‘Are you basing that on blind faith, or have you been reading the tea leaves again?’ She stopped and grimaced, instantly ashamed of her outburst. ‘Sorry. I… I’m a bit nervous about this.’
He reached out and curled his hand around hers, drawing it onto his lap. His action was so unexpected that for a moment all she could do was stare at his strong fingers, dark against her pale skin.
Her emotional reaction to his action was way over the top, she knew that, but she had no control over the tears that began to spill down her cheeks.
She pulled her hand free, mumbling, ‘Hormones,’ as she sniffed and dashed the moisture away with the back of her hand.
He could feel the tension rolling off her in waves; he felt a stab of guilt that his first reaction was to pretend he couldn’t.
‘Try and relax.’
She shot him a look; did he think this was easy? Perhaps he did, and why wouldn’t he? In the past this was the point she would have nodded and hidden her nerves under a smile.
‘This is me trying—I promise you.’
‘You know what to expect this time.’
‘That’s the problem…’ Panic closed her throat.
A wave of emotion moved through him as he watched her struggle, and he had no defence against the uncomfortable mixture of tenderness and guilt that stirred inside him as he looked into her beautiful unhappy eyes.
How many times had he made her unhappy?
Bea turned her head away, her thoughts drifting back to Dante’s comments about his brother. ‘I like Carl.’ Although Dante was right, there was a tiny part of her that did blame Carl.
Carl doesn’t want to be King.
The sentence that had changed her life, but at the time it had elicited a muted but sympathetic response from her. She remembered thinking that she could not imagine what it was like to have your life mapped out from birth.
‘I am supporting his decision.’
‘His decision?’
‘He is renouncing his title and his claim to the throne.’
Still she hadn’t got what he was telling her. ‘Is that even possible? What will he do?’
‘Be happy.’
She had got a horrible feeling in her stomach at that moment that his happiness might come at a cost, and she’d been proved right.
She sighed, feeling petty and mean-spirited. She did not normally struggle with empathy, but when it came to the erstwhile Crown Prince he would be linked in her head forever with losing Dante on the heels of losing their baby. But then you couldn’t lose what you’d never had.
‘If it helps, I will be able to be there more than—’
Her glance swivelled his way, and she arched an enquiring brow.
‘More than I was. There were a lot of people waiting for me to fail.’ The admission seemed drawn from him almost against his will.
Beatrice stared. He had never said anything like that to her before. He sounded almost…vulnerable?
‘We made this baby together, and we will make decisions about this baby together. I want to make this work.’
She swallowed. ‘So do I.’
He nodded and sat back in his seat just as the convoy of armoured limousines, the metallic paint catching the sun, finally drove along a wide chestnut tree–lined boulevard that dissected the capital city of San Macizo. The strict development laws meant there were no skyscrapers to compete with the old historic buildings.
There were modern buildings, the glass fronts reflecting back images, but they blended in seamlessly with the old. Traces of the historic waves of invasion and occupation were everywhere. The eclectic mix extended to culture and food—the capital featured highly on international foodies’ wish lists.