Page 7 of King's Heir of Hate

“But…” She had never seen this man flustered. Furious, yes. Cracking at the seams, certainly. Wild with passion, temper, emotion. All the things she had learned since that he deplored. She had seen all of that. But she’d never seen him simply…flustered. Yet today she thought that was exactly what he was. “But back in Boston…”

She thought she could hear his teeth grinding together. No doubt because he was physically allergic to admitting that they had, in fact, been in Boston. Together. Intimately.

“Are you…referencing our secret, scandalous past?” she asked in a very sweet tone that was not all that sweet. “Heaven forfend! Next thing you know, you’ll be acknowledging that it actually happened, and then where would we be?”

“You didn’t get pregnant then,” he gritted out, a flash of something in his gaze that made her think that he was remembering that breathless year, the sheets they’d torn up, the pleasure they’d found—

But Boston was not the issue here. Not today.

“Of course I didn’t get pregnant then.” She folded her hands over her belly bump and allowed herself to enjoy the little things right here and now. Like this moment that felt a bit like schadenfreude. “Perhaps one of the numerous things you’ve conveniently forgotten about that time is how much we both wanted—”

“I do not want to discuss the details of those days,” he bit out. Confirming that he was indeed remembering the same things she was, she rather thought. “They are like a fever dream I do not wish to revisit now that the worst of the illness is past.”

“So you have mentioned,” she said, soothingly, as if he was a fractious child. It had the effect she expected it would. He glowered.

But for years, that had been the closest she could get to the passion she remembered. The passion that sometimes woke her in the night to fume in her empty bed.

Or, some years, cry.

She would act the part required of her, poke at him a little, and call it a result when he responded in some way. In any way. And so had seven years gone by, somehow.

Yes, she was enjoying this today. It felt like payback. After all, he wassoshocked. As if he hadn’t been a full and enthusiastic participant in the act that led to this. “Let me set the scene for you. Two people meet and their attraction is overwhelming, outrageous. Life-altering, some might say.”

“Esme.”

“I knowyouwouldn’t say that. Now.” He scowled and she kept going. “Yet both of them knew that they had degrees to finish, kingdoms not to disappoint, and so on. They spent their first two weeks together in an agony of extended foreplay—”

“Esme.Why must you always do this? I do not wish to wallow in these memories you seem to want to trot out at the slightest provocation—”

“I was on the pill, Tadeo,” she told him coolly. “I got on the pill the morning after our first meeting, and it worked. After our wedding, when you informed me that I would be imprisoned in this marriage until the day your father died and then summarily released, I saw no particular reason to continue playing games with my hormones. I went off the pill then. And here we are.”

“You knew that you were not using birth control,” he said, sounding as if he was being extremely careful with his words, likely because he thought they might detonate. Or he would. “You knew, and yet—”

“Be very careful, Tadeo,” Esme advised him then. “You are straying perilously close to blaming me for a night in which both of us were drinking the very same alcohol from the very same bottle, and then made the very same choice. Perhaps you should question yourself.”

“I’ve questioned myself every night since.”

“Marvelous.” She clasped her hands together. “Then you have already taken yourself to task for not handling the birth control options yourself. Either way, here we are. I am five months and thirteen days pregnant. If you would like to go ahead and divorce me, I won’t stop you. That might even be best.”

Her clasped hands folded nicely, so she did that and then propped them up on her belly again. Esme made herself smile, as beatifically as possible. Then when all he did was glower in her direction, she kept going. “I’ve had a lot of time to think about it, and I do think it might be best. I’m happy to divorce. You can continue doing…whatever self-flagellation exercises it is that you prefer. I can have a life. And our child can have the attention of both of its parents without having to worry about living in the ice fjords of the palace here.” She considered. “Or at least not full-time.”

“You might have had a lot of time to think about this, but I have had not.”Flustered, she thought again, as he raked his hands through his hair. It made her wonder if he would ever grow it out again the way he had when he was a graduate student in a foreign land. And the other occupant of her bed.

After their affair had ended, he’d cut it all off.

She’d seen it in a tabloid and had cried for days.

“You can have all the time you need,” she told him serenely now, as if bestowing upon him a great gift. “That said, there is a ticking clock.” She patted her belly. “Like it or not.”

Tadeo glared at her for what felt like a very long time. His gaze swept over her, from the top of her head to as much of her as he could see from his side of the table.

Esme could have told him that she’d been sitting out here playing with fabrics, imagining the nursery in this house. She had decided with the help of the staff members here, who had all become her friends, that it would be best to decorate it. To celebrate the baby and her impending motherhood while they all waited for that other shoe to fall.

They had all known that it would. Esme had told them from the start that if they felt it necessary to confess her condition to the King, she would understand. At the end of the day, they worked for him. Everyone in the kingdom did.

Especially her.

But not one of her staff had taken her up on that. Over the years, they’d become close. With the occasional addition of her friends from college, who would sometimes fly in and brighten things up for a while, the staff here were Esme’s daily support.