Waking Up In His Royal Bed

by Kim Lawrence

  The babies she had tried so hard to give him; ten months of married life within the palace walls and ten months of waiting and hoping, then the awful inevitable sense of failure.

  He swung his legs over the side of the bed, causing the rumpled sheet across his middle to slide a few treacherous inches lower.

  Fighting the dormant protective instincts that Beatrice woke in him, Dante shrugged, but the truth was the thing she actually needed protecting from was him.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  Cheeks hot, eyes wary, she dragged her wandering gaze up from his muscled thighs, but his expression was frustratingly hard to read.

  ‘For what?’ If he said he was sorry for last night she would hit him, she vowed grimly. ‘Marrying me? I knew what I was doing,’ she retorted, not happy at being cast in the role of victim.

  ‘And now you’re getting on with your life.’ Without him.

  ‘That might be easier if you weren’t sitting in my bed.’

  ‘I need to be in Paris tomorrow. The meeting was delayed and—’

  ‘You wanted to mess my life up some more?’ There was more weariness than reproach in her voice.

  ‘I didn’t invite myself into your bed, Beatrice.’

  Colour scored her cheeks. Did he really think she needed that spelt out? ‘Sorry. I’m not blaming you. You’ve been very good about making it easy for me to leave.

  ‘So are there any papers?’

  ‘There are papers, but…’

  ‘But?’

  ‘The tabloids love to—’

  She tensed, suddenly seeing where this was going, and why he wasn’t quite meeting her eyes. Pale but composed, she cut him off. ‘Congratulations.’

  His brows knitted into a perplexed frown. ‘For what?’

  ‘You’re engaged…?’ Her racing thoughts quickly joined the dots, swiftly turning the theory in her head to fact in seconds. It would be something official. He wouldn’t have come all this way to tell her in person that he had a lover. She had kind of taken that for granted. A sensual man like Dante was not built for celibacy.

  His steady stare told her nothing, but she knew and she was totally fine with it, or she would be if she didn’t throw up.

  ‘Aren’t you?’

  Finally, a low hissing sound of amazement escaped his clenched teeth. ‘Engaged would be a little premature. I’m not divorced yet.’

  Her eyelashes flickered like butterflies against her cheeks. ‘Oh, I just…’

  ‘Made one of your leaps based on the well-known scientific theory that if something is totally crazy it is true.’

  ‘It was a perfectly reasonable assumption,’ she retorted huffily, hating that she felt almost sick with relief, but adding for her own benefit as much as his, ‘You will get remarried one day—you’ll have to.’

  His gut twisted in recognition of the accuracy of her words have to. She said have to—the people around him, his family, the courtiers, called it duty. Every word he spoke, his every action would be observed and judged. He would be judged.

  The bottom line was his life was no longer his own. Even as he opened his mouth to respond Dante recognised the hypocrisy of his occupation of the moral high ground. ‘So, you think that I’d be engaged and sleep with you?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said without hesitation, the damning shame curdling inside her reserved for herself, not him, because she knew that nothing would have stopped her sleeping with Dante last night. ‘You’d only be keeping up the family tradition,’ she sniped.

  One corner of his mobile lips quirked upwards as he remembered how shocked she’d been when she’d realised that his parents both had lovers who upon occasion slept over. His normality was her shocking.

  ‘Will you sit down? I’m not about to leap on you.’

  ‘No.’ She backed a little further into the corner. It wasn’t him she was worried about; they were both naked, and sitting was just one touch away from lying down. Her eyes widened as another equally and actually more probable explanation for his presence occurred to her. ‘Is this about the divorce?’ Her voice rose a shrill octave as she gulped and tacked on, ‘Is there a problem?’

  ‘No, it is not about the divorce. It is about Grandfather.’

  ‘Reynard?’ She stopped nervously pleating the fabric she held tight across her breasts and smiled. The old King, who had stepped back from the throne in favour of his son, Dante’s father, after he suffered a stroke. Reynard had been one of the very few people she had been able to relax around in the palace.

  Known for his acerbic tongue and a wit that took no prisoners, he’d made Beatrice laugh, though she had not realised until after the fact that being taught chess by him was considered a rare privilege.

  They still played chess online. ‘One of these days I’m going to beat him.’

  One corner of Dante’s mouth lifted in a half-smile. ‘If you ever do it’ll be for real. He won’t let you win.’

  ‘I hope not… So how is he?’ She read enough in his face to make her panic; it wasn’t so much his expression that made her heart lurch, more the careful lack of it. ‘Oh, my God, he’s not…not…?’

  ‘No…no…he’s all right,’ Dante soothed.

  She had barely released a sigh of relief when he added, ‘He has had another stroke.’

  ‘Oh, God, no!’

  ‘Don’t panic, the doctors gave him the clot-busting stuff in time, so they say there’s no permanent damage, no further damage at least.’

  She huffed out a sigh of relief but still felt shaky and sad because one day her worst-case scenario would be true, and a world without that irascible character would be a lesser place.

  ‘We’ve kept everything in-house but it’s inevitable that the news is bound to leak soon, and you know how they play up the drama disaster angle. I wanted you to know the facts, not the exaggerated fiction.’

  ‘Why didn’t you just say this was why you came?’ His eyes captured her own and Beatrice felt the blush run over her skin. ‘All right,’ she cut in quickly before he could point out that last night had not involved much talking. ‘You could have messaged me…rung…?’

  ‘Yes, I could.’ He released her eyes suddenly.

  ‘It wasn’t kind coming here. This hasn’t been easy for me…’

  His jaw clenched. ‘You think it has for me?’ he pushed out in a driven tone.

  ‘Right, so let’s just call last night goodbye.’ It had to be because she couldn’t do this more than once. ‘Give my love to Reynard. I really wish I could see him. He really is all right?’

  ‘He really is. You could see him.’

  Beatrice gave a bitter laugh. ‘Come back to San Macizo? I presume you’re joking.’

  ‘Were you so unhappy there?’

  She kept her expression flat. ‘I was irrelevant there.’ The only function that would have made her acceptable was producing babies and she hadn’t done that. The month after month of raised expectations and then… Dante must have been relieved when she had announced that she’d had enough. The recognition made her throat tighten; she ignored it.

  She was ignoring so hard she nearly tripped over the draped sheet. Enough was enough!

  Head high, not glancing in his direction, she stalked across to the wardrobe and, presenting him with her back, pulled the turquoise silk robe from its hanger on the door.

  There was a sheer ridiculousness to her display of false modesty around Dante, who knew every inch of her body—intimately. She let the sheet fall.

  ‘I tried for ten months,’ she said, throwing the words lightly over her shoulder, glad that he couldn’t see her face. ‘I tried to do the right thing, say the right thing. I tried to fit in. I tried…’ She didn’t finish the sentence, but the unspoken words hung between them like a veil. They both knew what she had tried and failed to do, the only thing that would have made he
r acceptable to his family: provide an heir.

  CHAPTER THREE

  BACK TURNED TO HIM, Beatrice tightened the sash before she turned, doing her best to not notice the molten gleam in his eyes as he watched her cinch the belt a little tighter.

  She tilted her chin to a defiant angle and tossed her hair back from her face before tucking it behind her ears as she stomped over the sheet, her pearly painted toenails looking bright against the pale painted boards scattered with rustic rugs.

  Despite the snow that had begun to fall again outside, the temperature was if anything too warm, thanks no doubt to the massive cast-iron radiator that didn’t seem to respond to the thermostat.

  Pretty much the way her internal thermostat ignored instructions when Dante was in the vicinity.

  ‘You were the one who was hung up on that.’

  The claim made her want to throw something at him.

  ‘You were never irrelevant. A pain in the…but never irrelevant,’ he drawled, unable to stop his eyes drifting over the long sensual flow of her body outlined under the silk. ‘Have I seen that before? It brings out the colour of your eyes.’ Which were so blue he’d initially assumed that she wore contact lenses.

  She sketched a tight smile. ‘It’s been six months. I’ve added a few things to my wardrobe. You probably have a list somewhere.’

  ‘Six months since you left, Beatrice. I didn’t ask you to go.’

  She’d left. It was not an option for him; he could never walk. He was trapped, playing a part. He would be for the rest of his life. Typecast for perpetuity as a person he would never be.

  Beatrice felt her anger spark, the old resentments stir. He made it sound so simple, and leaving had been the hardest thing she had ever done. How much simpler it would have been if she had stopped loving him, how much simpler it was for him because he never had loved her, not really.

  It was a truth she had always known, a truth she had buried deep.

  ‘You didn’t try and stop me.’

  ‘Did you want me to?’

  ‘Even if I had got pregnant, a baby shouldn’t be used to paper over the cracks in a relationship, which is why this can’t happen again.’

  ‘This…?’

  ‘This, as in you turning up and…’ She caught her eyes drifting to his mouth and despaired as she felt the flush of desire whoosh through her body. This need inside her frightened her; she didn’t want to feel this way. ‘I think in the future any communications should be through our solicitors,’ she concluded, struggling to keep her voice clear of her inner desperation, making it as cold as she could.

  Dante felt something tighten in his chest that he refused to recognise as loneliness, as he pushed back fragments of memories that flashed in quick succession through his head. The tears in his brother’s eyes as he said sorry, the coldness in his parents’ eyes as they informed him that the future of the royal family rested on his shoulders.

  ‘So, you don’t think that exes can be friends.’

  Her hard little laugh sounded unlike the full, throatier, uninhibited laugh he remembered. A few weeks into their marriage and she hadn’t laughed at all.

  ‘This isn’t friendship, Dante. Friends share.’

  Share, she said. He almost laughed. The last thing he had wanted to do was share when he was with Beatrice. He had wanted to forget. He didn’t want to prove himself to his wife; he was proving himself to everyone else.

  For the first time in his life Dante had been experiencing fear of failure, something so alien to him that it had taken him some time to identify it. Worse than the weakness was the idea of Beatrice seeing those fears, looking at him differently… He knew the look. He had seen it every day and he couldn’t have borne it.

  He had seen that look in the eyes of the team who had been put in place to coordinate his own repackaging, even while they told him they had total confidence in him, before asking him to embrace values that he had long ago rejected. They appealed to his sense of duty.

  The real shock, at least to him, was that he possessed one. He’d spent his life trying to forget the early lessons on duty and service, but it seemed that they had made a lasting impression.

  He didn’t share this insight, unwilling to give anyone the leverage this weakness would have afforded them. Instead he listened and then worked towards cutting the team down to three people he could work with.

  He would have liked to get rid of the lot, but he was a realist. It had taken his brother a lifetime to recognise what he had grasped in weeks wearing the mantle of Crown Prince. You really couldn’t have it all, you had to make sacrifices.

  His glance narrowed in on Beatrice’s lovely face. What you were prepared to sacrifice was the question.

  ‘I can’t be half in, half out, Dante, it’s not…fair. It’s cruel…’ she quivered out.

  His glance flickered across the lovely, anguished features of the woman he had married. Finally seeing sense was how his father had reacted when he had broken the news that they were splitting up.

  ‘She has come to her senses. Beatrice is leaving me.’

  Dante had pushed the fact home that this was her choice, though not adding that fighting the decision was about the only noble thing he had done in his life. Lucky for him nobility was not a prerequisite for the job of King-in-waiting, unlike hypocrisy.

  He knew that he ought not to be feeling this rage, this sense of betrayal. Their marriage had been about a child, then there was no child. Beatrice’s decision had been the logical one. He could not see why it had shocked him so much.

  Most successful marriages owed their longevity to mutual convenience and laziness, or, as in his parents’ case, they were business arrangements, two people living parallel lives that occasionally touched. This was not something that Beatrice could ever understand.

  In the end, the official line had been trial separation, while behind-the-scenes lists of replacements were drawn up for when the trial was officially made permanent.

  He wasn’t much interested in the lists, or the names of those that were added, or deleted after a skeleton emerged from their blue-blooded closet.

  One suitable bride was much the same as another to him, though he wondered if the woman who had been chosen to share the throne with his brother, and had unwittingly been his brother’s tipping point, had been included. He could not remember her face or name, just that she belonged to one of the few minor European royal families he and Carl were not related to.

  Carl had choked before it was made official, choosing to step away from the lie and his life…because though San Macizo was considered progressive, the idea of an openly gay ruler unable to provide an heir was not something that could be negotiated.

  His option had been walk away, or live a lie.

  Dante had wondered whether, if the situations had been reversed, he would have shown as much strength as his brother.

  One of the things that had struck him, after his initial shock at the revelations, was that he was shocked that he really hadn’t seen it coming. When his brother had revealed his sexual orientation and his deep unhappiness, Dante hadn’t had a clue. But then he never had been much interested in anyone’s life but his own, he acknowledged with a spasm of self-disgust.

  There was an equal likelihood that he hadn’t recognised his brother’s struggles because it really wouldn’t have suited him to see them.

  His glance zeroed in on Beatrice’s face, the soft angles, the purity of profile, the glow that was there despite the unhappiness in her eyes. Just as he had tried not to see Beatrice was unhappy.

  ‘And you’re out.’ His shoulders lifted in a seemingly negligent shrug. ‘Fair enough.’

  She blinked, hard thrown by his response, a small irrational part of her irked that he wasn’t fighting. ‘You agree?’

  ‘I already did. We are getting divorced, so relax, things are in hand
,’ he drawled.

  ‘Are they?’ Yesterday she’d have agreed but yesterday she hadn’t been breathing the same air as Dante. Since then she had been tested and had come face to face with her total vulnerability, her genetic weakness where he was concerned.

  ‘It’s in everyone’s best interests for this to happen. We’re all on the same page here.’

  ‘Pity the same couldn’t be said for our marriage.’

  It shouldn’t have hurt that he didn’t deny it, but it did.

  Her decision to leave had been greeted with thinly disguised universal relief, which gave a lie to the myth that divorce didn’t happen in the Velazquez family. It made her wonder if there had been others before her who had been airbrushed from royal history.

  ‘I don’t think anyone expected it to last, not even you…?’

  Dante shrugged and deflected smoothly. ‘I never expected to get married. I think it has a very different meaning for us both.’

  In his family marriage was discussed in the same breath as airport expansion, or hushing the scandal of a minister who had pushed family values being caught in a compromising position, and the latest opinion poll on the current popularity of the royal family—it was business.

  His heart had always been shielded by cynicism, which he embraced, but maybe it was the same cynicism that had left him with no defence against the emotional gut punch that Beatrice and her pregnancy had been.

  ‘You’re right.’ He unfolded his long lean length and stood there oblivious to his naked state before casually bending to retrieve items of clothing, throwing them on the bed before he began to dress.

  She couldn’t not look; his body was so perfect, his most mundane action coordinated grace. She just wished her appreciation could be purely aesthetic; just looking made her feel hungry and ashamed in equal measure.

  ‘I am?’ she said, the practical, sane portion of her mind recognising this was a good thing, the irrational, emotional section wanting him to argue.

  He turned as he pulled up his trousers over his narrow hips, his eyes on her face as his long fingers slid his belt home.