she said.
“I couldn’t go any further,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize to me. Explain. Explain all of it. Yesterday, today. Something hurts badly enough that you have to run when it catches up with you and I want to know what it is.”
“We were going to have to pass the accident site to get to the beach I had in mind and for some reason I didn’t realize until we went around that last corner. It reminded me of that day.”
“Oh...no, Xander I’m sorry.”
“I’m sure it’s horrible to watch someone die,” he said, a shiver racking his body, “even if they’re a stranger. But to watch your mother...to watch her get white, all of her color bleeding out of her, onto your hands...there is nothing worse.” He met her gaze, the demons behind his eyes raging now, lashing him from the inside out. “I couldn’t do anything but sit with her until help arrived and by then it was too late. But they couldn’t get me to let go of her. The last thing she ever heard from me was anger. Those were the last sounds she heard on this earth. Me yelling at her. Swearing at her. I was...so angry with her, Layna.”
“About what?”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “It doesn’t change anything. It doesn’t change what happened. It doesn’t change the last moments of that relationship. I can never fix it. Can never apologize for the words I said. I can never go back and decide not to get angry. Decide to pull the car over. Decide not to go out that day. I can never go back and tell her that no matter how angry I was back then, I would have gotten over it and we would have been okay.”
He shivered again. “Get on the sand,” she said, “out of the water, and wait for me.”
She scrambled back up the stairs, up to where the car was parked and took the keys from the ignition, fished a blanket and food out of the trunk, then closed all the doors before heading back down to where he sat.
She threw the blanket over his shoulders. “There. And I have sandwiches.”
“I don’t think I could eat,” he said.
“Then we’ll talk.”
“Trust me?” he asked.
“Not really.”
“Probably a good thing. But if memory from my misspent youth serves me, there’s a cave over here. We could get out of the wind. And not have anyone stumble across the heir to the throne shivering and on the cusp of a mental breakdown.”
“That might be for the best.”
He kept the blanket on his shoulders and led the way down the beach and away from the water.
“This is all a little too perfect, Xander,” she said, walking into the small stone alcove cut into the mountain.
“My break with reality and emotional meltdown?”
“How many women have you seduced in here?”
“Oh, this was my much younger misspent youth. Not my teenage years.”
“I never really knew if you’d dated much before we were together.”
He winced. “I didn’t date so much as take advantage of women who liked the idea of getting dirty with a prince.”
“I see.”
“I take it you didn’t?”
She blushed, but thankfully, in the dark she knew he couldn’t see it. “I come from a political family and my mother was very blunt with me early on about what nets you a good husband. Purity, or at the very least the illusion of it, is quite important. Princes and the like don’t want a lot of tabloid articles going around about their future wife’s wild years.”
He laughed. “I was expertly snared, wasn’t I?”
“We both knew what our marriage was supposed to be. But yes, I did work to make my image one that would fit in with the Drakos family. I worked to be suitable.”
“You did far too much for me,” he said. “I never deserved any of it.”
“I didn’t do it for you,” she said. “I did it for me. I don’t think you fully grasp what a shallow little power grabber I was.”
“You were far too pretty for me to care.”
“Yes, and when life took that I had to work on developing my character a bit. A harsh wake-up call, and I resisted it for as long as I could.”
“I’m still resisting it,” he said. He put his hand on the rough stone wall and looked up. “I know a little bit about those hazy years, you know.”
“Do you?” she asked, her throat tight all of a sudden.