Luckily there were so many pains inside of him vying for purchase this one did not cut him off at the knees.
“Would you tell me about her?” Ines asked quietly.
“I hardly remember her,” Alexandre lied.
“By all accounts she was wonderful. The antithesis to your father. I would like to know about that. My mother… Perhaps my mother was not always the way I know her. But for as long as I can remember she dulled everything with whatever substance she could find. And I think my father preferred it that way.” She finally looked away from the stone, up at him. Her blue eyes a vivid blue—that the tears in them seemed to bring out. “I want a role model to look up to.”
He did not know what this was. He understood she might be upset with him for his behavior in the office this morning, but what did that have to do with his mother? With their child?
“What do you remember of her?” she prodded. The tears, the emotion in her didn’t seem to disrupt her determination.
“Very little.”
She sighed heavily, and she soundedtired. “Alex.”
Darling, what’s the matter?She’d asked him that as though she could fix it. Everything that was the matter. But she would fix nothing. And neither would he if he leaned on her.
It would all end in blood and death and bludgeons needlessly used against each other.
“I do not wish to rehash my memories of the mother I lost, Ines,” he said curtly. “Why are you pushing this?” Always pushing at the things he needed to stay locked away.
“I want to understand.”
I don’t understand you.She’d said that when he’d brought her back here. When she’d kissed him outside her room after running away formonths.
But he figured that was only fair, since he didn’t understand her at all.
Except he wasn’t poking intoherpain. “You think you will find some…childhood trauma that you will—what? Fix?”
She shook her head sadly. “No, of course not.”
“Then, I do not see the purpose of this.”
“I can’t want to understand you?”
“There is nothing to understand beyond the fact I am the king of Alis.” He had truly believed she’d understood this. For almost a year she had, and he could not fathom what had changed. What he had done wrong for all of this to come crumbling around him.
Except he had done nothing, changed nothing.Shehad been the agent of all change. If she had not pushed for an annulment, if she had not run away, if she did not continue to push at him to behave differently than he knew heshould—walks in gardens, spending the night in her bed, sex in hisoffice—they would not be having these conversations. He would not be inturmoil.
“I know you wish that were true, but it isn’t,” Ines said quietly. “You can’tbea crown, Alex. You are a man. A man with a wife and a child on the way.”
“A queen and a prince or princess.”
Her expression hardened at that. “We are not our titles. However you see yourself, you will not reduce me to atitle. Apawn.”
“Fine, butIam a title. I will always be. This is fact. Not a point to be argued.”
She blew out a frustrated breath. Good. Better frustrated than soft. Better they argue about titles than hismother.
“Do you want our child to be raised the way you were?” she asked him.
He could see it so clearly. Standing in that doorway as his father pounded his fists into his mother’s dead body, Evelyne crying down the hall as the nurses tended to a child without a mother.
But no one had tended to him, so he’d watched a nightmare.
“No,” he rasped out. He did not want that for his child. Didn’t she see he was trying to protect themallfrom that?
“I do not want them raised the way I was either. I want something different for our child. But we are responsible for building that, Alex.”
