“Ah, good morning, Ines. I’m afraid I don’t have time to talk just now. I have an appointment.” And his concentration was already a bit scattered with the news Evelyne had gone into labor. This information had left him feeling…more on edge than he’d like.
He could remember the day Evelyne had been born more clearly than he liked. The hushed whispers. The screaming. The blood when he’d snuck himself into his mother’s room and she’d tasked him with saving the baby she’d birthed, the kingdom she left behind.
“Yes,” Ines agreed in the here and now. “I am your appointment.” She sat in the chair opposite his desk, dressed for a day of royal meetings. A trim suit in a vibrant blue. Her brown hair with hints of mahogany was pulled back in an elegant twist. She wore an exquisitely simple gold pendant around her neck, blue diamonds at her ears that matched the color of her eyes, and his wedding ring on her finger. Her left hand rested over the right in her lap, her ankles crossed and drawn slightly beneath her chair.
She really was quite perfect. In every picture, in every portrait, in every moment, Ines looked like a queen.
He did not allow himself to consider the rare moments he saw her mussed, her lips swollen from his. Those moments tended to threaten his necessary equilibrium. His required focus.
So he supposed she wasnotperfect. She could stand to be alittleduller. Perhaps she would not pop into his thoughts unbidden if he did not find her quite so beautiful. But a beautiful queen was something indeed, and to wish her duller was no wish for his kingdom, so he shoved that thought away.
He skirted his desk and took a seat so they were opposite each other. A bit like strangers.
In some ways, she was a stranger to him. He might know that she preferred cream in her coffee, lemon in her tea. He might even know what she looked like beneath her clothes—far too beautiful, small, soft, perfect—and what sounds she made in pleasure—haunting, really. But sometimes it struck him that he did not knowher.
She kept herself hidden behind a royal mask, just as he did. A good thing, Alexandre knew. A preferred thing. And still…sometimes he’d see her tucked away with Evelyne somewhere, laughing over something, and he’d have the strangest desire to want to know what it was about, what she found funny, what made her smile just like that.
But he did not have time for such things, and she was definitely not laughing this morning. “You’ve been avoiding being alone with me, and this discussion requires privacy,” she said directly. “So I made an appointment.”
There was no censure in her tone, but he felt it all the same. “I’m sure that wasn’t necessary.”
She regarded him coolly but did not argue. She let that lie slide, just as she did so many things. “I wish to speak to you about our…evening appointments.”
Alexandre did not care for what that worddidto him. Elicited physical responses and memories he tried to block out of any time he visited her bedchamber. Which had been far more than he’d anticipated, thinking atmostit would take a month or two to render her with child.
He blamed the frequency on how difficult it had been to stay away, when he’d known that was the best course of action.
He did not understand the feelings she brought out in him. They didn’t make sense. Nothing straightforward. Nothing black-and-white. A messiness. An uncontrollable cyclone of disparate things.
And messiness, a lack of control, these were all purviews of his father. The way his father had felt about his mother. Because no doubt the formidable King Enzo, happy to order people hung for small crimes and other such atrocities, had not known the meaning of love—although he had claimed to love his queen.
A love Alexandre had stolen from him, according to Enzo. A love that had destroyed everything in its wake.
And it was Alexandre’s job to fix all his father had destroyed. His mother had told him this with her last breath, so how could it be anything but the most simple and important truth?
Alexandre had to be on constant guard or he could not be the king required of his family and his country. A king who putthemabove all else.
Was this fair to him as a person? Of course not, but it was his role, his task. Thepersoncould not exist if the crown was meant to lead, protect, save.
So he could not worry himself over Evelyne—he had all the best doctors with her. He could not concern himself with how the appointments with Ines used to make him feel—they were done and over.
“I’m not sure this is something that requires a discussion,” Alexandre said stiffly. He did not attend suchappointmentsanymore because Alis had its heir in Evelyne’s soon-to-be child.
Concern jittered again in his chest, but he shoved it away. He had all the best doctors at her disposal. She would not meet the same fate as their mother had. He simply wouldn’t allow it.
Ines held his gaze. Her eyes were the same color blue as the diamonds at her ears and direct. “You have skipped the last three such appointments. You have given me no reason why this is the case. Therefore I would like to discuss it.”
She did not say this in any accusatory wayexactly. But she said it in a way that felt like he had performed some dereliction of duty, and she was the general here to hand out punishment.
He cleared his throat at the strange, uncomfortable uncertainty that settled inside his chest. A king did not have room for uncertainty. Certainly not when it came to his wife.
“I apologize for not being clearer,” he said, trying to trot out his regal tone and finding it fell a bit flat with her. Or maybe when discussingsexwith his wife in the necessary…vague terms. “With an heir now secured, we no longer need to…” He had no other words. Everything became a kind of odd blank.
Thiswas what Ines did to him sometimes. Turned him into a man he did not recognize. Who did not know how to proceed or protect. When everything—everything—rested on his ability to do both.
“This is not about an heir to the throne, Alexandre,” Ines returned. Her tone remained businesslike, her posture straight and regal. “I wish to be a mother regardless of where our child would fall in the royal hierarchy.”
He stared at her for a minute. He got the sense she’d been thinking about this for quite some time. Had practiced these words and this argument, and so it felt somehow like a betrayal. That she would upend his status quo so purposely.
