11. “Bring Me to Life” - Evanescence
“Bring Me to Life” - Evanescence
Once Elizabeth and Axel leave, it takes Henry three seconds to turn on me. “What the bloody hell was that?” He throws his arm out, knocking over a sixteenth-century vase standing nearby.
“What was what?” I grab it before it can smash onto the floor.
“Offering her money. Saying nasty things. Acting like a bloody snob.”
“I didn’t act like a snob.” I cross my arms over my chest. His eyes track the movement, making me instantly regret it, but I can’t drop them now without drawing his attention again.
“Really? Then why did you use your posh voice?” He props an elbow on the mantelpiece behind him, faking nonchalance like a pro. He’s wound as tightly as I am, and he can’t hide it from me.
“I don’t have a posh voice.”
“‘Would you care for some refreshments?’” he mocks.
I march over to him until I’m only a few feet away. His eyes flit across my face as if reading it to determine my next move. I start to laugh.
He couldn’t have looked more startled if I’d started stripping and twerking right here in the Audience Room. His eyes narrow as he takes me in, and it only makes me laugh harder. I bend forward until I’m nearly doubled over, unable to suppress the guffaws wracking their way out of my body.
“C?” Henry asks, trepidation evident in his tone.
I’m laughing too hard to answer.
“Celia.” He takes my arm and attempts to tug me upright. It takes a few tries before he’s successful. He leads me to the settee.
“What is so damn funny?” he asks when my laughter finally subsides.
My stomach aches from all the laughing, but also from keeping the nausea at bay earlier, as they all acted like a picture-perfect family from an advert for omega-3 gummies. Without warning, the last few chuckles turn into sobs, wracking my body just as hard as the laughter did.
The sofa shifts beneath Henry’s weight as he tugs me into his side. His arms wrap around me, holding me to him, and I bury my face in his shirt. His button-ups always look like they’ll be stiff and starchy, but up close they’re as soft as cashmere.
He smells so damn good, like whiskey and spearmint and home.
Whenever I’m out of the country for a state visit, feeling homesick, this is the smell I crave.
Not my freshly laundered sheets or hot chocolate chip cookies or the lavender in the East Terrace Garden or that incredible shea butter lotion Bea found in Paris, but this.
Henry.
Once I’ve thoroughly soaked through the cotton of his white shirt and my sobs have retreated to nothing more than sniffling shudders, I shift so I’m not leaning completely against him.
He pulls back to look down at me. “Wanna tell me what that was all about?”
I shake my head, not ready to meet his eyes just yet. “I’m a mess?”
“You’ve had a big shock,” he says quietly.
I wait several beats in case he plans to add more, but he doesn’t. “So did you,” I say, picking at a small thread at his buttonhole. “You’re not falling apart at the seams.”
His hands gently stroke the top of my head like he’s deep in thought. “Yeah, but this feels like a good thing to me.” Several seconds pass. “I’m guessing it doesn’t feel like that to you.”
“You could say that.” I keep my tone even, because I don’t know where this is going. I don’t want to restart our fight, but I won’t be caught with my guard down either.
“I think this could work, babe.” Musing lines his voice. He’s already imagining a future with them, with all of us, as though he can just stitch us together into the fabric of his life simply because he wants us there.
“How exactly do you see this working?” It comes out icier than I intend, but it’s no secret I don’t always have the best control of my mouth.
“People successfully blend their families all the time,” he says.
I push away from his chest. “We’re the royal family, Henry.” The cold rushes in as I stand, putting distance between his heat and my anger. “You don’t blend royals!”
He shakes his head and looks off to the side in disgust. “You’re back to being a snob.”
“It’s the truth. Everyone knows it, including Elizabeth, which is why she marched in here, intent on ripping our family to shreds!”
He pushes to his feet, and I take several steps backward. “If you had been paying attention, you would have noticed that she was trying to increase the size of my family, not rip it apart, which seems to be the only thing you’re capable of doing lately!”
I flinch. He might as well have slapped me. “Is that really how you feel?” I say quietly.
“No.” He runs his fingers through his hair. “Yes. I don’t know. All I know is that I’m being offered the chance to be different from my own father, and I’m sure as hell not going to turn it down.”
My breath hitches in my chest, stuck in place by the lump that has taken up residence there as well. The two compete for space, neither willing to give way to the other. “This isn’t your only chance,” I say.
Henry looks up at me, brows slightly furrowed. “I know. This would never take the place of any children you and I have together. But just in case . . .”
“In case what? In case I never give you what you want? This is your backup plan?”
“No.” He sinks back down on the sofa and rests his elbows on his knees, his hands both buried in his hair now. “God, no. I just want to be happy. This seems like the only thing with even the slightest possibility of making that happen.”
I close my eyes against the accusation. I no longer make him happy. Of course I don’t. I can’t give him what he wants.
“I want you to be happy too.” I try to keep the tears out of my voice. I can’t let him know how deeply his words cut.
“Then can you let me have this? Please?”
“How am I supposed to do that, Henry?” I spread my hands out in front of me. “This will destroy us. How can you not see that?”
He jumps to his feet again, never able to hold still for more than a minute. “It won’t, C. I promise you that. You never even gave them a chance.”
“Of course I did. I sat through the entire meeting, didn’t I?”
He shakes his head and looks at the floor. “I could see the wheels turning in your head the whole time. You were trying to come up with a way to make it all disappear.”
“I was trying to think of a way to save us all from going up in a cloud of smoke.” Desperation yanks my voice up in both pitch and volume.
“The only person you cared about in that meeting was you. You don’t care if I’m not happy, if I never get what I want. You certainly don’t care about the two of them. It’s always you and your image before everything else.”
“How can you say that?”
His glare meets mine. “Because the only thing you can talk about is the way the press is painting you.”
“That’s not true.” I blink hard to keep the tears from spilling over.
“You hid my own child from me.”
“You don’t know that he’s yours.”
“I can’t believe you met him before and didn’t tell me.”
“I knew you were going to bring that up,” I say with a sigh.
“Just like it came as no surprise when I found out. I thought, ‘How typical, Celia.’”
I cover my face with my hands. I will not let this man witness me crying again. I do not want his sympathy or his pity. I inhale deeply and brush at my face, pretending I have dust caught in the corners of my eyes.
“So you’re just going to accept everything she said? What if she’s lying, Henry? You’d do that to us?”
“He looks just like me, C. Even you can’t deny that. Which, I suspect, is why you tried to cover the whole thing up.”
I stare down at my nails, pressing on my cuticles even though I got a manicure yesterday. “It’s really just a matter of whether you slept with her or not.” I look up as I say it, intent on catching him in any lie he tries to spin.
His face hardens into something I can’t describe, and he says “I don’t remember” in a tone that’s so low I have to strain to make it out.
“You don’t remember,” I repeat.
He cuts me a glance. “That’s what I said.”
“How could you not remember if you had sex with her?”
I think about the only two men I’ve ever had sex with—Beck and Henry. I couldn’t meet either of them in a corridor without the cells of my body remembering the cells of theirs, in spite of the fact that Beck is now happily married to my private secretary.
I was a virgin when Beck and I started dating, something my university friends loved to tease me about.
I just didn’t understand how anyone could blow off their studies for something that only lasted a few minutes.
Especially since the only guy I had ever wanted had rejected me to date the entire female population of Wesbourne. And apparently get them knocked up.
My opinion on sex being a waste of time has changed since then, but that is entirely due to my previous misconceptions about what it could be. Of course, the guy who obliterated those misconceptions has obliterated them for a lot of other women as well.
“You wouldn’t understand,” Henry says.
“You mean because I never worked my way through entire university campuses by having meaningless sex with someone new every night?”
He paces to the other side of the room. There’s no bar cart in here, or I’m sure he would be pouring himself several fingers of whiskey.
“You never fail to bring that up, do you?” He turns and approaches me again.
I move backward to get out of his way. “You just love to throw it in my face, like it’s a fucking ball we’re hitting back and forth. You know I did it to protect you.”
I clench my jaw so hard it clicks. “Pretty sure you could have protected me just fine while finding a different hobby than rolling in the sheets. Not exactly the actions of a man who professes to have been in love with me.”
“Says the girl who was engaged to marry someone else.”
“How is that my fault?” I say. “You said you didn’t want me!”
“Yeah, in order to protect you! God, Celia.” He tugs on his hair. “How many times do we have to have this conversation?”
“As many as it takes for me to get over my fear of your past coming to bite us in the ass.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Is it?” My eyebrows flick upward. “If you had just kept it in your pants once in a while, we wouldn’t be facing the threat of fifty illegitimate children running around out there.”
Henry shakes his head and gives me a look that says, You are acting insane. “I know you think I was a complete dipshit, but you of all people should know you can’t believe everything the media puts out there.”
“And yet we just came from a meeting with your supposed lover and child. Who, I might add, you don’t even remember.”
“Have you ever had so much to drink you don’t remember things clearly?” He raises his brows as if to say Hmm? “Remember Seychelles?”
My face heats at the memory: me, losing track after my sixth Mai Tai and waking to discover my mind a blank slate.
According to Henry, I wandered the beach that night singing show tunes—which I hate—until a bird pooped on my head, which drove me to instant tears.
I fell asleep before he could even get me in the shower.
“I didn’t have sex with anyone that night,” I point out.
“No shit,” he says. “That would have been rape.”
Thinking about our honeymoon is not good for keeping the tears at bay. I pinch the bridge of my nose. “We wouldn’t be in this mess if you had just used a fucking condom.”
He steps closer, making me press up against the mantle. “You know you’re the only one I’ve ever not used a condom with.”
“And yet we have evidence to the contrary.” I’m breathless with him invading so much of my personal space. “Maybe you just didn’t remember.”
The look on his face says he does not miss the sarcasm in my voice. “That fluke may be my only chance to have a child.”
I flinch.
His face immediately turns apologetic. “I’m sorry, C. That was a shit thing to say.”
“Yeah, no fuck.” I sniff and push past him before he can mess with my emotions any further. “So what now? Are you going to ride off into the sunset with Elizabeth?”
He snorts. “Don’t be ridiculous. But I do plan to stay in touch with her.”
I straighten one of the pillows on the sofa. What I want to do is punch it, but that feels a little useless at this point. “What kind of name is ‘Axel’ anyway?”
“Well, for a guy that likes cars, I kind of dig it.”
“Look how cute you two are. Naming your kids after your hobbies.”
“Mock it all you want, but that’s my kid we’re talking about, so you won’t do it in front of him or his mother.”
I don’t even have time to come up with a response before he’s gone, as if he can’t handle speaking to me for another second. I gape at the door that has already closed on him.
He left as though there isn’t anything for him here anymore. Maybe there isn’t. I won’t give him a child, even though he doesn’t know that. And I won’t accept the one he found another way. I’m not leaving him much choice.
But he’s not leaving me much of one, either. While he fights for the child he’s apparently always wanted, I will be fighting for my family and for my country.
He’s mistaken if he thinks I will go down without doing everything I can to stop the carnage that’s coming.