BACK TURNED TO HIM, Beatrice tightened the sash before she turned, doing her best to not notice the molten gleam in his eyes as he watched her cinch the belt a little tighter.
She tilted her chin to a defiant angle and tossed her hair back from her face before tucking it behind her ears as she stomped over the sheet, her pearly painted toenails looking bright against the pale painted boards scattered with rustic rugs.
Despite the snow that had begun to fall again outside, the temperature was if anything too warm, thanks no doubt to the massive cast-iron radiator that didn’t seem to respond to the thermostat.
Pretty much the way her internal thermostat ignored instructions when Dante was in the vicinity.
‘You were the one who was hung up on that.’
The claim made her want to throw something at him.
‘You were never irrelevant. A pain in the...but never irrelevant,’ he drawled, unable to stop his eyes drifting over the long sensual flow of her body outlined under the silk. ‘Have I seen that before? It brings out the colour of your eyes.’ Which were so blue he’d initially assumed that she wore contact lenses.
She sketched a tight smile. ‘It’s been six months. I’ve added a few things to my wardrobe. You probably have a list somewhere.’
‘Six months since you left, Beatrice. I didn’t ask you to go.’
She’d left. It was not an option for him; he could never walk. He was trapped, playing a part. He would be for the rest of his life. Typecast for perpetuity as a person he would never be.
Beatrice felt her anger spark, the old resentments stir. He made it sound so simple, and leaving had been the hardest thing she had ever done. How much simpler it would have been if she had stopped loving him, how much simpler it was for him because he never had loved her, not really.
It was a truth she had always known, a truth she had buried deep.
‘You didn’t try and stop me.’
‘Did you want me to?’
‘Even if I had got pregnant, a baby shouldn’t be used to paper over the cracks in a relationship, which is why this can’t happen again.’
‘This...?’
‘This, as in you turning up and...’ She caught her eyes drifting to his mouth and despaired as she felt the flush of desire whoosh through her body. This need inside her frightened her; she didn’t want to feel this way. ‘I think in the future any communications should be through our solicitors,’ she concluded, struggling to keep her voice clear of her inner desperation, making it as cold as she could.
Dante felt something tighten in his chest that he refused to recognise as loneliness, as he pushed back fragments of memories that flashed in quick succession through his head. The tears in his brother’s eyes as he said sorry, the coldness in his parents’ eyes as they informed him that the future of the royal family rested on his shoulders.
‘So, you don’t think that exes can be friends.’
Her hard little laugh sounded unlike the full, throatier, uninhibited laugh he remembered. A few weeks into their marriage and she hadn’t laughed at all.
‘This isn’t friendship, Dante. Friends share.’
Share, she said. He almost laughed. The last thing he had wanted to do was share when he was with Beatrice. He had wanted to forget. He didn’t want to prove himself to his wife; he was proving himself to everyone else.
For the first time in his life Dante had been experiencing fear of failure, something so alien to him that it had taken him some time to identify it. Worse than the weakness was the idea of Beatrice seeing those fears, looking at him differently... He knew the look. He had seen it every day and he couldn’t have borne it.
He had seen that look in the eyes of the team who had been put in place to coordinate his own repackaging, even while they told him they had total confidence in him, before asking him to embrace values that he had long ago rejected. They appealed to his sense of duty.
The real shock, at least to him, was that he possessed one. He’d spent his life trying to forget the early lessons on duty and service, but it seemed that they had made a lasting impression.
He didn’t share this insight, unwilling to give anyone the leverage this weakness would have afforded them. Instead he listened and then worked towards cutting the team down to three people he could work with.
He would have liked to get rid of the lot, but he was a realist. It had taken his brother a lifetime to recognise what he had grasped in weeks wearing the mantle of Crown Prince. You really couldn’t have it all, you had to make sacrifices.
His glance narrowed in on Beatrice’s lovely face. What you were prepared to sacrifice was the question.
‘I can’t be half in, half out, Dante, it’s not...fair. It’s cruel...’ she quivered out.
His glance flickered across the lovely, anguished features of the woman he had married. Finally seeing sense was how his father had reacted when he had broken the news that they were splitting up.
‘She has come to her senses. Beatrice is leaving me.’
Dante had pushed the fact home that this was her choice, though not adding that fighting the decision was about the only noble thing he had done in his life. Lucky for him nobility was not a prerequisite for the job of King-in-waiting, unlike hypocrisy.
He knew that he ought not to be feeling this rage, this sense of betrayal. Their marriage had been about a child, then there was no child. Beatrice’s decision had been the logical one. He could not see why it had shocked him so much.
Most successful marriages owed their longevity to mutual convenience and laziness, or, as in his parents’ case, they were business arrangements, two people living parallel lives that occasionally touched. This was not something that Beatrice could ever understand.
In the end, the official line had been trial separation, while behind-the-scenes lists of replacements were drawn up for when the trial was officially made permanent.
He wasn’t much interested in the lists, or the names of those that were added, or deleted after a skeleton emerged from their blue-blooded closet.
One suitable bride was much the same as another to him, though he wondered if the woman who had been chosen to share the throne with his brother, and had unwittingly been his brother’s tipping point, had been included. He could not remember her face or name, just that she belonged to one of the few minor European royal families he and Carl were not related to.
Carl had choked before it was made official, choosing to step away from the lie and his life...because though San Macizo was considered progressive, the idea of an openly gay ruler unable to provide an heir was not something that could be negotiated.
His option had been walk away, or live a lie.
Dante had wondered whether, if the situations had been reversed, he would have shown as much strength as his brother.
One of the things that had struck him, after his initial shock at the revelations, was that he was shocked that he really hadn’t seen it coming. When his brother had revealed his sexual orientation and his deep unhappiness, Dante hadn’t had a clue. But then he never had been much interested in anyone’s life but his own, he acknowledged with a spasm of self-disgust.
There was an equal likelihood that he hadn’t recognised his brother’s struggles because it really wouldn’t have suited him to see them.
His glance zeroed in on Beatrice’s face, the soft angles, the purity of profile, the glow that was there despite the unhappiness in her eyes. Just as he had tried not to see Beatrice was unhappy.
‘And you’re out.’ His shoulders lifted in a seemingly negligent shrug. ‘Fair enough.’
She blinked, hard thrown by his response, a small irrational part of her irked that he wasn’t fighting. ‘You agree?’
‘I already did. We are getting divorced, so relax, things are in hand,’ he drawled.
‘Are they?’ Yesterday she’d have agreed but yesterday she hadn’t been breathing the same air as Dante. Since then she had been tested and had come face to face with her total vulnerability, her genetic weakness where he was concerned.
‘It’s in everyone’s best interests for this to happen. We’re all on the same page here.’
‘Pity the same couldn’t be said for our marriage.’
It shouldn’t have hurt that he didn’t deny it, but it did.
Her decision to leave had been greeted with thinly disguised universal relief, which gave a lie to the myth that divorce didn’t happen in the Velazquez family. It made her wonder if there had been others before her who had been airbrushed from royal history.
‘I don’t think anyone expected it to last, not even you...?’
Dante shrugged and deflected smoothly. ‘I never expected to get married. I think it has a very different meaning for us both.’
In his family marriage was discussed in the same breath as airport expansion, or hushing the scandal of a minister who had pushed family values being caught in a compromising position, and the latest opinion poll on the current popularity of the royal family—it was business.
His heart had always been shielded by cynicism, which he embraced, but maybe it was the same cynicism that had left him with no defence against the emotional gut punch that Beatrice and her pregnancy had been.
‘You’re right.’ He unfolded his long lean length and stood there oblivious to his naked state before casually bending to retrieve items of clothing, throwing them on the bed before he began to dress.
She couldn’t not look; his body was so perfect, his most mundane action coordinated grace. She just wished her appreciation could be purely aesthetic; just looking made her feel hungry and ashamed in equal measure.
‘I am?’ she said, the practical, sane portion of her mind recognising this was a good thing, the irrational, emotional section wanting him to argue.
He turned as he pulled up his trousers over his narrow hips, his eyes on her face as his long fingers slid his belt home.
‘Our lives touched but now—’ Touched but nearly not connected—maybe it had been the sheer depth of his reaction that had made him show restraint, and it had required every ounce of self-control he possessed not to seek the glorious woman with endless legs and golden skin he had seen across the crowded theatre foyer, or at least find out her name...but he had walked away.
When, days later, he had found himself in the front row of the catwalk show of the hottest designer of the season with...he really couldn’t remember who he had arrived with, but he could remember every detail of the tall blonde under the spotlight drifting past, hands on her hips, oozing sex in a way that had sent a collective shiver of appreciation around the audience. She had been wearing an outfit that was intended to be androgynous but on her it really hadn’t been—it had felt like Fate.
He had allowed his companion to drag him to the sort of back-slapping, self-congratulatory, booze-fuelled backstage party that he would normally have avoided, where he got to know her name, Beatrice, and the fact she had already left.
His companion, already disgruntled by the lack of attention, had stayed as he’d run out of the place...in the grip of an urgency that he hadn’t paused to analyse.
An image of her face as he’d seen it that day supplanted itself across her features. She’d stood too far away then for him to see the sprinkling of freckles across her nose. But they’d been visible later, when he had literally almost knocked her down on the steps of the gallery where the fashion show had been held. She’d looked younger minus the sleeked hair and the crazy, exaggerated eye make-up and he had decided in that second that there was such a thing as Fate—he had stopped fighting it. Never before had he felt so utterly transfixed by a woman.
She didn’t fit into any stereotype he had known. She was fresh and funny and even the fact she’d turned out to be virgin territory, which ought to have made him run for the hills, hadn’t.
A clattering noise from downstairs cut into his reminisces and made Beatrice jump guiltily.
‘How is Maya?’ he asked.
‘People are finally recognising her artistic talent.’
Her sister might think that talent spoke for itself but Beatrice knew that wasn’t the case. That was where she came in. She had done night classes in marketing during her time modelling, while everything she’d earned during that period had gone into their start-up nest egg for their own eco-fashion range.
Dante grunted, in the act of fighting his way into his shirt. Beatrice willed her expression calm as his probing gaze moved across her face.
‘Will you be all right?’
‘I’ll be fine.’ She would be; she wasn’t going to let her Dante addiction of a few months define her or the rest of her life. She had accepted that it would be painful for a while, but she was a resilient person by nature, strong. Everyone said so.
So it must be true.
When her dad had died people had said how strong she was, what a rock she was. Then when Mum had married Edward she had been there for Maya, who had been the target of their stepfather’s abuse. For a time, she had been the only one who had seen what the man was doing, because there had been nothing physical involved as he had begun to systematically destroy her sister’s self-esteem and confidence.
For a while their mother had chosen the man she had married over her daughters, believing his lies, letting him manipulate her, controlling every aspect of her life. It had been a bad time and for a long time Beatrice, more judgemental than her sister, had struggled to forgive her mother her weakness.
The irony was that marriage to Dante had shown her that the same weakness was in her, the same flaw. Dante hadn’t lied, which perhaps made her self-deception worse. She had wanted to believe he was something he wasn’t, that they had something that didn’t exist.
She pushed away the memories, focusing on the fact that she and Maya had forgiven their mother; their bond had survived and so had they. Now all they both wanted was their happily divorced mum to stop feeling so guilty.
‘And how are your parents?’ She felt obliged to enquire but could not inject any warmth into the cool of her voice.
‘Pretty much the same.’
She lifted her brows in an acknowledgement as the memory of that first-night dinner in the palace with his parents flashed into her head. The shoulder-blade-aching tension in the room had taken her appetite away, and, if it hadn’t, the unspoken criticisms behind the comments directed her way by the King and Queen would have guaranteed she was going to bed hungry.
And alone.
It had been two in the morning before she’d sat up at the sound of Dante’s tread. She remembered that waiting, checking the time every few minutes. In the strange room, strange bed, in a strange country it had felt longer.
She had switched on the bedside light.
‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you.’
She remembered so clearly the empathy that had surged through her body when she saw the grey hue of exhaustion on his normally vibrantly toned skin. Her throat tightened now as she remembered just wanting to hold him. If that day had been tough for her, she had told herself, it must have been a hundred times worse for Dante.
‘I wasn’t asleep,’ she’d said as he’d come to sit on the side of the bed.
‘You were waiting up.’
She’d shaken her head at the accusation. ‘You look so tired.’ She’d run a hand over the stubble on his square jaw—he even made haggard look sexy as hell.
‘Not too tired.’ She remembered the cool of his fingers as he’d caught the hand she had raised to his cheek and pulled her into him, his whisky-tinged breath warm and on his mouth as he’d husked against her lips, ‘I just want to...bury myself in you.’
She pushed away the memories that were too painful now. They reminded her of her own wilful stupidity—for her that night it had gone beyond physical release. Dante had always taken her to a sensual heaven, but this connection had gone deeper, she had told herself as she’d lain later, her damp, cooling body entwined in his, tears of emotion too intense to name leaking from the corners of her eyes. She had felt so...complete.
But it had been a lie, her lie, and the cracks had started to appear almost immediately—before their heated, damp bodies had finished cooling in the velvet darkness.