Chapter Three #2
“How interesting that I need a personal escort today,” Esme said merrily as she left the car for the staff to move where they liked. “Does the King think that I am likely to foment rebellion on my way to see him?”
“If Your Majesty would watch your step,” replied the studiously unbothered Arturo, as he held the door for her.
Esme trailed after him once inside, trying not to let herself become too emotional.
It was difficult, but she couldn’t blame her hormones entirely.
She had been emotional the first time she’d walked into this palace too.
It had been before their wedding and she’d still had that reckless core of hope deep inside her—
But that was long gone. She tried to shake the memory off as she followed docilely enough behind Arturo as he led her deep into the palace.
Having grown up in the palace next door—give or take a few mountain ranges—Esme had always thought that the Bellazan palace felt like a fairy tale.
It was all about its spires and flourishes, with dramatic details in every direction.
Her father’s palace was far more utilitarian, more of a civic expression of royalty than an ideal.
She would never admit this to her own people, but she preferred the Bellazan palace to the Clarebonne one. This one was prettier. Airier. It made her want to sing songs and spin about, not that she ever had. It would be frowned upon.
Luckily, she thought as they walked, its inhabitants made up for their lovely fairy-tale palace by being as dour as humanly possible.
Arturo took her on a route that, she couldn’t help but notice, avoided all the main thoroughfares of the palace where anyone might see her. Then delivered her into a salon in the family wing where only one person could possibly see her and left her there, with a deep and proper bow as he exited.
She wandered over to the window and gazed out of it, looking at the hills in the distance. The small principality of Andorra was to the south. Her own Clarebonne to the east, Spain to the west, France to the north.
It struck her then that her own world had become quite small these last five months.
“I was nesting,” she said under her breath, defending herself. “And sleeping.”
And mourning kings and lives lost in more than one way.
Then again, she thought as the door opened behind her and her whole body reacted—indicating at once that Tadeo had entered the room—it was possible that she had been preparing for battle.
She turned to look at him.
Today he’d chosen the typical dark, bespoke suit. His usual fare. And also his armor, she thought. She stood where she was, smiling gently as he let his gaze track all over her—lingering on her belly, of course.
And had the satisfaction of watching his jaw clench.
“I apologize for my emotional outbursts yesterday,” he said without any preamble, and he didn’t even sound stiff. Though he also didn’t sound all that sorrowful. “It won’t happen again.”
“I should think not,” she replied calmly. “That would mean you might actually have to feel things, and we can’t have that.”
That blue gaze of his went frigid, but he did not reply. Instead, he moved to take one of the seats, gesturing for her to do the same.
Esme thought about resisting, but decided against it for strategic reasons when there were far bigger things to worry about. She went and sat so she was facing him across an exquisite little table made of glass with dramatic leg flourishes. So cozy. So intimate.
Such bullshit.
She imagined it had taken most of his team to decide on this room. They would have debated it. Would the austerity of his office be the wrong touch? Was the royal glory of the more formal rooms too aspirational? She hoped that he was up half the night concerned with the messaging of this.
Tadeo was always preoccupied with his messaging.
“I will confess to you that I did not make any provision for something so unforeseen to occur in this marriage,” he continued in the same relatively friendly voice, despite the chill in his gaze.
Esme gazed back at him. “Points for sounding so human, Tadeo. How long did you practice that? You sound sincere and slightly self-deprecating. The faint smile is a nice touch as well.”
Said faint smile disappeared immediately. “I’m trying to have a conversation with you.”
“No,” she replied steadily. “You are not. You are trying to manage me. They are not the same thing.”
“I’m not going to have a semantic battle with you, Esme,” Tadeo replied, sounding significantly more like himself. Which was to say, a lofty robot.
“I don’t think that pointing out the reality of a thing is a battle,” Esme said, sitting back in her chair.
“Unless, of course, one of the people in this room is overly committed to protecting a reality that does not exist.” She patted her belly.
“That couldn’t be me. Reality is growing inside of me, by the day, whether I like it or not. ”
“It has always been my intention to divorce you, as you know,” he replied, something like steel around his eyes.
“The topic has come up a time or two, yes,” Esme agreed, warmly enough that she hoped it covered that spike of hurt she wished she didn’t feel any longer.
Yet did. “But then, you wouldn’t be you if you weren’t planning your escape before you walked into a room.
I do believe that some people refer to that as a trauma response, Tadeo. Have you ever considered—”
“When I want your psychoanalysis, Esme, I will ask for it. You may note that I never have.”
She inclined her head. “Please,” she said, smiling wider.
“Don’t let me keep you from opining on the state of our marriage.
I do love these chats. They are like quarterly performance reviews.
Or better yet, like small, sweet love notes tucked into my life at these delightfully random intervals.
I can’t tell you how I look forward to them. ”
Tadeo studied her for a long moment, his face impressively impassive. In the beginning, she’d been able to get a frown out of him. These days she had to content herself with that flexed muscle in his jaw.
This was part of why her performance as the Princess, now Queen, of Bellaza required such a commitment to perfection. The more beautifully she did her part, the more outrageously she could behave in private.
A girl had to have her fun somewhere.
“This ruins my plans,” he told her. After some while.
Esme felt an actual flare of temper at that, but she had years of practice batting such things down.
“I beg your pardon. Do you mean to say that your child, the heir to your throne, has destroyed the plans you made in your head? That’s a strange way indeed to say congratulations, Tadeo. Even for you.”
“I like to tell myself that there is a perfect heiress out there.” He leaned forward as he said this, his blue gaze heavy on hers, so Esme could make no mistake.
He wanted her to hear him on this. To well and truly hear him.
“When I think of her, her features themselves are blurry. Because it doesn’t matter.
What matters is how she will act. She will be quiet.
Accepting. Meek in all things. She will not be emotional, or arch, or forever making attempts to be witty. ”
Esme allowed herself to frown slightly, as if picturing this saint among women. “She sounds deeply boring.” She clucked her tongue. “The poor thing. Send her to me and I’ll teach her how to live a little. It’s necessary when married to an animated plank of wood to make one’s own fun, you see.”
Tadeo did not react. He continued to list off this made-up heiress’s manufactured virtues. “She will be soft-spoken in both public and private. She will never make demands. She will be practical enough and clever enough to understand her place.”
“She sounds like quite the paragon.” If Esme felt these words of his—this description of the perfect wife he insisted on painting—like a small, wickedly sharp dagger to the heart, she kept it to herself.
“I wish you every happiness, Tadeo, assuming that is one of the three emotions you allow yourself to feel annually. Does that mean we’re going ahead with the divorce? ”
“You know perfectly well that we cannot,” he retorted. “And so I must give up on this perfect paragon of a queen and make do with you instead.”
Esme wanted to scream so she smiled at him instead. “A fate worse than death.”
“I struggle with how best to arrange this unforeseen situation to its best advantage,” he said after a moment, no longer spearing her with that look of his.
“You keep calling it that.” Esme shook her head. “I do hope you get that out of your system. I don’t think that I will find it amusing if you call our child an unforeseen circumstance to its face.”
“I understand that this is all a grand joke to you,” Tadeo said, and he leaned forward then. And more surprising, he looked…undone, somehow. Everything inside Esme thrilled at that, though she knew better than to show it. “But it is not a joke to me.”
“If you had to suffer through morning sickness for three solid months, with bits of it thereafter as a little treat when you least expect it, I doubt you would think it was all that funny yourself, Tadeo,” she murmured in reply.
He ignored that. “You persist in poking at me whenever you can. You think it’s amusing. I do not. I have certain obligations—”
“I am aware of your obligations.” Esme rolled her eyes. “This entire speech worked better when I was barely twenty-one, and in case you’re laboring under a misconception, I didn’t really like it all that much then.”
“Things will be different now,” he told her, that ruthlessness she sometimes thought only she’d ever seen in him making his voice low and dark. “I will not tolerate these displays of yours that you trot out, presumably for your own entertainment.”