Page 30 of King's Heir of Hate

“Are you expecting to meet someone here?” Tadeo asked, sounding amused.

“My parents.” She smiled up at him. “They are the King and Queen of Clarebonne, after all. I feel certain they are on the guest list.”

“They didn’t tell you?” He looked confused.

“Why would they tell me?” She shook her head at him, though she didn’t think he was joking. “Gone are the days when the Clarebonne palace kept me apprised of the King and Queen’s movements.”

“I thought you said you spoke to your mother every day.”

“I do.” Esme frowned at him. “We don’t talk about work, generally.”

Again, Tadeo looked as if he couldn’t quite comprehend what she was saying. “Then what do you talk about?”

Esme didn’t get a chance to answer him, because he was swept into conversation with some other heads of state. But she couldn’t stop thinking about what that question revealed. About what it suggested about his relationships with his parents. With his father, most of all.

Had they evernottalked about work?

She moved through the grand ballroom, smiling and clasping hands with many of the people she recognized as she went. And she recognized almost everyone. It was all quite lovely, and in some cases decidedly not lovely—that was part of the fun of these events, she always thought—and either way, she found herself smiling far more genuinely when she saw the people she was looking for standing over near an alcove.

Her mother saw her a few moments later as she drew near, and Queen Luisa’s practiced, regal smile turned into something far more personal, wide and happy, at the sight of her daughter.

Then her gaze dropped to Esme’s belly and her smile dropped. It became a gasp. Then she tugged on her husband’s arm in a complete violation of all known protocol, yanking his attention away from the earnest Dutch minister he was speaking with.

And when Esme finally reached them, they were both talking a mile a minute, hugging her close and already making noises at her baby belly. Then even more noises when she told them it was a boy.

For a while, there was nothing but that. This outpouring of emotion, so pure and so happy, that it took Esme a few extra moments to realize how much she’d missed it.

How inured she’d become to the empty shell of Bellaza. And her less empty, but still decidedly cold husband—

But that made her heart hurt all over again, and she didn’t want tohurt. Not now. Not while her parents were here and felt like a long dose of sunlight after an endless winter.

“You have been holding out on us,” her father, King Alain, said sternly, though his dark eyes danced.

“I have been,” Esme confessed.

“I’m sure she had her reasons,” said her mother at once, because Queen Luisa never had and never would waste an opportunity to champion her daughter. No matter what.

Tonight, Esme couldn’t help but wonder who had ever championed Tadeo.

That made her heart ache too.

When her father’s attention was reclaimed by the Dutch minister, Luisa linked her arm through Esme’s and hugged her close.

“I’m so happy for you, my darling,” she said in her musical way. “But at such a happy time, what I cannot understand is why your eyes are so sad.”

Esme felt all her breath go out of her in a rush. She felt both exposed and seen, her mother’s specialty. It felt like a kind of nostalgia. Like a perfect hug she knew would end. “Notsad,” she said after a moment, when she was sure her voice would not sound the least bit rough or choked. “It’s more complicated than that.”

Queen Luisa studied her daughter for a moment, then turned her attention to the crowd before them. She kept her arm linked with Esme’s as her own gaze took on a faraway look.

“You know that Queen Marisol and I were friends, do you not?” But that was not really a question, Esme knew. This was a story. And that she’d invoked the name of the scandalous Marisol, the much-maligned mother of Tadeo, had Esme immediately riveted. “Long before she was the Queen of Bellaza, she was a childhood friend. We grew up together, I suppose you could say, and spent several summers in our youth doing the same circuit of house parties with the sorts of people our parents wanted us to know, outside of the glare of the headlines.” Her smile was mysterious, but all she said was, “I got to know her rather well.”

“No one speaks of her in the palace,” Esme said softly.

Her mother made a low noise. “I am not surprised.”

“When she does come up, it is never a pleasant conversation.”

Luisa made a humming sort of noise. Esme knew that sound. It was her elegant way or dissenting without succumbing to a vulgar snort or a laugh.