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His.

The reception dragged on, but she was having fun and he didn’t want to interrupt her. Didn’t want to take a single moment of this away from her.

When everyone finally left, the two of them walked back into the château.

“I just need a minute,” she said.

She vanished into the bathroom, and his stomach went tight, his whole body on red alert.

What would she come out wearing? That was the question.

He walked out of the room for a moment, taking off his jacket, undoing his cuffs. He went to the sideboard in the hallway, and opened up a cabinet, where he found what he had been looking for. Some liquor.

Anything would do.

As his bank account had grown he had begun to be a bit more choosy about his alcohol, but at the end of the day, he was the boy who had stolen a bottle of cooking sherry and done his best to get a buzz off of it with his only friend.

What fools they had been. They had thought they were grown even back then.

And in many ways, Adonis had been.

There were things that he had been through…

No. He wasn’t going to let those thoughts crowd him. Not now. Not now that he was here with Esme. Not now that he had promised her that he was going to be a husband to her.

He could do it. He had to put the past away once and for all. He had been wallowing in that, drowning in it as his attraction for Esme had grown, and it had pushed him to leave the company.

He was making the opposite choice now. She was right; it wasn’t something that would have happened without the pregnancy. But the pregnancy was happening now.

He poured a measure of whiskey in the tumbler, and knocked it back.

Something to bring his mind to the present. To force it off of everything else.

He took a breath, set the glass down on the sideboard and walked back into the room as he loosened his tie, and cast it onto the ground. Then he noticed that the bathroom door was open, and Esme was gone.

He peered inside and saw that her wedding dress was draped over the top of the shower.

She was nowhere to be seen.

Had she run away from him? Had all of this been a ruse so that she could get away from him?

Had she never really wanted this in the first place?

She was trapped. Young and trapped with him, and suddenly he saw it from that perspective, and hated himself.

What had he dragged her into?

And had she really thought that she had to comply with Alex and run away in order to be free?

On instinct, he raced over to the window, and then he stopped.

She was there in the garden, a little apparition floating on a swing down below. All in something white and flowy, though he knew it wasn’t that gown.

She hadn’t run away from him. But she wasn’t certain of him; that much was true.

If she were, she wouldn’t have put this much distance between them.

He finished unbuttoning his shirt, and shrugged it off. Then he walked out of the bedroom, down the stairs, following the same path he assumed she had out the door.