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“When is a trial too much?” she managed to ask. “I don’t know how I would begin to measure.”
“Did you learn this kind of wit in the orphanage?” Zeus’s voice was mild, and yet still a caress. “I know you didn’t learn it while at the mercy of Isabeau the humorless.”
“It’s a natural talent,” Nina found herself saying. “Not everyone can be born into a royal family. Some of us really do have to rely on our wits.”
He was toying with his food almost absently, but his gaze was intent. And on her. “What warms my heart is the notion that we will be having this conversation for the rest of our lives.”
She felt that same surge of instant denial rush through her, but she caught herself.
This was Zeus of Theosia. He lived to be provoking. Letting him succeed in provoking her was letting him win. And she might have been carrying his child, but she had no intention of letting him win anything. Not if she could help it.
She was determined that she could.
“You’re going to have to explain your reasoning to me.” She lowered her gaze to her plate and took up a forkful of rice laden with spices. “Six months ago you engineered a ridiculous French farce of a setup to get out of one marriage. Why would you want to jump into another?”
“I consider myself several steps above a French farce, thank you,” he said reproachfully. But his green eyes were gleaming, brighter than any lantern or string of lights. “Perhaps I have finally seen the error of my ways.”
“I doubt that very much.”
“I do rather like the error of my ways, now that you mention it,” he said. “It could be that as my father grows ever more frail, I am filled with a sudden burst of filial devotion and wish to give him what he’s always wanted—a wife and a child. One-stop shopping.”
“That’s almost sweet.” Nina smiled at him. Sharply. “Which is how I know that’s not your motivation.”
“I shall have the palace’s legal team deliver the relevant proclamations to your bedchamber,” he told her. “I think you should find them interesting reading. The crux of the matter, I’m afraid, is that I don’t have to offer you any explanation at all.”
“Very well,” Nina said and shrugged. She returned her attention to her food.
And, because she’d been raised in a harder school than this, she proceeded to ignore him as she tasted all the various dishes he’d arranged on her plate. The flavors were as bright as the lights above her, but she could hardly take them in.
Because Zeus lounged there beside her, simmering with intensity and entirely too male. She couldn’t pretend she wasn’t aware of him. At least not to herself. She was hardly aware of anything else. Still, she ate her dinner as if she was entirely on her own, gazing out over the sea as a tender moon began to rise.
And she would have carried on in the same vein, because he was apparently prepared to sit there in brooding silence for as long as she could maintain hers, but the baby began kicking again. Extra hard, so that she had to stop and press her hand against the point of impact.
She didn’t even mean to look at Zeus while she did it, but she couldn’t seem to help herself. And she found an arrested sort of expression in those deep green eyes.
“The baby’s kicking,” she told him, though she immediately questioned why she was telling him anything. It would have been far easier to say nothing and keep on doing what she was doing. Far less intimate, anyway. Because though she would have told a stranger on the bus that the baby was kicking, it was something else again to tell the man who’d helped make that baby.
Or maybe it was just that the man was him.
It was something about how green his eyes were, perhaps. Or how, just for a moment, she got a glimpse of the man she thought she’d seen that long-ago night.
Nina didn’t like to think about that night in such detail. She’d been confused, that was all. That was the sort of thing that happened when a person accidentally fell into the arms of a notoriously wicked prince, proceeded to give him her virginity, and then stayed up the rest of the night—very nearly every moment of it—compounding the error.
Repeatedly.
And in between those rounds of experiencing so much pleasure that she couldn’t believe she’d lived this long without it, they’d talked, too. The way people talked when they never expected to see each other again, she understood now.
She hadn’t understood it then.Thenshe’d been wonderstruck at finally—finally—being seen. For herself. Her real, true self.
Nina definitely didn’t like to remember that.
Now she was carrying the baby they’d made that night. And she was sitting high up on a magical balcony in a palace dedicated to gods, looking at the closest example to one she had ever seen on earth.
For a moment she thought he’d smirk, make a droll remark, do hisZeusthing.
Maybe that would be better.
Instead, the ancient mask seemed to crumble as she watched. Zeus leaned forward, suddenly looking nothing like that lounging, lazy creature who all the world thought they knew so well because he was always performing for them.
