Chapter Ten
ESME HOPED THAT he couldn’t tell that she was holding her breath.
She doubted that he could. He looked so undone. As she watched, Tadeo seemed to implode, right there before her eyes. Right there on the carpet before that massive, imposing desk that made her think of monoliths and mysterious henges, not monarchs.
If she listened hard, she was fairly sure that she could hear him exploding—
But he didn’t. Not quite. She watched his nostrils flare. She watched him stand straighter. A moment passed. Then another. And she began to realize that she was watching him wrestle himself under control again.
He was rendering himself unto ice. Esme was watching him make himself into a sculpture that resembled him, but wasn’t him.
Not the real him. Not the him who felt and laughed, danced and loved.
Not the him who had been so alive and so potent that the real truth was, she’d never recovered from the loss of him.
And it wasn’t the first time she’d seen him do this.
“This is what you did in Boston,” she said, and felt a kind of trembling deep inside—a terrible recognition.
She could remember the sense of dislocation, of betrayal.
How could he stand there and look like the man she’d loved and who’d loved her back so deeply and yet somehow…
not be him at all any longer? How was that possible?
“I watched you do it. You stood there in that living room in your Beacon Hill town house with all that wood and the sunshine pouring in and you turned yourself into an ice sculpture right in front of me.”
She remembered the wood floors, old and scarred and beautiful. The sun pouring in like it was any day, even a good day, somewhere else. And all too well did she remember the stranger staring back at her from the face of the man she’d been so in love with, it actually hurt.
It still fucking hurt.
“You always defer to the theatrical,” Tadeo told her after a moment, and he even sounded like ice now.
As if all he had to do was set the temperature gauge inside himself and sooner or later, no matter what, he would freeze.
“I’m not a sculpture. There’s no ice involved.
I am merely making certain that I’m always in control of myself. ”
He did not have to say, You should take note of this skill and try it sometime. It was implied.
“Control is feeling your emotions and choosing not to be governed by them,” Esme told him, using her own control then.
Not to act like a different person, but to make sure she was herself.
“It’s not pretending you don’t have any emotions at all and shoving them away inside of you, so that the very hint of one is a catastrophe. ”
He stared at her so long she wondered if she needed to worry about frostbite. “You will forgive me if I do not intend to take advice from a woman who threw herself into a lake to make a point.”
Esme shrugged. “Similarly, I am not about to be shamed by an automaton. My emotions have never interfered with the duties that I perform. But you can’t say the same, can you?”
He stood straighter as if he’d been shot. As if she’d shot him through the heart when, to her recollection, it was the other way around.
“I have never failed to do my duty,” Tadeo ground out, outrage in every syllable.
“To your country,” Esme agreed. She leaned forward in her chair.
“But what about your duties to me? I am your queen. I am your wife. I will shortly be the mother of your child. Don’t you think you owe me more than all these rules and regulations you dream up purely so that you won’t have to feel something? ”
He scowled at her, but she counted reactions as victories.
“What complaints can you possibly have to make?” he demanded.
He had dressed in an identical suit to the one he’d worn when he’d jumped into the lake, she noticed.
His uniform. Always elegantly subdued, contained.
“No one is cruel to you. I maintain you in the finest style. I am endlessly courteous to you in public, and recently, in private, we—”
It was possible, Esme thought then, that she was less in control of her emotions than she’d thought.
“First of all,” she said, getting to her feet and scowling right back at him, “you seem to have forgotten who I am. It’s not simply a case of you not knowing me well, it’s that you seem to be laboring under the misconception that you picked me up at a roadside stand on the way to the Cape.”
That muscle in his jaw flexed. “I have no such misconception.”
“Do you not? Are you sure?” She drew herself up to her full height and gazed at him with all the centuries of her ancestors in her bones.
“I am Princess Esme, of Clarebonne, only child and heir to my father’s throne.
You cannot keep me in style or at all. I keep myself.
” She shook her head at him. “I never needed you, Tadeo. I chose you. Even when you told me that you would court me coldly and marry me bleakly, I still chose you. I’m choosing you today as well. ”
And maybe she’d needed to remind herself of that, too.
“I do not understand why you insist on making all of this an amateur theatrical hour,” Tadeo threw at her darkly.
But his blue eyes were wild and stormy, she could see. Filled with what she knew were feelings, though she was certain he would deny that if she pointed it out.
“I do it to wound you,” she told him sweetly. “That could be my only aim, of course. I’m certain that between the two of us, with all our education and life experience, we couldn’t possibly come up with another reason why a woman would choose a man.”
“And how dare you suggest that I don’t know who you are,” he continued, and Esme wasn’t sure if he was pretending she hadn’t spoken or he really hadn’t heard her.
Another indication that he was not the ice floe he pretended he was.
“I have been handed dossiers prepared about you since you were a child. I know that your favorite color is pink. That you apparently like to paint, but only on historic walls. I know that you create relationships with every single person you meet.” His eyes blazed blue fire.
“And you think that makes you better than other people.”
“Not better,” Esme corrected him, though her pulse had picked up. “Just open to other people. It’s not the same thing.”
“You are caring, compassionate, and kind,” he told her in the same tone, but he did not sound particularly complimentary as he thundered this at her from across his office. “These are all reasons that I chose you to be my queen even after the debacle of Boston.”
“Was the debacle with us that whole year?” she mused. “Or did it come back with you after you went home that summer?”
Tadeo looked like he wanted to answer that, but didn’t.
He pushed on. “I’m fully aware of who you are.
I simply do not need nor want to immerse myself in the things that you think are necessary for a relationship.
I don’t even know why you insist upon it.
I watched you build relationships with every staff member you’ve ever had.
You treat them like family. What do you need with me? ”
Esme blew out a breath, suddenly less interested in this fight. Because it was always a fight, and she always lost. Every time, she lost.
“I don’t know how else to tell you that I love you,” she said quietly. “Just as I don’t know why that’s meaningless to you.”
Once again, he looked as if he was coming apart at the seams. As if she was piercing his flesh with knives instead of standing across from him and keeping her hands to herself.
“It’s not meaningless at all,” he bit out, and he sounded…furious, she thought. She was taken aback. He sounded something like livid. “I just find it psychotic.”
“Psychotic,” she repeated, stunned.
“Look at what love has wrought in this kingdom alone,” he seethed at her, not quite shouting.
Not quite, but close. “My mother claimed to love my father. So deeply, so desperately, that she then shared that love with every man she encountered. My father claimed he loved her too, so very much so that he enmeshed his kingdom in the dirt and grime of her exploits, tainting our family name.”
“Just because they loved badly doesn’t make love, itself, bad,” she managed to get out, though her throat felt tight.
“What use is love?” he demanded, and he was definitely louder then. “We have something far more enduring. The legacy of both of our kingdoms and how we will usher them into the next era. Why must you always push for more than that?”
“We are people, Tadeo. Human beings. We are made of flesh and bone, we bleed, we cry.” Even he cried, she thought, though she doubted he would admit it. “Why shouldn’t we feel what everyone else feels?”
“I don’t want to feel any of this,” Tadeo told her starkly then, with all of that stormy fury and an undercurrent of something a lot like grief beneath it. “I tried to tell you this in Boston.”
“You were lying,” Esme threw at him.
But he only shook his head, and she saw there was something grim in his gaze. “I wasn’t lying. I was coming to my senses. As I’m doing now, too.”
She remembered this part. That tone. That distance in his eyes.
It took everything she had not to start shaking, right there, the way she had then.
“Don’t you see?” Esme realized that she was pleading with him, but she was unable to stop herself.
She wasn’t sure she really wanted to stop herself.
“Your parents’ relationship isn’t you. It doesn’t have to be us.
We can make whatever we want out of our life.
Out of this reign of ours.” She blew out a breath and took a step closer to him.
“You remember what it was like. I know you do. When we would lie in bed, drunk on feeling, imagining how beautiful we could make this life we got to share?”
“I do remember it,” he told her, ice and fury. “And I want no part of it.”
“Tadeo. You have to—”