Chapter One #3
It felt like a metaphor for the way she had laid waste to Tadeo’s own principles and self-regard.
Tadeo hated fucking metaphors.
Though as he walked through one atrium that bled into the next, with more floral theatrics at every turn, he knew that he could not lay that solely at her feet. The woman could be as wicked as she liked, but it was the wickedness in him that had met hers.
He was the one at fault. He accepted that.
Now he wished to be done with it. There was no doubt a sweet, unassuming, deeply boring heiress somewhere that he could marry and never think about again.
She would do her job and leave him to his.
They would have a pleasant, comfortable, smooth sort of life, marked by nothing but the milestones of their children and the peaceful prosperity of the kingdom.
He could almost taste it. All that was needed was the quietly amicable divorce he had planned, with tasteful statements to the press about going their separate ways with no acrimony and the best of wishes for the other’s happiness, etcetera, and he could have peace at last.
At last.
On the other side of the ruined house, he stepped outside onto one of the back terraces and surveyed the gardens as they stretched out toward the horizon and the Pyrenees in the distance.
It did not take a degree in landscape architecture to realize that the gardens, too, had been changed.
In seven years, Esme had completely transformed the sophisticated, manicured gardens that previous queens who had lived here—excluding his mother, of course, who had never set foot on this property while the gleaming shores of the C?te d’Azur existed—had enjoyed.
They had all taken pride in overseeing the tending of these gardens, always passing the torch along to keep them quiet, contemplative.
A fitting place of respite for a queen. A place for meditation and relaxation.
There was nothing the least bit relaxing about the gardens greeting him now.
They were a deafening bugle of early spring exuberance.
There were daffodils and crocuses and cherry blossoms, and they were everywhere, bright and bold. Unseemly and overwhelming, Tadeo thought darkly, and he could not understand why he could not find a single, solitary soul to explain to him what was happening here.
He knew that Esme had not gone on a trip of any kind. Her schedule went through his office, for his review. The palace had only just begun taking on their outward-facing duties again as mourning for the late King had only this week come to an official end.
Esme should have been here. Doing whatever it was she did with her time.
Which was, he reflected now, wrecking heritage sites with the wanton application of tawdry colors slapped about with no thought whatsoever for the lines of the garden or its pathways or its internal logic, apparently.
He stood still in the not precisely warm air of the late February morning, generating more than enough heat on his own. The sun was already warm, hinting at the fairer months to come. The chill of winter almost felt like a memory when the sunlight moved over his face.
Tadeo needed her excised from this house, and the kingdom, and his life before another season passed. If he allowed himself the sort of dramatics he felt only when he was in Esme’s vicinity, he would be tempted to think his own life depended on it.
“But I do not allow it,” he growled out at himself. As a reminder he should not have needed, yet clearly did. Another reason this long, torturous chapter of his life needed to end.
He thought he heard a sound in the distance and he made himself walk toward it, scowling at the once-orderly flower beds everywhere, now showing no restraint or any evidence of planning.
It was all too bright. Too out of control.
As if someone had spun around in a circle like a child with bubbles, flinging seeds about.
The image he had then, of Esme doing exactly that, did not help his mood any.
Tadeo battled his way down an overgrown pathway where vines had been encouraged to do as they liked, making his way out toward the far end of the gardens, where a pergola sat between the garden proper and the start of the vineyards that some enterprising queen had insisted be grown here some while back.
They did not produce a lot of wine, but every year, the queen’s vintners produced a specialized run of limited-edition bottles of the queen’s Pinot Noir.
It had long been seen as something of a status symbol among certain sets in the kingdom’s society.
Tadeo half expected to find the vines torn up and discarded in favor of an amusement park or something equally hideous, but they were still there. Waiting for the summer to ripen into grapes suitable for wine.
He heard voices again and strode toward them, feeling more and more like a storm cloud as he went.
Then he walked up through the vine-laden path to the pergola and found his wife at last.
She was sitting at the long table in the shade there with what appeared to be her own staff members. There was food and drink in platters, but there were also swathes of fabric, and Esme herself seemed to be wearing half of them.
It took him long, heart-pounding moments to realize that he was reacting to two things at once.
One, he had no idea what they were doing, and no one seemed to look at his direction or even notice he was there, which was unusual.
Two, and more concerning, it was impossible not to notice that Esme looked… well.
Very well.
Glowing, in fact.
And his body, his temple that he preferred to keep completely under his control at all times like a bit of marble that he alone could sculpt, betrayed him yet again.
The way it had from the start where Esme was concerned.
Because every time he laid eyes on this woman, it was like he was burned alive.
She was a poison in his blood, a curse upon his soul, and a great lamentation in the cock that he otherwise ruthlessly controlled.
If a great lamentation was what to call it when he was nothing at all but hard and needy while the woman was doing nothing but sitting in a chair across a table from where he was standing, with very little of her visible aside from her face.
Damn her.
He waited. Esme didn’t look up. She was talking animatedly to one of the women dressed in black beside her. They were both moving their fingers over the fabric that was swaddled all over as if they’d been draping it over Esme on purpose, but he couldn’t hear what they were saying.
It was possible he had stood there a long while before a different woman altogether looked up, met Tadeo’s gaze, and gasped.
“Your Majesty!” she cried.
He watched the ripple effect as it happened. First everyone froze. Then, as if lit by the same flame, all of the servants leaped to their feet—pushing back their chairs so there were loud scraping noises against the tile patio, then dropping into deep, deep curtsies.
His queen, Tadeo noticed—his wife, though hopefully not for much longer—did not rise, though it was protocol that she do so. Esme stayed where she was, draped in so many different shades of billowing fabric that he could barely see her body beneath it.
“Leave us,” Tadeo told the staff, and did not watch them as they all fluttered off, like so many dark-feathered birds.
He kept watching Esme. He studied her maddeningly perfect oval of a face with her dark flashing eyes and that lush, impossible mouth that he absolutely could not feel all over his body, because that was insupportable.
“Have you taken up sewing?” he asked her, not convinced he was entirely in control of his voice. He blamed her for that, too.
The proverbial straw on a camel’s back.
“I’m redecorating a room,” she replied.
In that same serene voice of hers. Brimming with that same abominable confidence that he found both atrocious and wildly compelling.
Tragically, she also remained the most beautiful woman he’d ever encountered.
This had been true when she was but a sophomore at Wellesley. It was even more true now. It was an outrage on every level, but she still looked like the model of the perfect woman, should he have been asked to draw such a creature.
Should drawing be one of his talents.
It was not that she was the most beautiful woman in the world, he supposed.
But it was a cruel trick of fate that she managed to hit every single one of the buttons Tadeo had not entirely realized he had until he’d met her.
She was elegant. She was graceful in everything, from her smallest gestures to the way she laughed—a sound that came from her belly and transformed her whole face.
She had the sort of exquisite manners that were necessary for the circles they moved in, but Esme always made them seem as if they were innate.
As it was not something she was doing, but something that was simply a part of who she was.
She had been kind to his father, who had been less enticed by the fairy-tale argument and had been largely chilly in return.
She was always kind to their subjects, no matter what sort of questions they tried to ask her while she was shaking hands and playing her part.
It was his cross to bear that she also looked equally as stunning when she was in jeans and flats as she did in a bespoke gown made for ceremony and circumstance.
Today, she had her dark, glossy hair piled casually on the back of her head. It looked like she was wearing a simple T-shirt, which seemed to hug her curves more than usual. And yet she still simply emanated sophistication from every pore.
Only Tadeo knew that there were ways to touch this woman that lit her on fire.
Only he knew what she looked like, her dark eyes glazed over with sex and longing, her mouth open while sounds of desire poured out, and how she writhed beneath him, taking more and more until he wasn’t certain if either one of them would actually survive—
But that was not the point of this visit.
“My father has been dead for five months,” he told her curtly.
“Five months and thirteen days,” Esme replied. Oddly specific, to his mind, but she said it so calmly. Her lips curved. “I am aware, Tadeo.”
If he could go back in time, he would not have given her access to his family name. By the end, only his father still called him that in person. Most of his friends from school called him variations on his title. Or other nicknames of one sort or another.
The press, of course, used all of his names as they pleased.
He could have had her call him by his proper first name and he often thought that would be easier, because he wouldn’t feel this tug of undeserved familiarity. Maybe the name alone would have done it. Maybe then he would never have become familiar with her at all.
But he couldn’t go back to that first dinner in a quiet restaurant overlooking the Charles and fix what happened.
He could only do the necessary damage control now.
“I told you long ago that we would remain married only as long as necessary,” he told her, no longer caring how dark he sounded. It needed to be done. It didn’t matter how it was done. “I’ve come here to let you know that I intend to begin our divorce proceedings. Immediately.”
Tadeo didn’t know what he expected. For her to cheer, perhaps?
Sometimes he convinced himself that she was no more interested in continuing this marriage of theirs than he was.
Perhaps he thought she might cry? After all, he hadn’t been so far gone that he’d forgotten the things she’d whispered in the night after his father’s death.
Sometimes he thought those words haunted him.
But of all the possible responses he’d imagined, it wasn’t the way she smiled at him.
Her lips curved gently. Even kindly, he thought.
And then she rose.
The fabric cascaded off her and slid in heaps of shimmering color to either side of her, landing on the tiles at her feet.
But Tadeo forgot all about that. He couldn’t take his eyes off her.
Because the Esme he had last seen five months ago had been lean and lithe and in some way resembled the ballet dancer she had once told him she would have liked to have become, in a different life.
She stood, the fabric fell, and she placed her hand on the shelf of the belly—her belly—that had swelled up to enormous size. A great deal as if she had a ball beneath her shirt, when, of course, she did not.
It was impossible. It was inconceivable.
It was a disaster of epic proportions and she was smiling—
“About that divorce,” Esme said, as if they were discussing the weather. Or what to have the staff prepare for a snack. As if she was not very obviously pregnant. “I wonder if you might want to rethink.”