The Royal's Obsession Read Online Free PDF

public meetings and events before they married. Until their wedding night, they never spent any time at all alone.”
    Anastasia thought about it for a moment. What would it be like to come straight from the arms of her family into a marriage with a man that she didn’t know at all? What would a young bride feel as the doors closed behind them and she was finally alone with the man who she was meant to live with for the rest of her life?
    She glanced at Augustine, who was studying a painted blue ceramic pot carefully. What would it be like if the man who was suddenly watching her from across the marriage bed was him?
    “That sounds frightening,” she murmured, coming to stand beside him. “I…I’ve never been someone who was too concerned with control, but losing that much control feels terrifying. Suddenly…suddenly you are just in a new life, with new expectations and someone who has…an incredible amount of access to you.”
    Augustine’s glance was amused but he nodded.
    “No, but my grandparents beat the odds. They were together for some fifty years, they raised my father and my uncles with love and care, and up until the end of their lives, they would still walk hand in hand through the royal garden in Athens. Everyone should be so lucky.”
    “Did they have an easy beginning?”
    He laughed at that.
    “Not at all. Family legend has it that when they fought, the entire palace could hear it. Once, she became so angry that she threw a gravy boat that was more than three hundred years old at him, shattering it to pieces. They fought, but as my grandfather told it much later, they were only fighting because they did not know how to be in love.”
    Anastasia thought about what Augustine was saying. She could imagine the early tempestuous days of his grandparents’ love. She could think about what it might be like to fight, first for yourself, and then for the love that was possible.
    “They were very lucky,” she said, “and very brave as well. I wish I were that brave.”
    Augustine looked at her for such a long time that she started to fidget. Finally he smiled a little, shaking his head.
    “You are a strange one, pretty Anastasia. I like hearing the truth from you.”
    She shrugged it off, a blush on her face.
    “I think I just want to avoid trouble,” she said as candidly as she could. “But look, there’s a stand there selling honey…”
    The honey stand was a simple wood counter arranged under a bright and cheerful yellow-orange banner. The woman, sensing a sale, offered them both paper cups with plastic spoons stuck in them.
    “What’s this?” Anastasia asked in confusion, looking at the small solid bits that seemed trapped in the honey.
    “Honeycomb,” replied Augustine, already eating his. “Eat it, it’s good for you. If it was in bigger pieces, you would chew it like gum and spit it out when it lost its flavor, but right now, as small as those pieces are, you can just swallow them.”
    Dubiously, Anastasia spooned a small portion of the honey into her mouth. The honey itself was dark and sweet, bursting with flavor in the a way that the honey back home simply didn’t. She had had buckwheat honey and orange blossom honey before, but this was something different. The small pieces of honeycomb in the honey itself were slightly crunchy but with a darker flavor that made it the perfect complement.
    “This is amazing,” she said with a sigh. “I should get some and send it back to my parents.”
    She ended up buying two jars of the superior dark honey, but when the woman gave them to her, it upset her little paper cup. She caught it before it fell, but a dribble of honey ended up on her hand.
    Without thinking of what she was doing, she leaned down to lap at it with her tongue. When Anastasia looked up, it was to see that Augustine was watching her with those intent dark eyes.
    “Well, waste not, want not, I guess,” she said with a slightly guilty laugh.
    Augustine tore his eyes away