Chapter One #2
Ines held his gaze. Her eyes were the same color blue as the diamonds at her ears and direct. “You have skipped the last three such appointments. You have given me no reason why this is the case. Therefore I would like to discuss it.”
She did not say this in any accusatory way exactly. But she said it in a way that felt like he had performed some dereliction of duty, and she was the general here to hand out punishment.
He cleared his throat at the strange, uncomfortable uncertainty that settled inside his chest. A king did not have room for uncertainty. Certainly not when it came to his wife.
“I apologize for not being clearer,” he said, trying to trot out his regal tone and finding it fell a bit flat with her.
Or maybe when discussing sex with his wife in the necessary…
vague terms. “With an heir now secured, we no longer need to…” He had no other words. Everything became a kind of odd blank.
This was what Ines did to him sometimes. Turned him into a man he did not recognize. Who did not know how to proceed or protect. When everything—everything—rested on his ability to do both.
“This is not about an heir to the throne, Alexandre,” Ines returned. Her tone remained businesslike, her posture straight and regal. “I wish to be a mother regardless of where our child would fall in the royal hierarchy.”
He stared at her for a minute. He got the sense she’d been thinking about this for quite some time. Had practiced these words and this argument, and so it felt somehow like a betrayal. That she would upend his status quo so purposely.
“As the king and queen, it will be our duty to usher Evelyne’s child into our world, into being an heir. We may not be his parents, but we will have a very important role. Surely this is enough.”
She didn’t flinch, didn’t look down or away. She held herself as still and regal as any queen should. Her gaze was direct, if a little chilly. “It is not enough.”
It is not enough. He blinked. Once. Before he remembered himself. Gathered himself. Armored himself. He looked down at her, as he might any recalcitrant employee. Because at the end of the day, his wife was a role—not a person. They were titles, not feelings.
He would forgive her for forgetting, but he would not change course.
“Ines, I’m sure you can be reasonable.”
“In this I’m afraid I cannot be,” she said, sounding the very example of control. “If you are not going to give me a child, then I should like an annulment.”
Queen Ines Lidia regarded her husband with as much control as she had left in her. She had begun to think she didn’t affect him. That any flashes of temper or passion she had seen over the past year were figments of her own imagination.
But she saw both in his eyes now. Little flickers of a man she knew existed under all the trappings of the title he was so devoted to.
“I understand how divorce is out of the question for you,” she continued, keeping her tone reasonable.
“But I’m sure your publicity team can work through an annulment.
” She didn’t let herself clutch her hands together like she wanted to.
She would not look down at her lap. She had to maintain eye contact and certainty.
She’d been practicing this conversation for weeks now.
Perhaps she’d had the tiniest hope he would simply agree to return to their appointment schedule rather than an annulment, but mostly she had known better. He’d made the decision not to come to her bedroom on purpose and with reason.
Alexandre did nothing without his precious reason.
“The timing could not be better,” Ines continued, keeping her polite smile in place. “Evelyne having the baby, the heir, in the coming days means there will be ample distraction from anything such as an annulment. Any bad press over it shouldn’t last long in the face of the new heir being born.”
When he didn’t speak, she knew he was angrier than he let show on his face.
In some ways, she thought she understood her husband better than anyone.
She too knew what it was like to be saddled with a duty far too adult at far too young an age.
And she could even admit that Alexandre’s duties were far more complex than hers had been.
Not just to be a good king, but to be the king that fixed everything.
It was difficult work. A constant fight.
King Enzo had done deep, lasting damage to the country of Alis.
All Ines had been tasked with since she could remember was to bag an important husband so her father’s wealth could buy him some influence. She had been trained since birth to be nothing more than some royal’s wife.
And she’d succeeded. Bagged a prince, as her mother had told her somewhat drunkenly one night before the wedding.
Before Enzo had died, her father had enjoyed that royal ear he’d wanted.
Of course, Enzo had been chaotic and not very trustworthy, so Ines didn’t think it had worked quite the way her father had hoped.
Particularly when Enzo had died and Alexandre had shown no interest in playing her father’s games.
In those first few months of being a princess, of Alexandre meeting every appointment, she’d been happy enough.
Then, she’d gotten everything she’d wanted when King Enzo had died, except a child, and her father had gotten nothing.
But such satisfactions were short-lived when she was left with no child—and a husband who avoided her.
She would have stayed with Alexandre forever, and maybe even happily, if she had a child. But if he couldn’t even bear to visit her bed, she needed something…else.
“You made vows, Ines,” he said, enunciating every word like he could turn it into a dagger without any heat or ice behind it. “You knew going in what those vows meant. You cannot simply break them because…we don’t see eye to eye.”
She made herself breathe carefully before she responded. She’d learned as a child to hide her temper, her reaction. She knew how to keep those things buried deep down, and they would not serve her here anymore than they had served her in her father’s house.
But this was more than seeing eye to eye, as he well knew, and his trivializing it was infuriating.
“But you are changing the nature of our agreement,” Ines argued, keeping her calm even if she had to clasp her hands together to remind herself she had to be centered. “You are changing what that meant. We were meant to have a child. Now you are saying we won’t.”
There were other things she wanted, but she was giving up on them.
Something about seeing Evelyne so happy—with her husband, Gabriel, and with her pregnancy.
It was a window into a life Ines had never believed she could have.
She had known since birth her only role was to secure her father’s status with the royal family. That love would never really matter.
She had done her duty, married the prince, become a queen. She had thought that would be it. And all along she told herself it would be all right because someday she would be a mother, and she would raise a prince or princess to be a good person.
Someday she would have someone to love and love her back.
Perhaps she could have withstood being unhappy forever, Alexandre always at arm’s length no matter how she’d come to care for him.
There was that care and many things she enjoyed about being queen.
She got to work with charities, make sure the issues she cared about were supported throughout the country of Alis.
She had power and sway and influence, and because of Alexandre’s outreach programs, she got to go into the public and help.
She had not expected to be allowed to be so deeply involved in her people’s lives.
She had not expected any future royal husband to actually want her input and help.
That had certainly not been her father’s way. He’d rather viewed a female child as cattle to be sold off.
So if Evelyne had never returned to the palace—married and pregnant and happy—perhaps Ines would still be going along. Perhaps she would even let Alexandre strip this last dream from her.
But the friendship she’d developed with her sister-in-law had opened her eyes to a different future.
Ines liked to think she’d learned a thing or two from Evelyne over the past few months.
How to stand up for herself as much as she stood up for others.
How to value herself, not bury herself in everyone else’s value.
Evelyne was not afraid, not dutiful. She stood up to her brother and to her husband.
And life had rewarded her.
So Ines had come to the conclusion that enjoying her duties was not enough. She deserved more.
She would have loved to believe she could get that more from Alex. She knew what a good man he was. Underneath all his layers of cold control was a man who desperately wanted to put his country to rights, to undo his father’s evil. Ines loved being at his side for that.
But Ines knew she could not get under that control. If he cared about her at all, he saw her as a tool. Not a wife in the true sense of the word. Not even a friend.
So if he would not give her a child, she could not stay.
Her hands shook, so she tightened her grip on them. She did not let herself look away from Alexandre’s handsome face, though the grim line of his mouth and the fire of fury danced in his dark eyes.
She had seen him furious before, mostly when his father had been alive, but he always kept it under control. And he did so now.
Perhaps that was why something that was nothing like fear fluttered low in her stomach. Because she didn’t fear Alexandre. Sometimes she was terribly afraid she was so in love with him that, even if she did leave, she’d never get over it.
Alexandre inhaled deeply, and she braced herself because she knew he would speak once he carefully exhaled.