Chapter Two
ESME COULD ADMIT that she found the look on Tadeo’s face deeply satisfying, whatever that might have said about her as a person. She accepted that it likely said nothing good.
And yet there it was, just the same. Pure satisfaction, sweeping through her like a small, personal tsunami.
She had anticipated that this moment would please her when it came—and she’d known it would come eventually—but she had to admit that this far exceeded her expectations.
Esme would not go so far as to say it made up for the past five months of self-recrimination, worry, and intense doubt, but it certainly felt like a gesture in that direction.
After all, she’d been expecting him for a long while now.
At first, she’d thought that he might come sooner.
Right after that night in the palace, when the passion that he’d been denying for seven years had finally boiled over in that mess of grief and comfort…
and what she thought was simply humanity at its most basic.
What people did when they were still alive and someone they’d loved was dead.
But he didn’t, because he was made of ice when he wanted to be. So frigid it was a wonder flowers could even grow in this kingdom.
Then she’d been certain that he would make it happen at different times over the past few months.
After he got back on his feet in the wake of the funeral.
After he soothed the nation with his careful speeches from the iconic Bellazan throne room, promising his rule would be what they’d come to expect from his father—smooth and peaceful.
After he figured out every last in and out of his new position, which shouldn’t have been too overwhelming or taxing for him, all things considered.
Since he had been training for it since the day he was born.
It had taken her a long while to accept that he was really going to wait as long as possible to face what had happened that night. To come to the bitter conclusion that he had no intention of addressing it, only of divorcing her.
In the meantime, of course, she’d had other things to think about. More pressing things, as said things were growing inside her.
“How is this possible?” asked the man himself now, after a satisfyingly long while looking stunned. The way a cartoon character looked when struck with a shovel, she rather thought. She’d never seen Tadeo look like that before. She would have said it was impossible.
But then, their entire history was studded with impossibilities, one after the next—so what was another one tossed on top?
Esme was distressed to find that he was still as offensively gorgeous as ever.
He had not lost all of his hair. He had not shrunk down from his more than six feet.
He had not lost that rangy, athletic physique of his that made it seem as if he spent significant hours of his life roaming about playing sports of one kind or another when she knew full well he did not.
He was the king now and had previously been a very visible and involved crown prince.
He could not be racing about playing football—soccer, when he’d been in the States—the way he had in his youth.
Sadly for her, he still possessed that chiseled male beauty and the most beautiful face she had ever seen on a man in her life.
He had those remarkably blue eyes. That thick brown hair that wanted desperately to curl when he wasn’t being so stern and austere.
That impossibly perfect jaw with a dimple, no less, on the rare occasions he smiled.
That dimple had been her undoing.
More than once.
There was no sign of it today. Tadeo was wearing one of his casual outfits, such as it was. Esme was in a soft pair of maternity jeans to hold her precious belly, but His Majesty preferred not to wear jeans at all. He found them déclassé.
He had told her that shortly after their wedding as if she couldn’t remember him wearing them back in Boston. All the time.
Here in Bellaza he preferred dark trousers.
They were actually cargo pants today, and clung lovingly to his unduly powerful thighs.
He was wearing what she supposed was technically a sweatshirt, but was of course of such fine construction and made from such intensely exquisite fabric that it fell over his exquisite chest like cashmere.
Esme’s whole life would be completely different right now if this man had been even slightly unattractive.
She thought about this all the time.
If she had simply found him pleasant, if the conversation had been stilted that first night. If he hadn’t reached over, that wondering sort of smile on his beautiful face with that dimple in evidence and that intensity in his blue gaze, then picked up her hand—
They would be different people. She would probably still be here, in this house of exile on the palace grounds, but she imagined she’d be resigned to it.
And happier for it. Or they would have committed to one of those dreadfully common marriages of cold convenience, with separate rooms and scheduled copulation for the making of heirs, with a happy retreat into polite if distant companionship thereafter.
Not unlike the marriage they’d had, really—except notably devoid of all the seething tension that had always underscored even their most seemingly polite interactions.
Tadeo scowled at her. “Do you intend to answer my question, Esme?”
She ordered herself to stop thinking about copulation. And his ruinous dimple. “I beg your pardon. I thought that was facetious at best.” She studied him. “How do you think it happened, Tadeo?”
“But…” She had never seen this man flustered.
Furious, yes. Cracking at the seams, certainly.
Wild with passion, temper, emotion. All the things she had learned since that he deplored.
She had seen all of that. But she’d never seen him simply…
flustered. Yet today she thought that was exactly what he was. “But back in Boston…”
She thought she could hear his teeth grinding together. No doubt because he was physically allergic to admitting that they had, in fact, been in Boston. Together. Intimately.
“Are you…referencing our secret, scandalous past?” she asked in a very sweet tone that was not all that sweet. “Heaven forfend! Next thing you know, you’ll be acknowledging that it actually happened, and then where would we be?”
“You didn’t get pregnant then,” he gritted out, a flash of something in his gaze that made her think that he was remembering that breathless year, the sheets they’d torn up, the pleasure they’d found—
But Boston was not the issue here. Not today.
“Of course I didn’t get pregnant then.” She folded her hands over her belly bump and allowed herself to enjoy the little things right here and now.
Like this moment that felt a bit like schadenfreude.
“Perhaps one of the numerous things you’ve conveniently forgotten about that time is how much we both wanted—”
“I do not want to discuss the details of those days,” he bit out. Confirming that he was indeed remembering the same things she was, she rather thought. “They are like a fever dream I do not wish to revisit now that the worst of the illness is past.”
“So you have mentioned,” she said, soothingly, as if he was a fractious child. It had the effect she expected it would. He glowered.
But for years, that had been the closest she could get to the passion she remembered. The passion that sometimes woke her in the night to fume in her empty bed.
Or, some years, cry.
She would act the part required of her, poke at him a little, and call it a result when he responded in some way. In any way. And so had seven years gone by, somehow.
Yes, she was enjoying this today. It felt like payback.
After all, he was so shocked. As if he hadn’t been a full and enthusiastic participant in the act that led to this.
“Let me set the scene for you. Two people meet and their attraction is overwhelming, outrageous. Life-altering, some might say.”
“Esme.”
“I know you wouldn’t say that. Now.” He scowled and she kept going. “Yet both of them knew that they had degrees to finish, kingdoms not to disappoint, and so on. They spent their first two weeks together in an agony of extended foreplay—”
“Esme. Why must you always do this? I do not wish to wallow in these memories you seem to want to trot out at the slightest provocation—”
“I was on the pill, Tadeo,” she told him coolly.
“I got on the pill the morning after our first meeting, and it worked. After our wedding, when you informed me that I would be imprisoned in this marriage until the day your father died and then summarily released, I saw no particular reason to continue playing games with my hormones. I went off the pill then. And here we are.”
“You knew that you were not using birth control,” he said, sounding as if he was being extremely careful with his words, likely because he thought they might detonate. Or he would. “You knew, and yet—”
“Be very careful, Tadeo,” Esme advised him then. “You are straying perilously close to blaming me for a night in which both of us were drinking the very same alcohol from the very same bottle, and then made the very same choice. Perhaps you should question yourself.”
“I’ve questioned myself every night since.”
“Marvelous.” She clasped her hands together.
“Then you have already taken yourself to task for not handling the birth control options yourself. Either way, here we are. I am five months and thirteen days pregnant. If you would like to go ahead and divorce me, I won’t stop you. That might even be best.”