Page 96 of Royal Affair
"And the barn?" Her voice was a harsh rasp, anger burning as she spat out the question. "When you made love to me in the barn?"
The question cut deeper than anything she could have screamed. Because she wasn't asking about sex—she was asking about when I'd looked into her eyes and seen my entire future.
"You wanted rough fucking in the dark, I fucked you inside a sunset farm barn. Satisfying the sex-starved princess nymph that you are. Don't get me wrong, you are good in bed, a little naïve but hey, we live and learn, right princess? But I fucked you. I did not make love to you. You do not know what love looks like, clearly…. if we go by your history."
"Good sex, like I said. But that's all it was."
She flinched as if I'd slapped her, but she didn't look away. Didn't cry. Didn't scream. She just stood there, taking every cruel word and filing it away behind those beautiful eyes that would never look at me with love again.
"I see," she said finally, and her voice was completely empty now. "Thank you for clarifying."
She turned toward the door, her posture rigidly controlled. She didn't look at me, didn't acknowledge my presence at all. I had become nothing to her in the space of five minutes, and somehow that was worse than her hatred would have been.
She paused at the door, her hand on the handle, and for a moment I thought she might turn back. Might give me one last chance to take it all back.
Instead, she said without turning around: "James loving you was like slow dancing on a landmine….. I would always take therisk." Evangeline's head tilted down for a split second before rising back up. Evangeline said her farewell.
"I hope you got everything you wanted, Mr. Banks. Safe travels."
The door closed behind her with a soft click, and I was left standing in the sudden silence, alone with the weight of what I'd done.
As I left the palace, my phone buzzed with another message from Harrison: 'Hard choice, but the right one. Some battles can't be won.' How did he know what had just happened? The timing was too perfect, the knowledge too specific. But I was too destroyed to care about Harrison's mysterious sources.
I left the palace that night with nothing but a single bag and the weight of what I'd done. As the taxi pulled away from the gates, I glimpsed Evangeline's window, and I wondered if she was crying. If she were angry. If she was already starting to forget me.
It didn't matter. Knowing in a few months , maybe , she'd understand that I'd done the right thing. She'd find someone worthy of her, someone who could give her the life she deserved. Someone who wouldn't destroy everything she touched.
And I'd live with the knowledge that I'd loved her enough to break both our hearts to save her from a future that would have destroyed us both.
It was the right thing to do.
It had to be.
Because if it wasn't, I'd just thrown away the only happiness I'd ever known for nothing.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Evangeline
Six months. 26 weeks since James Banks had looked me in the eye and told me I meant nothing to him.
4,417 hours since he'd reduced what I thought was love to "entertainment" and "good sex."
26,297,460 heartbeats since I'd learned that even when you think you know someone's heart, you can be catastrophically wrong. I closed the laptop with shaking hands, another dead end staring back at me from the screen. No interviews. No new security contracts. No social media presence. James Banks had vanished as completely as if he'd never existed, leaving behind only the smoking ruins of my heart and my own pathetic attempts to find any trace of James. I clung to the hope that he was experiencing the same hell that currently cos-played my life since his return to London.
Every few weeks, I told myself I'd stop looking. Stop torturing myself with searches that lead nowhere. Stop hoping for a sign that what we had shared meant something, anything, to him. However, my new routine, like clockwork, had me here again at three in the morning, scrolling through security firmwebsites and news articles, desperate for even a glimpse of his name.
The woman staring back at me from my laptop screen's reflection looked like a ghost—hollow-eyed, pale, all sharp angles where there had once been soft curves. I'd lost weight I couldn't afford to lose, and no amount of concealer could hide the damage six months of grief had carved into my face.
"Your Highness?" My lady-in-waiting, Margaret, appeared in the doorway of my private sitting room. "Your mother is waiting in the Blue Drawing Room."
I nodded, closing the laptop and smoothing down the silk of my navy dress. Another meeting, another discussion about my future that would happen without my meaningful input. It was remarkably easy how I'd slipped back into the role of dutiful princess, how readily I'd accepted that my brief taste of real life had been exactly that—brief.
The numbness had settled in somewhere around week three, after the tears had stopped and the anger had burned itself out. It was easier this way, I'd discovered. Easier to float through state dinners and charity galas and endless meetings about constitutional reform when you felt nothing at all. When your heart was so thoroughly shattered that even the pieces had given up trying to fit back together.
The Blue Drawing Room was my mother's favorite for private conversations, probably because the cold formality of it suited her purposes. She sat in her usual chair, but she wasn't alone. A man stood by the windows, tall and dark-haired, with the classical features that belonged in a Renaissance painting—and knew it.
"Evangeline, darling," Mother said, rising as I entered. "Prince Dmitri has returned for another visit."
