The Wild Heir(10)

I rub my lips together anxiously. I hadn’t expected an ultimatum but I don’t know why I’m surprised. Of course this is where this had to go—it’s the only way for my parents to find out where I stand. The only way I can change is if I’m forced to.

“I don’t mean to sound harsh,” my father says with a tired sigh, “but it’s the truth. You’ve long said you don’t want to abdicate, and if that’s the truth, now is the time to become the person you’re meant to be.”

I nod. “And I can do that. Start including me in your weekly council meetings. Start bringing me to the parliament or on official dinners or…”

“I will,” he says. “I just wish I had started sooner, before my condition started to deteriorate. But you know that’s only solving one half of the problem.”

For some reason I had hoped my father wasn’t going to bring up the marriage thing. That it would stay this crazy idea of my mother’s. But that doesn’t seem to be the case.

He reaches down to the low table on the other side of him and lifts up a clipboard with paper. There’s a few grainy black and white pictures of a girl, which must make this the list that my mother has compiled.

Shit is about to get weird.

“Is that the list?”

“It’s the list,” he says, flipping through a few pages. “I know this is the last thing you expected, but I have to say I think your mother is on the right track with this.”

“Do you really?” I hate having to question him in this state but I don’t think either one of them realize what a big fucking step this is.

“It’s not conventional,” he admits, glancing at me quickly. “But what about our lives is conventional?”

“So you’re just going to give me this list and expect me to pick out a girl and then we’ll get married and that will be the end of it?”

“Something like that.”

My heart is starting to race again at the idea, my lungs feeling choked. “You do realize this isn’t how the world works.”

“It’s how our world works, right now, at this moment.”

“Marriage won’t change me.”

He chuckles. “Oh, it will. And for the better. More than that, it will change you in the eye of the public and that’s all we really care about right now.”

“More than my own feelings, my own freedom.”

That brings a sharp look out of him. “Magnus. Sometimes there is something bigger than your thoughts and feelings. This is one of those times.”

“You loved my mother.”

He narrows his eyes. “I still do.”

“Sorry. What I meant was that you married her for love. Didn’t you? I mean, she was a commoner. You had to plead your case to your own father and he basically made you choose her or the throne.”

He gives me a barely perceptible nod, his eyes not leaving mine. “If there had been another potential heir, I wouldn’t be here. I was his only hope. He had no choice but to let me marry her.”

“So that’s love. That’s real love. You fought for her for years and years before you were finally allowed to marry her. What you’re prescribing me is the opposite of that.”

“And since when do you care about love, Magnus? Have you ever been in love? Do you want to be in love? Is that what you’re doing every night with all these different women, are you bedding them because you’re searching for love?”

I blink at him for a moment, my thoughts becoming heavy, clouded. “No. I don’t know what I’m looking for.”

“And I know you don’t love any of them either. So what’s the difference?”

I give him a poignant look. I really don’t want to explain, but he’s leaving me no choice. “I like sex. Okay?”

My father rolls his eyes and snorts. “Dear boy. That is more than apparent. I know this is the last thing you want to hear, but just because you’re getting married doesn’t mean you stop having sex.”

I throw my hands up. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t want to marry someone I don’t know, let alone someone I do know. I don’t want to have sex with the same woman for the rest of my life.”

He cocks a brow. “Not even if it’s good sex?”

I don’t want to talk about this anymore. It’s still beyond mind-boggling that we’re even having this conversation to begin with.

“I don’t know what else to say,” I tell him, “other than I don’t want to do this and you have to understand why. It’s 2018. This sort of shit shouldn’t happen.”

“You’d be surprised how many marriages out there—genuinely happy ones—started out just this way. Royals, celebrities, we’re all very good at pulling the wool over the public’s eyes. And that’s precisely what we’re going to do with you. You will marry someone, Magnus, or you won’t be king. You will marry someone and your relationship will look believable to the world, and I promise you, in time, if you let it happen, you will learn to believe it too.”

He hands me the clipboard and I’m surprised to find my hands are shaking as I hold it, my eyes glancing absently at the girl on the first page, some pretty, dark-haired brunette princess from Spain. Who isn’t too far from the women I date but marriage is a whole other ballgame.