Page 39 of The Wicked Prince

Half the time it ended their work for the evening anyway as Robin almost always found it impossible to stay up with the fire flushing her cheeks—and nothing else contributing to the crimson—and the ache in her leg easing at John’s careful ministrations.

One morning, Robin’s handmaids laid out a dress she’d never seen before—not that she really knew her own wardrobe well, but she was familiar with it and she knew she didn’t have any wool dresses. When she’d questioned the girls, they’d started tittering behind their hands about it. While Robin wanted to strangle them half of the time for their comments about presenting herself properly as a princess, she had grown fond of them—they were sweet things. One of them finally revealed it had been on John’s order to get her ‘dresses appropriate for winter.’

And then they revealed the other new addition to her wardrobe on John’s orders. A long-sleeved, woolen tunic and breeches with a note as well reading:To replace your current training clothes. At least for winter.

The girls hadn’t wanted to give it to her considering how much they abhorred her in anything that wasn’t strictly appropriate for a princess, but it was under Prince John’s orders. She didn’t need new clothes, and they were trying to lower expenses as much as possible, but… Robin let the girls help her into the wool dress. The clothes were already made and it got her through the day a little easier until she ended up with her legs in John’s lap on his sofa every night.

When her men came through, she was leaving this part of the story out for them. They’d never let her live it down. And she would never want to admit such weakness and fragility to them, that her old injury could reduce her to letting Prince John put his hands on her. Especially considering—

“How did you break your leg?” John asked one night.

Robin was pulled out of her idle thoughts and dozing. She murmured, “Does it matter?”

“Fine. I’ll guess. Well, my father broke his falling off a galloping horse during battle, and given the amount of running from the law you’ve done, that seems possible.”

Robin snorted into her hand. Maybe she should just tell him. He clearly had no idea.

“Alright, not that. Well, how about running along the roofs or scaling walls?”

“Not quite.”

Unless he was just playing dumb. He played a lot of things very well.

“You spent a lot of time in the forest; did you fall out of a tree?”

Robin still wasn’t entirely sure who he was. Not to her. She needed more time to figure out the truth.

“Something like that.”

John was satisfied with that answer, and Robin saw no need to dive into the details.

One morning, halfway through winter, Robin dropped to the ground beside John, both of them huffing for breath, after a long bout of sparring with the quarterstaffs. Robin was in the woolen outfit John had given her and she looked over at him. She watched his breath condense in the air, his eyes closed and his hair falling back toward the ground. He’d improved quite a bit since they’d started, even if she still had to manually correct his grip and stance every once in a while.

She’d been married to him for over half a year and she had no better understanding of him than she did the day he proposed to her and she bit him in response.

They needed to head back to their rooms and get cleaned up for the day.

Instead, Robin asked, “Why do you do it?”

John cracked an eye open and asked, “Do what?”

“Put on the act you do.”

“What act?”

“The tyrant. The lazy, spoiled, greedy, cowardly man clinging to his brother’s throne.”

He closed his eyes, resting his head on his hand and speaking with a lazy drawl. “Who ever said that was an act?”

Robin jabbed her hand into his side, causing him to hiss and shoot up, curling in on himself. Robin pushed herself up onto one hand and said, “Well, I’m not buying it. I know you’re not a tyrant, otherwise you never would have agreed to work with me to minimize the damage being done to Astren. You’re not lazy. The amount of work we do? It’s all we do, not to mention you still show up here every day and put in the effort to improve, no matter how bad you are at protecting yourself even though you profess there’s no sense in it. Spoiled? Well, you might be a little spoiled. You’re terrible at sharing, and you might be a little greedy in that you have a taste for extravagance, but you have agreed to cut things from the castle’s budget, so obviously not that greedy. It’s not wealth for wealth’s sake.”

“I’m not disagreeing that I’m spoiled but of all those attributes what makes you think that one is accurate?”

Robin gestured to the training grounds. “You’re a prince with a private training ground that even our personal guards aren’t allowed in. I think that makes anyone spoiled.”

“Yourguards aren’t allowed in here. If I for some reason gave leave of my senses and ended up here without you, any guards with me would be allowed to stand here to keep watch.”

“Why my guards then?” Robin gaped at him. “That oversight is what allowed me to escape the castle gates in the first place, and even now you haven’t fixed that leak in security.”

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