by Kim Lawrence
‘Though I should warn you, you might be bored. Two others of our group are new parents too and another is pregnant, so you might get a bit tired of all the baby talk.’
Beatrice could not control the guilty colour she felt rising up her neck, even though she knew logically that nobody was about to suspect the truth. As far as anyone else was concerned they had been estranged for the last eight months and, while there might be a lot of speculation as to why she was back, a baby was not going to be on their list of possibilities.
As she continued to struggle to frame a response, aware that Lara was beginning to look puzzled by her silence, it was Dante who came to her rescue.
‘Hands up.’
He held up his hands, the long tapering fingers splayed in an attitude of mea culpa that caused conversation to halt and every eye to turn his way. ‘My fault.’
Beatrice’s initial relief was immediately tempered with wariness. What was he going to say?
Lara Faure raised a delicate brow, her teasing eyes flashing between the handsome Prince and his wife. ‘It is in my experience that it is always the husband’s fault.’
Beatrice held her breath as she waited for Dante to speak. The gleam in his dark eyes as they brushed her reminded her of the Dante she had fallen in love with, the Dante who made the outrageous sound normal, and had delighted in making her blush in public.
‘I have been complaining,’ he drawled, leaning back in his seat while his long, sensitive brown fingers now played an invisible tune on the white linen as they lightly drummed, ‘that she spreads herself too thin—she has just so much enthusiasm.’ His shoulders lifted in an expressive, fluid shrug. ‘It makes her take on too many things. I have to book an appointment to see her.’ He threw the words out, along with a heavy-lidded caressing look that sent Beatrice’s core temperature up by several degrees.
Ignoring her burning blood, she focused on his ability to lie through his beautiful teeth and continued to conceal her true thoughts behind an impassive mask.
‘Books and music. Two of her favourite things.’ And both offering no physical danger that might harm mother or child. ‘Though I have to warn you, she can’t hold a tune. I can spare you, cara, go have fun.’
‘He likes to think I actually need to ask his permission before I have fun.’
People laughed and conversations started up, but under her own smile there was hope as she allowed herself to think that this was not all pretence.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
TO BEATRICE’S RELIEF the party did not drag on long after the meal. The guests of honour excused themselves relatively early and Dante took the opportunity to extract them at the same time.
As they walked through the doors into their private drawing room, he was tugging off his tie. A moment later the top buttons of his formal shirt were unfastened, and he gave a grunt of satisfaction before he flopped onto one of the deeply upholstered sofas that were arranged around the carved fireplace.
‘That could have been worse.’ He threw several cushions on the floor with a grimace of irritation before angling a glance at Beatrice. ‘You don’t agree?’
‘Your father ignored me regally all evening.’
‘I’d pay to have my father ignore me.’
She failed to fight off a smile.
‘So what else?’
‘I wanted to tell Lara that I was pregnant.’
‘Then why didn’t you?’
She slung him an exasperated look. ‘I may know very little about royal protocols but I’m pretty sure telling a dinner guest I’m pregnant before the King and Queen know they are going to have a grandchild might break a couple.’
‘True…but you have made a friend?’
‘I like her,’ she said, ignoring the invitation when he patted the arm of the sofa beside him and choosing to sit instead opposite, with the long coffee table, with the tasteful stack of prerequisite coffee-table books that nobody was ever going to read, between them.
Her eyes went to the hand that still rested on the arm as she wondered uneasily if the gesture had been meant to remind her of another occasion when she had accepted the invitation only to find herself pulled down on top of him. She pushed away the images, but not before her core temperature had jumped several uncomfortable degrees.
‘Should I have told Lara that I’d join her book club?’
‘Why not? You make it sound as though you’ve signed your soul away. And it sounds more like a mother and baby group and you will fit right in. I have a list of the obstetricians I spoke of, if you’d like to look at them.’ He scanned her face. ‘We can tell my parents, if that would make you feel more comfortable.’
‘But what if something goes wrong?’ The words ‘like the last time’ hung unspoken in the airwaves between them. She shook her head, the imagined scenes of that eventuality lodged there, a nightmare mixture of their lost baby and the emotionally charged scenes that had followed her mum’s unsuccessful IVF attempts.
‘You cannot think that way. You need to enjoy this pregnancy and you won’t if you spend the entire time anticipating a problem.’ She could leave that to him, he decided as he experienced a swell of helplessness, a reminder of the way he had felt when the first pregnancy had tragically ended.
He hadn’t known what to do, what to say, and anything he had said had sounded trite and inadequate. He’d felt utterly helpless to lessen the grief she’d been feeling and unwilling to examine his own grief; his conditioning had kicked in and he’d taken refuge in work.
He knew he had failed her and was determined he would not again. He could keep her safe and he would.
‘And if there is a problem?’
‘Then we will deal with it together.’
It sounded good but it was the part he left out that made her look away. If anything went wrong with this pregnancy there would be no reason for her to be here.
‘You know what would make you feel better?’
She forced a smile and tried to ease the sadness away. ‘I’m pretty sure you’re going to tell me.’
‘You need to brush up on your lying skills, because you really are a terrible liar.’
‘You make it sound like that is a bad thing.’
‘A good lie gets you out of many a sticky situation, and sincerity,’ he said, ‘is a very bad thing, diplomatically speaking. Of course, if you can feign it—’ He reached out and caught one of her shoes before it hit him in the face.
‘I wasn’t aiming at you.’
‘Then you have real potential. That’s better,’ he approved when she lost her battle to contain her mirth.
‘If you wore heels you’d know they are not a subject for jokes.’
‘You don’t need heels, and I already struggle with door frames,’ he said, watching her wriggle her toes as she stretched out her legs towards the coffee table. He registered the tiny smile playing around the corners of her mouth before, tongue between her teeth, she nudged the neatly arranged books with her outstretched foot, spoiling their geometrical precision.
With effort he prised his eyes from the long length of her endless smooth legs. It did nothing to ease the pulsing need that had settled like a hot stone in his groin.
‘Feel better now?’
‘A little.’
‘Sometimes saying what you want to is a luxury.’
His voice held no discernible inflection but something in his expression made her wonder if they were still talking book clubs. She somehow doubted it; the gleam she could see through the dark mesh of his lashes confirmed it.
The slow, heavy pump of her heart got louder in her ears. It was something that would be reckless to pursue, better leave it be.
Sound advice.
‘What do you want to say?’
Playing with fire, Bea.
For a long moment he said nothing. ‘Do you really want to know?’
/> She swallowed, frustrated at having the ball thrown back in her court. If she wanted this to go to the next level, he was saying she had to take the conscious step to make it happen… She’d have no one to blame but herself.
This was exactly the sort of situation she had sworn to avoid and here she was virtually running after it, running after him. She could feel that reckless let tomorrow take care of itself feeling creeping up on her. Even from this distance she could hear him breathing like someone who had just crossed the marathon finish line, or was that her?
Without taking his eyes off her, he levered himself into a sitting position, leaned across the table that separated them and ran a hand down the instep of one of her bare feet.
She sucked in a fractured breath, opened her mouth to say—She would never know what, because the phone that lay in the small beaded evening bag she had dumped on the table rang.
‘Leave it!’ he growled out as the noise shattered the moment.
Yanked back to reality and her senses and not nearly as grateful as she ought to be for the fact, Beatrice shook her head, pulled her feet back, tucking them under her as she delved into the bag. Pulling her phone out, she glanced at the screen.
‘It’s Maya. I have to take it.’
Dante’s jaw clenched, all of him clenched as frustration pumped through his veins in a steady stream. ‘Of course you do.’ He doubted Beatrice heard him as she was already sweeping into the direction of the bedroom, her phone pressed to her ear.
When she returned a few minutes later Beatrice wasn’t sure if Dante would still be there, then she saw him looking tall and dangerous, prowling up and down the room like a caged tiger, glass of something amber in his hand and the lamplight shading his impossibly high carved cheekbones.
‘Maya says hello.’
He flashed her a look. ‘I’m quite sure that’s not what she said, but hello, Maya.’ He raised his glass in a salute.
Beatrice’s lips compressed as she glared at him. His continued pacing was really beginning to wind her up. As if she weren’t already tense enough, and guilty.
Maya had to have picked up that she couldn’t wait to get off the phone. Her concerned sister, whose only crime was to have bad or good timing, depending on how you looked at it.
She winced as she replayed the short conversation in her head. The gratitude she ought to have felt for being saved from basically herself was absent. The problem being she wasn’t sure that she’d wanted to be saved.
Who was she kidding? She definitely hadn’t wanted to be saved.
He halted his relentless pacing, drained his glass and set it down. It didn’t take the taint of guilt and regret from his mouth. It seemed insane now that he had ever thought he could handle the scent of her perfume, the sound of her voice. It was all part of his personal agony. Wanting her was driving him out of his mind; the lust was all-consuming—it wiped out every other consideration.
He was still the same person; his own needs always would take priority.
‘I can’t say I blame her.’
Beatrice felt emotion swell in her chest. He sounded tired…and while you couldn’t consider someone who was six feet five of solid bone and muscle vulnerable, his defences seemed to have lowered. Whatever internal battle he was fighting might have lowered his defences, but the dangerous explosive quality that was innate to him was much closer to the surface.
‘Maya has nothing against you.’
His eyes lifted and he smiled; it held no humour. ‘Of course she doesn’t.’
‘It’s true, she is…protective, that’s all.’
‘I get that, and I admire her for it. I admire you. You are both there for each other,’ he said broodingly.
She watched as he set his glass down with a thud and reached for the brandy.
‘We’re sisters, that’s what it’s like. You know that, you have a brother.’
The moment the words left her lips she knew she’d said the wrong thing.
She could almost smell the adrenalin coming off him as he stalked towards her, stopping a foot or so away. She couldn’t take her eyes off the muscle clenching and unclenching in his hollow cheek.
‘I was never there for my brother!’ The words came out, acrid with self-loathing.
The confusion swirling in her head deepened. She took a step towards him and laid a hand on his forearm, conscious as she did so of the quivering coiled tension in the muscle that was iron hard.
It didn’t cross her mind to be afraid or even nervous; she had never been afraid of Dante.
‘But you are, Dante. You are doing all this.’ She gestured to the room they stood in. ‘For Carl, you walked away from your life and you never blamed him once.’
‘You think I am noble…that is so far from the truth, cara, that it is almost funny. I had no idea that he was gay, let alone that he was so unhappy.’
‘Perhaps he wasn’t ready to share.’
‘I should have known,’ Dante persisted stubbornly. ‘What sort of brother doesn’t know his brother is hating his life, is so unhappy?’
‘Oh, Dante, I’m so sorry. But that is not your fault.’
‘If I’d been any sort of brother, he would have felt able to come to me. He couldn’t, he didn’t. What sort of brother, man, does that make me?’ He glanced down, seeming to notice for the first time the small hand on his arm.
He pushed it away and Beatrice, the hand he had rejected pressed up to her chest, stood there, absorbing his words. Her heart twisting in her chest for him, she felt helpless to ease the haunted guilt she could see shining in his dark eyes, but she knew she had to try.
‘It’s not your fault he was unhappy, but you could never make the decision for him, Dante. He had to find the courage in himself to do that, and he did.’
‘Oh, yeah, I was a really great person to confide in,’ he sneered. ‘My brother was crying out for help, a silent scream, but I was too busy with my own life. I did what all certified selfish bastards do. I looked after number one.’
His anguish felt like a dull blade in her heart.
This time when she laid a hand on his arm, he didn’t shrug it off.
‘Have you spoken to Carl about this?’ she asked, wary of putting too much pressure on him. ‘Asked him how he feels? Told him how you feel?’ Her hand slid down his forearm until it covered his hand, her fingers sliding in between his.
She already knew the answer to that. Dante was not a man who spoke about feelings, which made her sure that it would not be long before he was regretting sharing this much with her.
‘We don’t talk about it,’ he said, thinking of the email that remained on his phone. His brother had said all he needed in that, and neither of them had referred to it since.
‘Maybe you should…’ She paused, her heart aching as she saw the guilt that was eating him up. ‘Talk? Maybe we should talk too?’
‘I’ve always lived for myself. I can’t be the man…your—’
‘You are my man, my husband.’
‘What are you doing, Bea?’ The pupils of his eyes expanded dramatically as his glance rested on his own hand, now caught between both of hers, as she raised it to her mouth and touched his fingertips with her lips.
She felt muscles bunch in rejection and let go of his hand, but only in order to reach up and grab the back of his neck, dragging his face down to enable her to slant her lips across his.
She wanted to say, Here is my heart, Dante, let me love you, but instead she said, ‘Make love to me, Dante.’
It was a fight he was always going to lose.
He had no idea how long it lasted before a groan that reverberated through his body was wrenched from his throat as he dragged her to him.
One hand behind the back of her head, he covered her mouth with his, the heat an explosion as their lips touched, their tongues tangled. The passion
released burnt everything but raw need away.
The only cool he was aware of was the feel of her hands on his skin as she pushed her hands under the fabric of his shirt, across his chest and down over his belly, causing him to suck in gasps and then groans of encouragement as she fought with the zip of his trousers.
He kissed the smooth skin of her shoulder, and both shoulders were bared as her dress slithered to the floor and lay in a silk pool at her feet.
His hands on her waist, he pushed her away, far enough for him to see the complete picture she made. Smooth golden limbs and feminine curves concealed only by a strapless bra and a minuscule pair of matching knickers.
‘You look like a goddess,’ he rasped with throaty awe.
‘I feel like a woman. You make me feel like a woman, Dante.’
Without a word he scooped her up. She laid her head against his bare chest as he carried her through to the bedroom they had once shared, that they would share tonight, and if this was all they had then she would take it.
She knew with total certainty that any pain down the line was worth tonight. Tonight she needed him as much as he needed her. He might not love her the way she loved him but she would take what he had to give.
Dante was very giving; his touch set her alight and fed the relentless hunger inside her. As he paused to fight free of his shirt, she kissed his chest, tasting the salt on his skin, and when he bent back, his body arching over her as he knelt astride her supine body, he took her face between his hands, and kissed her like a man starved.
It wasn’t until he lowered himself that she realised her bra was gone, even though she hadn’t felt the loss until her sensitised breasts were crushed against the hard barrier of his chest.
Her legs parted to his touch, a low moan of pleasure fighting its way through her clenched teeth as he teased the sensitive moist folds with skilful fingers.
She was mindless with the need to feel him inside her, to feel him deep, feel him touch where no other man had. The relief when her agony communicated itself to him and he settled between her parted legs made her sob, as her legs wrapped around his waist, urging him deeper; she was frustrated by the teasing strokes until finally he sank deep, wringing a feral moan from her lips as her body arched up to meet him. As her nerve endings sang all the sensations merged into one glorious whole, they merged, they were one—almost.