Chapter Four
ESME WAS A fire in his blood, all bright colors and wild songs in his head.
She tasted the way she always had—too good to believe. An impossible, immediate addiction that he had always felt as keenly as if she was an injection straight into his veins.
Sometimes he thought he hated her for showing him that it was even possible to feel like this.
And he knew he hated her more because she wasn’t afraid to turn him inside out and lay out all his weaknesses before him. So he could not continue to tell himself stories that cast him as the hero.
Once upon a time, he knew that he’d found that sharpness of hers, that clear-eyed intensity, refreshing.
She had been so very different from the other women he knew, the safe and careful women he’d chosen, and Tadeo had been mesmerized.
Kissing her was like coming home to a place he’d long since thought had burned to ash. It was an immediate shock to his system. It was like catapulting himself straight to the heart of a burning inferno and he knew better.
He knew better.
But he deepened the kiss.
Tadeo kept one hand braced on the arm of her chair and used the other to angle her jaw where he wanted it, because there was no simple kiss when it came to this. To them.
Everything with Esme was plunder, possession, and each and every time, it was perfect. She was perfect—
That was the word that got stuck in his head. The word that grew until it drowned everything else out, even her.
Or almost her.
Tadeo pulled away and found her eyes glazed, dark and starry, and her lips ripe from his. He could feel the way he wanted her like a broken bone. Like a crack and a shattering, a rending apart.
But he was a king now. There had never been any room in his life for this. There wasn’t now.
“This,” he bit out at her, though for a moment he wasn’t sure that his mouth wouldn’t kiss her of its own accord. That his body wouldn’t mount its own rebellion, the way he could feel it wanted to in every cell. “This is the problem.”
“It’s not a problem,” she returned, even though she was breathless. Even though she looked kissed within an inch of her life and she was round with his child but still had lips like that, lips that tasted like everything he’d ever wanted. “You just want it to be.”
It took a Herculean effort, and he hated that it was so difficult, but Tadeo pushed himself upright and stood back.
He knew that she could see exactly what she did to him.
His cock was so heavy that it ached and he was certain she could see it clearly as it pressed against his trousers.
He could see that greedy look in her luminous eyes. He knew what it meant.
Tadeo could also think of any number of ways that she could help him with this issue—but that was how they’d gotten into this mess.
Back in Boston. Five months ago. Every time he thought he’d found a measure of self-control, Esme proved him wrong.
Every single time.
“I don’t need you to understand this,” he managed to grit out, though he had to dig deep. “I don’t need your comfort or your help.”
“So you have said. Many times.”
He hated when she used that voice, so arch and amused when he was stretched over quicksand and could lose his footing at any moment.
Tadeo ran a hand over his face, though it did nothing to remove the taste of her from his mouth.
“What you fail to understand is that I don’t want to be the kind of man who feels the things that you make me feel, Esme. ”
That landed. He could see it got to her, though she covered it beautifully in an instant. Sometimes he thought he was the only one who could see behind the masks she wore. Other times he thought that the fact he could was part of this curse she’d laid on him at first sight.
And he had never found a way to stop caring when he hurt her. He never took any pleasure in it.
But it still had to be done.
“I have never wanted it,” he told her, very deliberately. “Boston should never have happened. You seem to think that what happened there is the truth of things between us, but surely the past seven years should have proved to you that Boston was the aberration.”
“What exactly do you think would have happened if we hadn’t met in Boston?
” Esme asked. She did not look as wrecked as he felt, or even as wrecked as she’d seemed for a flash a moment ago—but then, she never did.
She dabbed at the corner of her mouth with a delicate finger, and shrugged.
“What do you suppose it would have been like if we’d met for the first time when you decided to start courting me? How do you think that would have gone?”
He knew exactly how it would have gone. And he understood her point, though he would have preferred it if he had not.
They were conflagrations waiting to happen, the two of them. When they were together, they burst into flame. It was as simple and complicated as that.
It was entirely possible that if he’d met her for the first time on one of those public dinner dates, the whole world would have seen him toss her up against a wall and kiss her wildly, savagely, the way he had after that night in Boston.
Then, too, the whole world would have seen the way they couldn’t keep their hands off each other that whole year. They would have known that he’d neglected his duties and his studies so he could spend days in bed with her, unable to do anything if it meant he had to stop touching her.
That he had even imagined himself head over heels in love.
It was the kind of alternate timeline that could keep a man up at night. And Tadeo had already lost enough sleep over this woman.
“I know exactly what would have happened, and so do you,” she said, as if she could read his mind. Sometimes he thought she could.
“I’m not debating that. The difference between us is that I know that the relationship we had—and, indeed, still have—was toxic. You seem to think it was a love story.”
For the first time, he saw something in her…shake. There was a flash in her dark eyes, but more than that, he thought he saw her tremble.
A direct hit, he supposed, but he couldn’t say he felt good about it. She didn’t have one of her quick responses ready and he found he didn’t like that either.
Esme was sitting in an ancient chair in a room noted widely for its charm and beauty, but she was the only thing he could see.
She was the focal point and it was not only because she was so impractically pretty, though she was.
It was because there was something about her, some lightning that crackled all over her and drew people to her.
She lit up every room she entered. She took the light with her when she left.
Leaving her was one of the hardest things he’d ever had to do. As was marrying her.
He felt like a starving man, but he took this unexpected moment of quiet between them to let himself just…
look at her. Her lovely dark eyes that had always contained too much to bear.
Too much wisdom, too much love, too much.
Her dark brows. Those marvelous cheekbones that made her face a true work of art.
That gently bowed upper lip that he dreamed about, some nights.
The dark hair she wore up in the front and let cascade down behind her, a mass of thick waves.
Tadeo could smell the sweetness of her shampoo from here. The hint of coconut. The touch of spun sugar.
The woman was a menace, and that stretchy, skimpy dress she wore was not helping any.
Her breasts were indeed bigger, rounder—and now he knew why. And that rounded belly made him feel… Tadeo told himself it didn’t matter what he felt. What mattered was how he handled this.
That was all that ever mattered.
“You are so afraid of this thing between us,” she said, her soft voice breaking into his thoughts like a detonation.
Though he was surprised to find her gaze was directed toward the window, not at him.
He thought that she was taking another swing at him, but instead, she turned her head and found him with those too-wise dark eyes once more.
He thought he saw something like reproach there.
Or maybe it was something deeper than that.
Maybe she was simply letting him see it hurt her.
He felt his hands clench and forced himself to straighten out his fingers.
“You’re terrified,” Esme said, in her devastatingly quiet way, “and so you come up with all of these rules to keep it under wraps. But surely what happened five months ago should make it clear that hiding from something like this only makes it inevitable that it will burst out eventually. And now you are apparently trapped with me.”
She threw all of this at him in that way she did, using that outrageous calm she could pull out at will—though Tadeo knew she would probably claim that he was the one with armor.
“So what now?” she asked when he said nothing, and her dark brows rose like an indictment.
“Do you shove it back down, hide it away in one of your little locked rooms, and hope for the best? Because it’s been ten years now, Tadeo.
The chemistry between us hasn’t gotten any less intense since the day we met.
In fact, I’d say it’s going in the opposite direction. ”
He reminded himself—again—that he was the king.
He had a duty to his people, one made more complicated by the damage his mother had done to the royal family’s reputation.
Everything he did was a restoration project, aimed at rehabilitating the family in his people’s eyes—up to and including the fairy-tale wedding to the princess from the neighboring kingdom that had already been considered a love story for a quarter of a century by the time they got married.
The divorce he’d planned would have taken all of that into account.
But he wouldn’t be any kind of a king—or much of a man—if he couldn’t pivot when necessary.
“I’ve already thought of our problematic chemistry,” he said.
“How shocking that you consider it problematic.”