Chapter Nine
CHAPTER NINE
Obviously, I say no .
I say no repeatedly, but Taio mounts one argument after the next.
“Surely,” I say in some desperation after this has gone on for a long while, “the fact that I’m an ignorant American should disqualify me already from any possible consideration that I might become your wife.”
“None of that matters,” he says now, gruffly. “You are carrying my child. That is the beginning and the end of it.”
“Taio—” I begin, with renewed determination in my voice.
But he cuts me off this time by coming and kneeling down before me. So we are eye to eye. His gaze stays on my face for a long, simmering moment and then, perhaps inevitably, his hand moves to cover my belly.
It might be inevitable but I feel it.
Everywhere .
And it is complicated now, or perhaps I mean layered, with all that’s happened between us since the last time we really touched each other. The lies and separation. The truths discovered and told. This urge we seem to both have to protect each other.
The baby he now holds beneath his palms.
Inside me, yes. But ours.
I can remember, with perfect clarity, every single touch we shared between us. And now there is this.
The warmth of his hands. The wonder all over his face.
And the slickness between my legs that connects to that winding, humming, insatiable need deep inside me that is never far from the surface.
All of it makes my heart seem to swell and grow, and this time there doesn’t seem to be a single thing that I can do to keep the tears from falling. I tell myself it’s because I’ve never understood the lure of families, not until this moment.
Not until this man touched me like this, because now, suddenly, I feel as if I finally get it.
He and I made this child together. What magic would it be to raise it together, too?
And this does not feel like an intellectual question.
It feels primal and raw, like it is coming from a part of me I’ve never encountered before.
“Annagret,” he says urgently. “You are the mother of this child already. Do not deny me the right to be its father. To be a family.”
And I am not prepared to argue that one away with my cheeks wet and his hands on me, that intensely raw look on his face. How could I? How could anyone?
I think of my own father, stooped by the weight of his inability to stand up for anything, especially me. I think of the times I cried while he held me over another cruelty or dismissal from my stepmother, yet nothing changed. And how I learned to stop crying.
I gaze at Taio, who has already stood up for our baby more than my father ever did for his.
I think of how the word family feels in me when he says it.
The way he’s looking at me seems to jar my heart wide open, so wide open it ought to hurt, and I don’t have it in me to deny him anything, it seems. “Okay,” I manage to say, wiping at my eyes with the backs of my hands.
“Okay?” he repeats, and I am certain it is not that he does not comprehend the word.
He wants me to say it. He wants me to make it real.
So I do. “I will marry you,” I tell him, though saying those words out loud makes me feel shaky inside.
Not precarious. Just…awed by my own temerity to let myself believe in something like this.
Like him. I try to soften it. “If you think that I must.”
“I know that you must,” he replies.
I expect him to stand, then, and start issuing commands, or whatever it is that Marquesses do. But he doesn’t move.
Taio stays where he is, those warm, heavy palms molded to the curve of my belly. His thumbs move almost absently, stroking my bump and the baby within.
It’s a tender moment, but it also sends a wildfire sensation spiraling through me and I wonder if I ought to be this immediately electrified by him when the baby is right here . Surely I ought to have been taken over by some maternal instinct by now that would protect me from seductions like this.
Like him.
But instead, I feel myself go soft and hot.
I can see that gleam in his dark gaze now, and I remember the last time I saw it. When he was so deep inside me and it was all that delirious pleasure, the moments of pain barely a memory—
“Very well, then,” he says, though his voice is gruff. And that fire is clear to see in his gaze. “Consider it done, cosita . I will see to everything.”
And he does. He pulls back from that chair, leaves me shivering where I sit, and does exactly what he promises.
I am swept off, once again by the impenetrable Salma, to yet another astonishing suite of rooms. I’m fed, clothed, indulged.
But not by Taio.
I don’t mind. I’m going to marry this man. I’ve decided that this is the best thing for the baby. That makes all this perfectly rational. Even smart.
By this point, I can barely remember that I might have cried slightly in that study.
I allow Tess to think that I’m still off somewhere on a job. On the third day we video conference with each other and I applaud her choice of new investigator and I agree that she ought to hire the two others who impress us both.
“Maybe it’s time to level up,” she says.
“I agree.” I look at her, the first person who really believed in me, and smile. “And I trust you to put it together, Tess.”
It doesn’t occur to me until after the call is over that it’s almost like I’m letting go of Miravakia Investigations…but I dismiss that.
This is a strange little break, that’s all. It can’t be reality.
Reality, as I know all too well, does not often turn up in a palace.
And when, on the fourth day, it is time for the wedding that Taio has arranged, I let Salma and a fleet of aides dress me.
They fuss and they sigh and they turn me into the perfect bride in a white dress that looks like it was made of dreams. My hair is braided around my crown, then curled as it hangs down, with flowers woven in.
The dress itself manages to make me look like the very best version of myself, feminine and strong at once.
“It’s beautiful,” I whisper before I can stop myself.
“The Marquess had a specific vision, Madam,” Salma tells me, but she’s the closest to smiling I’ve ever seen her.
When I look in the mirror, it’s not that I can’t recognize myself this time. It’s that I do. I look like a version of me I stopped believing in a long, long time ago. A version of me I left in the ashes of the life I left behind in Pennsylvania.
I look hopeful . I glow.
I find myself wishing we could wear those masks again.
“Are you ready, Madam?” Salma asks me.
I blink and realize that all the other aides have left. It’s only me standing before a mirror, wishing for the first time in a very long time that my mother was around. This seems like a day that calls for mothers.
I blow out a breath, press a hand to my belly, and remind myself that I am one now. And that has to be enough.
Salma walks with me down a set of stairs I didn’t know were in this part of the house, to a courtyard that’s bursting with flowers and bathed in the midday light.
And when we reach the bottom, Taio is there, wearing a top hat and tails the way other men wear baseball hats and sweats.
It is that level of ease, wrapped up in all that masculine grandeur of his.
“Annagret.”
He says my name as if he did not really expect to see me. Or maybe he didn’t think he would see me like this, in a bridal gown with curls in my hair, the sun on my face, and this bizarre urge to go and hold him like we’re—
But we’re not, I caution myself. We’re not anything. We’re getting married for the baby. That’s the reason this is happening.
If I wasn’t pregnant, we would never have met again.
I want to say something funny or cutting to reset this mood. To wipe away that look of reverence in his gaze and make myself feel…well. Not better, but less likely to dissolve into floods of tears here at the bottom of this ancient stair.
Instead, all I can seem to do is smile.
Taio escorts me from the grand house, down a winding path to a sweet little chapel tucked into the hills.
Once we are there, we are greeted by a priest who knows Taio by name.
Salma comes in behind us, accompanied by a man I am fairly sure I last saw doing something of great importance involving the displays of flowers all over the house.
The ceremony is swift, which I am grateful for, despite the reading of Taio’s many formal names and titles. And lovely, which I did not expect. The vows are spoken in English and Spanish, and I find myself laughing, as if this is an act of joy.
I remind myself that it can’t be.
Even though he looks like a dream come true, again.
Still.
It was bad enough in that courtyard, but now, in this small chapel, he’s all I can see.
His wedding suit is a feat of sartorial splendor, and I know, now, that it’s not only the cuts of fabric that exalt him, but the simple fact of his own magnificence.
He is so beautiful that it hurts, and he holds my hands in his so that I hurt, too.
He slides two rings of exquisite beauty onto my finger when it is time, but I can hardly bear to look at them. Because I cannot bear to look away from him.
I feel the weight of his gaze inside of me, as if he is turning me inside out. As if he can see every last part of me, like some kind of searchlight.
“You may kiss your bride, Excelentísimo Senor ,” the priest says, with an encouraging nod.
And Taio does.
He gathers me into his arms. He tilts me back and I find this unforgivable. His hands on me. That simmering gleam in his gaze, his stern mouth. If I didn’t know better, I would think he is something like possessive.
But the true issue is that it feels too much like that night, and this is meant to be reality—
His mouth finds mine, and it’s as if we spiral right back to that enchanted little cottage sitting there on a cliff in France.
Where everything is possible, and we are connected, naked and vulnerable and wide open.
As if I didn’t imagine those things.