Total pages in book: 121
Estimated words: 117920 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 590(@200wpm)___ 472(@250wpm)___ 393(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 117920 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 590(@200wpm)___ 472(@250wpm)___ 393(@300wpm)
“You wouldn’t have understood.”
“Not understood?!” I cry out. “How dare you say that to me!”
She stares at me in shock for a moment before she yells back, “You would have acted like this!”
“No!” I yell. “I wouldn’t have. Aurora, for fuck’s sake, you kept this from me and now I’m finding out from a fucking tabloid. What the fuck were you thinking? We could have prevented this if you trusted me enough with it!”
Her mouth opens, chin trembling.
“Fuck,” I growl. I get out of bed and slip on my pajama pants from the floor, trying to think, needing space. My hands go into my hair, pulling, trying to get my temper under control.
“Aksel, I am sorry,” she says again. “Please.”
“Please nothing.” I turn to face her, breathing hard, my heart pinching in my chest like it’s in a vice. “I confessed to you my biggest secret, my crime, and you just kept yours to yourself. I trusted you with it because I trust you and your big heart, but it’s obvious you don’t trust me at all.”
“I do trust you!” she yells, pleads. “I do. I was going to tell you.”
“When? When?” I throw my arms out. “One day? Is this why you don’t want to tell the girls, is this why you didn’t want us to become anything?”
“I want us to become something!” she yells. “But, damn it, Aksel. You’ve got your head in the clouds.”
In the clouds? “Is that what you think? That the fact that I want babies with you, that I want to tell my girls, the world about you, the fact that I want to marry you and make you my queen, you think that means I have my head in the clouds?”
Suddenly she falls silent, her mouth clamped shut, eyes wide as she stares at me. “You…you want to marry me?” she whispers.
I fight the urge to roll my eyes. “Yes. I figured that was apparent when I asked you to be the mother of my children.”
“You didn’t propose…”
“Propose?” I cry out. “How could I propose when I can’t even get you to admit to the world we’re together. If I got down on one knee here and asked you to be my wife, would you have said yes?”
She grows silent again. I suppose most proposals don’t involve a lot of yelling. I wasn’t even planning on it while we were here, though I did have a ring picked out just in case.
The more she doesn’t say anything though, the more I hope she never does.
I’m not sure if I could take it.
I’m not sure if—
“I wouldn’t have said yes,” she says quietly. “I’m sorry.”
And that’s when the walls collapse in on me.
I can’t even breathe. There’s concrete in my chest. “What?”
She shakes her head. “I don’t think we can be together. Not now, not after this. Not ever.”
This pain is brutal. Sharp, swift, slicing me up from gut to mouth. I’m bleeding heartache right here. I lean against the dresser behind me, trying to hold on.
“Why?” I manage to say, my voice breaking, everything breaking.
I am not a man anymore, I am just shell.
A fragile, breakable shell.
“Why?” she repeats and that’s when I see the tears stream down her face. “Because we can never work. This just proves it.”
“But we work better than anything!”
“When it’s just the two of us,” she cries out softly. “But it’s not just the two of us. You’re a king and you have a country and more importantly, your daughters. I can’t even stay your nanny after this. I’m a criminal in everyone’s eyes. Your daughters are going to be hurt by this and if I stay, they’ll be hurt even more. I love you to death, Aksel, but I won’t jeopardize them in order to be with you. And you know that’s the right thing to do. It’s the only thing to do.”
She’s talking bullshit. I know why she’s saying it but she’s already going into it ready to give up, ready to roll over. That’s not how I do things.
“Listen,” I tell her, trying to keep my voice from rising. “I love you. I love my daughters. And you don’t get to tell me how I feel about anything, nor do you get to tell me what’s important and what’s not. I’m aware that I am a fucking king and I have a country. But I make the calls in my life, no one else.”
I lean over and grab her by the shoulders, forcing her to look me in the eyes. “The girls will understand,” I tell her. “They don’t read the tabloids anyway, not at their age, but we can certainly explain to them in our own words what happened to you. That’s what we should be doing at this stage of their lives anyway. We should be giving them the heads up about things that might get printed.”