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‘Oh, I’ll be fine after a bottle of champagne,’ she said airily and watched the look of utter horror cross his face before adding with a sigh, ‘Joke…? You remember those?’ Nine months of sobriety was not going to be a big ask for her—her normal alcohol consumption mostly involved nursing a glass for the sake of being sociable.
Not that she was making a statement. She had just never really liked the taste.
‘I remember everything, Beatrice.’
The silence stretched as something in the atmosphere of the enclosed space changed. Impossible to put a name to, mainly because she didn’t dare to, but it made her pulse race and her throat dry as he leaned in.
When he broke the silence all she was thinking about was his mouth and the way he tasted, the way he always tasted.
‘Let’s skip the dinner and go to bed!’
The feelings fizzing up inside her were making her breathless. ‘You’re not serious.’
He arched a brow and gave a wicked grin. ‘I don’t know, am I…?’
His laughter followed her out of the car as she hurried to put some safe distance between them.
She marched towards the door and past the men who stood either side, staring straight ahead. They wore bright gold-trimmed ceremonial uniforms, but the guns slung over their shoulders were not ceremonial but unfortunately very real.
It wasn’t until she entered the echoing hallway with its row of glittering chandeliers suspended from a high vaulted carved ceiling that Beatrice took a deep breath, fighting against the tangle of jumbled memories that crowded her head.
For a split second panic almost took control. She had no idea if she was standing, sitting or lying, then, as she exhaled and the panicked thud in her ears of her own heartbeat receded, she was able to reel herself back to something approaching control.
The breath left her parted lips in a slow, measured, calming hiss before she turned, masking her emotions under a slightly shaky smile.
Dante was standing a couple of feet away, his hands shoved in the pockets of his well-cut trousers. He had been watching her almost lose it. The enormity of what he was asking her to do hit him between the eyes like the proverbial blunt object.
She was distracted from this uncomfortable possibility by the fact that he was standing right in front of a larger-than-life portrait of a previous King of San Macizo, though this painting captured him when he had been Crown Prince.
She had noticed the striking similarity between the two men the first time she’d walked in, though she’d not then noted the far more modest portraits of his several wives hidden on a wall in a rarely used part of the building.
Legend had it that the first, rather plain-looking wife, who had died in childbirth, had been his one true love, but then legends rarely had substance. Still, it was a pleasingly romantic tale and she had liked to think it true.
The illusion that the figure staring down with hauteur etched on his carved features had actually stepped out of the frame lasted several blinks.
The man standing watching her had all the hauteur along with the perfect symmetry of features his ancestor had possessed. Had his ancestor possessed the same earthy sensual quality that Dante had? If he had, the artist hadn’t captured it, though with those lips you had to wonder.
She pulled her shoulders back, feeling some sympathy for the long-ago wives, wondering if they too had stopped trying to figure out why their responses to their prince bypassed logic or common sense. Like her, had they just come to accept and guard against it as much as possible?
Dante watched as she made a visible effort to gather herself, but the expression on her face reminded him of a fighter who had taken too many punches, and maybe she had in the emotional sense.
He was prepared for the guilt and he accepted it. He had anticipated it. What he had not anticipated was that seeing her here, in this setting, would actually make him more aware of the ache that he had lived with since her departure. An ache he had refused to acknowledge, an ache that indicated weakness he couldn’t own up to.
His upbringing had developed a strong streak of self-sufficiency in Dante. He had been sent to boarding school at six, where the policy was to discourage contact between siblings, the theory being part of the institute’s ethos that was intended to develop a strength of character and independence.
Which in Dante’s experience in practical terms translated as an ability to look after number one ahead of all others, and he had learnt the lesson. Well, the option had been enduring the misery of those who didn’t, and there had been more than a few who’d never understood that showing weakness exposed you to the bullies.
Dante never had shown weakness; he had gone into the school system privileged and come out privileged and selfish as hell. The strategies developed at a tender age were coping mechanisms that had stood him in good stead. One kicked in now, stopping him acknowledging the emptiness.
‘I can make your excuses?’
Her chin went up. ‘I can make my own,’ she began hotly and stopped, an expression of guilt spreading across her face as she saw through his offhand manner. ‘There is no need to be worried about the baby. I would never do anything that put him at risk.’
‘Him?’
‘Or her.’
‘Do you want to know?’
