Page 48 of Christmas in the King's Bed

It had never occurred to her that he would sell her out so quickly. Not before the wedding, anyway.

“I had no choice,” she said now, trying not to sound as miserable as she felt.

“No attempts to convince me it wasn’t your fault, I see. No tears, no protestations.”

She lifted her chin, even though there wasn’t a single part of her that didn’t want to curl into a ball and die. “I think you know that my father delivered me into your hands for one reason only. To funnel information back to him.”

He let out a hollow laugh. “Why did I imagine otherwise?”

“I don’t believe you did,” she made herself say, as if nothing had changed between them from that first meeting to now. “Not really.”

Another laugh, as if he was angry at himself, not her. Or perhaps both. “It is good to know that you follow instructions to the letter, Calista. Something I will have to keep in mind in the future.”

She wanted to cry. She wanted to hit things, or possibly just crawl away somewhere and sob her heart out.

Instead, she made herself glare at him. “I warned you. I told you not to trust me. There was no reason why you should have in the first place.”

And her heart stuttered in her chest when he reached over and took her chin in his fingers.

“Because I wanted to trust you, Calista,” he bit out. “Because I knew exactly who you were, but I hoped—I wished—that you might surprise yourself.”

“Then you really are a fool,” she threw back at him, though it made her shake. “What did you imagine? That you could change the world simply because you decreed it?”

She jerked her chin out of his fingers, but she was all too aware that he let her go. And more, that she wished he hadn’t.

“Yes,” Orion said, starkly. “I thought you would want to change.”

He couldn’t have hurt her more if he’d swung and hit her.

Hard.

Her breath left her as if he had.

“You will never know how much I wanted—”

But Calista cut herself off, because it was all futile. It didn’t matter. This was never the part of her life that was supposed to matter. This was the distraction, and she didn’t understand when or how the King of Idylla had shifted everything around inside her.

When he had got to her and got her so...muddled.

Some mornings, she woke up and forgot all about board meetings and Skyros Media and her lifelong dream of bringing down her father.

For hours.

And every time she remembered, it was another betrayal of her sister.

She couldn’t pretend she hadn’t known, when she’d chosen to give her father information about Orion—much lessthatinformation—that she was sacrificing those hours of freedom, no matter how much she’d loved to forget the mess of it all. The squalid dirt that had made her family’s name.

She knew full well she was sacrificing the bright glow of these past weeks for the same cold future she’d always been aiming toward.

It was the right thing to do, she told herself, again and again. A king would always prosper, but the same couldn’t be said of Melody, there beneath their father’s thumb.

But that it was right didn’t make it hurt less.

Calista was starting to think that the hurt was a part of it, and one more price she would have to pay.

Sometimes, looking at him, it almost felt worth it.

“I don’t understand any of this,” she said, trying to keep her eyes away from him in the shadows of the back seat, because it was too painful. But it didn’t work. “You and I should never have met. You should never have told me that you were a virgin. All of this could have been avoided if you’d stood up to my father in the first place. It wasn’t your sin. It was your father’s.”