Chapter Eight #2
At the palace there were more cameras, and she could already hear the roars from the paparazzi as Tadeo helped her from the car.
He made certain to pause for a moment outside it, as if he needed to adjust his sleeves, with her belly on full display.
Then there was the long procession up the palace stairs and in through its grand gates that allowed most of Europe to get a glimpse of the contours of her pregnancy.
Precisely as planned, she knew. Esme couldn’t quite put her finger on why it was that she felt so unsettled by the conversation they’d had in the car.
It wasn’t his rules. As the weeks passed, they had loosened. Now it was not pure silence that he required. It was pleasantness. Only if he felt attacked, or he felt she was being unreasonable, did he decree that she’d lost access to him.
Though it was never for a week these days and the real truth was, he didn’t do that much anymore anyway. It was as if he’d become as addicted to their nights together as she was. Esme suspected that he didn’t sleep any better without her than she did without him.
But she didn’t dare say that, either.
What she did instead was pour her feelings into everything they did.
Whether it was a dance at a ball or the way she held on to him as she found her pleasure, she did anything and everything she could to infuse these moments with the love she felt swimming inside her, as sure as the blood in her veins.
Sometimes she was sure that he could feel it.
Sometimes, in those unguarded moments when they were together and naked, and there was nothing in all the world but the fire they built together, she was sure that she glimpsed it.
That light in his eyes. When he looked at her, sometimes, that curve in his mouth.
All those things he never said.
Inside the palace, they moved along a gorgeous entry hall that led into a ballroom. They were announced and then they walked down the stairs and were swallowed up by the crowd. Only then did Esme allow herself to start looking around with purpose.
“Are you expecting to meet someone here?” Tadeo asked, sounding amused.
“My parents.” She smiled up at him. “They are the King and Queen of Clarebonne, after all. I feel certain they are on the guest list.”
“They didn’t tell you?” He looked confused.
“Why would they tell me?” She shook her head at him, though she didn’t think he was joking. “Gone are the days when the Clarebonne palace kept me apprised of the King and Queen’s movements.”
“I thought you said you spoke to your mother every day.”
“I do.” Esme frowned at him. “We don’t talk about work, generally.”
Again, Tadeo looked as if he couldn’t quite comprehend what she was saying. “Then what do you talk about?”
Esme didn’t get a chance to answer him, because he was swept into conversation with some other heads of state. But she couldn’t stop thinking about what that question revealed. About what it suggested about his relationships with his parents. With his father, most of all.
Had they ever not talked about work?
She moved through the grand ballroom, smiling and clasping hands with many of the people she recognized as she went.
And she recognized almost everyone. It was all quite lovely, and in some cases decidedly not lovely—that was part of the fun of these events, she always thought—and either way, she found herself smiling far more genuinely when she saw the people she was looking for standing over near an alcove.
Her mother saw her a few moments later as she drew near, and Queen Luisa’s practiced, regal smile turned into something far more personal, wide and happy, at the sight of her daughter.
Then her gaze dropped to Esme’s belly and her smile dropped. It became a gasp. Then she tugged on her husband’s arm in a complete violation of all known protocol, yanking his attention away from the earnest Dutch minister he was speaking with.
And when Esme finally reached them, they were both talking a mile a minute, hugging her close and already making noises at her baby belly. Then even more noises when she told them it was a boy.
For a while, there was nothing but that. This outpouring of emotion, so pure and so happy, that it took Esme a few extra moments to realize how much she’d missed it.
How inured she’d become to the empty shell of Bellaza. And her less empty, but still decidedly cold husband—
But that made her heart hurt all over again, and she didn’t want to hurt. Not now. Not while her parents were here and felt like a long dose of sunlight after an endless winter.
“You have been holding out on us,” her father, King Alain, said sternly, though his dark eyes danced.
“I have been,” Esme confessed.
“I’m sure she had her reasons,” said her mother at once, because Queen Luisa never had and never would waste an opportunity to champion her daughter. No matter what.
Tonight, Esme couldn’t help but wonder who had ever championed Tadeo.
That made her heart ache too.
When her father’s attention was reclaimed by the Dutch minister, Luisa linked her arm through Esme’s and hugged her close.
“I’m so happy for you, my darling,” she said in her musical way. “But at such a happy time, what I cannot understand is why your eyes are so sad.”
Esme felt all her breath go out of her in a rush.
She felt both exposed and seen, her mother’s specialty.
It felt like a kind of nostalgia. Like a perfect hug she knew would end.
“Not sad,” she said after a moment, when she was sure her voice would not sound the least bit rough or choked. “It’s more complicated than that.”
Queen Luisa studied her daughter for a moment, then turned her attention to the crowd before them. She kept her arm linked with Esme’s as her own gaze took on a faraway look.
“You know that Queen Marisol and I were friends, do you not?” But that was not really a question, Esme knew.
This was a story. And that she’d invoked the name of the scandalous Marisol, the much-maligned mother of Tadeo, had Esme immediately riveted.
“Long before she was the Queen of Bellaza, she was a childhood friend. We grew up together, I suppose you could say, and spent several summers in our youth doing the same circuit of house parties with the sorts of people our parents wanted us to know, outside of the glare of the headlines.” Her smile was mysterious, but all she said was, “I got to know her rather well.”
“No one speaks of her in the palace,” Esme said softly.
Her mother made a low noise. “I am not surprised.”
“When she does come up, it is never a pleasant conversation.”
Luisa made a humming sort of noise. Esme knew that sound. It was her elegant way or dissenting without succumbing to a vulgar snort or a laugh.
“I will tell you this,” her mother said.
“The Marisol I knew was a bright light. She was always happy while the rest of us liked to waft about complaining of our boredom and disaffection, as you do. She could make the most tedious afternoon a delight, simply by her presence. And when she fell in love with Hugo of Bellaza, it seemed at first that he made her the happiest she’d ever been. ”
Esme looked at her in surprise and her mother nodded.
“It was not long after their engagement, I think, that she started to change. She grew quieter. More careful. After a while, there was no sign of the childhood friend I’d known for so long.
She had become Queen Marisol.” Luisa looked at Esme then.
“And Queen Marisol was the saddest woman I have ever known.”
Esme felt something like an earthquake deep inside her.
“Mother,” she said, shaking her head. “I’m having his baby—”
Luisa’s eyes flashed. “And you owe that baby you, Esme. My daughter is a bright light herself. Yet every time I see you, the light grows darker and darker in your gaze. Is this what you wish to pass on to your child?” She made a soft noise.
“I would tell you that Marisol most assuredly did not want that. Yet that is where she ended up. And if I’m not mistaken, the child she loved to distraction takes after his father.
Not her. Not the parent who loved him because he was hers, not because he would one day be king. ”
Then the music changed and they were interrupted by distant cousins. Luisa squeezed Esme’s arm with her own, kissed her on the cheek, then let her go.
And Esme found herself thinking of nothing else but what her mother had said for the rest of the evening.
She kept her professional smile in place.
She applauded the bride, who looked like she thought she’d won the Cinderella lottery.
She smiled at the groom, who looked very pleased with himself.
She danced more than once with her husband, who she’d once thought would be her own fairy tale, and tried her best to get the sadness out of her eyes.
Whatever her mother had seen. Whatever that meant.
That night, they stayed in a fine old house near the palace, and made love to each other with a ferocity and a depth that made Esme think she might actually weep.
Particularly afterward, where she laid curled up beside him, and had to accept that whatever she thought was happening, it was a certainty that he did not think making love as part of what they were doing. He could be telling himself anything.
He might not even find all of this as beautiful and transformative as she did.
“Are you all right?” he asked in the dark, the two of them so close on the new bed. “You seem…”
But he didn’t finish what he’d been about to say. He kissed her instead. He threw them straight back into that fire of theirs.
Hadn’t he made it clear? He didn’t want to hear the things she had to say. He didn’t want to listen to her, because when he did, he had to feel.