The Future King's Bride (The Royal House of Cacciatore 3)

‘Honestly?’ His mouth hardened into a look of utter disdain. ‘How dare you use that word?’ he raged. ‘How dare you use it to me?’

‘Gianferro—I realise how it must seem—’

‘Oh, please, Millie.’ The breath he sucked in felt as though it had been fired into his lungs by a flame-thrower. He had not known that it was possible to feel such a hot sense of injustice. ‘I have had my suspicions—so please don’t heap insult onto injury by attempting some kind of false apology.’

She stared at him. ‘Your…suspicions?’ she breathed. ‘You mean you suspected?’

His eyes were like black ice. ‘Of course I suspected—what kind of fool do you take me for?’ he snapped. The kind of fool who had not wanted to frighten or to hurt her with his nebulous fears—when all the time it seemed he had been right to harbour them. Now he wanted to lash out. He wanted to hurt her back, as she had hurt him—and to salvage something of his pride, too, to show her that he was not a fool, and that she had badly underestimated him.

Oh, so very badly…

But he had let her, hadn’t he? When questions had drifted into his mind he had chosen to ignore them…because he’d wanted to believe that his young wife was pure and sweet and true. Because the alternative had been unthinkable.

He had blithely ignored all the dangers of letting a woman get close and he had misjudged her. Just because a woman was a virgin that didn’t mean that she couldn’t also be a liar and a cheat. He had forgiven her for the understandable lapse with the Italian teacher, and yet all the time there had been this far greater sin of deception waiting in the wings.

‘In some corner of my mind I have suspected for some time,’ he said furiously, but part of his rage was directed at himself. For letting her innocence blind him to what was crashingly obvious. Well, more fool you, he told himself bitterly.

Millie’s heart was breaking as she saw the look of contempt on his face—but worse than that was the fact that she had been deluding herself. She had thought that their relationship was deepening, that they were growing closer all the time. She had allowed herself to bask in the confidence that what they had between them would soon be strong enough to provide a secure base for a baby. But it seemed she had been wrong. How wrong?

She screwed up her eyes. ‘But…but how? How on earth could you know?’

‘Oh, come on, Millie! A woman who shares her husband’s desire to have a baby usually exhibits some kind of disappointment each month when it does not happen. But not you.’ His eyes gleamed coldly as the stealthy poison of betrayal began to seep in. ‘Oh, no. You used to answer my questions with the air of someone who had always known what the answer would be…because of course you damned well did! You had already made certain what the answer would be.’

Her lips trembled. ‘Won’t you please let me explain?’

‘What’s to explain? That you deceived me?’ he bit out, and he saw her flinch but didn’t care. He didn’t care. For the first time in his life he had been guilty of brushing a suspicion aside because he hadn’t wanted to believe it. And the fact that his judgement had failed him wounded his ego and his pride as much as anything else. ‘Because, no matter how much you try to dress it up, that is the truth of it,’ he bit out.

But her words rushed out anyway, tumbling over themselves in an effort to explain. To try and get him to understand—even though deep down she feared that it was too late for understanding. Oh, why had she done it—and then, having done it, left it so long? Because that was what happened sometimes. You were troubled by a nagging fear and it just seemed easier to brush it aside. Well, she was about to pay for it.

With her marriage?

‘I just felt that we were rushing into parenthood. That it was too soon to have a child between us when we didn’t really know each other as people. Gianferro—you wondered out loud on our honeymoon whether you had made me pregnant!’

‘And how you must have laughed,’ he said softly. ‘Because presumably you were already on the Pill.’

‘Yes! But I didn’t laugh—of course I didn’t. I was scared. And mixed-up, if you must know—because I had been to see my doctor and he had prescribed me the Pill as a matter of course. I understood that was what all brides-to-be did.’

‘You didn’t think of discussing it with me first?’ he demanded.

‘How could I—when the subject was so clearly off-limits? You married me because I fulfilled certain criteria, and the main one was my innocence!

So you can hardly expect me to have brought up the subject of birth control with you before the wedding, can you? Even if I’d wanted to—or dared to—we were scarcely alone for a second!’

‘How about afterwards, Millie? Huh? Once we had been…intimate? Couldn’t you have told me then?’

She knew that it would muddy the waters still further to tell him that intimacy had been a long time in coming for her that only recently had she really felt they had finally reached it.

‘You frightened me with your autocratic assurance that we should have a child straight away,’ she admitted. ‘I felt as though I would shrink for ever into the shadows if I did.’

‘Oh, what is the point in all this?’ he bit out impatiently. ‘We could go round and round in circles for ever, and in the meantime I could use my time more usefully.’

‘More usefully?’ she echoed in disbelief.

He wanted to hurt her as badly as she had hurt him, and he lashed out now as only he could. Nothing so coarse as personal insults, but words dipped in the icy and distancing substance of Court protocol. ‘If you will excuse me, Millie—I have matters which require my attention.’

‘You still don’t understand, do you?’ she questioned slowly.

He gave her a look of imperial disdain and Millie almost shrank. ‘Are you trying to suggest that I’m missing the point?’ He raised his dark brows. ‘Perhaps it was less a fear of pregnancy itself which was the problem—but concern about the identity of the father.’