Easy to say, easy to think, but less easy when every time he touched her something inside her said it was right.
Then don’t let him touch you!
Cutting off her increasingly desperate internal dialogue, Beatrice cleared her throat to give herself time to think of a next move that would manage to convey that last night didn’t mean she wasn’t totally over him. An action that wouldn’t draw attention to the skin-prickling awareness and the warm pelvic heaviness.
A next move that established that she could walk away just as easily as he could after satisfying a primal itch. That he wasn’t the only one who could compartmentalise his life.
‘Last night was—’
His deep voice, the edges iced with impatience, cut across her before she could establish anything. ‘Considering you are standing there huddled in a sheet, acting like some outraged virgin, I’m taking that you regret last night as a given.’
The accusing note in his voice brought a tinge of angry colour to her cheeks.
‘That’s really astute of you,’ she drawled sarcastically. Where Dante was concerned her virginal outrage had always been zero, even when she’d had a right to the title. She had had no qualms about giving him her virginity, though he had been a lot less relaxed about receiving the unexpected gift.
‘Do you regret marrying me?’ Asking the second time did not make it any clearer to him why her answer mattered to him…except to lessen his guilt, maybe?
The irony was not lost on him. There could be few people who had spent a life where guilt featured less heavily… His upper lip curled in a bleak smile.
If he’d been a man who believed in karma he might think that his present situation was Fate’s way of making him pay for an empty life of utter hedonism. Where the only way was the easy way. Having once rejected the concept of duty, now he was ruled by it.
He’d imagined that he was doing the right thing when he had proposed, never for one moment asking himself what the right thing was for Beatrice. He’d been the one making the ultimate sacrifice. Unwilling to own his thoughts, jaw clenched, he pushed out a breath through flared nostrils.
She blinked, her long lashes brushing the smooth curve of her cheeks like butterfly wings. ‘There’s no point regretting, is there?’
‘Which means you do.’ Did she ever ask herself if things might have ended differently if their baby had clung to life and not simply been a heartbeat that had vanished from the screen?
His guts tightened like an icy fist as the memory surfaced of the doctor relaying the news alongside the information that the baby had just faded away.
He had been consumed by a devastation that had felt as if he were being swallowed up. It had made no sense. He’d never wanted children—hadn’t wanted a child.
‘I’m looking forwards.’
His glance lifted as his thoughts shifted back to the present moment.
The intensity of his stare made Bea lose her thread, but after a momentary pause she managed to regain control and her defiance.
‘The past is done and gone. I’m not interested in revisiting—’ She felt the sheet slip and yanked it up. As she did the colour seeping under her skin deepened the golden-toned glow as the irony of what she was about to claim hit her. Sometimes honesty, wise or not, was the best, or only, policy.
Her shoulders lowered as the defensive antagonism drained away, exposing the vulnerability that lay beneath. Dante looked away but not before he felt something twist hard in his chest.
‘I have a lot of lovely memories that I will always treasure. I’m just not as realistic as you are sometimes.’ She bit down on her quivering lower lip before the emotion took her over.
A spasm played across the surface of his symmetrical features that had more than once been called too perfect. ‘Maybe I have lower expectations… You should try it, Beatrice. Less disappointment in life,’ he suggested harshly.
‘You want me to be as cynical as you are? That’s a big ask, Dante.’
Heavy eyelids at half mast, his eyes gleaming, he quirked his mobile lips into a mocking smile that invited her to share his joke as their eyes connected. ‘You call it cynicism. I call it realism, and it’s all about baby steps, cara.’
It wasn’t just her expression that froze, time did too. He could almost hear the seconds count down before her lashes came down in a protective sweep, but not before he had seen the hurt shimmer in her eyes.
Jaw clenched, he silently cursed himself. Of course he knew the self-recrimination might have been of more use if it had come sooner. Like when the loss of their baby had become not a personal tragedy, but one debated by palace mandarins and sources close to the throne.
It had come as no surprise to him—he’d known the moment his brother stepped away from the throne what lay ahead for him. But to Beatrice it must have felt like an alternative universe.
She waited for the toddler in her head with Dante’s eyes to take his first faltering steps before she let the image go and looked up, ignoring the ache inside her. Dante didn’t meet her eyes—maybe he was thinking about the practicalprincess he would replace her with…the one that could give him babies.
The babies she had tried so hard to give him; ten months of married life within the palace walls and ten months of waiting and hoping, then the awful inevitable sense of failure.