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CHAPTER FIVE
THATKISSCOMPLICATEDEVERYTHING.
It was bad enough that Nina had agreed to marry him. She’d lain awake that first night, staring at the ornate ceiling that arched high above her. She’d listened to the sound of the sea outside. And she’d asked herself what on earth she thought she was doing here.
But came back, always, to her baby.
How could she reasonably refuse to marry her baby’s father? She’d argued with herself all night. Because certainly, she had her issues with royals in general. This child would be a crown prince or princess. Nina had never met one of those she didn’t have deep suspicions about in one way or another, but that didn’t mean there couldn’t be a perfectly lovely version.
Was that good enough reason to deny her child its birthright?
The fact of the matter was, she wasn’t romantic, despite the odd daydream. Not really. She had congratulated herself on that, lying in that vast bed in her guest bedchamber, running her fingers up and down her sides and over her belly as she tried to get used to sleeping on one side or the other.
I can make decisions based on what’s good for you, she told her baby.Not silly little fairy tales of true love.
She might have dreamed of romance and other such things when she was with Isabeau, but that was only because the Haught Montagne court had been devoid of any such tender notions. And because she’d been sixteen when she’d first gotten there and might have been foolish enough to thinkwhat ifin those first few months. Before Isabeau had stopped pretending and had showed her true colors. When Nina had let herself imagine that there might be a place she belonged.
Her years at Isabeau’s side had cured her of such foolishness. And watching Isabeau’s many passionate entanglements—all while she was so determined to marry Zeus—had soured Nina on romance completely. Zeus’s own exploits, extensively covered in the press, had suggested to her that love was nothing more than a cynical bid to sell more column space in greedy magazines.
Nina had always told herself that when she was finally set free, she would go out into the world and follow her heart wherever it led without involving the tabloids at all.
But what she’d discovered was that she liked following her heart well enough—but only in terms of the many destinations she could finally explore on her own terms. She’d never had any interest in following her heart topeople. Not once in her first two months of travel, before she’d started to feel so wretched, had it even occurred to her to try out apassionate entanglementof her own. Maybe she should have.
She’d loved what little part she’d taken in the happy nights in the various hostels where she’d stayed. It had seemed like such a different world, all these heedless young people, dancing and drinking without a care—night after night, as if no one was watching them. Because no onewaswatching them.
But she’d never followed through on any of the invitations, spoken or unspoken, that had come her way.
A romantic would have, surely. A romantic would have wonderedwhat if.
That had been what decided her. If she was the kind of woman who intended to hold out for love, that would have been one thing. But she wasn’t. She was practical. A realist. Love was for silly girls in skimpy dresses, filled with wonder and maybes. Not grown, weathered women who knew better, who’d already been called a horrid disgrace in at least ten languages. And if she wasn’t the sort who was going to hold out for romantic love, she might as well marry the Prince, who had his own, likely nefarious, reasons for marrying her—but what did that matter?
It was about her child in the end.
That was the only love that mattered.
She’d marched off to find him that morning, filled with a sense of purpose and even pleasure that she could secure her child’s future like this. Almost as if, finally, she’d relegated her memories of her own cold, hard childhood to the dustbin.
Then Zeus had kissed her and ruined everything.
Because now she was forced to lie in her bed, night after night, and wonder if the reason she hadn’t used her travel time to experiment in all the ways everyone else did was not because she was so practical andabove it all.
She was terribly afraid it had been because of him.
After all, she’d only started on that adventure in the first place because of her night in Prince Zeus’s arms. And once the scandal had broken, she had happily left Haught Montagne. Then marched out into the world, telling herself with every step that she barely remembered a thing, because all that really mattered was that she was free of Isabeau at last.
But even if that were true—and it wasn’t—his kiss brought it all back.
Because the man tasted like sunshine and the darkest nights, sin and sweet surrender, and she remembered every single thing she’d ever done with him. Every last detail of that long, languorous night. Almost as if his betrayal of her come morning didn’t matter.
Now she was more than six months pregnant, trapped in the Palace of the Gods with the only man she’d ever met who could reasonably suggest he might earn that title in the modern world. And Prince Zeus, the wickedest man alive, was insisting she marry him.
Nina couldn’t come up with a good enough reason why she shouldn’t.
But she’d regretted it the moment she said she would.
Not just because he’d kissed her—and she’d betrayed herself entirely by kissing him back like a desperate woman, a shocking truth she was still struggling to come to terms with—but because the palace staff descended upon her soon after, the inevitable Theosian courtiers in their wake.
And as they began to play their little games around her, it occurred to Nina that she hadn’t even thought to havethisnightmare.
