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CHAPTER ELEVEN
TO BEATRICE’SRELIEFthe party did not drag on long after the meal. The guests of honour excused themselves relatively early and Dante took the opportunity to extract them at the same time.
As they walked through the doors into their private drawing room, he was tugging off his tie. A moment later the top buttons of his formal shirt were unfastened, and he gave a grunt of satisfaction before he flopped onto one of the deeply upholstered sofas that were arranged around the carved fireplace.
‘That could have been worse.’ He threw several cushions on the floor with a grimace of irritation before angling a glance at Beatrice. ‘You don’t agree?’
‘Your father ignored me regally all evening.’
‘I’d pay to have my father ignore me.’
She failed to fight off a smile.
‘So what else?’
‘I wanted to tell Lara that I was pregnant.’
‘Then why didn’t you?’
She slung him an exasperated look. ‘I may know very little about royal protocols but I’m pretty sure telling a dinner guest I’m pregnant before the King and Queen know they are going to have a grandchild might break a couple.’
‘True…but you have made a friend?’
‘I like her,’ she said, ignoring the invitation when he patted the arm of the sofa beside him and choosing to sit instead opposite, with the long coffee table, with the tasteful stack of prerequisite coffee-table books that nobody was ever going to read, between them.
Her eyes went to the hand that still rested on the arm as she wondered uneasily if the gesture had been meant to remind her of another occasion when she had accepted the invitation only to find herself pulled down on top of him. She pushed away the images, but not before her core temperature had jumped several uncomfortable degrees.
‘Should I have told Lara that I’d join her book club?’
‘Why not? You make it sound as though you’ve signed your soul away. And it sounds more like a mother and baby group and you will fit right in. I have a list of the obstetricians I spoke of, if you’d like to look at them.’ He scanned her face. ‘We can tell my parents, if that would make you feel more comfortable.’
‘But what if something goes wrong?’ The words ‘like the last time’ hung unspoken in the airwaves between them. She shook her head, the imagined scenes of that eventuality lodged there, a nightmare mixture of their lost baby and the emotionally charged scenes that had followed her mum’s unsuccessful IVF attempts.
‘You cannot think that way. You need to enjoy this pregnancy and you won’t if you spend the entire time anticipating a problem.’ She could leave that to him, he decided as he experienced a swell of helplessness, a reminder of the way he had felt when the first pregnancy had tragically ended.
He hadn’t known what to do, what to say, and anything he had said had sounded trite and inadequate. He’d felt utterly helpless to lessen the grief she’d been feeling and unwilling to examine his own grief; his conditioning had kicked in and he’d taken refuge in work.
He knew he had failed her and was determined he would not again. He could keep her safe and he would.
‘And if there is a problem?’
‘Then we will deal with it together.’
It sounded good but it was the part he left out that made her look away. If anything went wrong with this pregnancy there would be no reason for her to be here.
‘You know what would make you feel better?’
She forced a smile and tried to ease the sadness away. ‘I’m pretty sure you’re going to tell me.’
‘You need to brush up on your lying skills, because you really are a terrible liar.’
‘You make it sound like that is a bad thing.’
‘A good lie gets you out of many a sticky situation, and sincerity,’ he said, ‘is a very bad thing, diplomatically speaking. Of course, if you can feign it—’ He reached out and caught one of her shoes before it hit him in the face.
‘I wasn’t aiming at you.’
‘Then you have real potential. That’s better,’ he approved when she lost her battle to contain her mirth.
