She was wrong. He couldn’t let those standards slip and he had accepted who he was. It was she who hadn’t accepted it.
And if she did...if she just loved you...if she accepted you for who you were without you having to do a thing...why didn’t anyone else?
But he couldn’t go there, couldn’t think about that.
Sleep was too far off, his mind far too active, so he left his office, heading through the quiet halls to his private study.
He opened the door and walked straight in.
Only to find Inara standing in front of the fireplace, still in her blue gown, her hands clasped tightly in front of her, her cheeks still wet.
Not gone to the Queen’s Estate after all.
Shock rooted him to the spot, swiftly followed by a wild joy he couldn’t quite shake.
‘What are you doing here?’ His voice was rough.
The expression on her face was raw with pain, open with longing. ‘I can’t leave you, love. I tried and I can’t. Because you’re right. I wanted the Prince, not the King. But that isn’t love and I...wanted to show you that love isn’t about expectations, and it isn’t a weight. It’s not a burden. Love is acceptance and...’
She swallowed. ‘I love you, Cassius. I love you as the King as well as the Prince. I love the man you were and I love the man you are now. And so I’ll stay here with you, for as long as you want me. You don’t have to do anything. You don’t have to be anyone. Just be you. You as you are, right now, is all I want.’
There was a roaring in his ears, as if someone had let off a bomb somewhere nearby and the sound of the explosion was still echoing.
You as you are, right now, is all I want.
That couldn’t be true. It couldn’t.
‘You don’t want that,’ he said hoarsely. ‘You can’t want that. I’m...flawed, Inara. Don’t you see? Don’t you understand? If I don’t have to do anything...if I don’t have to be anyone...’ He stopped, pain twisting in his heart at a truth he didn’t want to face. ‘Then why couldn’t my father...?’
She crossed the room to him, coming to stand in front of him, her small hands lifting to take his face between them. The heat of her palms seared him all the way through.
‘Didn’t you ever think, love, that the problem wasn’t you?’ Her voice was soft and there was no hiding from the bright flame in her eyes. ‘That the problem was him?’
How she understood what he was talking about, he didn’t know, but she did. And he found he’d lifted his own hands, his fingers circling her wrists, pressing against the fragile bones, feeling her heat and her strength. ‘How could it be him? He loved Caspian. He never had any issue—’
‘It was never you, Cassius,’ Inara said thickly. ‘And if he couldn’t see the kind, generous, wonderful man you actually are, the selfless, compassionate King you’ve become, then he was blind. And he was stupid. And he was wrong.’
He wanted to tell her that that couldn’t be the truth, that it couldn’t be as simple as that, but her grey eyes had gone luminous and everything he’d been going to say had gone clean out of his head.
‘It’s time to stop punishing yourself, my love,’ she said quietly. ‘Let your family go. You don’t need to keep them here any longer. You have me now, and I’ll keep you safe.’
Something inside him suddenly cracked apart, the hard shell he’d drawn around him shattering, letting out all the flawed emotions he’d been so desperate to keep inside. The grief and the guilt and the pain and the anger.
And, most of all, the love.
Because she’d stayed. She’d stayed. She’d stayed for him. She didn’t want him to be anything else. She didn’t demand it.
Love was sacrifice and duty, but love was also Inara—here, after he thought she’d left him. Inara, who’d accepted herself and who’d accepted him too. Who’d taught him that he could be himself, that he could be both king and prince. But, above all, a man.
A man who loved her.
Cassius let go of her wrists, sliding his hands down her arms, down her sides to her hips. Then he pulled her hard against him, every cell in his body craving her presence. Craving everything she had to give and more.
‘Inara,’ he whispered. ‘Inara...’ He had no other words.
But then she solved the problem by going up on her toes and kissing him. Making it clear that he didn’t need to say a thing.
So he didn’t try. Instead, he tore her gown away and took her down onto the floor of his study, telling her with his hands on her body and the kisses following in their wake, and with his sex as he eventually pushed inside her, what she meant to him.
He couldn’t say the whole of what he felt; he didn’t know how. But he could learn. He was willing.
So she taught him all she knew, a lesson that began that night in his study and continued on through all the years of their marriage—lessons in joy, in happiness. In comfort, and pleasure, and most important of all in love.
And eventually Cassius found the words to tell her what he felt for her, how she’d freed him, how she’d changed him. How she made him more himself every day.
But by then he didn’t need to.
She already knew.