His Forbidden Pregnant Princess Page 14

  He frowned. He wasn’t even certain he cared.

  Sophia was the mother of his child. She was to be his wife. There was no arguing with that. And as she had said to him just the other night...whatever people thought of him, he could rule. And he could do it well.

  The rest didn’t matter.

  “How are you finding things?” he asked as Sophia was ushered toward him at the entrance of the dining hall.

  She was wearing a dress of such a pale color that the sequins over the top of it looked as though they had been somehow fastened directly to her pale, smooth skin. It glittered with each step she took, and the top came to an artful V at her breasts, showing off those delicate curves in exquisite fashion.

  She took hold of his arm, looked up at him. “Entertaining dignitaries’ wives is a strange experience.”

  “But it is your life now,” he pointed out.

  She wilted somewhat at that.

  “I am sorry, cara mia,” he said, “but it cannot be ignored that being queen does carry its share of burdens. Your mother, I’m certain, knows all about that.”

  “Yes,” she said, though somewhat hesitant.

  He wondered what the caveat was, because there was one. He could hear it. Unspoken, deep down her throat. But they were walking into a dining room crowded full of people, half of whom were hoping they would be witnessing some sort of glorious meltdown, he was certain, so he was hardly going to broach the topic now.

  He sat at the head of the table, and Sophia had departed from him and made her way down to the foot.

  Tradition, he mused, was such a fascinating thing. Things like this... They formed from somewhere, and that demonstrated that humans could clearly create them out of thin air. On a whim. But there were certain points in history where tradition had simply been followed, and not created. As though someone else had made those rules, and human beings were bound to them. As though they could not be broken.

  Tradition. Appearances.

  Those things had been paramount to his mother, even while she had lived in exactly the fashion she had wanted. And he... He clung to it because it gave him a sense of purpose. Because it made him feel as if what had happened to him—and the lack of fallout after—had been unavoidable.

  It was the reason that he was seated across the room from Sophia now, when he would like her at his side.

  All of these fake rules.

  He was a damned king, and yet there were all these rules.

  The rules that kept him from receiving any sort of justice. The rules that prevented him from acting on his attraction to Sophia in the first place.

  And the rules that kept him from sitting beside her now. The rules that had kept them from spending the day together.

  A strange thing. All of it.

  Those seated around him directly had been artfully chosen people. Selected carefully by members of his cabinet. People who would only speak highly of him, and certainly not call into question his union with his stepsister. He was certain the same could be said for those who had been seated directly around Sophia, and those in the middle could fling poison back and forth across the table to their hearts’ content, for he and his bride could not hear it.

  When the meal was finished he rose, nodding his head once and signaling Sophia to follow suit.

  She looked up at him with slightly cautious eyes, but she followed his lead. She had watched his father and her mother do this many times. She knew that she was simply to follow his lead.

  They met at the center of the table and he took her arm again, then they turned toward the doors and made their exit.

  The guests would follow shortly, but they had a moment, a quiet moment there in the antechamber.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I do understand how these things work.”

  “But it’s only just dawning on you that your role in them has changed. Am I correct in assuming that?”

  “It’s a lot of things. Marrying you. Becoming a mother. The fact that I was going to be queen was low on my list of things to deal with.”

  “And yet, you will be my queen. Tomorrow.”

  Her skin looked a bit waxen, pale, her gown and her necklace glittering in the dim light, which was helpful to her, as she herself did not glitter at all at the moment.

  “It’s too late to go back,” he said.

  She jerked her focus toward him. “I didn’t say that I wanted to.”

  “You don’t seem happy.”

  “I’m overwhelmed. I have been overwhelmed from the moment that you kissed me in the garden all those weeks ago. I don’t know how you can expect me to feel any differently than that.”

  “Well, I suggest that by the time we are in the chapel tomorrow you find a way to feel slightly less overwhelmed.”

  She lifted a brow, her expression going totally flat. “As you command, sire.”

  He had no opportunity to respond to that because their guests began to depart the dining room and fill the antechamber.

  “With regrets,” Luca said, “I must bid you all good-night. As must my fiancée. With the wedding tomorrow we do not wish to overextend her.”

  He wrapped his arm around her waist, breaking with propriety completely by engaging in such an intimate hold in public, and propelled her from the room. She was all but hissing by the time they arrived in her bedroom.

  “Luca,” she said. “We have guests, and I spent the entire day on my best behavior, not so that you could ruin it now.”

  “My apologies,” he said, his tone hard. “I am ever ruining the reputations of others.”

  She looked ashamed at that. And he felt guilty. Because he knew that wasn’t what she meant.

  “Luca, I didn’t mean...”

  “I’m aware. I apologize for using that against you.”

  She didn’t seem to know what to say to that. “Don’t apologize to me,” she said finally. “We’re going to have to learn how to make this work.”

  She looked thoughtful at that.

  “We don’t have a lot of practice getting along. Not outside of bed anyway,” he said.

  “That is very true.” She clasped her hands and folded them in front of her body. Then she let out a long, slow breath and lifted one leg slightly, towing her high heel off, before working on the other. It reduced her height by three inches, leaving her looking a small, shimmering fairy standing in the bedchamber.

  “I know how they made it work,” she said slowly. “I know why it was easy for them.”

  “Why is that?”

  “They loved each other. They loved each other so very much, Luca. It wasn’t a child, or the need for marriage or money that brought them together. They risked everything to be together. Not because they had to, but because they wanted to.”

  Her words were soft, and yet they landed in his soul like a blow. “I don’t understand what you want me to do with that. I don’t understand what you want me to say. You’re pregnant. Your mother was not pregnant. I cannot change the circumstances of why we are marrying.”

  “I know,” she said. “But I’ve found that over the past weeks my reasons for marrying you have changed.” She looked up at him, her dark eyes luminous. “Luca, I imagined myself half in love with you for most of my life but it wasn’t until after that night in San Paolo that I realized that wasn’t true.”

  His stomach crawled like acid. Of course. She had realized she didn’t love him after she found out that he had been such a weak victim of such a disgusting crime. That his body had been used in such a fashion. Of course she was repulsed by him. Who wouldn’t be? He was repulsed by himself most of the time. Questioning a great many things about him. Questioning his attraction to Sophia herself. If it was something inside him that had been twisted and broken off beyond repair. Something that had caused him to want a thing that was forbi
dden to him.

  “I am sorry to have destroyed your vision of me.”

  “No,” she said. “That was when my vision of you became whole. Luca, you were a safe thing to love. I couldn’t be with you. You were my stepbrother. How could it ever happen? You could never hurt me, not the way my father had done. And all the better, as long as I was obsessed with you, no one else could hurt me, either. You were a wall that I could build around myself. A thing to distract my heart with. The minute that you touched me that wall was destroyed. I didn’t know you. How could I love you if I didn’t know you? I admired things about you. I admired your strength. I admired what an honest man you were. But I didn’t know the cost of those things, Luca, and knowing that... That was when I began to love you for real. I love you, Luca. I didn’t want to say it. Because I wanted so badly to protect myself. I have been rejected before. I loved my father, and he only wanted to use what money your father could give him. I could not face being the one who tore themselves open and revealed their whole heart, only to be met with nothing. And I almost did... The other night I almost did. But I was afraid. I’m not going to be afraid anymore. I don’t want to be. You deserve more than someone hiding and protecting themselves.” She swallowed hard. “I love you.”

  Everything inside him rebelled at her claim. Utterly. Completely. There was no way it could be true. No way in heaven or hell.

  “You don’t love me,” he said, his voice hard. “You want to make all of this a bit more palatable for you. You want to make it easier. But you don’t love me.”

  “I do.”

  “Fine. Think what you wish, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to change anything.”

  “Why not? Why can’t it change anything?”

  “Because I don’t love anything,” he said. “Nothing at all.”

  “That can’t be true, Luca. You loved your father. You care a great deal for my mother...”

  “Family. Is different.”

  “How? Your mother was family...”

  “I’m going to marry you, Sophia,” he said. “I don’t see why we need to get involved in an argument regarding feelings. I have committed to you. Why should you want anything else?”

  “Because it’s not just something else. It’s everything else. Love is vital, Luca, and without it... It’s the glue. It’s not about lust. It’s not blood. It’s love.”

  “There we disagree. Because some days it’s the promises that will be all that hold us together. That is how life works. Sometimes it’s simply the things you have decided that keep you going. You cannot make decisions in desperation. You must make them with a cool head, and only then can you be certain you will act with a level of integrity.”

  “Fine. I can accept that you feel that way. In fact, it’s one of the things I admire about you. You’re a good man. You always have been. There is no doubt about that. But there has to be more. We cannot have one without the other. I don’t want commitment without love, Luca. I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  He could not understand why she couldn’t let this go. Love was nothing. Love was...

  Love failed. It left you bleeding on the ground. He had heard it said many times that love did not seek its own, but that was not his experience.

  His mother cared only for herself.

  He had been a casualty in her pursuit of pleasure, in her pursuit of protecting her own comfort.

  He hadn’t mattered.

  Why should Sophia feel that he did? And why should she try to demand that he...?

  It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter as long as he promised to stay with her.

  “Because don’t I deserve to be loved? Don’t I deserve to be at the forefront of whatever action is being taken? I have been loved, richly so in my life. But...I’ve never been chosen. My mother loved me in spite of the fact that having me plunged her into poverty. Your father loved me because he loved my mother. My own father didn’t care at all. He wanted money. And you want the baby. Is it so much to ask, Luca, that I be wanted for who I am? That I be loved for who I am?”

  “I have told you a great many times that you are a sickness in my blood. If I didn’t want you then we wouldn’t be here at all. There would be no baby.”

  “Being your sickness isn’t the same as being your love, Luca, and if you can’t sort that out, then I’m not sure we have anything left to say to each other.”

  “So you’ll just storm away from me?” he asked, anger rising up unreasonably inside him. “If you can’t have exactly what you want the moment you want you’re going to leave?” Of course she would. Why would she stay with him? That was the fundamental issue with all of this. She could profess to love him, and she might even believe it. But when it all came down, that would not be so. It couldn’t be.

  Because he was a man who had been used and discarded. The violation he had experienced at the hands of his mother’s paramour not remotely as invasive as the one he had experienced when his mother had chosen to maintain her reputation over protecting him. Seeking justice for him.

  And he had no idea how to feel about it. Because she was dead. Because he wasn’t entirely certain he wanted his pain splashed all over the headlines, and had they sought legal action against the man who had harmed him, he certainly would have been in the headlines.

  He didn’t know what he wanted. He didn’t know what he was worth.

  But he knew he wasn’t worth Sophia and all of the feelings she professed to have for him now.

  She had tried to explain to him how her feelings for him had shifted, but she didn’t truly understand. She couldn’t.

  “I told my mother what was done to me,” he said, his voice low. “I went to her. Trusted her. I had been drugged. I had been violated. Abused. And I told her as much. That she had let that man into the palace, and that he had sought me out and harmed me in such a way. She was upset. And she was fearful. But it was not for me. It was for her own self. She could not have my father finding out she had been conducting affairs. She could not have the public finding out that she had been engaged in such a thing. And if we were to bring him before the law, then of course he would expose my mother for what she was. She couldn’t have that. She didn’t care for me, Sophia. Not one bit. My own mother.”

  “She was broken,” Sophia said. “As my father is broken. You cannot possibly think that I deserve the way my father treated me, can you?”

  “That’s different.”

  “It isn’t. You’re just too afraid to step out from beneath this.”

  “Because on the other side is nothing. Nothing but the harsh, unending truth that I was nothing more than an incidental to the person who should have loved me simply because of the connection that we shared.”

  “Luca,” she said. “I love you.”

  Suddenly, the emotion in his chest was like panic. Because she kept persisting even though he had told her to stop. And the monster inside him was growling louder, and he couldn’t drown it out with platitudes. Nothing about promises or duty, or about standing tall in the face of an unfriendly press. About being a king and therefore being above these kinds of emotions, needing to rule with a cool head and a steady heart, rather than one given to things such as this. But he could not speak those words. He could not even feel them.

  “You cannot love me,” he said. “You cannot love me because I do not love myself.” He gritted his teeth, despising the weakness inside him. “The man I could’ve been was stolen from me. I had to rebuild myself out of something, because God knows nobody was going to do it for me. I was broken open. All that I might have been poured out. And when I put myself together I did not make an effort to replace those things within me that were weak. Those things within me that had... That made me seem as though I might make a good victim.”

  “No,” she said. “That’s not fair.”

  “There is no fair in this. I was chosen for
a reason. The boldness that it takes to do to me what that man did. Did you ever think of it that way? I was the future King of San Gennaro, and he felt as though he could take advantage of me, and he knew that he would not be punished. He knew that my mother would protect him. He knew that I would not be able to come forward and speak out against him. My hands would be tied. I refused... I refused to be remade in the same fashion that I had been born. I despise what I was, but I like the man I am now a little more. You cannot...”

  He turned away from her, closing his eyes and gathering his control once again. “You cannot.”

  “Luca,” she said, sounding broken, and he hated that, too. She deserved something else. Something different. A chance to be with a man, to want a man, to care for a man, who was not...broken in this way.

  “Do you know,” he said. “I have often wondered if there was something inherently sick inside me.”

  “You keep saying that word.”

  “I know. Because I wonder if it’s why I’ve wanted you so badly for so long. Because there was something in me...”

  “No. Stop trying to push me away.”

  “I’m not trying to push you away. I’ll marry you. But I’m never going to love you in the way that you want me to. I can’t. That part of myself is gone. It’s dead. I had to cut it out of me so that I can survive all that I went through.” He shook his head. “I will not change it for you. I cannot.”

  To change now would be to open himself back up to the kind of pain that he wanted gone from him forever, and he wouldn’t do it.

  “But you are pushing me away,” she said.

  “Sophia...”

  She took a step away from him. “I’m sorry, Luca. I love you. And I’m not going to marry you simply because of duty. I would marry you because I loved you but I want you to marry me for the same reason. It would be so easy...” Her words came out choked, her brown eyes filling with tears. “It would be so easy to simply let this be. To take what you’re offering, and be content with that. But I... I cannot. Luca, I can’t. Because I think we could both have more. It doesn’t have to be a sickness. It can be the cure. But only if you let it. And if I stay, and I allow you to have me without risking anything...”