by Kim Lawrence
CHAPTER SIX
‘I’M AFRAID HIS Highness is—’
‘Unavailable at the moment?’ Beatrice inserted, her words dripping with saccharine-coated sarcastic venom, not caring by this point that she was killing the messenger.
This messenger at least.
It had taken all her courage to make that first call and she had felt physically sick as she had punched in Dante’s personal number, only to have her call diverted to someone who had identified herself as ‘His Royal Highness the Crown Prince’s office’—not actually an office but a snooty-sounding female, whom Beatrice took an instant dislike to.
Over the last few hours her instincts had proved to be bang on. She also knew that her husband was ghosting her—every single number or email address she had for him came up as unrecognised or no longer available.
The only number that was taking her calls was this one.
‘His Royal Highness is not taking calls but I can pass on a message.’
‘Yes, you mentioned that,’ Beatrice cut her off before she went deep into auto message mode.
This was the fifth time now that she had tried to contact Dante and the fifth time she had been given the same runaround by this faceless underling with the nice line in patronising.
‘But if you would prefer to address your questions to His Highness’s legal representatives… Do you have the number of the law firm? I can—’
Eyes squeezed tight, Beatrice told her exactly what she could do, and heard the shocked, offended gasp on the other end. She wasn’t proud of it, but there were limits, and she had reached hers and then some.
In the periphery of her vision she was aware of Maya’s frantic hand signals as she mimed zipping motions across her lips.
She ignored them and smiled. She wasn’t enjoying herself, but it was a relief to stick her head over the parapet and stick it to Dante’s messenger.
‘I don’t actually have any questions, I just want to deliver some information.’
‘I will pass on any important information.’
‘It is personal information. Sensitive information.’
‘I am a personal assistant.’
‘In that case…why not?’ Beatrice came back smoothly. ‘Do you have a pen? Fine, yes, well, take this down, will you? Tell my husband…’ She ground the title home as she jabbed the pencil she had picked up into the stack of unopened post on the table. ‘Tell him that I thought he might like to know that he is going to be a father. Got that?’ she asked pleasantly, and decided to take the choked sound at the other end of the line as an affirmative. ‘Well, thank you so much for your help. I’ll be sure to mention your name when I speak to my husband!’ Her breath gusting fast and frantic, she ended the call, her glance moving from the phone, still grasped in her white-knuckled hand, to her sister.
She pressed her hand to her mouth and gave a nervous giggle, her eyes flying to Maya, who rolled her own.
‘You didn’t stick to your script.’
‘No, I didn’t.’ Beatrice looked at the stack of bullet points printed on cards that had been meant to aid her calm delivery of the facts, even factoring in a potential mind blank when it came to telling Dante.
She had not factored in a red-mist moment.
‘I imagine you might get a response now,’ Maya murmured as Beatrice continued to look at the phone in her hand as if it were an unexploded bomb.
‘I lost my temper. What have I done now?’
It had been three in the morning before Beatrice had finally managed to drop off, so it took her a few moments to orientate herself and realise that the noise was not part of her dream, but real.
Someone—it didn’t take too many guesses who—had their hand pressed to the doorbell, filling the flat with a continual tiny rendition of the ‘William Tell Overture’, their landlord’s tasteful choice.
Maya appeared as Bea was dragging on a robe over her nightshirt.
‘How did he get here this quickly?’
Beatrice shrugged.
‘Shall I get it, tell him to come back later?’
‘Like that’s going to work…’ She dragged a hand through her tousled hair and tried to dredge up some calm. ‘No…no, I’ll be fine.’ She took another deep breath, and tightened the sash on her full-length robe as she lifted her chin to a defiant angle.
Maya looked doubtful. ‘If you say so. I’ll be in my bedroom if you need me.’
‘Thanks.’ Beatrice smiled but barely noticed her sister go; her thoughts had already moved on to the person outside the door.
She was vaguely conscious of her sister’s bedroom door clicking closed as she blew out a slow calming breath, which didn’t slow the speed of her pounding heart even a little, and reached for the handle.
Leaving the safety catch in place, she opened it. The action would normally have revealed the communal hallway, with a worn rug that covered the scratched parquet floor, and a noticeboard. But today all she could see through the door was Dante, who effectively blocked everything else from view.
He pushed himself off the wall and far enough away for her to see more of the dark suit he was wearing. Not his normal immaculate self—the fabric was crumpled and his white shirt was open at the neck, revealing a section of warm brown skin—but she barely noticed these details. All she saw, or rather felt, were the powerful, raw emotions that were emanating from him.
‘You moved.’ Dante had been keeping his emotions in check, but the sight of her standing there and he could feel them slipping through his fingers like a wet rope, taking his control with it. ‘No one told me.’
The journey here—he’d been mid-Atlantic when he had received the message, a sentence that was going to literally change his life in ways he was still too shocked to imagine—had already pushed his control to the limits.
The sight of her big blue eyes looking warily at him through the gap, rimmed with red from where she had been crying, didn’t make him any less furious. It just added another layer to the emotions fighting for supremacy in his chest.
‘Last week—it’s bigger.’ Just as she would be soon. An idea that still seemed deeply strange and not quite real.
Dante was very real though, and very angry.
‘The people who live there now seem… I left my security team persuading them I am not dangerous.’ While he had spent several frustrating minutes finding the correct address to give his driver.
‘What are you doing here?’ The accusing words floated through the gap and drew a low feral disbelieving growl from his throat.
‘Are you serious?’
‘It really wasn’t necessary for you to come in person. A simple acknowledgement you’d got the news would have done fine.’
‘Well, I am here.’
‘I’m sure everyone in the building knows that. Come back tomorrow.’
Was he meant to care what people thought?
‘That isn’t going to happen and we both know it. Are you going to let me in or would you like to have this discussion here?’ He bestowed a scathing glance at his surroundings before fixing her with a steely bitter stare. ‘Sorry, I forgot my megaphone, but I have several paparazzi on speed dial…if that is your preference? Sure, let’s share the news! Oh, I forgot, you already have.’ It would be interesting to know just how many people she had told before she had told him…but then he was only the father.
Her lips tightened at the sarcasm. ‘Lower your voice and don’t be so unreasonable.’
‘I suppose I should consider myself lucky you didn’t send the news by text!’
Although on second thoughts, he decided as he experienced a stomach-clenching chilled aftershock of what he had felt as he had listened to his stand-in PA tell him he was going to be a father, a text might have been preferable!
She slipped the safety chain and hastily backed away, standing there, arms fol
ded across her chest, as he entered a hallway that had been described in the rental details as a spacious dining hall.
A slight exaggeration, but it had never felt this claustrophobically cramped before.
‘I tried to contact you.’
‘You didn’t try very hard.’
Her lips compressed. ‘I suppose it depends on your definition of hard. The number I have for you no longer exists. Though why I’m telling you this I don’t know, because I assume that you’re the one who arranged for my calls to be diverted to your robotic PA.’
‘She’s a very good PA.’ And he might have sacked her, he realised, a furrow forming between his dark brows as he replayed the in-flight exchange.
The details of the incident were a little sketchy, but in his shocked state of mind he presumed he must have asked her to repeat what she had just said, because she had repeated, word for word, the message that had left him literally rigid with shock.
The second time of telling had involved the same words, but no longer a statement, more a question conveying a snide implication that he had taken exception to.
‘She says she is pregnant? Are you calling my wife a liar?’
‘She is very efficient,’ he said now.
‘Oh, I have no doubt that she was only saying what she was told to. I assume that it was you who told her that any further communication would be through our legal teams.’
‘That,’ he reminded her grimly, ‘was your idea.’
‘I should have known it would be my fault.’ Without warning the fight drained out of her, leaving her feeling weak-kneed, shaky and fighting back tears.
‘Are you all right?’
She scraped together enough defiance to throw back a querulous, ‘I’m pregnant, not ill.’
His chest lifted in a silent sigh. ‘So, it’s true?’
‘Obviously not. I just made it up.’
‘Sorry, that was a stupid thing to say.’
She squeezed her eyes closed and felt his hand on her elbow. ‘Yes, it was.’ She opened her eyes and shook her head, unable to keep a quiver of emotion out of her voice as she tilted her head back to look him in the face.
‘You should sit down.’
‘I should be in bed. I was in bed.’ Conscious of her shaky knees and the fact she was grateful for the support of his hand, she nodded to the door just behind him. ‘The sitting room is through there,’ she said, afraid that he might take the next door, to her bedroom. Bedrooms were where all this had started. ‘Be careful. There are boxes we haven’t got around to unpacking yet.’
Skirting the packing cases, he continued to hover protectively until she had sat down on one of the sofas.
‘So, have you seen a doctor?’ he asked, dropping into a squat beside her. He scanned her pale features and felt a gut punch of guilt. She looked as if she had been crying for a week. Maybe she had. She looked so fragile that he was afraid to hold her. She looked as if she might break.
She nodded.
‘So, there’s no mistake.’ Under the fresh wave of guilt he was conscious of something new. A possessiveness, a protectiveness.
She shook her head, feeling tears threaten again as she wondered if that was what he had been hoping. That this was all some mistake that they would laugh about. She couldn’t really blame him.
‘And a scan?’
‘Not yet…what are you doing?’
He lifted the phone away from his ear. ‘Making arrangements.’
‘Dante, it’s half three in the morning.’
He shook his head as though the relevance passed him by.
‘I know in your world you can demand anything you want at any time of day and people will jump, but in my world we make appointments in daylight hours and get put on waiting lists.’
‘Waiting lists?’
‘If you want to do something, make me a cup of tea. Ginger. It helps the nausea. The kitchen’s through that way.’ She tipped her head in the direction of an arch at the end of the room that fed into the galley kitchen. ‘Teas are in the bottom cupboard, first right.’
She closed her eyes, pretty much too exhausted to see if he reacted and definitely too exhausted to argue. She didn’t open them until she felt a hand on her arm.
‘Drink,’ he said, watching her.
She did, blowing on the surface of the liquid first to cool it as he took a seat on the opposite sofa. He appeared lost in his own thoughts.
Feeling like someone sitting in the eye of a storm, knowing that any second all hell would break loose again, she drank and felt a little less wretched.
She set her mug down on a side table and waited, tensing when Dante unfolded his long, lean length and got to his feet.
‘I didn’t think about the time,’ he admitted. ‘I was—’
‘In shock—I know.’
‘I realise that you must feel… I know this isn’t what you wanted, but it is happening, and we have to deal with it.’
‘We don’t need to deal with anything.’ She still felt as if she had been run over by a truck, but the tea was making her slightly more coherent. ‘I am already dealing,’ she added, anxious to correct any impression to the contrary she might have given. ‘I’m booked in for my first scan, just to confirm dates, I think, in a few weeks.’
‘Right, I’ll cancel and have them schedule one for when we get back,’ he murmured half to himself.
‘Back?’ she said, pretending a bewilderment she wasn’t feeling as a cold fist tightened in her stomach.
‘I’m not going anywhere. I’m here and I’m staying here.’ She drew her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. ‘Relax, once the divorce comes through we can sort out the details, how things will work.’
‘What the hell are you talking about?’ he ground out, realising that his life had changed the moment he had met Beatrice. Nothing had been the same since that day.
‘There isn’t going to be a divorce now you are carrying my child.’
She looked into his eyes and saw the same steely conviction that his voice carried. She half rose and subsided, shaking as panic spilled through her body.
She looked up at him, eyes looking even bigger. The dark rings around them making him think of a trapped animal.
‘You are carrying our child, the heir to the throne. That changes everything.’
‘He…she won’t want that,’ she said, pressing a hand to her stomach, the gesture unconscious.
‘Shouldn’t that be their call? Are you going to try and rob that child of their heritage, their birthright?’
‘It didn’t make you or Carl very happy,’ she slung back.
‘We don’t have to repeat the mistakes of my parents.’
She lifted a shaking hand to her head. ‘There has to be another way. I can’t go back to that…’ She shook her head. ‘I won’t be manipulated and managed.’
He was looking at her with the strangest expression. ‘Is that how you felt?’
His shock seemed genuine.
‘It is the way it was.’
‘It won’t be like that when you go back. There will be changes.’
She didn’t have the strength to hide her extreme scepticism even if she had wanted to. ‘What changes?’
‘To hell with opinion polls, I’m putting my family first. This is not about having an heir. It is about being a father.’ Until this moment he had never appreciated the massive difference between the two. ‘We’ll make it work.’
‘For the baby.’
He said nothing, the steely determination she saw shining in his eyes said it all as he took her chin between his fingers.
‘You can’t bring this child up alone…’
She fought the urge to turn her cheek into his palm. ‘People do every day, some out of choice, some because there is no alternative.’
> ‘But you have an alternative,’ he cut in smoothly. ‘We’ve had a trial separation, why not a trial marriage?’
‘Another word for a sham? Been there, done that,’ she said tiredly. The emotional and physical stress of the past days, and maybe the pregnancy hormones, were making their strength-sapping presence felt and her fight was being replaced by a dangerous fatalism.
Perhaps sensing her defences were failing, he leaned in towards her, bringing their faces level; she met his eyes and felt guilty for doubting his sincerity. There was nothing sham about the emotions rolling off him.
When she thought about it later, she decided it was the emotion in his face, the concern and self-recrimination that made her stop fighting the inevitable.
She lifted her chin. ‘Things will have to change…if I come back,’ she tacked on quickly.
‘I promise there will be no managing.’
‘I want to be more than a decorative accessory; I want to be treated as an equal, not patronised. Oh…’ Her head dropped a little as she looked at him through the veil of her dark lashes. ‘I don’t want you to tell anyone, not until I’m three months along and things are…safer.’
‘My parents?’
She gave a tiny laugh that left her blue eyes sombre. ‘Especially your parents.’ She did not think she could stand any of their insincerity. They wanted a royal baby and for a while she’d be flavour of the month, but she knew that before long they’d be planning behind the scenes how to detach her from the baby.
Did the conviction make her paranoid? Well, better that than naive.
‘They don’t like me, they never liked me…which is fine, because I don’t like them either.’
After a moment, he nodded. ‘This waiting, secrecy…did the doctor indicate that anything was amiss? That there is a potential problem with this pregnancy, with you?’ The tautness in him rose visibly as his sharpened glance moved across her face.
‘No, it’s just early, and if anything did happen like before…’ She felt the tears form in her eyes and looked away, the muscles in her pale slender throat working as she fought to contain her fears. ‘I don’t want anyone else to know. I don’t care what you tell them, just—’