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“Don’t tell me what to do!” he’d shouted before he’d backhanded her across the face.
Her hand drifted up to her cheek. Miles hadn’t left a permanent mark, but his tantrums and self-indulgences had left plenty of wounds invisible to the naked eye.
In the years since Miles’s death, she had kept people at arm’s length, including potential friends and prospective romances. Marriage and children had been even further down the list of things she saw in her future. She wasn’t a fool to believe that all men were so horrible. But she was a fool when it came to her own judgment. She’d made such a colossal error with Miles. What if she made another one with Alaric?
Another glance at her watch. Nine fifty-six.
Alaric was a good man in many ways. She knew that he was right, that marrying him would ensure the best possible future for their child.
But what about them? Could she really commit herself to another loveless marriage? He’d made it perfectly clear yesterday that it would be a business arrangement, another point in favor of the argument that she had read far more into their relationship of the past year. Yet the way he’d spoken about being a father...she wanted that for her child. She’d been so blessed to grow up with a father who had adored her. She’d lost a piece of herself when he’d died. Could she truly deny her son or daughter the chance to have a father like Alaric, one she sensed would fight for and love and care for them just as much as her own father had? All because she’d made mistakes in the past and was now letting her own fears and insecurities influence her decision?
And then there was the glaring fact that, if it did come out that Alaric had gotten his executive assistant pregnant, it could undo some of the considerable progress he’d achieved over the last few weeks. From stripping Daxon of his power to distancing himself from Celestine’s antics just as Switzerland had agreed to throw both its support and its treasury behind the palace, Linnaea had made more advancements in just over a month than it had in the years she’d been working here.
Alaric always placed the country first. It was a role he’d been born to, and one he’d accepted long ago. She’d always worked with Linnaea’s best interests at heart. She loved the country, the people.
But could she do the same as Alaric? Commit her entire life to the throne?
Her head dropped back against the wall with a dull thud. Instead of walking into this meeting with answers, all she had was more questions.
The numbers changed to ten o’clock. She stood, crossed the hall and knocked. Movements she did every day. But right now, she felt like she was moving through a dream, each gesture sluggish.
It didn’t help that Alaric had changed the location of their meeting from his office to his private apartment. If he’d been trying to throw her off, he’d succeeded far too easily.
The door opened. Alaric towered over her, his face the same inscrutable mask he always wore, his emerald eyes dark and flinty.
Her heart thudded in her chest. Before that night in the gym, she’d acknowledged Alaric’s handsomeness. He was, and always had been, devastatingly attractive. So were the abs on Michelangelo’s statue of David. That didn’t mean she was going to fall head over heels for a hunk of marble, living or not. Alaric had been handsome but cold, a leader who placed his people first but also ruthless when it came to decision-making. She had carried out his orders on more than one occasion while privately disagreeing with how he’d gone about it. He eschewed any type of emotion over logic, facts and data.
Seeing him as she’d seen him the night of the failed Christmas dinner—raw, rough, wild—had turned her appreciation into red-hot longing.
It hadn’t just changed her physical attraction to him. He’d started to ask for her opinion more, confide to her the reasons behind his decisions. She’d glimpsed so much more of the man behind the prince. Here was a man who truly wanted the best for his people, who didn’t want to make the mistakes of his predecessor who had made his decisions purely on emotion. She still didn’t agree with his borderline obsession with keeping all feelings out of his choices. But she’d understood him better, respected his reasons and silently thanked the powers that be that her silly infatuation would never go beyond her own fantasies where she could risk getting her heart broken.
Then he’d looked at her, eyes alight with molten emerald fire, and she’d burned for him.
And now she was carrying his child. She was carrying his child and, she acknowledged as she walked into his apartment, she owed it to her child to give it everything she could. Including a father.
Her eyes wandered before she could stop herself. His suite was triple the size of hers, with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the mountains and a balcony facing the lake. Brown leather furniture trimmed in brass, thick burgundy carpets and drapes that made the room feel surprisingly cozy and a couple of carefully selected paintings of Linnaean landscapes.
She turned to find him watching her. She returned his frank gaze, concealing her surprise at the comfortable home he’d created for himself.
“Did you sleep well?” he asked as he gestured to a chair in front of the fireplace, a thick blanket draped over one arm. She sat, resisting the beckoning warmth of the crackling flames and the buttery soft leather as she watched him sit across from her.
“As well as I could.”
The tiniest quirk of his lips made something twist in her chest. Alaric’s equivalent of throwing his head back and laughing. When she’d seen its appearance in various meetings over the years, it had always made her inwardly chuckle. Over the last year, she’d seen it more, chalked it up as a sign of their growing camaraderie that he was sharing something so simple and yet so important with her, a piece of himself no one else got to see.
“Before you tell me what decision stole your sleep, I’d like to share something with you.” He reached out and grabbed something red off the end table next to his chair. He unwrapped the brightly colored fabric to reveal a small coin.
“Are you offering to buy my hand in marriage?”
“If I was into such outdated methods of persuading a woman to marry me, I would be offering far more than this.” He stood, crossed the room and placed the coin in her hand. She peered closer. It was gold, the edges slightly worn, the image smoothed out by time and wear, as if the owner had taken it out of their pocket and touched it, tracing the delicate features of the Ferris wheel emblazoned on one side. On the other, elegant script read Riesenrad.
“The Ferris wheel in Vienna?”
She looked up to see Alaric’s gaze fixated not on her but the coin, a naked pain in his eyes that shocked her.
“My father took me with him to Vienna after my mother died. I was fourteen.” He turned away, shoving his hands into his pockets as he walked over to the windows and looked out over his domain. With his shoulders thrown back and his suit tailored to follow every hard line of his muscular body, he looked every inch the future king.
“It was the one time I remember him trying to be a father. He was in town for a conference and took me out to lunch, walks around Vienna between meetings. It was the most time we’d spent together. It made me think that perhaps my mother’s death had changed things. On our last night, we were supposed to ride the Riesenrad.”
