King’s Heir Ultimatum
Lorraine Hall
For best friends.
Chapter One
KINGALEXANDREENZORODRIGOLIDIAhad been a married man for almost a year. He had been king for almost three months, thanks to the untimely death of his father.
He knew far more about how to be a king than about being a husband.
Being a king made sense, after all. There were laws to uphold, the previous king’s mistakes to fix and a country to usher into a new era of peace and stability.
Being ahusbandwas something else entirely. If he was not royalty, at least. Luckily, he was.
He had not chosen his wife. Ines had been chosen for him. At the time, Alexandre had been rather grateful that his father’s choice had been bearable. King Enzo had been a vindictive despot of a king, and even worse as a father, so Enzo had not chosen Ines for anything except access to her father’s wealth.
She could have been anything. A pampered, spoiled, dramatic nuisance. A pompous, withdrawn, cruel snob. The terrible options were endless.
But Ines had turned out to be a wonderful princess and an even better queen. She was dutiful, modest and quiet. She was kind and pleasant, but not dull. She never behaved above anyone, and so the country of Alis quite loved her. She was a workhorse and never complained, always happy to take on the next royal task assigned.
If she disagreed with him about anything, they had calm, reasonable discussions, and he could almost always talk her around to his way of thinking.
Alexandre was hardly ever wrong.
He’d had a lifetime of preparing to be king—of preparing to undo every horrible thing his father had enacted. On his mother’s deathbed, she had tasked him with fixing everything. Alexandre might have only been five, but he had taken that promise he’d made her quite seriously. For the nearly twenty-five years between her death and his father’s three months ago, he had watched his father and planned to fix everything the horrible man had done to his family, to his county.
For the past three months, he had worked exclusively to undo all his father’s petty, militaristic whims.
Not that Alexandre was perfect. He could not claim to be. He had failed many in his life. He had not been able to protect his mother from the wrath of his father’s so-called love. He had not been able to protect her from the medical complications that had stolen her life at Evelyne’s birth. He knew he had not always been able to protect his younger sister from the abuses of their father as she’d grown up.
But he had done his level best. And would continue to do so, until death took him. There was simply no other choice.
So Ines was a better wife than Alexandre could have ever hoped for, taking on her responsibilities so easily, so adeptly. She could connect with their kingdom in a more…emotionalway than a protector could.
Perhaps the necessary heir had not come as quickly as he might have liked, but that was hardly her fault. And now, he needn’t worry about it. Thanks to an old Alis law, the heir did not need to be born from the eldest child or even the male heir. The first child born of the following generation became heir to the throne.
His sister was due any day now, and Evelyne’s son would be the future king. So Alexandre no longer needed to worry about producing an heir with Ines. His sister and his best friend had done it for him.
It had been a relief.
Not because it was any trial to bed his wife. Quite the opposite.Thatwas the problem. He did not have room for passion or interest orrelationshipsin his life. The kind of emotion that marked his parents was the kind that ruined kingdoms.
Alexandre would not stand for it.
Ines was meant to be his wife in name only…once she’d produced an heir. But an heir had not come. Doctors had assured him that there was nothing medically preventing either of them from conceiving a child. The doctor had advised him—and her—torelax.
Something Alexandre could only see as the enemy. Because if herelaxed, he could make a mistake. One that would harm his entire country. That would have been impossible enough before his father’s unlikely death three months ago.
Now? Relaxation would be the same as catastrophic. He hadyearsof work yet before he could fully ensure Alis was on the right track.
So the minute Evelyne had returned from her exile after Enzo’s death, pregnant with the Alis heir, Alexandre had stopped keeping his weekly…appointmentswith Ines.
They had not discussed it, but she had not mounted any kind of argument or asked him why he no longer came to her bedchamber on the assigned evenings. She let it slide.
This was the beauty of Ines. A good queen let things that did not matter slide.
So he was more than a little surprised to find his wife in his office this morning when he arrived. He glanced at his watch. She was not one to interrupt his daily routine.
