Chapter Twelve
LIKE EVERYTHING ELSE he had ever done, which was no surprise to Esme, Tadeo took to love as if it was something upon which he would be tested. And might fail at any point.
They did not sleep apart. Ever. He told her that he loved her as often as possible.
“Someday,” she said with a laugh, “you might even say that without sounding as if you’re worried that the words might bite you back.”
He was lying next to her in their bed that time. And he looked at her, his expression a mix of affront and astonishment.
“Loving is perilous,” he said. “For my heart. You will have to excuse me if it takes some getting used to.”
But he got used to it.
Because of course he did. The first thing he did was get rid of that monolithic desk from the king’s office. He did not explain why, though Esme had her suspicions. It was consigned to some far-off corner of the palace, never to cross the King’s eyesight again.
And in its place, Tadeo installed a lovely, wooden desk that caught the sun and gleamed in a way that reminded both of them of that marvelous old town house of his in Beacon Hill.
Before the baby was born, he took Esme back to Clarebonne, so that her people could cheer for her—or that was what he said. But Esme rather thought it was to show her parents that things were better between them now. Thawed.
“Do my eyes still look sad?” Esme asked her mother on one of their walks.
Luisa had her arm laced through her daughter’s, and she squeezed it tight. “Not a drop,” she said.
Their son was born two weeks late, a squalling, dark-haired slice of perfection, who they both fell in love with immediately. They called him Alain for Esme’s father, a man to admire and look up to. And Hugo, for Tadeo’s father, as a chance to shine brighter.
But the name they used was Enrique, and Enrique was a delight.
One night after she nursed him, Tadeo held the baby and soothed him to sleep in his arms, looking something like stricken when Esme caught his gaze.
“I had no idea,” he said, hoarse.
“About what?” Esme asked.
“That it was supposed to feel like this all along,” he whispered. “So huge. Almost painful. But so beautiful, Esme. Incapacitatingly beautiful.”
“That is exactly how it’s supposed to feel,” she told him, coming over to the chair where he sat and kissing him on his temple.
He reached up and smoothed his palm over her cheek. “When I met you, I felt like this and I thought something was wrong. I thought it had to be a mistake. Something to fight and get over.” His eyes glistened, and Esme’s heart thumped. “I’m so glad you never let me.”
Esme leaned down and kissed him on his mouth. “And I never will,” she promised him.
She gave birth to their daughter three years later and called her Marisol Luisa, though the family knew her as Soli. She was made of grit and sunshine, and even the older brother she tortured was besotted with her.
Together, the two of them would rule the two kingdoms.
Esme considered it her job to make sure that they never lost themselves in the jobs that waited for them. And when it came to the future Queen Soli of Clarebonne, Esme and her daughter spent as much time as possible with the expert on that topic. Luisa.
On one such visit, when Luisa had come to Bellaza and was walking in the gardens with her granddaughter, engrossed in very serious conversations with the small girl, Esme stood by a window and watched them.
Her parents were not simply grandparents to her children, Enrique and Soli and the three others she’d had after them because she and Tadeo could not seem to think of a good reason not to have the big family they’d always wanted as only children.
Over the years, she had watched her parents stand in, in many ways, for the parents Tadeo had never had.
They had showed him the love he had always deserved.
And she had watched her husband bloom into the man she’d always known he could be. The man she’d fallen in love with so long ago.
“I pinch myself every day that we get to live like this,” he told her one night as they danced at some glimmering ball, surrounded on all sides by the toast of Europe—though Esme had eyes only for Tadeo. “Like everything is magic, no matter what challenges come our way.”
She tilted back her head and smiled at him. “I love you too,” she said. “And the best part is, the magic only gets better as we go along.”
Esme knew that this was true. Because she knew that all the way on the other end of the palace estate there stood a manor house.
And maybe one day, when she was gone, her daughters would congregate there and wrinkle up their noses, and restore the place to some former ideal of sophistication and elegance.
Assuming she had failed to raise them right, that was.
But in these years, when they needed a night away from the palace and their boisterous family, Esme and Tadeo would liberate one of the royal vehicles and take off across the back roads in the dark, and they would paint like wild animals and laugh all the while.
They would make love to each other in every single one of the rooms, moving into intensity and joy and holding space for the sorrows of life brought, and the inevitable scars they carried.
But all of that became beautiful, because it was shared.
Because it was allowed to be bright and messy, a visual cacophony of the secrets their hearts carried.
When her children grew older and asked Esme to tell the story of how their parents had met, she told him the truth.
With only a few details omitted, to protect their tender sensibilities.
She showed them that terrible portrait in the gallery and pointed out how stiff and sad both she and their father looked.
“Because we were,” she would say.
And as they gasped and laughed and were scandalized by their father’s seemingly tyrannical behavior, Tadeo would laugh too. He would hold Esme on his lap and smile at all the fine young humans they were raising to feel every single thing they felt—but learn how to control it, too.
“Lucky for me,” he would always tell them, “your mother loves me well enough that I learned to love myself, and her, and all of you, too.”
He also commissioned a new portrait for their fiftieth anniversary, a far better representation of the two of them. The same pose. The same people. But the love they shared poured out of the canvas and lit up the whole of that gallery.
And if this was the happy-ever-after that she got, Esme liked to think, it was worth those ten years of uncertainty. It was worth everything. Given the chance, she would do it again.
In a heartbeat.
That was the kind of thing she told only Tadeo, tangled around him in the bed they shared, where he could respond to her in the only way that mattered. The only way that made both of their hearts beat out the same rhythm.
Because it was perfectly clear to the both of them that they had always been meant to be one, all along.
And now they always would be.
Keep reading for an excerpt from BODYGUARD’S ROYAL TEMPTATION by Abby Green.