“I’m going to say no,” she’d said when she broke his heart. “Cordonia deserves better. You deserve better.”
She can’t forget the way he’d looked at her, devastation in his eyes. It makes her want to reconsider, to go back to him and tell him that she’ll figure out a way to make it work, a way to make to make ‘being Queen’ work for her. Instead, she keeps packing, words Liam had said to her weeks earlier playing through her mind.
“Leo’s mother couldn’t handle the pressures of courtly life,” he’d told her as he explained the events of the last few decades that had left Cordonia weak and the monarchy unstable. “She hadn’t been at court long before marriage.”
It was too heavy a burden for her to bear.
She’s been packing ever since, the last of her savings used to book a plane ticket back to New York. She can’t marry him, but she definitely can’t stay and watch him marry someone else.
Her belongings are almost all packed away when she hears a knock on the door. She hesitates for a moment, unsure who it is and not wanting to explain where she’s going and what she’s doing to Maxwell or Hana or Drake.
But then there’s another, more insistent, knock.
Riley tugs at the hem of the baggy t-shirt she’s wearing, making sure it’s long enough for her to appear decent, and then she opens the door.
It’s Liam. She’s never seen him look so dishevelled, his hair askew and his eyes red. “I shouldn’t be here,” he says, his voice hoarse. “But… I need to be here.”
She swallows, her throat dry, and then steps aside to let him in.
“May I?” he asks once he’s inside the room, gesturing at the lock on the door. Riley nods, watching him turn the key until the door clicks closed. He turns back to look at her, and she sees the exact moment he notices the open suitcase on her bed.
“Why are you here?” He moves his gaze back to her, his jaw set with determination. “I didn’t think you’d want to-”
He interrupts her with a kiss, seizing her face in his hands and lowering his lips to hers. The kiss is hard, desperate, and although she knows she shouldn’t kiss back when she’s supposed to have said her goodbyes, she clings to him, creases his shirt in her hands, and kisses him back.
“You said I deserved better,” he says when he finally breaks the kiss. “But I don’t want better. I want you.”
“Liam…”
“I know.” He sighs, raises his eyes to the ceiling. His eyes are shining with tears, and she watches his throat move as he swallows down at sob. “I understand why you can’t stay. I know it’s a lot to ask of anyone.”
She bites her lip. “Liam, I’m sorry.”
He doesn’t accept her apology. He doesn’t even seem to acknowledge it. Instead, he looks over her shoulder at the suitcase again.
It’s the first time a silence between them has been uncomfortable, and it feels even worse with him still holding her face in his hands, still only inches away. She wants to say something, anything, but the only thing she can think of to say is to ask him what he’ll do now, who he’s going to pick, and she can’t ask that. She doesn’t want to know.
“I thought we’d have more time,” he says finally. “I thought we’d have forever. I tried to do everything properly, to act the way I’m expected to, but there isn’t a forever anymore and… Riley, I don’t want you to leave before I can-” He pauses, his thumb brushing along the curve of her cheek. She leans in, her breath shaky and her eyes closed, tears clinging to her eyelashes. “I don’t want you to leave before I can love you.”
He kisses her again, one hand trailing away from her cheek and combing through her hair, his other arm around her waist and pulling her into him. She clutches at his shoulders, drags her tongue along the seam of his lips, asks for more even though she knows she shouldn’t ask him for anything.
But now that he’s said it, she doesn’t want to leave without loving him either. She wants to know all of him. Feel all of him.
She leads him back towards the bed, their lips never parting. He reaches behind her to push the suitcase off the bed and it crashes onto the floor, her clothes spilling out around it.
She doesn’t care.
They fall onto the bed together. Liam presses kisses to her cheeks, her lips, and in return, she kisses him everywhere she can reach, slides her hands over his shoulder and down his back, tugs at his shirt so it comes untucked. She tries to pull it over his head, but Liam stops her, pushes himself out of her embrace and stands, his fingers busy unbuttoning his shirt.
He’s rushing, shedding his shirt and undoing his belt. She follows his lead, stripping off the baggy t-shirt she’s wearing, and then she reaches for him, her hands intercepting his at the waistband of his trousers. She shifts forward, intending to drop to her knees before him, but he reaches out and stops her.
“Don’t,” he says. “I don’t want you kneeling. I don’t want you to… Let me.” She stares up at him, stays sat on the edge of the bed, and watches as he kneels before her. He slides his hands from her knees up her thighs, and she bends to kiss him, soft and slow. When their lips part, he sighs, brushes his nose against hers. “We may not have a future, Riley, but you will always be my Queen.”
She doesn’t get a chance to respond before he’s nudging her legs apart, kissing the inside of her thigh and then his mouth’s upon her.
Riley has one hand in his hair, the other grasping at the sheet behind her. She’s breathless, overwhelmed by the feel of him, and it doesn’t take long before she breaks, a cry on her lips when she comes. Liam rests his forehead against her thigh, his breath hot and fast, and she teases her fingers through his hair as he tries to catch his breath.
It’s only when he stands up and tilts her head up towards him that she realises she’s crying.
He pushes gently at her shoulders so she lies back, flat on the bed, and then his body covers hers as he kisses away her tears, his lips marking a path from her cheeks down to her lips. For a while, they just kiss – sometimes soft, sometimes deep – but they don’t have forever, and soon he’s got one hand at her breast and one hand between her legs. Riley gasps, arches into him, her body trembling with each stroke of his fingers inside her.
Liam stops before she can fall apart again, and she sobs when he draws his hand away and finally, slowly, pushes into her.
And then he stops again.
“Riley,” he says, his voice strained. His arms are shaking either side of her as he keeps himself still. She looks up at him, at his warm gaze and his sad smile, and she forces herself not to cry, tries to blink back the tears clouding her vision. Tries instead to remember every little detail of his expression. “I love you. I’m always going to love you.”
“I’m always going to love you too.”
Liam presses his lips together, blinks away a few tears of his own, and then he ducks his head and presses his lips to her heart. It’s only then, with her heart beating frantically beneath his lips, that he starts to move, his hips rocking into hers.
‘I love you,’ he says into her skin, over and over again. ‘Sorry’, she writes onto his.
Afterwards, he holds her close, brushes his lips to her forehead. She wants to sleep, wants to see what he looks like when she wakes up beside him in the morning, but they both know they can’t.
She doesn’t think he’s even been there an hour when he redresses and wanders back over to the door. She throws her t-shirt back on, pads after him. He stops just before opening the door and rifles through the pockets of his trousers for something.
It’s a ring. Gold and diamonds. Not too elaborate, like she would have expected – small and beautiful and perfect. “Here,” he says before she can protest. “I want you to have it. As a thank you for everything. For making me so happy.”
“Liam, I-”
“It’s yours,” he insists as takes hold of her hand and, for a moment, looks like he’s going to put the ring on her finger. He changes his mind, presses it into her palm. “No one else should wear it.”
On the plane back home, the ring glitters on the ring finger of her right (wrong) hand.