Chapter Eleven #3
Her breath stuttered slightly. He saw a flash of heat along her cheekbones. “What are you doing?” She frowned, but it looked to him as if summoning it took work. “Why aren’t you putting up your usual fight?”
And then, at last, it was Tadeo’s turn.
He was determined to get this right.
“Esme,” he said, tasting her name on his mouth the way he’d used to do, as if it was some kind of sweet liquor that could only go to his head. “I have been fighting against you since the day we met. You came in like a storm, swept me away, and I never found my footing again.”
“You didn’t need your footing. You have a crown.”
He tugged slightly on the lock of her hair, and she subsided.
“I tried my best. I broke up with you in a way calculated to hurt you the most. I insisted on a cold pageant of a wedding, and worse still, a frigid marriage. And you went along with all of those things. You went along with them, and I intended to reward you for that service by divorcing you.”
“Yes,” Esme agreed, though she looked…not quite confused. Something more like wary. “You’re the worst man I know. I have no idea what I see in you.”
“Nor do I,” he assured her. “But tonight, if you will allow it, I want to make you a new kind of vow.”
He moved in closer then and he took her hands in his, and was cheered when she gripped him in return.
“I was told that love is a fantasy, and emotions are weakness. That my country required me to lock those things away and hide them where they could never be seen, never be felt, and never, ever shown to those around me.” He lifted her hands to his mouth and pressed a kiss on her knuckles.
“And what has that made me? An ice sculpture, as you say.”
Esme’s eyes were wide, now. He could see the pulse in her throat going wild.
“Everything I know is inside out,” he told her, his voice low and raw, because perhaps that was what truth did when it finally came out.
It left marks. “It is possible my father was simply incapable of feeling anything and considered that his greatest virtue. Perhaps he decided that those who did not possess that virtue the way he did—meaning everyone around him—were disappointments. Maybe my mother simply refused to keep the parts of herself locked away as he demanded.”
It was his turn to blow out a breath, and he did, then held her hands tighter.
“When I came home from Boston that summer and told my father that I’d fallen in love with the woman that everyone expected me to marry—an absolute miracle of epic proportions—he was horrified.
I should have realized that was his problem, not mine.
But I had been raised on a steady diet of my mother’s scandalous behavior and my father’s noble attempts to keep his head up high despite them, and I believed he knew better. ”
He held her gaze intently, then. “I’m sorry for that. I’m sorry for not defending something so beautiful from the start.”
He felt the jolt that went through her, and saw the emotion in her eyes.
But he wasn’t finished. “You were the only one I wanted anywhere near me at my father’s funeral, but I could never admit that to myself.
I was relieved when you found me. And I remember exactly who started that kiss that night.
It was me. Filled with all those emotions I would have told you I didn’t know how to feel and just drunk enough to hope no one would notice. ”
“Tadeo, I don’t know—” she began.
“I cannot bear the thought of raising our child like that,” Tadeo continued, urgently.
“I can’t imagine turning my son against his mother.
I can’t imagine pretending that you’re not the reason I even know what love is.
” He let out a rusty sort of laugh. “I fought so hard against it, Esme. I gave that fight my all. And yet every time, no matter how hard I fight, I come straight back to you.”
He found he was holding his breath then.
Esme gazed up at him, her hands in his and her eyes wide and solemn, and once again he wondered if he was too late. If he’d taken too long. If he’d lost her, after all.
Then he saw her smile, and it was as if she took all the stars from the sky and aimed them straight at him.
“You do,” she said softly. “And I want you to do that. I don’t think you ever had a safe space in your life, for all you have palaces and manor houses and servants, and royal compartments that could house a crowd.”
“The only fight I’m interested in,” Tadeo told her, intensely, “is fighting for you, my Esme. Even if the enemy I must fight is me.”
“I have an idea.” She moved closer to him and she pressed that heavy stomach of hers against him and looped her arms around his neck as best she could.
She gazed up at him, and he felt like they made a perfect circle, there beneath the stars at last. The two of them, their foreheads touching.
The baby they’d made pressed in between their bodies. “Why don’t we start over?”
“Can we do such a thing?” he asked, but he realized he was smiling.
In private, not for a camera or a political reason.
A real smile, for the first time since Boston.
“You will have to ask the king of this realm,” Esme told him, her smile wider. She ran her fingers through his hair. “He is very powerful. He can do whatever he likes.”
“It sounds like you have an in with him.” Tadeo let that smile of his do what it liked. And her too. “I like your chances.”
She smiled up at him and then her smile faded as she traced her fingers over his face, as if she was learning his contours all over again.
“So do I,” she whispered. “So do I, my love.”
He captured her hand and held it to his cheek.
“I love you,” he told her, with all the solemnity and intensity of a vow made in cathedrals in the presence of most of Europe.
Though it was better now. It was only them.
“You were right. I have loved you since the moment we met, and I have loved you badly. All I can hope for is that you will let me spend the rest of our lives making it up to you.”
“I don’t need you to make anything up to me,” Esme told him, and there were tears on her face, but joy in her gaze. “All I need from you is you, Tadeo. Because between us, we can do anything, whether it’s change the way we rule these kingdoms or love each other the way we deserve.”
“I want that,” he whispered. “Though I doubt I deserve—”
She put her hands on his mouth and stopped him. “We have wasted too much time to dwell in the past. We have a baby coming, and I want him to know us like this. In love. In harmony.” He kissed the fingers on his mouth and she smiled. “We can do it. I want to do it, Tadeo. With you or not at all.”
And from that day forward, because he was indeed the king of all he surveyed and particularly of this sheltered valley in a remote section of the Pyrenees, Xavier Tadeo Santiago, King of Bellaza, made it so.