‘I’m not sure…’ Sadness settled across her features. Their first pregnancy had not lasted long enough for it to be a question she had been asked. ‘Will the sex matter?’ she asked, pushing the sadness away. She knew it would never go away, and she knew it was all right to feel it, but she didn’t want it to overshadow the miracle that was happening to her body now.
‘Matter?’
‘I mean, can a female succeed to the throne?’
Her eyes widened with shock as she saw his hand move towards her; she gave a little gasp as he placed his hand on her flat belly. ‘By the time it matters to this one’s future, she will.’
His hand fell away, and she wanted to put it back. A dangerous shiver ran through her body as warning bells clanged in her ears.
‘You intend to change things.’
‘Baby steps.’
This time the words did not injure; they made her smile.
The lines around his eyes crinkled, totally disarming her fragile defences, which were jolted back into life when he angled his head towards the curving staircase with the elaborate wrought-iron balustrade that led to their private apartments that stretched along the first floor of this wing.
‘I actually think tonight is a good idea. I’m going to see your parents at some point. It might as well be now.’ Meeting them in company would hopefully limit their ability to make snide digs. After all, appearances were everything in this household. ‘What time…?’
‘An hour?’
Dante stopped with his back to the glass-fronted lift and nodded towards the staircase. He knew that Beatrice was not keen on enclosed spaces and would walk up a heart-stopping number of steps to avoid a lift. ‘After you, you know the way.’
‘Which room?’ she began and stopped, her eyes flying wide as his meaning hit home. ‘I’m in our…your room?’ she blurted. It was only seconds before a flush began to work its way up her neck.
Their room, but he would have long vacated it.
He was probably trying one of those suitable candidates for size in another room?
The images that accompanied the possibilities made her feel nauseous and then mad because she had been suffering and celibate and it only seemed fair that he should have been too. But then life here had never been fair or balanced; it worried her that she needed to remind herself.
‘I never got around to moving my things out.’
The warning made her freeze. ‘You mean you’re still…!’ She would have laughed outright at the suggestion that he would have been personally involved in any moving if his comment hadn’t raised a number of issues. Mainly, was he assuming that they would be sharing the room? She could see how spending the night with him in the ski chalet might have led to this assumption.
‘Your things are still there.’
The casual throwaway information added another layer of confusion. It could’ve been a housekeeping error, except such a thing did not exist inside the palace walls.
There was literally an army of people that would have made it possible for her to wake up in the morning and not have to do a single thing for herself right up to the end of the day.
There was always someone hovering, ready to relieve you of the burden of tying your own shoelace should you find that a bore, or too tiresome. It had been one of the royal things that she’d never got the hang of. She simply couldn’t ask someone to perform a task that she was more than capable of completing herself, and she couldn’t for the life of her see how it was demeaning to be seen making her own sandwich or washing out her own tights, but both had been activities that had been frowned on.
She had expected Dante to laugh with her at the sheer absurdity of people having so much time on their hands that they thought sandwich-making was a sin worth passing up the chain of command when she told him about her sugar-coated reprimand—the sugar had made it so much less, not more, acceptable—but he had just looked at her with a frown indenting his forehead.
‘Can’t you just go with the flow for once? Is it really worth the argument?’
It was the moment she had realised that they had stopped laughing at the same things. Actually Dante had stopped laughing altogether—that Dante had gone forever. Sometimes she wondered if he had ever really existed.
There was sadness and regret in the shaded look she angled up at his lean face.
‘It’s your room. I’ll take one of the others.’
‘It was our room,’ he said without emphasis. ‘You might as well take it. I think you’ll find most of your things where you left them.’ Nobody had questioned his instructions to touch nothing, not even him, though now he might have to face the question that he had avoided because Beatrice was going to.
He’d kept telling himself that he’d get around to it, that he didn’t like the idea of someone else touching Beatrice’s things, but somehow it was a task he’d kept putting off.
He didn’t sleep there any more; he slept, the little he did, on a couch in his office. Not because he was avoiding anything. It was a matter of convenience.