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It was too much to unravel when all she had was one note.
She began to read her father’s earliest memoirs, hoping to learn something new about her family, or perhaps she wished subconsciously to drown herself in history because the present was overwhelming. Most days the niggle of her betrayal bothered her—several times a day really.
They were supposed to trust each other, and she did but...
But this was her brother. Telling Drake might get her brother killed.
Her brother might’ve changed for the better? Yes, he’d been terrible before, he’d had people murdered, but now he might have changed. Also now, he was the weaker one.
What if he planned some new treachery? He was surely powerless, though? Surely? He was injured and in hiding.
Not telling Drake could get him hurt if she was wrong.
What if the note writer was not Roarke? And again, it had to be.
She’d promised not to lie by evasion.
She was a bad person. A disgusting person. How could she do this?
This was when she first understood how irrevocably Drake had wormed into her psyche and maybe... her heart.
What she was doing was a lie by default, and it was eating her up from the inside.
She found a strange man at her entrance one morning. Someone had knocked. The guards had called out a visitor announcement. Drake was away dealing with some kingdom matter.
The guard nodded to her. “Princess. I was told to expect a tutor. This is he.”
“A tutor?”
“I’m Dr. Seth Bander, an advisor to your minister for trade and foreign affairs, Your Highness.” The man was gray-bearded and did look scholarly with his neat but battered gray suit and the books and folders in his hands. “Your, ahh, crown advisor? Drake Gessfangen? He told me I was to teach you what I know of government.” A folded paper slipped from his overloaded hands. “That’s a note from him.”
“Oh.” She scooped it up and quickly read the note. Drake had definitely decided she needed educating. He’d stamped his seal on it and added a humorous comment about not wanting her to be ignorant forever.
Off balance, she stepped aside to allow the tutor to go past her.
Ignorant? Her lips twitched into a smile. How dare he. And how typical. Insufferable man. A glow warmed her chest.
And so she sat for a few hours and was educated. It was both interesting and tedious.
Drake came home to her rooms that night, pinned her to the hallway wall and kissed her.
“Did you like my present?”
“Umm.” She thought of saying something to provoke him, teetering on the edge of being bratty, as he termed it.
“You’d better like him because I have more coming. Say you want to learn about governing this kingdom or I will have to bend you over the sofa and fuck you senseless.” He kissed her again, a long drawn-out kiss that melted her inside.
She massaged his chest with her fingers, kissed him there over the buttons, because she couldn’t help herself. “I like it, but you can still bend me over something.”
“Hah!”
And so a procession of tutors arrived. She had no delusions that Drake would give up power to her, it was not his way, but to allow her to be with him on the throne as more than an arm decoration? Yes.
What with the disturbing violence at the edges of the kingdom, Drake coming and going, the dread that another note would come from Roarke, and the tutors hammering knowledge into her about government this and that, she was exhausted.
And so, when she read an entry in her father’s memoir, volume two, written on the day of her fifth birthday, the world seemed to crack.
She read it again, closed the memoir, and walked out onto her shielded balcony. Her stomach had more critters fluttering about in it than a zoo. She put her hand there.
