The Most Powerful Of Kings - Jackie Ashenden Page 0,50

breath, fury making it difficult to speak. ‘He would have disowned you? Because you rescued your brother?’

Adonis’s face remained granite, his eyes hard jewels. There was no softness in him anywhere. ‘A king has to put his country before his feelings. Before his family. Before everything. Besides, exile was kinder to Xerxes than the throne would have been. The lessons my father would have taught him would have destroyed him. I was born for this. It is my duty. I chose to remain his heir.’ Adonis paused. ‘Xerxes didn’t know, but it was that decision that got him banished. My father put him out of my reach once and for all.’

Cold wound through the heat of her anger like a slow-moving frost, cold as the wintry blue of his eyes.

Dear God, the horror of it. No wonder this man was so icy, so hard. He hadn’t just learned his father’s lessons, he’d become them. They’d turned him to stone.

‘I am telling you all of this so that you understand,’ Adonis went on, his tone utterly flat. ‘A king cannot allow himself to be a man. To feel as a man would. To love as a man would. A king must put his country before everything, even his own family.’

His harshness felt like an arrow to her chest, piercing her. Was that what he was trying to say? That he could have nothing for himself? Nothing for the man? He could have all the power and authority, but there could be no friendship. No laughter. No love.

The nuns might have been distant, but even they had smiled and laughed. Even they had shown her what peace looked like and given her a taste of happiness.

But he hadn’t tasted it. He didn’t even know what it looked like. How could he? When his father had stripped him of all emotion? His childhood ripped away, a boy tortured for the sake of a throne, and all because of one mistake...

Her eyes pricked with tears, the ferocity of her anger at what had been done to him choking her. ‘You know you’ve been brainwashed, don’t you?’ she said hoarsely. ‘That everything you’ve been told is a lie?’

An expression rippled across his face, gone too fast for her to tell what it was. ‘I brought you here, Anna,’ he went on as if she hadn’t spoken, ‘because first, you are pregnant with my child, and until that resolves itself one way or the other I want you out of harm’s way. And second... Ione needs a mother.’

Anna stared at him, her anger forgotten for a moment. ‘What?’

His hold on her hand tightened. ‘Ione knows you. She likes you, too, which makes you perfect. I want you to be my wife, Anna. Be my queen. Be the mother Ione needs.’

Another wave of shock hit her, stealing any breath remaining in her lungs. ‘But...you can’t want to marry me. I’m just a nun. I have vows I want to take.’

‘You’re pregnant. And you can’t take your vows if you have a child, most certainly not if that child is mine.’ His thumb brushed over the centre of her palm in a sensual stroke that, despite the shock, set all her nerve endings alight. ‘And you were right about Ione. She does need more than I can give. You care about her, you put her first.’ His gaze was focused, relentless. ‘She needs you more than the convent does. More than the Reverend Mother.’ Something hotter glittered abruptly in his eyes. ‘A convent is not the place for a woman like you, anyway. You’re passionate, intense. And I can give you everything you need to satisfy that passion.’

Sex, he was talking about sex. He didn’t mean any other kind of passion.

But you want more than that.

Yet the thought was a dim one, hazy, lost under the stunning surprise of his proposal and the vision of a different life that it had conjured up. A life she’d never thought she’d have and yet always wanted.

She could see it now: a husband and child; a family; a place where she belonged.

She’d thought she’d found that in the convent, with God as her husband and her family the church. But now that she considered it, there had always been something...passionless and detached about that vision. Something distant. There was no immediacy to it, no heat. No desire. No laughter and no joy. At least not for her.

There will be no joy with him either, you realise.

Anna stared into his blue eyes,