Royal Surrender - chapter fourteen
Noe disappeared.
She did not respond to his messages. Twice he suggested they meet, and waited for her, but she did not turn up.
Cajetan was becoming desperate.
Meanwhile, the palace would not stop sharing their opinions about his so-called romance with Princess Gaidama.
“It’s polling very well,” the Queen told him. “We are very pleased.”
Cajetan was not pleased. Princess Gaidama was nice enough, but there was nothing there. Their conversations were pleasant, but he forgot them immediately. She was objectively lovely, but it didn’t make him ache. Things he wouldn’t have thought twice about before.
But now there was Noe. And he could not think around her.
He suspected he knew exactly why she’d disappeared. The timing lined up a little too precisely, much as he tried to think otherwise.
And so he called her again, only this time, from a number she would not recognize as his.
“Don’t hang up,” he told her when she answered.
“I don’t play games with you, Cajetan,” she said quietly. “Do me the same favor.”
He rubbed a hand over his face. “I can only imagine what you must be thinking, Noe. And I hate that this has hurt you.”
“It was always going to hurt me, Cajetan,” she replied, and he didn’t like that stoic note in her voice, like he was something she was going to have to work to survive. “It was foolish to think otherwise. But it’s done now.”
He heard her sharp, indrawn sound of pain, and he couldn’t bear it.
“Please,” he said. “Come to the club tonight. We can talk about it in person. Don’t we owe each other that much?”
“The bargain was that we would owe each other nothing,” Noe reminded him softly. “Isn’t that what we promised?”
He didn’t want to think of promises. He was drowning in promises, some that had been made for him. Or maybe it was that he couldn’t think, not when she was there, in the world, hurting because of him.
“Just come,” he said, and it occurred to him that he was begging. Unabashedly. Like the man she knew, not the prince he was when he was without her. “Come, Noe. Please.”
That night, he flew into London and waited for her in what he’d come to think of as their rooms, pacing through the suite in an agony of anticipation.
When Cajetan never paced.
The hour grew late. Then later. His tension grew higher.
He tried to tell himself that she was finished with him and he would simply have to accept it. That she was right, they had promised that there would be no obligation, that with the rules they’d broken within these walls came a freedom.
No matter how much he hated it.
Then, just as he came as close to despair as he’d ever been, there was that chime at the door.
And when it opened, Noe was there.
Her dark eyes filled with the pain he’d caused her.