Chapter Four #2
Tadeo should not have been pleased, somewhere down deep, that she was clearly recovered. “Seeing what you did to the Queen’s Manor, a historic site that is meant to be a legacy upheld by every queen lucky enough to live there—”
“It’s a house,” Esme said. With excessive calm, to his ear. “It doesn’t know that it’s historic. It doesn’t care what color its walls are. It’s amazing to me, Tadeo, that for a man so allergic to emotion, you certainly do manage to find it in the strangest places.”
He wanted to jump on that. He wanted to argue. But that was what she wanted him to do, he knew that.
Instead, he stood there above her, glowering down at this bane of his existence. He knew that it had been ten years. He’d been there. But it was somehow exposing to hear her say it. Ten years of the problem that was Esme and now she was pregnant.
And he was no more in control of himself in her presence than he ever had been.
Tadeo had thought about a lot of things last night, because he hadn’t slept at all.
He had worked until he had to accept defeat, because he wasn’t processing anything effectively and certainly not at the level he should have been.
He’d gone to his private gym and had pushed himself to muscle failure as many times as he could in the hope it would put him to sleep.
But all it had done was make him tired enough that his defenses were down. It didn’t do a damn thing but give him more time and space to think about this mess.
“You have spent the past seven years developing a regal persona that is, as I know you are aware, the envy of Europe,” he told her now.
She gave him one of her best queenly smiles. “If I must be damned by faint praise, so be it.”
He pushed on. “Instead of accepting my decision about how our marriage should operate, or even simply acknowledging that it is what I need whether you agree with it or not, you have always mounted this passive-aggressive campaign of yours in private.”
“Oh no,” Esme said, shaking her head. “I don’t think that’s a fair characteristic at all. I haven’t been the least bit passive.”
He ignored that. “What I did not realize until I saw the outrage you have visited upon the manor house is that you are as poisoned with emotion as ever. And, apparently, incapable of finding appropriate outlets—as I have.”
She let out a laugh at that. “As you have,” she repeated. “Do you have outlets, Tadeo? Really? Because I rather thought you shut everything off and stormed about like a computer program brought to life and in search of an algorithm.”
It was the unerring accuracy that made her so dangerous, Tadeo thought. Against his will. He’d had five months as a brand-new king to consider precisely how he appeared to others—meaning, mostly, his subjects. His father had been stern, but fair.
Tadeo’s team had carefully suggested that perhaps he could…unbend.
So, naturally, the one person alive who had ever seen him lose control—and more than once—thought he was a robot.
“This is how our marriage will work,” he told her, stern himself this time. “You have often commented on the fact you felt I made all the decisions for us whether you agreed with them or not.”
“I have commented on that,” she agreed. “Because you have made all the decisions, whether I agreed with them or not. You knew that I would never back out of a betrothal that meant so much to my father. He still considers it his greatest achievement, aside from marrying my mother.” Her dark eyes seemed to see too far into him.
“You have shamelessly exploited the emotions you claim to find so distasteful. Is that what we’re talking about? Finally?”
Tadeo ignored that aside about her family. Or tried to ignore it, anyway. It was another blow that struck too close to home. It felt a little too right. Was he really that shameless?
But he already knew the answer. Of course he was. He would have done anything to present the correct image of himself to his father and the world, and he had. He couldn’t regret that now.
He cleared his throat. “Little as I hate to admit it, you’re not wrong that pretending for all these years that this chemistry does not exist was always destined to end in an explosion. This explosion has now had consequences.”
“I’m making a list now,” she told him. “It will be of all the things you call our child in advance that if I hear you call them when they’re here will not end well. Just so you know.”
“Our lives are now irrevocably altered,” he told her, and he could hear how stern and uncompromising he sounded.
Not that Esme seemed to care one bit.
“We can alter them however we see fit,” she tossed back at him.
Carelessly, he thought. “I know that you like to play these games of yours, where you pretend that your life is perfect, and make it look that way. But it’s really not necessary.
Maybe the gift you can give your kingdom is showing them that a divorce can be healthy.
” She shrugged. “Sometimes two people aren’t meant to be together, particularly when their marriage takes place in the pressure cooker of a palace.
There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s not shameful. I wish you could see that.”
“Divorce with a child is unacceptable,” he told her at once, and did not care to examine the tug deep inside him at that. As if his body rejected the very idea. “But I will also never tolerate the things my father did in his marriage.”
If he’d slapped her, he doubted she would have reacted more strongly. Esme sat up straighter, her body jerking slightly, as if she really had sustained a blow. He could see color flood her cheeks.
And he didn’t understand how he could feel both satisfied by that and disgusted with himself.
“Are you accusing me of something?” she asked, and for the first time in a long while, perhaps since Boston, she did not sound calm at all.
“You are clearly a woman who is ruled by her basic needs,” he said. “Are you not? You always seem to be at such pains to show me that you are.”
Esme shot to her feet and Tadeo thought, not for the first time, that this would all be so much easier if he wasn’t so affected by her. Like she was in his bloodstream.
It was worse now. He knew that her curves were lusher and that he had done that. That was his baby she was carrying. His baby that was changing the shape of her.
Even thinking about this made him outrageously hard.
There were many things that were blurry about the night of his father’s funeral, but not the way he’d lost himself deep inside Esme. Again and again, tearing them both apart, letting himself enjoy the one indulgence he denied himself above all others.
“Will you be requiring a paternity test, then?” Esme asked sharply, her gaze dark and furious and, if he wasn’t mistaken, curt. “By all means. Call in a parade of doctors. Knock yourself out and make this all about data. Maybe then you can process it.”
He refused to give her the satisfaction of seeing that land. “Going forward, you will have to choose,” he told her, coldly. “We are going to alter the rules of this relationship. You will, of course, take up the mantle of your responsibilities once more.”
“Of course. I feel naked without my mantle, don’t you?”
Tadeo decided that was simply a bid to get him to imagine her naked, which was not difficult. Or unusual. Only now he had to imagine this new, succulently ripe version of her and he felt himself very nearly break out in a sweat as he fought to think of anything but that.
Literally anything else.
Esme shook her head at him as if she was disappointed in him. “If you want to insult me, Tadeo, you should probably start with things that are actually possible. A slip in perfection on my part is not one of them.”
He was letting her distract him, and that was another thing that needed to end. This would be a new start for them. This would, he was certain, solve a great many of their issues and make all of this tension dissipate.
In truth, he thought it was a brilliant solution. He expected she would not—but he thought she’d come around.
“In private, you can either run your mouth or you can work it out in my bed,” he told her starkly, and had the satisfaction of watching her mouth drop open.
It was worth the wait, he thought. “You will no longer live at the manor house. You will be installed in the queen’s compartments here in the palace that adjoin my own.
If you cannot control your mouth, that is your choice.
You will sleep in your own room. If you can manage to keep your jabs and witticisms and little veiled attacks—always delivered so archly and so sweetly—to yourself, like a good girl, we will work off some of this friction together. ”
He studied her. This time he thought the color on her face was for a different reason. “But that comes with a caveat.”
“What a shock,” she breathed.
“We will not discuss these things again,” he told her, like thunder. “The rules are the rules. In private, you can talk all you like, but you may not touch me. Or you can touch me, but you must do so silently.”
She blinked. “You can’t possibly think this is healthy. This…psychotic compartmentalization. Can you?”
He moved then, responding to that part of himself he tried so hard to keep on ice, and instead of trying to lock himself down—he indulged himself.
Something he almost never did, because this fierce, overwhelming wildness surged up in him immediately. As if it only waited for an opportunity to burst free. It threatened to knock him over where he stood.
It was an irresistible riptide, hauling him out to sea whether he liked it or not.
Today—here—he allowed it.
Tadeo didn’t fight it. He let it take him, and he closed the space between them to loop a hand around her neck. Tight enough to lift her chin up. Tight enough that he could feel the way her skin heated and her pulse went wild.
And he was close enough that he could see the look in her eyes that he both craved and tried to avoid. All that longing and need. All that glorious passion he had finally decided he could taste—but only if there were rules.
That was what he’d concluded very early this morning, after exhausting himself. He’d stood in the gallery where their wedding portrait hung—so formal and controlled—and he’d finally conceded that what had brought them here was a failure. His failure.
But he would not fail again, and that meant rethinking the boundaries that he’d maintained for the whole of his life.
“What about any of this would you call healthy, Esme?” he demanded, his voice unrecognizable, like a stream of smoke.
Her mouth was so close to his and he had the taste of her on his tongue already. It would be so easy—
But he could not allow it.
Tadeo had to prove to her that he could maintain the boundaries he had set out. He had to prove it to himself.
He made himself let go of her.
He made himself step back.
There was a kind of exultation in the pain of it—in forcing himself to do this thing he did not wish to do at all, because it was right. He needed the reminder.
“I suggest you take yourself back to the manor house,” he told her. “And pack. Or I will instruct my staff to bring over only what I think you need.”
She only stared back at him, her gaze dark and glimmering and utterly unreadable. “What a charming invitation.”
“It is an order, Your Majesty,” he said formally. “But you can call it what you like. Either way you will be fully installed in this palace and under my control by tonight. I suggest you start thinking about how you intend to handle it.”
And then he tested himself even further. He didn’t wait for her to respond. He didn’t give her the opportunity to land another blow.
He turned on his heel, walked out of that salon, and left her there.
Even though every last part of him screamed for him to go back and finish what he started.
As deep and hard as possible.