Page 136 of Modern Romance January 2025 1-4

She pressed one elbow into the counter and rested her chin in the palm of her hand, watching as he neatly chopped a potato into cubes. ‘Do you enjoy it?’

He pulled another potato out and began to slice it. ‘I never thought about it like that. When I was growing up, it was part of what was expected of me.’

‘By whom?’

‘Mark.’ A grin tugged at his lips. ‘My motherwasmost definitely raised royal, and besides a few traditional recipes she’d been taught in theory, she couldn’t so much as peel this potato.’

Rosie found herself smiling at the recollection.

‘So most of the domestic things fell to Mark, when we moved to the States. I was still young, just a kid, but even then, he’d get me a stool so I could reach the counter, hand me a small paring knife and show me how to use it safely. I learned to cook at his side.’

‘American meals?’

‘Actually, he was obsessed with making Cavalonian food. He knew how much my mother missed it and wanted to please her. He felt a great burden of responsibility, I think, all his life, for having been instrumental in ruining her marriage.’

Rosie considered that. ‘It doesn’t sound to me as though he ruined her marriage, but rather just offered her a life raft.’

Sebastian’s eyes flicked to hers, his expression inscrutable. ‘Could it be that you’re beginning to see things my way?’

‘I see things through the lens of history, and from an outsider’s perspective. But you and King Renee have both said she was unhappy, that her husband was considerably older. Plus, he had the temerity to turn his back on his own son, so I’m inclined to think him a pretty cold-hearted person. It’s easy to believe their marriage was miserable, and that the fault for that was not your mother’s.’ She leaned forward a little, as Sebastian tipped the cubed potatoes into a pot of boiling, salted water, then turned back to her. ‘If it hadn’t been for Mark, she either would have lived a miserable life—and you would have been doomed to share that fate—or she might have left him anyway.’

‘Do you think your precious king shares your opinion?’

She compressed her lips, his irritation raising her defensive hackles even when she knew he had every right to feel as he did.

‘What sorts of dishes would he make?’ she asked, wilfully refusing to be drawn into an argument about the king’s thoughts. She was actually enjoying talking to him and didn’t want the mood to tank over something that had happened twenty-five years earlier.

Sebastian returned to the chopping board and now turned his hand to spinach, which he’d rinsed earlier. He chopped it roughly, then did the same to several cloves of garlic.

‘Stuffed courgettes, rolled eggplants, spiced mince, pita bread and dips, charcoal octopus, all of the desserts—my mother has a phenomenal sweet tooth. As a child, in the palace, she often ate only chocolate crepes for breakfast.’

Rosie laughed, trying to reconcile a little girl who would be able to sweet-talk her way into never-ending desserts with the quiet, slim woman she’d been introduced to at their wedding.

‘You’ve only met her once, haven’t you?’ Sebastian said, as if reading her mind.

She nodded. ‘On our wedding day.’

‘And she was not herself then,’ he admitted a little uneasily.

‘She didn’t approve of the marriage?’

‘It was more the pressure of being on television, of being back, it was a difficult day for her.’

‘Does she know about us?’ Rosie asked, wondering why that suddenly mattered so much to her.

‘You mean that her father bullied us both into this marriage?’

‘I find it hard to imagine anyone bullying you with any success.’

‘Manipulatedis a better word, you’re right.’

She sighed softly.

‘Yes. She knows our marriage was a requirement of her return. I tried to hide it from her, but she knows her father all too well. She guessed. I didn’t want to lie to her.’

‘And I suppose she would hardly have believed it to be anything other than an arranged marriage, given how soon after the funeral we were engaged.’

‘She knows her father,’ he repeated. ‘She remembers her own marriage arrangements, and the feeling that she’d climbed onto a juggernaut.’

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