Chapter Five #2
His jaw flexed. She took that as a win.
“I will consult with my team and get back to you.”
“Naturally,” she murmured, in the same tone he’d used when discussing the narrative she told herself. “After all, what surely matters most when anticipating a child is the messaging.”
Unsurprisingly, it turned out that words he didn’t care for spoken to him in his office did indeed count against her. Though Esme found that was not a particular hardship that night, because he’d annoyed her in return.
She did not tell herself narratives. She was the one who had to live according to his.
“I hope it was made clear to you that you are not to treat rooms in this palace in the same shocking fashion you did the manor house,” he said one evening while they were being transported to an event.
They sat in the back of one of the palace’s fleets of vintage cars, each of them dressed magnificently. Her gown flowed over the seats, and while it was impossible for him not to touch the fabric, he was very careful not to touch her.
“No garish paint jobs, please,” he told her, as if he thought she might mistake his meaning.
“No one has made anything clear to me,” Esme replied sweetly.
So very sweetly. “In fact, I’ve been under the impression that it’s all been left opaque on purpose.
It seems I am to be left to my own devices in all things and it is true that historically, this has indeed involved a few rounds of cheerful paints. ”
He sighed, and made a meal out of the sound.
“Let me be the one to make certain you understand. The palace is a monument. It is the property of the kingdom as well as its joy and its emblem. Nothing in it is to be moved, renovated, changed, or even reconsidered without a consult with palace staff. Not your palace staff. Mine. Is that understood?”
“I understand perfectly,” she said, in what she hoped was a voice so placid it irked him.
The look he shot her way suggested that she was successful.
“As there is no nursery available in my compartments, I can only hope that the royal heir will be perfectly happy to loll about on the floor. Catching every draft and building a baseline of neglect that will likely color the rest of his or her existence. When this astonishingly hardy child grows up and decides to end the monarchy in retaliation, I’m sure that his or her Spartan beginnings will figure highly in that decision. ”
Tadeo did not respond to that. Not with words. All he did was turn his head and fix that fulminating glare of his upon her, making it perfectly clear to Esme that if she had any designs on his body that evening, they would be denied. She had not earned the right to touch him. Again.
Once more, she rather thought she was glad.
But the trouble was, being irritated with him didn’t last.
Too many of their engagements involved them standing too close to each other. Touching each other—whether she took his arm as they walked or allowed him to sweep her into his arms for a dance in the middle of a ballroom.
All theater, she told herself. All smoke and mirrors.
But she was weak, it turned out. It had been easier before, when she could repair to the manor house after nights like these. When she did not have to lie awake at night, knowing that he was right there. Right on the same hall, in the bedchamber next to hers. Sleeping beneath the same ornate roof.
And if she could only follow his obnoxious rules, she could have everything she wanted.
Everything she thought she wanted, that was.
For the first few weeks, she wasn’t entirely certain that she did.
Or maybe the real truth was that she’d always imagined that if something changed in their marriage, everything would change.
It hadn’t occurred to her that it could substantially change in so many respects, yet still leave her feeling as abandoned and alone as ever.
It hadn’t occurred to her that there were so many more complicated places to go.
One night, Esme was so busy turning these things over and over in her head that they made it all the way to their night’s engagement without her saying a word. She didn’t even realize it until they were on the way home again.
It had been a long night of forced gaiety, but it turned out that they were both quite good at that sort of thing. She’d forgotten that, somehow, over the course of the last five months. That for all that Tadeo liked to brood at her, he could turn on his charm when it mattered.
That was what she was thinking about in the car as it slipped through the old city streets and then bumped over the old cobblestones around the palace. How easy it was for him to be charming to everyone else in the world but her.
She almost asked him about it—or, perhaps, bludgeoned him a bit with it, as that was likely to make her feel better—but then she remembered.
Somehow Esme had managed, quite accidentally, to remain quiet in private this entire night.
And beside her, she was certain that she could feel Tadeo getting more and more tense the closer they got to the palace.
It was as if a light bulb went off in her head with a loud pop.
Esme could have kicked herself. She’d been so busy thinking about how it felt for her that she’d forgotten that there was no way that Tadeo would have put all these strictures into place if he wasn’t trying to protect himself somehow too.
And now that she’d finally gotten around to thinking this through, she knew exactly how he was protecting himself with this: He didn’t think she could do it.
He didn’t think that she could ever stay quiet enough to win herself a place in his bed. He might even have thought, and not without reason, that the very idea that she was expected to win her place in his bed would keep her from trying. She was a Wellesley woman, after all.
It made perfect sense. Tadeo could wrap everything in ice when he had his clothes on. He could and he did.
But the moment they touched—and even more so when they were naked—he was as helpless in the face of the wildfire that they became as she was.
How could she have let herself forget this?
The car pulled up to the palace entrance. The courtiers and guards descended upon them as always to guide them inside and relay any pertinent information that could not wait to get the King’s ear. But Tadeo looked over at her as they exited the vehicle.
“I want to see you tomorrow,” he told her sternly. “In my office. I should like to discuss some of the finer points of protocol that I think the last five months might have erased.”
Any other night, or any other time at all, Esme would have responded to that provocation in kind. But tonight she knew exactly what he was doing. And why.
So all she did was smile at him, as demurely as possible.
She inclined her head graciously, wordlessly agreeing to his ridiculous demand, as if she had not been raised a princess herself and—unlike him—spent her formative years with her very own comportment instructor as her parents had not wished to send her to any finishing school. The cheek of the man.
But Esme said not one word.
He was pulled aside to attend to some matter or other, but Esme headed straight to her rooms. She found she was trembling, slightly, but she knew full well it was excitement.
Inside her compartments, she took specific care as she went through her nightly routine.
She brushed out her hair and left it to flow like ink down her back.
Instead of comfortable pajamas she liked to sleep in these days, she went and dug out a chemise she’d bought before her wedding in excess of hope.
She let the silky fabric shimmer over her body and then laughed when she looked in the mirror and saw the way that her baby belly made the whole thing…shorter. And far more provocative, really.
Perfect for tonight, then.
Esme dabbed a hint of perfume at her wrists and then pressed her wrists behind her ears, because long ago, in Boston, he had once groaned about how wild that scent made him with the proof of his admiration pressed hard against her thigh.
She took a deep breath, and laughed at that too, for she felt as shaky as an untouched virgin on her wedding night. Though she had been nothing of the kind, thanks to him. And this was no wedding night anyway.
Though in a way, she thought as she walked back into her bedroom from the dressing room here that rivaled the one she’d had in the manor house, it was. This was a new beginning for them whether he liked it or not.
Because Esme was quite certain she’d finally cracked the code. Like it or not—and she was quite certain he would not like it at all, at least in theory—she’d figured him out.
She went to the door that joined their bedrooms, took a deep breath, and then pulled it open.
But when she walked through, instead of finding herself in his bedchamber she discovered that she was in a small antechamber instead.
It was little more than a closet, with a chair and a small table beneath a portrait of a bucolic scene that could have been any mountain slope in the Pyrenees.
A door to what was obviously Tadeo’s bedroom and also a door to what she assumed was the hall.
Esme knew immediately what this room was.
A little waiting area for the ladies, in case the king was otherwise occupied—as she imagined many a king had been over the course of the kingdom’s long history.
This room allowed His Royal and Rutting Majesty to cycle wives and mistresses in and out as he pleased without any unpleasantness that might put him off his stroke.
It was one of the things she loved about these old buildings. They always told on themselves.
But she did not intend to wait about for the King’s pleasure tonight.
She knew Tadeo’s essential character too well, despite all these years of chilly discord shoved deep beneath their public personas.
She not only knew he wouldn’t be with another woman, she knew he was regretting the bargain he’d made with her, too.
Yet she also knew he kept his promises, even if that was to what he believed was his detriment.
She went to the other door, half expecting it to be locked against her.
But it opened easily when she turned the knob and she supposed that wasn’t a surprise, no matter that it felt like one. Tadeo was a man of his word, good or ill.
Inside, she found herself in the King’s bedchamber. It was an imposing, august sort of room. There was a grand four-poster bed on one wall and a capacious hearth with a seating area arranged around it. The rugs on the stone floor were thick and fine.
Over by the windows, bathing in the starlight, stood Tadeo himself.
She knew that he had heard her come in and she also knew, simply at a glance, that he was bracing himself against this intrusion.
He probably wanted her to say something now so that he could send her away again.
Esme would bite her tongue in half before she did anything of the kind.
Besides, she could think of far greater uses of her time. And her poor tongue. She glided across the room toward him and could see herself coming in the window’s reflection. So she knew he could see her too.
He turned to face her as she came closer, no longer wearing the majestic suit with all its regalia that he’d worn out tonight.
Now he wore a T-shirt and lounging trousers, yet both of them were made of a fabric so exquisite that she could see the way it fell—lovingly and caressingly—against his body from across the room.
It was even better up close. So was he.
“I don’t think this is a good idea,” he growled at her.
But all she did was smile at him.
Esme went up to him and stopped just before another step would send her catapulting into his body. She could feel the heat he gave off, as if he was a furnace. He smelled like the shower he must have just taken, a fragrant sort of damp that made her feel a bit damp herself.
She took a breath, because she wanted to remember every moment of this. No blurriness, no alcohol, no crushing grief—and the silence that made everything that much better. That made it all so much hotter.
That somehow made everything roaring here between them as stark and undeniable as she remembered it from the night they met.
Then, holding Tadeo’s gaze, Esme knelt down before him and watched those blue eyes of his burst into flame.