Chapter Two #2
Her clasped hands folded nicely, so she did that and then propped them up on her belly again.
Esme made herself smile, as beatifically as possible.
Then when all he did was glower in her direction, she kept going.
“I’ve had a lot of time to think about it, and I do think it might be best. I’m happy to divorce.
You can continue doing…whatever self-flagellation exercises it is that you prefer.
I can have a life. And our child can have the attention of both of its parents without having to worry about living in the ice fjords of the palace here.
” She considered. “Or at least not full-time.”
“You might have had a lot of time to think about this, but I have had not.” Flustered, she thought again, as he raked his hands through his hair. It made her wonder if he would ever grow it out again the way he had when he was a graduate student in a foreign land. And the other occupant of her bed.
After their affair had ended, he’d cut it all off.
She’d seen it in a tabloid and had cried for days.
“You can have all the time you need,” she told him serenely now, as if bestowing upon him a great gift. “That said, there is a ticking clock.” She patted her belly. “Like it or not.”
Tadeo glared at her for what felt like a very long time. His gaze swept over her, from the top of her head to as much of her as he could see from his side of the table.
Esme could have told him that she’d been sitting out here playing with fabrics, imagining the nursery in this house.
She had decided with the help of the staff members here, who had all become her friends, that it would be best to decorate it.
To celebrate the baby and her impending motherhood while they all waited for that other shoe to fall.
They had all known that it would. Esme had told them from the start that if they felt it necessary to confess her condition to the King, she would understand. At the end of the day, they worked for him. Everyone in the kingdom did.
Especially her.
But not one of her staff had taken her up on that. Over the years, they’d become close. With the occasional addition of her friends from college, who would sometimes fly in and brighten things up for a while, the staff here were Esme’s daily support.
Her parents were only a mountain range away, and supported her in all things, but she never wanted them to think that they’d made a mistake in setting up this marriage.
She never wanted to worry them. She still didn’t.
In fact, she worked hard to convince them that everything in her marriage was fine.
Perfectly fine—and she assumed her perceptive mother chose to believe her. Because her mother loved her.
We can see about confessions when His Majesty chooses to visit, the housekeeper had said tartly one morning, waiting for Esme outside the bathroom suite in her rooms. The older woman had held out the ginger drink they’d made for her on those early pregnancy mornings when her stomach wanted to separate itself from her body.
As violently as possible. But he would have to come here in order to do that, would he not?
Esme could tell Tadeo all that. She could tell him what the past seven years had been like, sequestered in this manor house and trotted out only to smile and wave and play her part, all while pretending she felt nothing for him outside of the roles they played.
But why start there? That was simply how long they’d been married.
She could go back even further. To having to drag herself through her final year of college utterly heartbroken, a ghost of her former self, because he had dropped her so cruelly.
Her friends had rallied. They had done their best, but they didn’t understand—and how could she explain?
—that the situations with college boys they loved and would forget that they were comparing to her affair with Tadeo were different.
Not as intense. Not as all-consuming. Not as real.
There was no way to share those things, even though she knew it was true. It would only make her sound delusional.
Esme had become so embarrassed by the fact that she couldn’t seem to find her smile again that she’d forced it.
She’d figured out how she could always put on a face appropriate to the moment, no matter what she was feeling inside.
She’d learned how to play whatever role was needed and expected, with no one the wiser.
This new ability got her through graduation, then off to London for a charity internship that had been plotted out long ago.
Princess Esme of Clarebonne had made a few tasteful charity-based headlines that year and at the end of it, she had been certain that she would be left to explain to her parents, her own kingdom—and his—that there would be no fairy-tale betrothal after all.
That just because their families had agreed that there would be one, one day, and had even hinted in public at their being betrothed from her birth, it would never happen.
She’d been preparing her statement since college.
Esme had been nothing short of flabbergasted when she’d received formal notice from his kingdom that the royal courtship would begin.
Maybe, finally, she could tell him what it had been like to have to succumb to an extremely public relationship, every moment scripted for the cameras, with the ex who had ripped her heart out of her body and stomped it into dust. Like it was nothing.
But she doubted he wanted to hear any of that.
Now, she watched him turn away from her, looking back over the gardens that she had made her own.
They were happy now. Bright explosions of color, basking in their own beauty.
She treated the manor house itself the same way.
Every time he made her sad, she found something else to brighten.
Room by room, wall by wall, she put bright colors in place of the parts of her heart that he’d bruised.
She couldn’t say that she regretted it.
“This isn’t what I had planned either, you know,” she said, addressing his back.
His outrageously well-muscled back that, if she let herself think about it too much, she could actually feel beneath her fingertips.
As if she was wrapped around him, holding him close, her fingers digging into his shoulder blades as he surged deep inside her—
The trouble with being pregnant, she had discovered, was that—contrary to what she’d always believed, given the way people talked about the state—she did not feel at all like that beaming, sexless, goddess mother figure she’d expected would take her over.
All she thought about was sex. Not just any kind of sex. Specifically, sex with Tadeo.
It was a torment.
His being here today didn’t exactly help.
He didn’t respond to her, so she kept going.
“I was looking forward to our divorce. I was going to move back to the States. Do some good work with my time. Help others, perhaps launch a lifestyle cooking show, whatever came to mind. I thought perhaps I would find a chic home in Manhattan like Jackie Onassis and swan about with oversize sunglasses for the rest of my life, refusing interviews. Either way, the world was mine.” She blew out a breath.
“But somehow I think that’s no longer the option that it was. ”
Her friends had been more and more adamant on every visit over the years. She needed to get the hell out of Bellaza. She had to get as far away as it was possible to get from King Tadeo.
That man has been a shadow over your entire life and has blocked out your sun since you were twenty, her best friend, Hilary, had said matter-of-factly. It’s been too long, Esme. It’s time for something new.
Esme had agreed. And instead, she was pregnant.
Not just pregnant the way anyone might be, she was pregnant with the baby who would be heir to the kingdom of Bellaza and there was precious little possibility that anyone in the palace or this valley would look kindly on that heir being raised on a separate continent. So that was that.
A full eclipse, I’m afraid, she’d told Hilary.
Tadeo turned back to her and though there was a glittering in his gaze, his face remained unreadable. When there had been a time, long ago now, that she’d been able to read him so easily.
“I will concede we are both to blame for this,” he said, sounding darkly formal and so stuffy it made her want to scream. But that would be playing into his narrative about her—so emotional, so immature, so over-the-top, and so on—so she smiled instead. “It is both of our faults.”
“I understand that you are getting used to this,” she said in the same soothing tone she’d been using, that she hoped he found condescending.
“You’ve had a shock and you’ll need some time with it.
That’s acceptable. But I’m not going to stand around and talk about the child we made, who will be coming into this world in not so many months, as something we should be ashamed of.
Or call it a fault or a mistake. I just want that very clear. ”
“I wasn’t the one who kept it a secret,” he replied with that cold efficiency that had always left her breathless. It was like a knife. “Have you seen a physician?”
“No, I thought that it would be great fun to simply risk everything and see what happened,” Esme shot back at him. When his eyes widened slightly, she sighed. “Of course I’ve seen a physician. The same physician I always see.”
“You mean the palace physician.” When she nodded, Tadeo looked astonished. “And no report was made to me?”
“I imagine the palace physician was under the impression you already knew,” Esme said coolly. “Since you are, in fact, my husband.”
“You knew that I did not.”
“I saw no reason to tell you.” Esme shrugged. “You made your position very clear. You told me to leave the palace and not to return unless and until I was summoned. That you would tell my people when that was and that you did not want to lay eyes on me until that occurred. I listened.”
She had not only listened. She had finally accepted, deep in her poor battered heart, that there would never be the kind of future she wanted with this man.
It had hurt almost as much as losing him the first time, but she’d gotten there.
She knew he’d meant it when he’d said he would divorce her.
He’d meant it when he’d said it before their wedding and he’d meant it even more when he’d reiterated it the morning after his father’s funeral.
Esme had mourned that spark of hope she’d carried inside all this while, truly she had.
But she had finally started to think about what life might be like without this particular shadow blotting out the sun.
And then she’d discovered she was pregnant.
Esme found that empathy for him in this moment felt scarce on the ground.
His gaze went cold. His jaw clenched. “You know perfectly well that I didn’t mean you should hide the fact that you were pregnant.”
Esme lifted her chin. “I don’t know that.
I only know what you said, Tadeo. Isn’t that something that you were at great pains to make me understand years ago?
You only wished to discuss what you said.
Not how your actions might have been received and certainly not how the way you said those things might have made someone else feel. ”
“I do not wish to discuss Boston,” he said then, in that low, furious voice of his that reminded her—violently—of that hideous day when he’d told her he was done with her. And had meant it then, too.
It still made her whole body flush. It still hurt, and she hated herself for that, but he didn’t deserve to see that any longer. So she smiled instead.
Because she was so damned good at smiling.
“Here in the house of exile,” she said, with an airiness that actually hurt, “I talk about whatever I wish. If you would like to direct the conversation, decide what words are used, and determine what eras are worthy of discussion, you can go back to the palace and order everyone about to your heart’s content. Your Majesty.”
Something flared on his face at that and Esme caught her breath, because for just a moment she could see the Tadeo that she knew. The Tadeo she missed. The hint of him, right there—
But he pulled it back. He hid it away. And then he stepped back as if she’d thrown herself over the table and tried to touch him.
As if she’d be so foolish after all these years.
She really had learned. At last.
“I am not going to process this information in real time with you,” he told her, with scathing formality. “Certainly not while you clearly wish to make my doing so as painful as possible. You’ll hear from my people soon.”
Then he turned sharply, as if he was back in the military service he’d done after graduate school, and marched away.
Esme watched him go. She took in that straight line of his back and the powerful way he moved until he disappeared into a riot of bright yellow daffodils, happy purple crocuses, and reckless sprays of forsythia.
She watched him until he was gone and then, when she was alone again, all of her masks and coping mechanisms tumbled at her feet like so much more slippery fabric for the nursery of a child who deserved better than all this acrimony.
As she sat down in her chair, cradled her head in her arms, and, despite her best intentions to banish the shadows from her life, sobbed.