by Lucy Monroe
He took glassware and cutlery through to the small dining room.
“I’d prefer to eat on the sofa,” she called from the kitchen, sounding every bit as cranky as she’d looked answering the door, not to mention as if she thought he should have known that already.
Not sure how she had expected him to read her mind, he made a quick change of direction, putting the glasses and cutlery down on the coffee table before returning to the kitchen. “What do you want to drink?”
“Milk.” Her mouth turned down in obvious dissatisfaction. “It’s good for the baby.”
“There are many other calcium-rich foods you can eat. You don’t have to drink milk if you’d prefer something else.”
She used to like milk. Was this one of those pregnancy things?
She glowered at him. “Stop being so nice!”
“You would prefer I was dismissive of your desires?”
“Yes. It would make it easier.”
“What?”
“You know what.”
“This supposed choice you must make?”
“It’s not supposed.”
Annoyance rose to match hers, but he controlled it, allowing nothing but certainty to color his tone. “There is no choice when it comes to our child, Gillian. You know that, though you refuse to acknowledge it.”
“Did your mother have a choice?”
What an odd question to ask, as if Gillian couldn’t imagine his mother marrying his father under any other circumstances. It pricked at Maks’s pride.
Perhaps a little of his irritation came through when he said, “She was not pregnant when they married if that is what you mean. In fact, I did not arrive until two weeks after their first anniversary.”
“Then why did she marry your father?”
Gillian made it sound as if marrying into his family was a fate worse than death. Forget small pricks at his pride, this was a fully realized blow.
“Many women would have been happy to receive my father’s marital-minded intentions,” he ground out.
Gillian’s brow furrowed. “But she knew about the countess when she married him?”
Maks frowned at the mention of his father’s love affair. Even though they’d discussed it before, he didn’t like dwelling on something that had been a source of unpleasantness for his family his entire life. “Yes. Why?”
“I cannot imagine marrying a man who was in love with another woman.”
“That is not something you have to worry about.” Maks would never allow that particular emotion sway in his heart or his life.
Romantic love only caused pain and undermined duty and dedication.
“You could fall in love with someone else later.” Gillian’s tone wasn’t at all certain.
Good. Even she realized how unlikely that was.
“If I were going to love anyone, I assure you, it would be you.” Surely she realized this?
But then what Maks thought Gillian should know and what she actually accepted as truth were widely divergent, he’d come to appreciate.
She shook her head. “Do you have any idea how that sounds, what that does to my heart to hear?”
In truth, clearly he did not. He thought she would have liked knowing that. “You would prefer I withhold the truth?”
“I would prefer you loved me.”
He wanted to turn away from the pain in her eyes, but he was not a weak man to refuse to face the consequences of his choices. “I am sorry.”
“You said that before you left my apartment ten weeks ago.”
“I meant it.” He was not a monster.
She frowned and turned back to the plates, sprinkling the fresh Parmesan over the chicken instead of looking at him. “We’re going to make a scandal, one way or another.”
“Maybe a small one, but nothing truly damaging to the country if we take a proactive approach. My PR team is very good.” It would cause some media furor.
His marriage couldn’t help but do otherwise, but his PR team would make sure that furor died down quickly and remained mostly positive.
They wouldn’t be able to do that if word of the breakup had gotten out before word of the baby and elopement, though.
“Is Demyan on it?”
He didn’t understand the question. “You know he’s Director of Operations for Yurkovich Tanner.”
“I was being facetious. He’s just Machiavellian enough to make a really good PR man.”
“I’ll tell him you said so.”
“Do. And tell him it’s not nice to hire hackers to break into confidential medical files.”
“I will leave that admonishment to you.” For his part, Maks was very grateful to his cousin’s foresight.
“Don’t think I won’t say it to him. He might scare everyone in your company, but he doesn’t scare me.”
“He intimidates.”
People said the same about Maks even though he’d played diplomat from the cradle, but Demyan had an edge to him unsmoothed by political expedience.
“He’s a scary guy.”
“But not to you.” They’d had this conversation once before.
She’d finished it by reminding him that she had Maks’s protection and that was all she needed to feel safe, no matter how intimidating a guy his cousin was.
The way Gillian’s blue eyes flared now said she remembered that conversation, too. But she was clearly not going there with the conversational thread again.
Her lips set in a firm line and she picked up the plates to carry through to the living room.
He shook his head and approached the fridge. He found milk and cherry limeade. He took the juice with him to the living room.
She looked at the carton in his hand and though she tried to frown, he could see she was pleased.
“Your favorite.”
“I’ve been craving it even more lately.”
“Your body no doubt wants Vitamin A and C.”
“Yes, Dr. Maks.”
“I read that pregnancy cravings are often linked to things your body needs for the baby, or because the baby has depleted your stores already.”
“I read that, too.”
“So, you’ve been reading up on pregnancy?” She wasn’t denying it just because she was cautiously approaching her second trimester. Good.
“Yes.”
“According to my research, your chances of miscarriage are closer to ten percent than twenty.” Though not all statistics agreed.
Many doctors still considered her chance of miscarriage at or above twenty percent until she hit the twelve-week mark.
It was the added stress she had to be under, pregnant to a man who was not only not yet her husband, but who would one day be king. Those added pressures and the tension between them increased her chances to miscarry.
He did not like it, but the stress of his position could not be avoided. And he did not see how to fix the other if she would not even entertain the idea of marriage until she’d reached that magical time marker in her head.
She looked at him curiously. “You think one in ten is good odds?”
“I do.”
She sat down, but didn’t argue. For which he was grateful. He didn’t want her thinking negatively.
Thought was a powerful weapon.
They’d been eating for a few silent minutes when she turned to him. “Thank you for dinner. It’s very good.”
He didn’t remind her she’d already thanked him. It was an overture.
He took it. “It is. There is no need to thank me. Your care is my responsibility. Thank you for allowing me to stay.”
“We aren’t together, Maks.”
“The baby growing in your womb says otherwise.”
“You’re so stubborn.”
“Have you looked in a mirror lately?”
He surprised her into a giggle and that made Maks smile.
“Nana always said I was sneaky that way. Everyone thinks I’m easygoing because I don’t fight what doesn’t matter to me.”<
br />
He began to better understand this woman he had dated for months without realizing once she could be a rock when it came to doing things her own way. “However, what does matter to you, you fight to the last?”
“Something like that.”
She hadn’t fought for him, or them when he said they had to end things. Despite her words of love Gillian had given in without a single volley to his side.
He felt pain in the center of his chest. Odd. This restaurant didn’t usually cause heartburn.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“I HAVE BEEN thinking a wedding onboard a luxury cruise liner. A friend of mine owns a fleet that sails the inside passage to Alaska on one of its routes. Ariston will make certain word of our marriage does not leak out until after the event.”
Gillian jumped, startled by Maks’s comment. He’d been mostly silent since they began eating dinner.
“I thought you were mulling over business.” She laughed more at herself than the situation. “I should have known better. You have a one-track mind.”
A single-minded determination that had led him back to her.
Maybe Gillian would have gotten over Maks, eventually. She’d certainly been doing her best to master the unrequited love that tore at her decimated heart every day he’d been gone.
But one short visit had set her back to the beginning, her heart hurting so much it was almost numb with it.
She knew that at some point that numbness would have become a protective blanket over her emotions. Just like it had done sometime in her childhood.
Maks made it clear he wasn’t going to let that happen.
“I assure you, my mind is capable of traveling multiple tracks at once.”
“I used to think so.”
“What has changed your mind?”
“It’s either the baby, my pregnancy, or our upcoming marriage—which is not a done deal, no matter what you tell yourself—since you showed up here three days ago.”
He settled back into the sofa, one long arm along its back, his left ankle crossed negligently over his right knee. “Those are three tracks.”
“Ha, ha.”
“I am not attempting humor, merely pointing out a fact. I have also in the last three days negotiated mineral rights for Yurkovich Tanner to a new rare minerals mine in Zimbabwe, overhauled and signed numerous contracts, avoided a political situation between Volyarus and Canada if you can believe it, interviewed several candidates for the position of Director of the Ministry for Education in Volyarus, mediated a labor dispute via teleconference in one of our currently operating mines, and finalized a new employee benefits package for the United States employees of Yurkovich Tanner.”
Okay. So the man was a machine of efficiency in both the business and political realm. “And still, you’ve had time to text me several times a day and call me nearly as often.”
“That should tell you where you sit in my priorities.”
She opened her mouth to say something smart, but closed it again without speaking. It was true. Maks had made time for her in a schedule that would defeat most men.
He always had.
“You don’t love me.” It wasn’t an accusation, more a statement of confusion.
Why make her such a priority when his interest in her was more for the Crown’s sake than his own emotions? But that was her answer, wasn’t it?
No effort was too great on behalf of his country and its people. Including finding a wife and mother to the next royal generation.
“I do not believe in love as the all positive, powerful force everyone seems to think it is.”
“How would you know?” He wasn’t in love.
He’d shattered her scarred heart when he rejected her and let Gillian know in unequivocal terms that he did not love her.
Could she make that important in the face of her child’s future, though?
That was the real question. How important was her pain in the balance of things? Both her parents had weighed their feelings, their desires, their careers, even their mildest convenience against their only child’s happiness. Gillian had always lost.
She wasn’t ever going to do that to her baby.
Maks lifted one dark brow in an unmistakably sardonic gesture challenging her question without words.
And then it clicked. She was being naive, not to mention somewhat myopic, wasn’t she? He’d certainly experienced the negative side of love through his father’s long-standing affair with the love of his life.
“Your father’s love for the countess is not the problem, it’s what he chose to do with that love.”
“So you say.”
“He had choices and he opted for the route most thinking people abandoned sometime in the Victorian era.”
“Really? You are so sure about that?”
“No, but if the countess was like me, compromised in her reproductive abilities, he still could have married her. They could have used a surrogate.”
“And risk having a woman make claims to the Volyarussian throne via her offspring? I do not think so.”
“Baloney. There had to be a woman among your countrymen that he could have trusted to sacrifice for the good of the throne in this way.”
“He approached my mother. Her dedication to Volyarus was a well-known circumstance.”
“And she demanded marriage.”
“She believed she would be a better queen than Countess Walek, a divorcée already with no children by her previous marriage.”
Gillian couldn’t help wondering if Queen Oxana had been in love with King Fedir back then, if her reason for demanding marriage had as much to do with affairs of the heart as the affairs of state.
Maybe like Leah in the Bible, she’d thought if she gave children to her husband she would earn his devotion. It hadn’t worked that way for Leah and certainly hadn’t for Queen Oxana.
“Your family is all kinds of dysfunctional, isn’t it?”
“No more so than yours.”
“Touché.”
Maks’s dark eyes studied Gillian with an expression she couldn’t put a name to. “You said you do love me.”
If she thought he was rubbing it in, she would dump the remainder of the pasta sauce pooled on her plate over his head. His tone was more clinical than gloating however, his expression still that enigmatic mask, but tinged with curiosity she could see.
“So?”
“Yet you did not fight for me.”
“What? I fought for you.”
“You evicted me from your apartment with haste.”
She stared at him. “What did you expect? You’d just dumped me. I wasn’t even worth looking into fertility treatments for.”
“You could have argued, insisted on doing exactly that. If you wanted to be with me.”
Like his mother had fought to be with his father? That had worked out well, hadn’t it?
Shoving aside the sarcasm, she still couldn’t believe he was trying to put it back on her.
Or was he? In his mind, he was only explaining his stance that love was not a positive, powerful force. And from his perspective, she had to think maybe she could understand why he’d come to that conclusion.
She tried to explain. “You admitted you don’t love me.”
“I never claimed to love you, but it had to be obvious I was considering marriage to you.”
“It was.” That was one of the reasons his rejection had hurt so much.
It had been such a shock in the face of what she’d thought were well-placed hopes. Hopes that had confounded her ten weeks ago and now, she still found inexplicable. “Why me? I’m not royal. I’m not anything special.”
“That is not true. You are a woman of definite integrity.”
“So are women a lot more politically connected than me.”
“You have your own connections.”
“You dated me because my father is a famous news correspondent?” It wouldn’t be the first time, but it would be the first time finding out could hu
rt enough to make breathing difficult.
“No. I dated you because I was attracted to you. Full stop.” His tone left no room for question. “Listen, Gillian, whatever you think of me, I did not want a marriage like my parents. I wanted to tie my life to a woman who would be my complement in every way. You handle yourself in diplomatic circles with an enviable aplomb.”
“It’s my shyness. I learned to use it to my advantage.”
“You come off as reserved but kind. It’s exactly what a monarchy like ours needs in its diplomats.”
“I’m hardly a diplomat.”
“But as princess of Volyarus, you would be.”
“It’s my mother’s connections you find most appealing.” That had never happened to her.
“She’s a popular politician both in her own country of South Africa and on the international scene.”
“Yes, she is.” A stalwart feminist, Annalea Pitsu would not approve of Gillian marrying into a monarchy and taking a supporting role however. “She is not exactly political royalty, though.”
Annalea was a mover and a shaker. Her disappointment with Gillian’s choice of career was made clear at each annual visit.
Maks shrugged. “Marrying a woman from another monarchy, particularly a political one, comes with its own set of burdens. None of which have I ever wanted to negotiate.”
“But…I don’t know…wouldn’t your people be happier if you married a Volyarussian?”
“If I had been drawn to a woman from my country as I was drawn to you, I would have pursued her.”
“Oh.” That told her.
In this, at least, Maks had no intention of being swayed by what the people of his country might prefer. Not the nobility, not the middle class.
There was no poverty class in Volyarus. It was too small and too well run for it.
Maks looked almost nonplussed. “That is all you have to say?”
“You’ve made it pretty clear you were sexually attracted to me.” Not that she was some kind of vamp, or anything.
“I was also attracted to your personality, to the quirky way your mind works, and we have many interests in common.”
“You thought I was your ideal woman.”
“Yes.”
“And then you found out I shouldn’t have been able to conceive.”