by Kim Lawrence
By the time three weeks had come around things had changed, and the consequences of her actions had been impossible to ignore. Even without the multiple tests she’d known why she felt different; she’d known even without the blue line that she was pregnant.
She’d also known exactly how this next step was going to go, with a few gaps she’d left for his shocked, angry reaction. She had played the scene out in her head and, allowing for a few variations, she’d known exactly what she was going to say.
When she’d been buzzed into the building she’d still known what she was going to say, as she’d been escorted in the glass-fronted lift by a silent suited man.
She’d walked in, and she’d known not just what she was going to say but when she was going to say it. She’d allow herself their last night and then she would tell him.
In the event, the door had barely closed before she had blurted it out.
‘I’m pregnant and, yes, I know we…you were careful.’
She had a vague recollection of dodging his eyes, allowing her hair to act as a screen to hide her guilty blushes. The memory even now had the power to make her insides squirm.
‘I’ve done three tests and…no, that’s a lie, I did six. I am not…do not suggest that… Just know that I want nothing from you. I’m going home tomorrow to tell my mum and sister and we’ll be totally fine. I’m not alone.’
He had stood there totally motionless during her machine-gun delivery of the facts. Strangely, saying it out loud had made the secret she had nursed to herself seem slightly less surreal.
She’d thought she’d been prepared for his every reaction, most had involved noise, but him turning on his heel and walking out of the door before she could even draw breath was not one she had been prepared for.
It might have been minutes or an hour, she didn’t have a clue, but when the door had opened again she hadn’t moved from the spot where she’d been before his abrupt departure. He had re-entered, still pale but not with shock now; determination as steely as his stare had been etched into the lines of his face.
‘Well, obviously we need to get married. I don’t need to involve my family in this—it’s one of the advantages of being the spare. Carl is getting married and they probably won’t even notice. How about you?’
Carl? What did his older brother have to do with this? ‘Family…?’ Her thought processes had been lagging a confusing few steps behind his words.
‘A big wedding, given the circumstances, is not an option, but if you want your immediate family to be there I can accommodate that. I have business in the area, so how does Vegas next week sound to you?’
He had paused, presumably for breath. She had definitely needed to breathe!
‘You’re not joking…? Dante, people don’t get married because of a baby… Let’s forget you ever said that. You’re in shock.’
He didn’t appear to appreciate her consideration. ‘I may only be the spare but I am still second in line to the throne…my child will not carry the stigma of being a bastard. Believe you me, I’ve seen it and it’s not pretty.’
‘You’re insane.’
Every argument she’d made against his plan he’d had a counterargument to. The most compelling one having been it was the right thing to do for the baby’s sake, the new life that they had made.
She had ended up agreeing, of course. Saying yes to Dante was a habit she had to break if her life was going to get back on track.
As for last night! How could she have been that stupid yet again? And she had nobody to blame for it but herself! Dante didn’t have to do anything to make her act like a lemming with her sights on a cliff edge, he just had to exist.
And nobody had ever existed as much as Dante—she had never met anyone who was so alive. He had a presence that was electrifying, and there was an earthy, raw quality to the megawatt vitality he exuded that made the idea of forgetting anything connected with him laughable.
But she had to. She had to put last night behind her and start again—it would get easier. It had to! First, she couldn’t run and hide or pretend that last night didn’t happen. She just had to accept she had messed up and move on.
Again…!
‘What are you doing here, Dante?’ Falling in love was not at all as she had imagined it—in fact it really should come with a health warning, or at least a misery warning!
‘You invited me. It seemed rude—’
‘How did you know where I was? How did you know we had gone away?’ For the first few weeks after she had left Dante she had moved in with her mother, then she had taken residence on Maya’s couch until a flat they could afford together had come up.
He arched a sardonic brow and she sighed.
‘All right, stupid question.’ She had considered fighting the insistence that she needed any sort of security, even the ultradiscreet team of men who in pairs watched her around the clock, but she had learnt that it was better to fight the battles you had a chance of winning. ‘You know, there was a time when my life was my own.’
‘It will be again.’ Unlike Dante’s. The moment his brother had stepped away from the line of succession had been the moment that Dante had known his life had changed forever. He was no longer the playboy prince and unexpected father-to-be. He was the future of the monarchy.
His flat delivery brought a furrow to her smooth wide brow, but his expression told her nothing. ‘A friend of Mum’s owns the place. We used to come here when we were kids.’
His glance lifted from his grim contemplation of his clenched hands and his future, as she glanced around the wood-lined walls of the modest ski lodge.
‘Ruth, that’s Mum’s friend, had a last-minute cancellation and offered it to us for the fortnight for a song. Maya is working on ideas for a sports line and we thought the snow might inspire her.’
‘So the business is going ahead? The fashion industry is notoriously tough.’
‘Slowly,’ she said, bringing her lashes down in a glossy protective sweep as he adjusted his position, causing a rippling of the taut muscles of his lean torso. He didn’t carry an ounce of surplus flesh; his broad-shouldered frame would have made many a professional athlete sigh with envy.
She would have retreated if there had been any place to retreat to. Instead she ignored the pelvic quivering, and pretended her skin wasn’t prickling, and tossed her hair as she adjusted her sheet once more.
‘It would go a lot quicker and easier if you made the bank that is playing hardball aware of the settlement that will be yours. Do they even know you’re going to be a very wealthy woman soon?’
Wealthy and single. She refused to acknowledge the sinking feeling in her stomach.
‘And I’m more than happy to make the funds you need available to you now.’
Her lips tightened. If people called her a gold-digger that was fine, so long as she knew she wasn’t. ‘I don’t want your money. I don’t want anything—’
I want to go back to the person I was, she thought forlornly, aware that it was not going to happen. She might only have been married for ten months, and been separated for six more, but she could never be the person she was before, she knew that.
‘Well, then, cara, you chose the right lawyer. Yours seemed more interested in golf than your interests.’
‘Could you pretend, even for one minute, that you don’t know every detail of what’s going on in my life? I repeat, why are you here?’
Good question, Dante thought as he dragged a hand through his hair, leaving it standing in sexy tufts across his head.
He’d told himself when Beatrice left that it would be easier if he could focus on his new role, without the distraction of worrying how she was coping, of knowing that behind her smile she was unhappy, resentful or usually both. That no matter how tough his day had been, hers had probably been worse.
Dante had never been
responsible for another person in his life. He’d lived for himself, and now he had an entire country relying on him and Beatrice—that really was irony, of the blackest variety.
Except now she wasn’t relying on him. The reports that landed on his desk all said as much. She was doing well…he had just wanted to see for himself. It was an option that would soon not be open to him. The list of potential successors to fill the space in his life Beatrice had left, candidates who would know how to deal with life inside the palace walls without his guidance, was already awaiting his attention. His stomach tightened in distaste at the thought of the breeding stock with good bloodlines.
‘There are a few papers for you to sign,’ he said, inviting her scorn with his lame response and receiving it as he skated around the truth in his head.
‘And now you’re a delivery service?’
He sighed out his frustration as his dark, intense gaze scanned her face hungrily. She was still the most beautiful thing he had ever seen in his life and for a while their lives had meshed. But things had changed. He had another life, responsibilities, duty. At some level had he thought coming here would offer him some sort of closure?
‘We never actually said…goodbye.’
She blinked, refusing to surrender to the surge of resentment that made her heart beat louder. ‘Didn’t we? You probably had a meeting, or maybe you left me a memo?’ She bit her lip hard enough to raise crimson pinpricks of blood. Could she sound any less like someone who had moved on?
‘You felt neglected?’
‘I felt…’ She fought to reel in her feelings. ‘It doesn’t really matter. This was a conversation we never had, let’s leave it at that. Let’s call last night closure.’
He shook his head, the antagonism leaving his face as he registered the glisten of unshed tears in her eyes. His shoulders dropped. ‘No, it wasn’t planned. I just… I’m sick of receiving any news about you through third parties.’
‘I miss…’ She stopped, biting back the words she couldn’t allow herself to admit to herself, let alone him. ‘I think it’s safer that way,’ she said quietly.
‘Who wants safe?’
The reckless gleam in his eyes reminded her of the man she had fallen in love with. There was an irony that she had to remind him he wasn’t that man any more. ‘Your future subjects and, frankly, Dante, I have all the excitement we can handle without…’
She closed her eyes and pushed back into the wall until the pressure hurt her shoulder blades. It was true—after she had walked away from the royal role she had never been equipped to fulfil, she had thrown herself into her life, and there were new, exciting and sometimes scary challenges to fill her days. She had recovered some of her natural enthusiasm, though these days it was mingled with caution. A caution that had been sadly missing last night. Dante walked into a room and all those instincts and hungers he woke in her roared into sense-killing life.
Senseless, she thought, underlining the second syllable in red in her head. Last night had had nothing to do with sense. Her insides tightened as the warm memories flooded her head. It’d had everything to do with passion, craving and hunger!
So she had a passion for chocolate, but if she gave into that indulgence Beatrice knew she’d need a new wardrobe. Exercise and a bit of self-control meant she could still fit into last year’s clothes.
The trouble was Dante was a perfect fit, in every sense of the word, and he always had been.
When in one of her more philosophical moments she had told herself that she would take away the good bits from her marriage, she had not intended it this literally. Though even when everything else was not working in their marriage the sex had still been incredible. The bedroom was one place they always managed to be on the same page. Unfortunately, you needed more than sexual chemistry and compatibility for a marriage to work, especially when it had hit the sort of life-changing roadblocks theirs had.
With a self-conscious start she realised that during her mental meanderings her glance had begun to drift across the strong sculpted breadth of his chest, and lower, to the ridged muscular definition of his belly, before she realised what she was doing, and brought her lashes down in a protective sweep. Not that they provided much protection from the raw sexual pulse he exuded, or his unnerving ability to read her mind.
‘Do you regret it?’
Her response to the question should have been immediate, a reflex, and of course she did regret what had happened, on one level. But on another, shameful level she would not have changed a thing, because Dante bypassed her common sense. She only had to breathe in the scent of his skin to send her instincts of self-preservation into hibernation.
I really have to break this cycle!
Easy to say, easy to think, but less easy when every time he touched her something inside her said it was right.
Then don’t let him touch you!
Cutting off her increasingly desperate internal dialogue, Beatrice cleared her throat to give herself time to think of a next move that would manage to convey that last night didn’t mean she wasn’t totally over him. An action that wouldn’t draw attention to the skin-prickling awareness and the warm pelvic heaviness.
A next move that established that she could walk away just as easily as he could after satisfying a primal itch. That he wasn’t the only one who could compartmentalise his life.
‘Last night was—’
His deep voice, the edges iced with impatience, cut across her before she could establish anything. ‘Considering you are standing there huddled in a sheet, acting like some outraged virgin, I’m taking that you regret last night as a given.’
The accusing note in his voice brought a tinge of angry colour to her cheeks.
‘That’s really astute of you,’ she drawled sarcastically. Where Dante was concerned her virginal outrage had always been zero, even when she’d had a right to the title. She had had no qualms about giving him her virginity, though he had been a lot less relaxed about receiving the unexpected gift.
‘Do you regret marrying me?’ Asking the second time did not make it any clearer to him why her answer mattered to him…except to lessen his guilt, maybe?
The irony was not lost on him. There could be few people who had spent a life where guilt featured less heavily… His upper lip curled in a bleak smile.
If he’d been a man who believed in karma he might think that his present situation was Fate’s way of making him pay for an empty life of utter hedonism. Where the only way was the easy way. Having once rejected the concept of duty, now he was ruled by it.
He’d imagined that he was doing the right thing when he had proposed, never for one moment asking himself what the right thing was for Beatrice. He’d been the one making the ultimate sacrifice. Unwilling to own his thoughts, jaw clenched, he pushed out a breath through flared nostrils.
She blinked, her long lashes brushing the smooth curve of her cheeks like butterfly wings. ‘There’s no point regretting, is there?’
‘Which means you do.’ Did she ever ask herself if things might have ended differently if their baby had clung to life and not simply been a heartbeat that had vanished from the screen?
His guts tightened like an icy fist as the memory surfaced of the doctor relaying the news alongside the information that the baby had just faded away.
He had been consumed by a devastation that had felt as if he were being swallowed up. It had made no sense. He’d never wanted children—hadn’t wanted a child.
‘I’m looking forwards.’
His glance lifted as his thoughts shifted back to the present moment.
The intensity of his stare made Bea lose her thread, but after a momentary pause she managed to regain control and her defiance.
‘The past is done and gone. I’m not interested in revisiting—’ She felt the sheet slip and yanked it up. As she did the colour seeping unde
r her skin deepened the golden-toned glow as the irony of what she was about to claim hit her. Sometimes honesty, wise or not, was the best, or only, policy.
Her shoulders lowered as the defensive antagonism drained away, exposing the vulnerability that lay beneath. Dante looked away but not before he felt something twist hard in his chest.
‘I have a lot of lovely memories that I will always treasure. I’m just not as realistic as you are sometimes.’ She bit down on her quivering lower lip before the emotion took her over.
A spasm played across the surface of his symmetrical features that had more than once been called too perfect. ‘Maybe I have lower expectations… You should try it, Beatrice. Less disappointment in life,’ he suggested harshly.
‘You want me to be as cynical as you are? That’s a big ask, Dante.’
Heavy eyelids at half mast, his eyes gleaming, he quirked his mobile lips into a mocking smile that invited her to share his joke as their eyes connected. ‘You call it cynicism. I call it realism, and it’s all about baby steps, cara.’
It wasn’t just her expression that froze, time did too. He could almost hear the seconds count down before her lashes came down in a protective sweep, but not before he had seen the hurt shimmer in her eyes.
Jaw clenched, he silently cursed himself. Of course he knew the self-recrimination might have been of more use if it had come sooner. Like when the loss of their baby had become not a personal tragedy, but one debated by palace mandarins and sources close to the throne.
It had come as no surprise to him—he’d known the moment his brother stepped away from the throne what lay ahead for him. But to Beatrice it must have felt like an alternative universe.
She waited for the toddler in her head with Dante’s eyes to take his first faltering steps before she let the image go and looked up, ignoring the ache inside her. Dante didn’t meet her eyes—maybe he was thinking about the practical princess he would replace her with…the one that could give him babies.