Page 33 of The Wicked Prince

She scoffed. “I didn’t even make it a full month without upsetting everyone I came into contact with.”

“No. They’re going to hate me.” John shifted closer, looking up at her tearstained cheeks and using every ounce of his little restraint not to wipe them away himself. “Let them blame me for it all. Let them blame me for famine and flood. Let them believe I am the one responsible for all ruination.”

Her watery eyes widened, and her mouth parted. His restraint nearly fractured as she took in a short breath. “What? What are you proposing?”

Something so much grander than he had envisioned when he first saw her as the answer to all his problems. She was so much more. She was the answer to all of Astren’s problems.

“You vowed to help the people who are suffering and starving, but there are no easy answers. I don’t want the people to die either. Dead people can’t pay taxes. They can’t harvest crops. They can’t fight wars. And the more those things happen, the worse our economic situation gets. The men who are alive and fighting don’t have food. No food. No taxes. No soldiers. We all suffer, even me. So let’s stop fighting each other.”

“And the unrest?” Robin took a deep breath, and his eyes traced her fingers as she ran her thumb under her eyes. “If we cannot help without hurting, how do we stop the people from boiling over? There were already people in that crowd turning on me simply for my inaction. I saw what happened when I did take action.”

“Then they won’t beyouractions. I’ll be their villain so you can be their champion.”

He’d be the most hated man in the world twice over for her sake.

Robin’s breath hitched. “I don’t understand you.”

“This. This is the reason I married you.” He took a risk and put his hands on the arms of her chair and rose to his knees. “Because I think you are the key to helping me hold Astren together until Richard wins the war and comes back. The people need a hero to believe in with Richard gone, and they chose you. So let’s make it you. You’re better suited for being a hero, he’s better suited for war, and I’m better suited for bearing the people’s displeasure. I’ve had a lot of practice. I have been reviled since childhood. It will be no burden for me.”

Robin looked toward her window and whispered, “A different kind of fight.”

John wasn’t entirely sure what that meant, but he didn’t dare do anything that could cause this to all fall apart.

“I still hate you. I’ll never trust you.” Robin tilted her head and examined him. “But for other reasons now. Maybe… You don’t want to run Astren into the ground. If only so you still have people to tax to pay for your ridiculous extravagance.”

He raised an eyebrow at her.

She raised hers right back as she said, “Don’t act like even with Astren’s best interests at heart you don’t still want your extravagance.”

“Some people simply appreciate the finer things in life, you savage.”

Her eyes lit slightly and her lips twitched. His breath caught in his throat, but the smile didn’t appear. “I suppose, though, we can put aside everything else and focus on doing what’s best for Astren. Instead of fighting against you, I’ll fight with you.”

She stretched her hand out towards him. He stared at it for a moment before slowly taking it and she firmly shook his hand. He didn’t breathe until she had pulled hers back, sliding out of his grip, and it took all of his willpower not to hold on and drink in the feeling of her skin on his for even just a moment more.

This was more than John supposed he could ever hope for.

Although… he couldn’t shake the part of him that still wanted her smile.

Chapter13

Robin was living some kind of strange dream or nightmare. She wasn’t sure which because now she and John had some sort of alliance between them instead of some sick, obsessive game.

While her Merry Men worked to find a way to free her from this marriage, she was going to make use of it. Do what she could for the people as best as she could while she had the opportunity to do it. If John was somehow on board with it, she supposed she couldn’t complain.

Robin’s peaceful days where all she did was train were gone, and she couldn’t slam the door on them fast enough. The morning after she entered into her pact with John, instead of being harangued by courtiers, she was beset by an army of royal tutors. The handmaids stayed the same though, shoving Robin into baths, practically tearing her hair out as they brushed it and pulled it back, and trying to kill her with impractical footwear and dresses meant to swallow her whole.

For a month her days from dawn till dusk were filled with lessons, trying to cram a lifetime of royal training into them. Fortunately, she had a foundation of her education as a noble, but only until she was ten. At least it meant she wasn’t completely clueless. She only saw John at dinner, where she didn’t actually get a reprieve for her poor mind because he would quiz her on her lessons. The original banquet table that had them sitting on opposite ends of the room had been exchanged at some point for a much shorter table that would have allowed them to actually reach out and touch—if they were both standing up and were stretching their arms as far down the table as possible, so not actually all that different from the original distance since they weren’t really at risk of bumping elbows, but it still felt far less formal than their original meals had been. She couldn’t recall when it had happened, but her focus was on her lessons, not the furniture.

Robin did nothing halfheartedly. She decided she would excel at this so she would have a better understanding of the position the country and the castle were in so none of those pesky contracts would ever catch her off guard again. And she did.

After a month, Robin was deemed competent enough to assist. In the most minor of ways, but it was something. John apparently believed people learned better hands on. It meant her lessons were reduced to just mornings while she spent the afternoons working with him. She’d initially expected that John would have her shadow some courtier, but to her surprise, when she asked what she’d be doing and who she’d be assisting, he’d simply looked up from Richard’s desk, grinned, and said, “I’m not sending my wife away to go assist someone else when I have plenty she can do for me.”

Robin wasn’t sure if it was because there was lingering distrust or some kind of masculine pride thing she’d never fully understood despite spending so much time surrounded by the creatures.

Either way, she sat at the low table in the study and got her own stack of papers and quill, so she was satisfied. It wasn’t going to be easy. It wasn’t going to be quick. But there was work to be done, and despite all the reasons she shouldn’t, she trusted that John had the country’s best economic interests at heart.

And surprisingly—

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