Chapter One
KING ALEXANDRE ENZO RODRIGO LIDIA had been a married man for almost a year. He had been king for almost three months, thanks to the untimely death of his father.
He knew far more about how to be a king than about being a husband.
Being a king made sense, after all. There were laws to uphold, the previous king’s mistakes to fix and a country to usher into a new era of peace and stability.
Being a husband was something else entirely. If he was not royalty, at least. Luckily, he was.
He had not chosen his wife. Ines had been chosen for him.
At the time, Alexandre had been rather grateful that his father’s choice had been bearable.
King Enzo had been a vindictive despot of a king, and even worse as a father, so Enzo had not chosen Ines for anything except access to her father’s wealth.
She could have been anything. A pampered, spoiled, dramatic nuisance. A pompous, withdrawn, cruel snob. The terrible options were endless.
But Ines had turned out to be a wonderful princess and an even better queen.
She was dutiful, modest and quiet. She was kind and pleasant, but not dull.
She never behaved above anyone, and so the country of Alis quite loved her.
She was a workhorse and never complained, always happy to take on the next royal task assigned.
If she disagreed with him about anything, they had calm, reasonable discussions, and he could almost always talk her around to his way of thinking.
Alexandre was hardly ever wrong.
He’d had a lifetime of preparing to be king—of preparing to undo every horrible thing his father had enacted.
On his mother’s deathbed, she had tasked him with fixing everything.
Alexandre might have only been five, but he had taken that promise he’d made her quite seriously.
For the nearly twenty-five years between her death and his father’s three months ago, he had watched his father and planned to fix everything the horrible man had done to his family, to his county.
For the past three months, he had worked exclusively to undo all his father’s petty, militaristic whims.
Not that Alexandre was perfect. He could not claim to be.
He had failed many in his life. He had not been able to protect his mother from the wrath of his father’s so-called love.
He had not been able to protect her from the medical complications that had stolen her life at Evelyne’s birth.
He knew he had not always been able to protect his younger sister from the abuses of their father as she’d grown up.
But he had done his level best. And would continue to do so, until death took him. There was simply no other choice.
So Ines was a better wife than Alexandre could have ever hoped for, taking on her responsibilities so easily, so adeptly. She could connect with their kingdom in a more…emotional way than a protector could.
Perhaps the necessary heir had not come as quickly as he might have liked, but that was hardly her fault.
And now, he needn’t worry about it. Thanks to an old Alis law, the heir did not need to be born from the eldest child or even the male heir.
The first child born of the following generation became heir to the throne.
His sister was due any day now, and Evelyne’s son would be the future king. So Alexandre no longer needed to worry about producing an heir with Ines. His sister and his best friend had done it for him.
It had been a relief.
Not because it was any trial to bed his wife. Quite the opposite. That was the problem. He did not have room for passion or interest or relationships in his life. The kind of emotion that marked his parents was the kind that ruined kingdoms.
Alexandre would not stand for it.
Ines was meant to be his wife in name only…once she’d produced an heir. But an heir had not come. Doctors had assured him that there was nothing medically preventing either of them from conceiving a child. The doctor had advised him—and her—to relax.
Something Alexandre could only see as the enemy. Because if he relaxed, he could make a mistake. One that would harm his entire country. That would have been impossible enough before his father’s unlikely death three months ago.
Now? Relaxation would be the same as catastrophic. He had years of work yet before he could fully ensure Alis was on the right track.
So the minute Evelyne had returned from her exile after Enzo’s death, pregnant with the Alis heir, Alexandre had stopped keeping his weekly…appointments with Ines.
They had not discussed it, but she had not mounted any kind of argument or asked him why he no longer came to her bedchamber on the assigned evenings. She let it slide.
This was the beauty of Ines. A good queen let things that did not matter slide.
So he was more than a little surprised to find his wife in his office this morning when he arrived. He glanced at his watch. She was not one to interrupt his daily routine.
“Ah, good morning, Ines. I’m afraid I don’t have time to talk just now. I have an appointment.” And his concentration was already a bit scattered with the news Evelyne had gone into labor. This information had left him feeling…more on edge than he’d like.
He could remember the day Evelyne had been born more clearly than he liked. The hushed whispers. The screaming. The blood when he’d snuck himself into his mother’s room and she’d tasked him with saving the baby she’d birthed, the kingdom she left behind.
“Yes,” Ines agreed in the here and now. “I am your appointment.” She sat in the chair opposite his desk, dressed for a day of royal meetings.
A trim suit in a vibrant blue. Her brown hair with hints of mahogany was pulled back in an elegant twist. She wore an exquisitely simple gold pendant around her neck, blue diamonds at her ears that matched the color of her eyes, and his wedding ring on her finger.
Her left hand rested over the right in her lap, her ankles crossed and drawn slightly beneath her chair.
She really was quite perfect. In every picture, in every portrait, in every moment, Ines looked like a queen.
He did not allow himself to consider the rare moments he saw her mussed, her lips swollen from his. Those moments tended to threaten his necessary equilibrium. His required focus.
So he supposed she was not perfect. She could stand to be a little duller. Perhaps she would not pop into his thoughts unbidden if he did not find her quite so beautiful. But a beautiful queen was something indeed, and to wish her duller was no wish for his kingdom, so he shoved that thought away.
He skirted his desk and took a seat so they were opposite each other. A bit like strangers.
In some ways, she was a stranger to him.
He might know that she preferred cream in her coffee, lemon in her tea.
He might even know what she looked like beneath her clothes—far too beautiful, small, soft, perfect—and what sounds she made in pleasure—haunting, really.
But sometimes it struck him that he did not know her.
She kept herself hidden behind a royal mask, just as he did.
A good thing, Alexandre knew. A preferred thing.
And still…sometimes he’d see her tucked away with Evelyne somewhere, laughing over something, and he’d have the strangest desire to want to know what it was about, what she found funny, what made her smile just like that.
But he did not have time for such things, and she was definitely not laughing this morning. “You’ve been avoiding being alone with me, and this discussion requires privacy,” she said directly. “So I made an appointment.”
There was no censure in her tone, but he felt it all the same. “I’m sure that wasn’t necessary.”
She regarded him coolly but did not argue. She let that lie slide, just as she did so many things. “I wish to speak to you about our…evening appointments.”
Alexandre did not care for what that word did to him. Elicited physical responses and memories he tried to block out of any time he visited her bedchamber. Which had been far more than he’d anticipated, thinking at most it would take a month or two to render her with child.
He blamed the frequency on how difficult it had been to stay away, when he’d known that was the best course of action.
He did not understand the feelings she brought out in him. They didn’t make sense. Nothing straightforward. Nothing black-and-white. A messiness. An uncontrollable cyclone of disparate things.
And messiness, a lack of control, these were all purviews of his father.
The way his father had felt about his mother.
Because no doubt the formidable King Enzo, happy to order people hung for small crimes and other such atrocities, had not known the meaning of love—although he had claimed to love his queen.
A love Alexandre had stolen from him, according to Enzo. A love that had destroyed everything in its wake.
And it was Alexandre’s job to fix all his father had destroyed. His mother had told him this with her last breath, so how could it be anything but the most simple and important truth?
Alexandre had to be on constant guard or he could not be the king required of his family and his country. A king who put them above all else.
Was this fair to him as a person? Of course not, but it was his role, his task. The person could not exist if the crown was meant to lead, protect, save.
So he could not worry himself over Evelyne—he had all the best doctors with her. He could not concern himself with how the appointments with Ines used to make him feel—they were done and over.
“I’m not sure this is something that requires a discussion,” Alexandre said stiffly. He did not attend such appointments anymore because Alis had its heir in Evelyne’s soon-to-be child.
Concern jittered again in his chest, but he shoved it away. He had all the best doctors at her disposal. She would not meet the same fate as their mother had. He simply wouldn’t allow it.