Page 15 of King's Heir of Hate

Leaving her was one of the hardest things he’d ever had to do. As was marrying her.

He felt like a starving man, but he took this unexpected moment of quiet between them to let himself just…lookat her. Her lovely dark eyes that had always contained too much to bear. Too much wisdom, too much love,too much. Her dark brows. Those marvelous cheekbones that made her face a true work of art. That gently bowed upper lip that he dreamed about, some nights. The dark hair she wore up in the front and let cascade down behind her, a mass of thick waves.

Tadeo could smell the sweetness of her shampoo from here. The hint of coconut. The touch of spun sugar.

The woman was a menace, and that stretchy, skimpy dress she wore was not helping any.

Her breasts were indeed bigger, rounder—and now he knew why. And that rounded belly made him feel… Tadeo told himself it didn’t matter what hefelt. What mattered was how hehandledthis.

That was all that ever mattered.

“You are so afraid of this thing between us,” she said, her soft voice breaking into his thoughts like a detonation.

Though he was surprised to find her gaze was directed toward the window, not at him. He thought that she was taking another swing at him, but instead, she turned her head and found him with those too-wise dark eyes once more. He thought he saw something like reproach there. Or maybe it was something deeper than that. Maybe she was simply letting him see it hurt her.

He felt his hands clench and forced himself to straighten out his fingers.

“You’re terrified,” Esme said, in her devastatingly quiet way, “and so you come up with all of these rules to keep it under wraps. But surely what happened five months ago should make it clear that hiding from something like this only makes it inevitable that it will burst out eventually. And now you are apparently trapped with me.”

She threw all of this at him in that way she did, using that outrageouscalmshe could pull out at will—though Tadeo knew she would probably claim that he was the one with armor.

“So what now?” she asked when he said nothing, and her dark brows rose like an indictment. “Do you shove it back down, hide it away in one of your little locked rooms, and hope for the best? Because it’s been ten years now, Tadeo. The chemistry between us hasn’t gotten any less intense since the day we met. In fact, I’d say it’s going in the opposite direction.”

He reminded himself—again—that he was the king. He had a duty to his people, one made more complicated by the damage his mother had done to the royal family’s reputation. Everything he did was a restoration project, aimed at rehabilitating the family in his people’s eyes—up to and including the fairy-tale wedding to the princess from the neighboring kingdom that had already been considered a love story for a quarter of a century by the time they got married.

The divorce he’d planned would have taken all of that into account.

But he wouldn’t be any kind of a king—or much of a man—if he couldn’t pivot when necessary.

“I’ve already thought of our problematic chemistry,” he said.

“How shocking that you consider itproblematic.”

Tadeo should not have been pleased, somewhere down deep, that she was clearly recovered. “Seeing what you did to theQueen’s Manor, a historic site that is meant to be a legacy upheld by every queen lucky enough to live there—”

“It’s a house,” Esme said. With excessive calm, to his ear. “It doesn’t know that it’s historic. It doesn’t care what color its walls are. It’s amazing to me, Tadeo, that for a man so allergic to emotion, you certainly do manage to find it in the strangest places.”

He wanted to jump on that. He wanted to argue. But that was what she wanted him to do, he knew that.

Instead, he stood there above her, glowering down at this bane of his existence. He knew that it had been ten years. He’d been there. But it was somehow exposing to hear her say it. Ten years of the problem that was Esme and now she was pregnant.

And he was no more in control of himself in her presence than he ever had been.

Tadeo had thought about a lot of things last night, because he hadn’t slept at all. He had worked until he had to accept defeat, because he wasn’t processing anything effectively and certainly not at the level he should have been. He’d gone to his private gym and had pushed himself to muscle failure as many times as he could in the hope it would put him to sleep.

But all it had done was make him tired enough that his defenses were down. It didn’t do a damn thing but give him more time and space to think about this mess.

“You have spent the past seven years developing a regal persona that is, as I know you are aware, the envy of Europe,” he told her now.

She gave him one of her best queenly smiles. “If I must be damned by faint praise, so be it.”

He pushed on. “Instead of accepting my decision about how our marriage should operate, or even simply acknowledging that it is whatIneed whether you agree with it or not, you havealways mounted this passive-aggressive campaign of yours in private.”

“Oh no,” Esme said, shaking her head. “I don’t think that’s a fair characteristic at all. I haven’t been the least bit passive.”

He ignored that. “What I did not realize until I saw the outrage you have visited upon the manor house is that you are as poisoned with emotion as ever. And, apparently, incapable of finding appropriate outlets—as I have.”

She let out a laugh at that. “As you have,” she repeated. “Do you haveoutlets, Tadeo? Really? Because I rather thought you shut everything off and stormed about like a computer program brought to life and in search of an algorithm.”