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Yet when the men had left, Nina pulled that beautiful ring off her finger and set it on the table before her with a decisive click.
“I can’t wear that,” she announced.
“Of course not,” Zeus agreed, lazily. “I have yet to present it to you. On bended knee, very likely. It’s a classic romantic gesture for a reason.”
“No.”
It registered on him that she actually seemed distressed, but before he could reach for her, she pushed herself off the couch and onto her feet.
“I can’t wear that, Zeus. Look at my hands.” And then, disconcertingly, she lifted her hands toward him, as if warding him off. “I spent ten years of my life scrubbing floors.”
“No one will ask you to scrub floors while wearing a ten-carat ring, Nina.”
“This whole thing is ridiculous,” she threw at him. “No one will believe for one second that you’re marrying aservant. A scandalous former servant. Because why would you?”
“I told you. This is a love story.”
Because he needed it to be to really pour salt in his father’s wounds.
That was what he kept telling himself.
She looked down at her bump. Then she lifted that same grave gaze to him. “No one will believe that, either,” she said quietly. Yet with conviction—and he found he disliked it. Intensely. “I’m sure no one will have any trouble believing that I somehow fell in love with you, in my mercenary way, as gold diggers are wont to do. But anyone who has ever met you knows how impossible it is that you would ever fall in love with anyone.”
Everything she said was true. And yet he wanted to argue—against the premise, against the names she called herself, against her description of him. Even though all of that was precisely why she was so perfect.
He opted to shrug instead. “And yet, why else would I marry if not for love?”
Nina only fixed him with that same look, much too grave for his liking. She stroked her belly. “I can’t think of a single reason. Can you?”
She looked as if she was about to say something else, but then she squeaked a little. Her hands moved on her belly to press down, and because she was no longer wearing a tent, he could see the way her belly rippled.
When Nina looked at him again, her whole face was changed. Light. Shining.
And it hit him, suddenly, that when she wasn’t wearing masks and pretending the way she’d had to do for so many years, this was what she looked like. Those brown eyes so bright they seemed shot through with sunshine. Her lovely face, open and happy. And that smile of hers, so charming that it lit up the whole of their hotel suite and likely outside as well, rendering Paris something other than gloomy this February day.
Rendering him...undone.
“Ouch,” she said, but she was laughing. “Apparently our child would like to weigh in on this discussion. I’m almost certain it voted for no ring, no marriage, and no more of this silly game.”
Zeus moved without thinking. He rose, moved to her, and then slid his own hands onto her warm belly. And he didn’t so much hear the way she caught her breath. He felt it, as if she was inside him.
And he felt his child again.
Hefelt, and instead of shoving the feelings away, he stood in them a moment. He kept his palms against her belly and felt her breath come faster. He let all of that wash around in him until he hardly knew who he was, and then he kept on.
“I don’t think you’re translating correctly,” he said as he felt the little drumbeat kick beneath his hands. “The child clearly wishes his parents to marry. He’s adamant.”
“Shethinks that she would be just fine as an independent entity,” Nina replied.
She pushed his hands away, but then their hands were tangled up together. That wasn’t any better.
Zeus wanted to laugh at himself, because if anyone had ever dared try to tell him that there would come a day that simplytouching handswith a woman would so nearly destroy him, he would have laughed.
But everything with Nina seemed charged like this. One slip away from total detonation.
Little as he liked to recall it, it had always been like this. From that night in Haught Montagne when he’d pressed into a moment that had bloomed between them, thinking she would frown and dismiss him, but she’d laughed. It had seemed preordained.
This had always been impossible to resist.
