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The queen pressed her lips together and didn’t argue further. “I suggest we wait for her to come around and ask her. If there’s something more serious going on, we can call the doctor then.” His mother stood and smoothed her skirt. “I’ll give you some privacy. Please let me know how she’s doing when she wakes.”
And with that, the queen left and Nic was alone with Brooke.
Pregnant.
With his child. The thought of it filled him with warmth. But all too quickly questions formed. Had she realized it yet? She wasn’t showing and he guessed that she was between five and eight weeks along. Was that too early for her to suspect? Yet she’d obviously been queasy and had to wonder why.
Brooke began to stir and Nic went to sit beside her. She blinked and slowly focused on him.
“What happened?”
“You passed out.”
“Damn.” She rubbed her eyes. “I yelled at your mother. She must hate me.”
“She doesn’t.” He skimmed his knuckles against her cheek. “What’s going on with you? I’ve never known you to be sick.”
She avoided his gaze. “Nothing, I’m just really overwrought and I think my blood sugar is low because I was too nervous to eat much at dinner.”
“Is that why you were eating these?” He picked up the crackers and held them before her.
“Whenever my stomach gets upset, I eat crackers to absorb the acid.” Her words made sense, but something about her tone told him she wasn’t giving him full disclosure.
“My mother told me she used to eat crackers when she was pregnant,” he said. “She claimed it helped with nausea.”
Brooke’s body tensed. “I’ve heard that before. I think if you keep something bland in your stomach it settles it.”
Nic’s irritation was growing by the second. Brooke was a terrible liar because she believed in being honest. So much so it had gotten her into trouble a number of times. Her behavior while answering his questions demonstrated that while she hadn’t actually said anything false, she was keeping things from him.
“Are you pregnant?”
“We’ve been careful.”
“That didn’t answer my question.” He leaned down and grabbed her chin, pinning her with his gaze. “Are you pregnant?”
“Yes.” Her voice came out small and unsure.
He sat back with a muffled curse. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“That was the plan when I came to Ithaca.” She pushed into a sitting position and retreated away from him as far as the headboard would allow. “I couldn’t tell you something like that over the phone, but then I showed up and you were so unhappy to see me.” She wrapped her arms around herself and stared at her shoes. “And then you announce that you are a prince and you need to get married so your country could have an heir and that your wife needed to be an aristocrat or a citizen of Sherdana.”
“So you were planning on leaving without ever telling me?” Outrage gave his voice a sharp edge.
“Don’t say it like that. You made a choice to come back here and do the honorable thing. I made a decision that would save you from regret.”
“But to never see my child?”
She put her hands over the lower half of her face and closed her eyes. After a long moment she spoke. “Don’t you think I considered that? But I knew you would have other children, hopefully lots of them.”
Her every word slashed his heart into ribbons. The woman he loved was having his child and he’d been days away from never knowing the truth. “Well, there’s no question of you going home now.”
“What? You can’t make that decision for me. My job, friends and family are in California. That’s where I belong. Just like you belong here in Sherdana with your family and your future wife.”
She was crazy if she thought he was just going to let her vanish out of his life. “You belong with me just like I belong with you and our child.”
“Maybe if you were the ordinary scientist I first fell in love with, but you are a prince with responsibilities that are bigger than both of us combined. Do the right thing and let me go. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”
“I refuse to accept that.” Nic got to his feet and stared down at her. Where a moment earlier she’d seemed fragile and lost, her passionate determination to do what she perceived as the honorable thing gave her the look of a Valkyrie. “Get some rest. We will talk at length later.”
Nic should have gone straight to his mother to deliver the confirmation of Brooke’s condition as he’d promised, but found he needed some privacy to absorb what he’d just learned. He headed to his suite in the royal wing, curious to see if it was in the condition Gabriel had said. But just as Ariana had said, there was no leak.
