Page 32 of King's Heir of Hate

“If only you were a king, who could make any law he liked on a whim.” She laughed, though there was very little mirth in the sound. “Not that that would matter, as we are not talking about the kingdom just now. We’re talking about us. You and me.”

“I have no desire to talk about you and me.” In another mood, she might have found his tone funny. It was quite close topanicked, though Tadeo would never allow himself topanic.

Still. It was close.

“This is a love story,” she told him, looking right at him. “It always has been. And you are trying to treat it like a Royal Proclamation.”

“I told you almost a decade ago that love stories are not something I am built for,” he growled.

But she remembered it differently. They had started telling each other that they loved each other early on. They’d said it all the time. When he’d come back from that fateful summer and had ended things with her, he’d denied he ever meant it.

The last time she’d told him she loved him she’d been sobbing, on the floor of his town house, and he’d told her he couldn’t help that. That it would fade.

It had not faded.

And more importantly, he was a liar.

She had decided that he’d gaslit her at will during that hideous breakup scene. That was the story she’d told herself all throughout the next couple of years. That and he was emotionally stunted. But she’d always ended up on the fact that he was a liar.

Because she had been there.

She knew what they’d had.

She knew what he’d said.

She decided that if he was lying, he was lying to himself first.

And the past seven years proved that. The night of his father’s funeral proved that. Everything that had happened since he’d learned about the pregnancy proved it.

It was never that she’d somehow gotten the wrong idea about him, or made him up in her head. She’d been right about him every step of the way.

Maybe, she thought, it was time he understood that.

“Do you know what’s funny?” Esme smiled as she said that. She came close to laughing, even. “I know youso well, Tadeo. I know that if I say anything about love you will immediately balk, even though everything that’s happened between us since you found out I was pregnant has showed me, time and again, that you’re as in love with me now as ever.”

He looked as if she’d struck him with an ax, but she didn’t let that stop her. “That, in fact, the reason you keep coming up withall these walls to put between us is because you’re still afraid of that love. But I realized recently that while I know you well enough that I can predict any response you might have and act accordingly in advance—and I do—youdon’t knowmeat all.”

For a moment, he looked like she really had smashed something heavy and sharp into the side of his head.

“Of course I know you,” he managed to get out after a few tense moments, when she was sure she could hear the sound of his heart. Beating too fast and too hard—or perhaps that was hers. “I don’t know what this outburst is about, Esme, but it is the antithesis of our agreement.”

She shook her head. “What agreement is that? I don’t recallagreeingto anything. I went along with you. That’s not the same thing.”

“It is the same thing,” he shot back at her. “I knew this was a mistake. I knew I shouldn’t have let you into my bed again. The reality is that you can’t handle it.”

Esme did laugh then, directly at him. “Yes, of course. My bad.Iam the one who can’t handle it.”

She could see his temper mounting. There was that thunderstorm in his blue eyes, that furious muscle in his jaw. “Do you think I don’t know you?” he gritted out. “I know this. Any time there is intimacy between us,thisis what happens. You start talking about love and it makes you impossible.”

“You don’t know me at all,” Esme corrected him with what she hoped was a calm tone that rankled. Deeply. “For example, did you know that I don’t know how to swim?”

“What?” He blinked, as if he was trying to keep up. “What does that have to do with anything? Are you quite well, Esme?”

Meaning,Have you had a mental break?

Because, naturally, he would think so.

“I never learned,” she told him blithely. “I suppose that should have been a part of my unconventional education. What a tragedy that it was not.”