by Maisey Yates
“Even after knowing you for only a few days, I would never expect that,” he said drily.
She swung her legs over the side of the bed, a cracker still in her hand, and stood. She wobbled and he reached out for her, hooking his arm around her waist to steady her. His response was immediate and fierce, his blood rushing south, his body hardening instantly. He could feel her heart pounding hard against his chest. Her copper eyes were wide, her lips parted slightly. How easy it would be to dip his head and taste her again…
She straightened, much too quickly for his taste, and pulled away, adjusting the hem of her casual T-shirt, her mouth now pulled into a tight line.
“Thank you,” she said tartly, moving back from him again, creating even more distance between them. “I’m not feeling very well.”
“So you said. Is it like this every day?”
“Pretty much. It hit with a vengeance right when I entered my sixth week.”
“How far along are you?” He realized then that he’d never asked.
“Seven weeks.”
His stomach tightened. She was nearly two months along already. It wouldn’t even be nine months until he held his son or daughter in his arms.
She was still slender, her stomach flat. He had to wonder if her breasts had already changed or if this was her normal shape. He could easily imagine her filling out, her belly getting round. Some previously undiscovered, primitive part of him surged with pride at the thought.
Pride…and a hot tide of arousal. He’d never actually thought of pregnant women as sexy before, but he could very easily imagine running his hands over Alison’s bare, full stomach, feeling his child move beneath his hands.
“The baby’s due in October,” she said.
He’d heard of pregnant women glowing, but he’d never seen it before. Until now. Alison’s whole face was lit up, a sweet, secret smile curving her lips slightly. The absolute joy he could see shining from her eyes was staggering. And it reminded him again why marrying her, providing his child with both parents, was the absolute best choice. She would be a good mother; he was absolutely certain of that. Were he not, there was no way he would have considered marrying her. If he wasn’t sure of that he would have simply sought sole custody of their child, and he would have done it without compunction.
“You are excited about it,” he said, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear.
“Of course I am.”
Their eyes locked and held, and the tightening in his stomach intensified, radiating outward, desire gnawing at him with an urgency that was impossible to ignore.
“We’ll have to have the wedding soon. Before you start to show,” he said, his voice harsher than he’d intended.
She chewed her lip, her eyes betraying insecurity, fear, for the first time since he’d met her. Anger he’d seen, sadness, too, but never this bleak hopelessness. It made his chest ache as fiercely as the rest of his body.
“As I said, there are provisos to my agreement.”
“You did say. What you didn’t say was what those little stipulations were.”
“I don’t want our child in boarding school or anything like that. I want him or her to have as much of a normal upbringing as possible. No team of nannies, no catering to his every whim. I don’t want a spoiled child, either.”
“Do I seem like I was a spoiled child?”
“Yes.” She replied without missing a beat, and then continued. “I want to continue being active in advocating for children. Maybe organize a charity or something.”
“A wonderful idea. We have several organizations in place and having my princess closely involved would probably do wonders for them.”
“And I don’t…I want my own room.”
He inclined his head. “That is a common practice in royal marriages.”
“I don’t think you understand. I don’t want for us to…I don’t want to have a sexual relationship with you.”
Alison tried to clamp down the wild fluttering in her stomach. She knew Maximo wouldn’t be happy. Hadn’t he referenced their physical attraction as a reason for marriage? But this was what she needed in order to be able to accept his proposal, such as it was.
His kiss had decimated her control, had made her forget who she was, who he was, where she was. Going to bed with him…What would that do to her closely guarded self-control? The thought of surrendering herself like that, of stripping herself bare both physically and emotionally before another human being in that way, terrified her to her bones. Marriage she could deal with, but sexual intimacy was several steps beyond her.
She was attracted to him; unreasonably so. And that only made her more determined to maintain a healthy distance between them. If she didn’t want him like this, if being near him didn’t make her limbs weak and her pulse pound in her chest, at the apex of her thighs, if she didn’t get embarrassingly wet with wanting just from the brush of his mouth over hers, she might be able to simply deal with it. But it was the ease with which he robbed her of her common sense, her ability to think coherently, that had all of her internal alarms going off. He had too much power over her already, and throwing sex in with that big mess of emotions was a recipe for absolute disaster.
“That makes no sense. You can’t deny that we are extremely attracted to each other.”
“Maybe not. But I don’t feel like I can commit to that sort of relationship with you. Things are complicated enough. A marriage in a strictly legal sense I can handle. But I’ve only known you for twenty-four hours and I can’t even begin to consider a sexual relationship with you. And you’re a very attractive man. I’m sure there will always be lots of women who want to…”
“If you’re concerned about my fidelity, don’t be. I was married for seven years and never once did I look at another woman. It was not a hardship for me.”
Maybe not, but Maximo had been in love with his wife. They weren’t in love. Not that she cared. But if she were to sleep with him, she would need to know that he was being faithful to her. And that was just one more reason not to cross that line with him. Even imagining a hypothetical situation where they were intimately involved made her care about who he slept with. It made her feel things like jealousy and insecurity, and other emotions she had no business feeling. If she actually made love with him it would no doubt be multiplied by a hundred, and that was just one of the many things she was trying to avoid.
“I’m not concerned about that. But if we were sleeping together then yes, I would want you to be faithful. You would want the same from me. Emotions would become involved.”
“Not for me,” he said starkly. She knew he spoke the truth. But he probably had lots of sexual experience. Divorcing love from sex was probably second nature to him. For her…she knew instinctively that sex could have a seriously devastating emotional effect on her. She just wouldn’t be able to open herself up like that to someone without becoming involved. It was one of the reasons she’d avoided it for the past twenty-eight years.
The last thing she needed was for him to become a necessity to her, and she knew that if she let herself she could easily melt into Maximo, let his strength hold her up when things were hard. She could grow to depend on him, and she’d spent far too long learning to be independent, to be in control, to take that chance.
“Maybe not. But this is what I want.”
“And you wouldn’t mind if I were having sex with other women?” he asked, his words obviously chosen to elicit a response from her. One they most certainly got, but she wasn’t going to let him know that.
“I wouldn’t care either way. If we aren’t sleeping together then there isn’t a relationship to be faithful to.”
“You may feel differently once we speak our vows.”
“I can’t imagine that I will. What we have in common is the desire to do what’s right for our child. Nothing more. We didn’t even conceive in the way most couples do.”
“But we very easily could have.”
It wasn’t true—
she knew it wasn’t—and yet it was far too easy to visualize the image, a picture of her meeting Maximo in a bar, a restaurant, on the street. Of them talking, smiling, laughing. Having dinner together. Going home together. Making love.
No. It was easy for him to assume that might have happened, because he figured her for a normal woman who dated, had casual relationships, had sex. She didn’t do any of those things. And she had never felt lacking in any way because of it. Until now. Now she felt at a disadvantage. How was she supposed to deal with a man like Maximo? A sophisticated, experienced man who probably knew a lot more about women and sex than the average male. And she knew far less about men and sex than the average female.
“Those are my terms, Max,” she said softly. “I can’t marry you if you won’t agree to them.”
“Then I agree to them. I don’t want a martyr in my bed. I’ve never had to coerce a woman into sex in my life and I don’t intend to start doing so with my own wife.”
It was the absolute truth. He wasn’t about to blackmail or beg to get a woman to have sex with him, not even one he desired as much as he did Alison. He hadn’t even begged Selena when she’d moved out of their room. No was no, even from his wife.
He was surprised that Alison was denying them both what they so obviously wanted, but not even a sexless marriage was new to him. He’d been there. He imagined it had been Selena’s way of punishing him for not giving her a baby, although the issue had been with her body and not his. It hadn’t mattered to him. He had never once seen her as less of a woman. But she had been so frustrated with their timed lovemaking that never, ever produced the result she wanted, that she hadn’t even allowed him to touch her in the last six months of their marriage. The last six months of her life.
He knew why Selena had denied him, and he wasn’t sure he hadn’t deserved it. But he didn’t know what Alison’s game was. She was twenty-eight, a career woman, not sheltered or shy in any way. And she was very clearly heterosexual and very clearly attracted to him. So it didn’t make any sense for her to turn down a physical relationship with him. Especially since she obviously wanted him. Women might be able to fake orgasms, but her response to his kiss was very real. There was no way she could have engineered her body’s response to him, and no reason for her to do so.
But if she needed to put up a pretense of morality by insisting she couldn’t sleep with a man she didn’t know, she was welcome to do it. Although he doubted that she would hold on to that stance. The attraction between them was far too strong for that. It was certainly beyond anything he’d ever known in his experience.
She licked her lips and his body ached with the need to taste her sweet mouth again, to move his tongue over hers. He was instantly hard, his body raging with his need.
If she felt half of what he did, and based on that explosive kiss they’d shared in the corridor he was certain that she did, her play at resistance wasn’t going to last for very long. It simply wasn’t possible.
“Are you feeling up to dining with my parents?”
She sucked that sweet lower lip into her mouth and chewed on it thoughtfully. When she released it there were little dents left by her teeth, and he wanted to soothe them with his thumb, his tongue.
“I don’t suppose it’s acceptable to cancel dinner with the king and queen. What would Miss Manners say?”
His lips twitched and she felt an odd sense of gratification over having amused him. “If you’re not feeling well we will cancel.”
Selena would have canceled. His wife had frequently felt under the weather. She had been very delicate, emotionally and physically, and he had looked on it as his duty to protect her, shield her. It would be his duty to do the same for Alison. She was under his protection now. And he wouldn’t fail her.
The look of steely determination that lit Alison’s copper gaze surprised him. “I’ll be fine. I’ve been going to work, cooking my own meals, functioning just fine without being coddled. I’m more than able to meet with your parents.”
A brief spark of vulnerability shadowed her eyes. “What are they going to think about all of this?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know that the nature of our relationship is any of their business.”
“You mean you don’t want them to know how the baby was conceived.”
“They didn’t know about Selena’s fertility problems.”
“I see.” She looked at him, her expression searching. “And you don’t want them to know.”
“It was important to her that no one knew about her infertility. I have honored that.” She had seen it as a failure, one she couldn’t face sharing with the public, or his parents.
“Then I don’t think it’s important for them to know how we conceived the baby.” Alison didn’t really relish having to keep up any kind of facade, but neither did she want to be a part of damaging his late-wife’s memory.
It made her heart break a little to know that she was going to have the dream Selena had been denied, having a baby with Maximo. As much as she would have rather been honest about the nature of her relationship, or lack of it, with Max, she felt she owed the other woman some protection.
“I’ll leave you to shower and get ready. I’ll be back in an hour.”
She watched Maximo, her fiancé, turn and leave the room. A feeling of longing, so intense she felt it physically, filled her. Part of her wanted him, impossibly, irresponsibly, almost as much as the sensible part of her craved distance and protection from him. It was like a tug-of-war, each desire pulling at her from opposite sides. And the sensible part of her had to win. It had to.
The dining room at the castillo was extremely formal. The high ceilings and ornately framed artwork gave the room a museumlike quality. The long banquet-style table could easily have seated thirty or forty people, and added to the wholly impersonal feel of the room. It made stupid, emotional tears prick at her eyes.
A child couldn’t sit and color at this table. They certainly couldn’t eat milk and cookies and peanut butter and jelly at this table. Finger painting was probably out, too, since it was likely a priceless antique.
Of course, she knew there were other tables in a place this big. Maximo’s quarters likely housed its own dining room. But what this room represented was everything she feared. Not for the first time since she’d said yes to Maximo’s proposal she wondered if she’d made the right choice. It had seemed like it then. His logic had made so much sense. But now…it seemed impossible standing at the entryway to this formal, forbidding room with two equally formal, forbidding people staring at her and Max, his arm clamped tightly around her waist, looming over her.
“Come in and sit down, son.” The king gestured to a place at his right at the head of the table. “We’re both very interested in why you’ve asked to have dinner with us tonight.”
The king was obviously a man of advanced years, but there was nothing frail about him. His hair was silver-gray, his skin tanned and healthy-looking, wrinkles almost entirely absent from his face. The queen was beautiful, years younger than her husband, her dark hair drawn back into a tight bun, her face also free of lines. They were both terribly intimidating and neither one of them offered a smile as she and Max moved into the room to sit down at the table.
The only friendly smile on offer came from a young woman who was sitting to the left of Queen Elisabetta. Her full lips stretched into a grin that showed her bright white teeth. With her golden skin, dark hair and shockingly blue eyes, she was one of the most beautiful women Alison had ever seen. A strange feeling settled in the pit of her stomach.
The woman jumped up from her seat when they approached and ran to throw her arms around Maximo. “Max!” she cried. “I’m so happy you’ve come home early!”
“It’s good to see you too, Bella.” He dropped a kiss on the younger woman’s head. “Alison,” he said, tightening his hold on her waist, “this is my younger sister Isabella.”
The suspicious knot that had been tightening in her stomach rel
eased its hold on her as soon as he announced his relationship to the very beautiful Isabella. She was relieved, she realized, to find out that she was his sister and not…
She cut off that train of thought before it could go any further. It wouldn’t have mattered if she were a lover or a former lover. It wasn’t her business. And there was no reason for her to care.
“Nice to meet you.” Isabella dropped a light kiss on Alison’s cheek. “I’m so pleased that Max brought a friend with him.” She cast her brother a sly look that seemed to say she had guessed that there was more to the relationship than he’d admitted.
“And these are my parents, King Luciano and Queen Elisabetta.” Maximo gestured to his parents who were still sitting, rigid as stone, at the head of the table.
“It’s nice to meet you, too,” Alison said, grateful at least for Isabella’s enthusiastic greeting. “All of you.”
Maximo pulled a chair out for her and she sat gingerly, feeling unbearably self-conscious. It was one thing to stand in front of people in a courtroom—that was her domain. She was confident there. She was in control. Here, she was very much the colloquial fish out of water, and she felt as if she was gasping for air.
Isabella offered Maximo an impish smile. “You didn’t tell me you had a girlfriend, Max.”
Maximo took her hand beneath the table, twining his long fingers with hers and lifting their hands, joined, onto the table. “I was trying to keep it just between Alison and myself until we were certain how serious things were.”
Alison nodded—any words she might have spoken jammed in her tightened throat. She hated this. Hated feeling so out of her depth. But, dear heaven, this was as far outside of her experience as anything could have possibly been. She’d never met a man’s parents; not in this sense. And these weren’t just any parents: they were royalty. And their faces were so stiff she had no doubt they felt she was quite patently beneath them.
“Is it serious?” his mother asked, her eyebrows raised, her lips unsmiling.