Page 12 of King's Heir of Hate

Tadeo studied her for a long moment, his face impressively impassive. In the beginning, she’d been able to get a frown out of him. These days she had to content herself with that flexed muscle in his jaw.

This was part of why her performance as the Princess, now Queen, of Bellaza required such a commitment to perfection.The more beautifully she did her part, the more outrageously she could behave in private.

A girl had to have her fun somewhere.

“This ruins my plans,” he told her. After some while.

Esme felt an actual flare of temper at that, but she had years of practice batting such things down. “I beg your pardon. Do you mean to say that your child, the heir to your throne, has destroyed the plans you made in your head? That’s a strange way indeed to say congratulations, Tadeo. Even for you.”

“I like to tell myself that there is a perfect heiress out there.” He leaned forward as he said this, his blue gaze heavy on hers, so Esme could make no mistake. Hewantedher to hear him on this. To well and trulyhear him. “When I think of her, her features themselves are blurry. Because it doesn’t matter. What matters is how she willact. She will be quiet. Accepting. Meek in all things. She will not be emotional, or arch, or forever making attempts to be witty.”

Esme allowed herself to frown slightly, as if picturing this saint among women. “She sounds deeply boring.” She clucked her tongue. “The poor thing. Send her to me and I’ll teach her how to live a little. It’s necessary when married to an animated plank of wood to make one’s own fun, you see.”

Tadeo did not react. He continued to list off this made-up heiress’s manufactured virtues. “She will be soft-spoken in both public and private. She will never make demands. She will be practical enough and clever enough to understand her place.”

“She sounds likequitethe paragon.” If Esme felt these words of his—this description of the perfect wife he insisted on painting—like a small, wickedly sharp dagger to the heart, she kept it to herself. “I wish you every happiness, Tadeo, assuming that is one of the three emotions you allow yourself to feel annually. Does that mean we’re going ahead with the divorce?”

“You know perfectly well that we cannot,” he retorted. “And so I must give up on this perfect paragon of a queen and make do with you instead.”

Esme wanted to scream so she smiled at him instead. “A fate worse than death.”

“I struggle with how best to arrange this unforeseen situation to its best advantage,” he said after a moment, no longerspearing herwith that look of his.

“You keep calling it that.” Esme shook her head. “I do hope you get that out of your system. I don’t think that I will find it amusing if you call our child anunforeseen circumstanceto its face.”

“I understand that this is all a grand joke to you,” Tadeo said, and he leaned forward then. And more surprising, he looked…undone, somehow. Everything inside Esme thrilled at that, though she knew better than to show it. “But it is not a joke to me.”

“If you had to suffer through morning sickness for three solid months, with bits of it thereafter as a little treat when you least expect it, I doubt you would think it was all that funny yourself, Tadeo,” she murmured in reply.

He ignored that. “You persist in poking at me whenever you can. You think it’s amusing. I do not. I have certain obligations—”

“I am aware of your obligations.” Esme rolled her eyes. “This entire speech worked better when I was barely twenty-one, and in case you’re laboring under a misconception, I didn’t really like it all that much then.”

“Things will be different now,” he told her, that ruthlessness she sometimes thought only she’d ever seen in him making his voice low and dark. “I will not tolerate these displays of yours that you trot out, presumably for your own entertainment.”

Her heart skipped a few beats, then sped up, the way it had when he’d shown her this side of himself the first time. So many years ago, she’d thought she was having a heart attack. She’d wondered if losing him might actually kill her.

Now she knew there were much worse things than dying of a broken heart, and one of them was living with it. Another was marrying the man who’d broken it. Repeatedly.

Survival meant she’d learned how to ignore her heart when it beat like this, so she could soothe it when she was alone.

“And what exactly will you do?” Esme waved a languid hand, the very picture of someone completely unbothered by this. By him. “Will you march your pregnant wife, your queen and the mother of your heir, down into the dank recesses of your dungeon? However will that play in the press, Tadeo? Do you think it’s possible that an out-of-control, raging king who’s decided a pregnant woman is the enemy might finally be more scandalous than a very boring story about a woman who wanted extramarital—”

“Do not bring up my mother,” he growled.

But Esme had long since decided that the much-maligned Queen Marisol was not an off-limits topic. She had decided that Tadeo could not use his mother as an excuse for everything he did and then refuse to hear her mentioned in return. Not that she had found many opportunities to put this decision into practice.

There was no time like the present.

She leaned forward. “Do you think it will work?”

His eyes glittered. It was obvious that he didn’t want to answer the question.

“Will what work?” he asked, as if it made his jaw hurt to get the words out. She hoped it did.

“Do you think that your perfect, anodyne heiress will wash away your mother’s grievous sins at last? Or do you just not wishto be reminded of them when you sit in a private room with another woman who dares speak her own mind?”

She didn’t expect him to move. Maybe he didn’t expect to move himself.