Waking Up In His Royal Bed

by Kim Lawrence

  ‘Oh, I know it’s not my…and I’m trying to be objective, but honestly, when you came back last time looking like a…a…’

  Shocked by the expression on her sister’s face, Beatrice covered her small hand with her own. ‘I’m not going back,’ she cut in, holding her sister’s teary, scared gaze.

  ‘So what was he…?’

  ‘Reynard has had a stroke.’

  Dismay spread across Maya’s heart-shaped face, melting away the last wisps of disapproval. ‘Oh, I’m so sorry. Reynard was such a lovely man, with such a wicked sense of humour. When is the funeral? I’d like to come if I may?’

  ‘It wasn’t fatal,’ Beatrice said quickly. She got up, picked up a piece of toast and started to butter it, not because she could have eaten a bite, just for something to do. ‘So those buyers lined up to view the samples…’

  ‘Changing the subject, Bea?’

  ‘I know you don’t like Dante.’

  ‘I think Dante is perfectly charming,’ Maya inserted, her lips curving into a wry smile, before adding, ‘But I don’t, I can’t, like anyone who makes you unhappy.’

  ‘I’m not unhappy.’

  It was an obvious struggle for Maya not to challenge this statement, but lip-biting won out.

  ‘And Dante is gone. He’s never coming back.’

  This time the crying went on a long time.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ‘DATES!’

  Beatrice blinked, caught between confusion and panic. She dragged her wandering blue gaze back to the young GP’s face and allowed the professional encouraging smile to drag her back from the brink of panic. Though kick-starting her brain remained a non-starter—she felt utterly incapable of forming coherent thoughts.

  ‘Dates…?’ she echoed, as though she were thinking about it, which she wasn’t. Thinking was simply not an option.

  The reality was she could barely remember her name, let alone the information the locum GP, a young woman her own age, was asking for. Her regular doctor was, ironically, given the circumstances, on paternity leave.

  ‘I know… I think…’ She clenched her hands as she struggled to push past the loud static buzz in her head, which she explained by telling herself she needed a sugar hit. She hadn’t managed to keep her breakfast down or, for that matter, last night’s supper…again!

  ‘Take your time,’ the woman said, even though Beatrice was sure she had overrun her allowed time slot by a long way. An image of the foot-tapping disapproval as fellow patients glanced at the clock on the waiting-room wall flashed into her head—she’d been there, done that herself.

  This doctor, with the relaxed attitude to time, seemed nice and sympathetic, which might not be a good thing. She had reached the point where it would only take a kind word to release the tears she could feel pressing against her eyelids.

  So Beatrice avoided the sympathy and focused on the hole in the woman’s tights as she wrapped her arms around herself in a self-protective hug to combat the cold inside her that was making her teeth chatter and sending intermittent tremors through her body.

  ‘So, I’m assuming that this wasn’t planned?’ the medic, who had scooted her chair around to Beatrice’s side of the desk, suggested.

  Beatrice shook her head and wished the medic’s calm were contagious, but then the professional had seen this a hundred times before and this wasn’t professional for Beatrice.

  ‘Statistically pregnancies rarely are planned.’

  Tell me about it, she thought, swallowing the ironic laugh locked in her aching throat. ‘Really?’ If that was meant to make her feel better, it didn’t.

  ‘Did someone come with you?’

  Beatrice reeled in her wandering thoughts, back from the unknown and scary future they had drifted towards, and tried very hard to focus on the here and now and not fainting—she never fainted.

  ‘Someone…?’ She moved her head, a tiny jerky, shaking motion, before clearing her throat, relieved when she responded with a close approximation of someone who had not totally lost it. ‘Yes…yes, my sister.’

  Who had refused to take no for an answer and had tagged along to the appointment that Beatrice had made after the stomach bug had not cleared up. Had Maya sussed the truth…had she?

  Of course she had, but she’d buried the knowledge so deep…constructed so many perfectly reasonable, safe alternatives that it had not lessened the mind-deadening shock when confronted with the inevitable reality.

  Despite the shock, her body continued to perform all its automated responses: she was breathing and moving, putting one foot… Actually she wasn’t—she was sitting down and her knees were shaking. She was thinking, Well, maybe not. Her thoughts continued to refuse to move beyond the big mental brick wall. I am pregnant.

  In her head she tacked several large exclamation marks on the acknowledgement, which did not make it feel any more real.

  ‘I’m six weeks,’ she said suddenly, her tone making it clear there were no ifs and buts or maybes about this. A warmth heated her pale cheeks as her thoughts drifted back to the night she’d spent under the duvet in the ski lodge with Dante. Sometimes on top of the duvet and sometimes… She felt a shameful flash of heat and closed down the thought of the night they had made a baby. ‘It’s our eighteen-month anniversary today…’

  ‘Congratulations. Your husband isn’t here today?’

  Beatrice watched the doctor tap some keys on the computer and grimace as she noticed the hole in her tights.

  ‘He’s out of the country,’ she said carefully.

  ‘Would you like me to…? Shall I ask your sister to come in?’

  Beatrice gave a pale smile of gratitude. ‘Yes, please.’

  A short while later she and Maya were out of the surgery and back in the fresh air. Beatrice expelled a long shuddering sigh and squeezed her eyes closed, opening them as she felt Maya’s arm link with her own.

  ‘Fancy walking back through the park?’

  ‘Didn’t we drive here?’ If she had imagined that she was in even worse shape than she thought, Beatrice decided.

  ‘Yes, but the fresh air might do us good… I’ll pick up the car later.’ She glanced at the little vintage car they had jointly bought when they first set up home together. It had seen better days.

  Beatrice shrugged. ‘Why not?’

  The watery spring sun had come out from behind the clouds as they trudged beneath the skeletal branches of a row of poplars and past the snowdrops that were pushing up through the cold ground.

  It was Maya who broke the silence.

  ‘I love the smell of spring, all that promise of new life…’ She pulled her wandering gaze, which had drifted to her sister’s flat stomach, upwards. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to be profound or anything.’

  Beatrice turned her head, then, as her eyes connected with the concern clouding Maya’s eyes that her sister was unable to hide, she quickly looked away. ‘You knew?’ she asked, digging her hands into the deep pockets of her coat.

  ‘It seemed…a…possibility…’

  ‘You must think I’m a total idiot!’ So must the doctor, not that she could remember the things she had said or any details of her own responses.

  ‘I will think you’re an idiot if you carry on saying daft things like that.’

  Beatrice produced a pale, lacklustre smile in response. ‘I suppose I must have known,’ she admitted, thinking of all the signs that had been there. ‘But I didn’t think it would happen again…after…’ Her voice trailed away, a faint ironic smile tugging at the corners of her lips as her thoughts drifted to the words of unbidden advice Dante’s grandfather, still autocratically regal despite the fact he had passed on his official title to his son after a stroke, had offered. ‘Relax, woman.’

  His words had stuck in her mind, mainly because at the time everyone else had been telling her to panic,
if not in so many words—it had not been hard to read between the lines or the glances and conversations that halted abruptly when she appeared.

  Well, it turned out that old Reynard was right all along. All she had needed to do was relax…

  Oh, God, no one had ever accused her of having good timing.

  Beatrice turned her head. The worried expression on her sister’s face pushed her into speech. ‘It’s just everyone was waiting, every month…and letting myself hope, and then having to tell Dante when it didn’t happen.’ He had acted as though it didn’t matter, but she knew it did; she knew that as far as the palace was concerned her fertility had stopped being a private matter the moment Dante became Crown Prince.

  She looked down at her flat belly and tried to separate the confusing mess of conflicting emotions fighting for supremacy in her head. ‘A year ago, this would have made him so happy.’ Frowning, she worried her full lower lip and wondered about his reaction now. Who was she kidding? She knew exactly what his reaction would be when he discovered that she was carrying the heir to the throne.

  This was the end of her new life; there was no way he would allow her to bring up his child outside San Macizo.

  ‘Is that why you left…?’

  ‘Left?’ Beatrice gave a vague shake of her head.

  Maya studied her sister’s face and glanced around for a convenient park bench, hoping they would make it there before Beatrice folded.

  ‘You never said why, just that it was over, when you got home.’

  Beatrice gave a sad smile. ‘I’m pretty sure that it was why Dante made it easy for me to go.’

  Maya caught her hand as Beatrice’s voice became suspended by tears.

  ‘You never asked me before,’ Beatrice said.

  ‘I thought you’d tell me when you were ready.’

  ‘It’s hard to explain my life. I felt like I’d stepped into a trickling stream and ended up trying to keep my head above raging white water. Things happened so fast—one minute I was me and the next I was pregnant and married.’

  ‘Then you were a princess.’

  Beatrice forced a laugh. ‘A very bad one…then I lost the baby and there was no time to grieve.’ She compressed her quivering lips. ‘I was expected to do my duty and provide an heir. People acted as though our first baby had never existed. I hate now that I kept apologising, when I wanted—’ She had wanted to hear Dante say that she didn’t have anything to apologise for, that a baby shouldn’t be about duty, it should be about love.

  But he hadn’t.

  But then love had not been a word her husband had ever used. Did he even believe it existed?

  He had been happy to tell her how much he wanted her, his throaty voice making her insides dissolve. But even then, sometimes she’d got the impression that he’d given in to the desire she awoke in him reluctantly.

  She had told herself that discussing feelings was hard for some men, but beneath the rationalising she had known it was more than that.

  She couldn’t acknowledge her secret fear that the issue wasn’t his inability to acknowledge his deep feelings; no, she worried that he just didn’t have them. After the baby was gone, there was nothing deep connecting them, just passion… And now there was another life.

  She gave a bleak little laugh and turned to Maya. ‘I wonder if there are any statistics about the rate of divorce for Vegas marriages?’

  ‘You sure there is going to be a divorce now?’

  Beatrice decided not to acknowledge the doubt she could see in her sister’s eyes. It was a doubt she shared, a doubt she was trying very hard not to confront.

  ‘I think you need to sit down,’ Maya added, stepping off the pathway and approaching a bench.

  It took Beatrice a few moments before she roused herself enough to react to the prompt of her sister patting the seat beside her.

  Hunched forward, Beatrice planted her hands on juddering knees.

  Maya put one small hand onto one of hers. ‘Tell me to shut up, it’s none of my business, but what happened, Bea?’

  ‘I found it pencilled into my diary.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘An appointment with an IVF specialist,’ she said. Maya was the only one who would know the full significance of that.

  Her sister did. ‘Oh, my God, what did you do?’

  ‘Other than not be like Mum, you mean? Oh, you know me, very subtle and royal to my fingertips. I charged into Dante’s meeting with a room full of the island’s captains of industry and told him that enough was enough. That I didn’t want staff, I didn’t want a diary and that my childbearing hips were not a subject for staff meetings!’

  She remembered the white line of fury outlining his sensual lips as he had escorted her from the room.

  Beatrice shrugged, her eyes following the antics of a squirrel that was running through the branches of a nearby tree.

  ‘He called me naive and said I was overreacting.’ The lingering bitterness hardened her voice. ‘I probably was, and, oh…it’s hard to describe what it’s like in the palace.’ She lifted her hands, her long fingers sliding through her silky blonde hair, lifting the tangled strands off her neck before she let it fall in silky waves down her back.

  ‘I wanted to wait. I didn’t want a baby then. I was still grieving for the one I’d lost… Oh, I know they were only a bundle of cells, but—’

  ‘Of course you needed time. Didn’t Dante understand how you felt?’

  ‘I never told him. We didn’t discuss it…or actually anything much. With Carl gone, he was under a lot of pressure. Maybe I’m more like Mum than I thought,’ she mused, remembering her words of moments ago—it would have made him happy.

  When did she stop asking herself what would make her happy?

  Like her own mother, she had seen what she wanted to; she had put her own needs to one side to please a man.

  ‘Oh, Bea, you know that’s not true!’

  Beatrice’s glance fluttered from her sister’s face across the flash of cheery yellow where winter jasmine was in bloom.

  ‘I’m going to have a baby.’ She said it like a practice run, imaging herself throwing the line into the conversation, but no, her imagination fell short. It still didn’t feel real. ‘I really do have great timing, don’t I?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say the timing is just down to you,’ her sister responded drily.

  ‘I will have to tell Dante.’

  Maya’s expression softened into sympathy as she saw the realisation hit home for Beatrice, who began to scrabble for her phone in the bag that was looped across her shoulder.

  ‘Give yourself time first, to get your own head around it,’ Maya advised, trying to hide the worry she felt behind an encouraging smile.

  Beatrice, her teeth worrying at her full lower lip, shook her head. The way she felt right now, that moment might never come and the longer she left it—well, it was never going to get any easier.

  ‘Do I have to tell him?’ she said with a surge of wild hope that vanished into guilt as she connected with the sympathy in her sister’s eyes. ‘I didn’t mean that. It’s just that everything will change. This baby is second in line to the throne.’ It seemed like a terrible responsibility to give a child before they were even born. ‘Dante had a bad childhood, you know, and now this baby will be brought up in that world…’

  ‘Dante had a bad childhood because his parents are vile self-centred narcissists. This baby will have you.’

  ‘If I go back.’ In her heart she knew there was no if about it. The baby made it a forgone conclusion. ‘It won’t be like the last time. I won’t be brought out like some sort of—’

  ‘Don’t tell me, Bea,’ Maya cut in. ‘Tell him. Did he know about Mum and the IVF thing?’

  Beatrice shook her head. ‘It seems like yesterday sometimes.’

  The sisters’ eyes me
t, their glances holding as they both remembered the period in their teens when, in an attempt to satisfy her husband’s demands for a child of their own, their mother had turned to IVF to give him the real child he had wanted, which he had said would make them a real family.

  Witnessing the physical and mental toll that cycle after cycle of treatment had wrought on their mother’s health had been bad, but what had been worse was the blame game that had come after each failure from the man who held his wife responsible for not providing him with his own child.

  ‘Do you have any idea what this is doing to me?’

  The familiar petulant response had soon set the tone of their stepfather’s reaction to having his plans disappointed. It had always been her fault: if she had rested more, if she had been more motivated, healthier, thinner, fatter…if…if… The list of accusations had been endless.

  When one specialist had refused to treat them any more because of the impact on their mother’s health, they had moved on to the next clinic.

  ‘I used to think that I’d never go down that road…’ Maya said suddenly. ‘But, do you remember Prue?’

  ‘The Prue who married the cricket player, but is much more famous for doing your maths homework?’

  ‘She and Jake had twins through IVF. I’ve never seen two people happier.’

  ‘That’s not the same. Prue and her cricketer wanted a baby because they loved…’ Beatrice felt her eyes fill. ‘It wasn’t duty. I left of my own volition, but it was only a matter of time before Dante would have been forced to put me aside for someone with a more reliable reproductive system.’

  ‘He is a total bastard,’ Maya said conversationally.

  ‘He’s the father of my child.’

  Maya grimaced. ‘I’m sorry…’

  ‘I’m not.’ Beatrice pressed her hands to her still-flat stomach. The panic was still there but it was pushed into the background by a certainty. ‘You probably think I’m mad, but I want this baby.’

  Maya smiled. ‘I don’t think you’re mad, I think you’re… I think you’ll make a marvellous mum and I intend to be a pretty great auntie too.’ Her eyes widened with awed realisation. ‘God, with you as a mum and Dante as a dad, this baby really has hit the gene jackpot.’