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His Majesty Xavier Tadeo Santiago did not have to make it all the way up the drive to the remote manor house in the farthest reaches of the royal estate to know that it was far past time to divorce his queen.

The drive itself was a pageant of early spring flowers flung in all directions like a discordant quilt. They were clumped here and festooned there, their bright colors clashing with each other and running all over the place, making a dramatic visual cacophony on both sides of the drive.

He found them offensive at once.

Tadeo was well acquainted with the work of the groundskeeper and his staff. They kept the rest of the royal estate in pristine and orderly condition, as was right and proper, since the royal family served its subjects and was called to present—always—their best foot forward. These grounds belonged to the kingdom. As did the palace, its contents, and indeed, the royal family itself.

Even the king himself was no more or less than the property of the kingdom, or so Tadeo’s father had always taught him.

It meant more with the ghost of Tadeo’s mother hanging always between them. The spectacle she’d made of herself. The shame and scandal she’d rained down upon the palace and the kingdom. His father had done his best to remain stalwart in the face of her behavior—always an uphill battle.

Now it was Tadeo’s duty to take up the mantle that his father had carried until the day of his death five months ago. It had taken him all of this time to feel comfortable in the role that he had been preparing for all his life. It had required all of his focus and commitment to make the transition from his father’s reign to his own as seamless as possible. There had been the somber funeral, then the burial, then the typical period of mourning.

But spring was coming. The Kingdom of Bellaza was coming alive after its cold, hard winter.

Tadeo needed to divorce his wife and move on—though, to minimize scandal and disruption, the divorce would have to be civilized. He had already plotted out the messaging with his team, and he had come to do this unpleasant task in person because he felt that was appropriate and a husband owed a wife that much. He assumed that it would be an uncomfortable conversation, perhaps, but a brief one.

After all, he had made it perfectly clear during their widely publicized courtship that this was precisely what would happen once he became king. They would play the part of a royal couple so well-suited to each other that their subjects made up happy endings for them—though there would be precious few public displays as they went about their official duties. Tadeo’s family was well known for its adherence to the strictest protocol. They would let the public make whatever meal it liked from perfectly polite and expected touches.

Tadeo had been told there was fan fiction about their private life all over the internet. He chose not to know what that was.

But this marriage would end. They would never see each other again once they navigated their way through a divorce so amicable it would be applauded. He’d already spent time with his team plotting out the details. Once the divorce was handled, after a suitable period of reflection, Tadeo would find a far more suitable queen and set about making the heir the kingdom required.

He had spent seven years making certain that he saw Esme only when required to for the work they did, never in any private capacity that could lead to complications in his plan in the form of the child he adamantly did not want with her.

Well, a voice in him chided, you managed it for almost all of those seven years, anyway.

Tadeo did not wish to think about that one slip, five months ago. There were other, more pressing things at the moment, like the fact that the condition of the manor’s grounds appalled him. More than that, the sight seemed to dig beneath his skin, as if she—and he knew it was her, if not with her own hands, then at her express direction—had planted all of the flowers in as unorthodox a fashion as possible specifically to bother him.

Queen Esme, betrothed to him since the day of her birth, his wife for the past seven years—and for one reckless year across an ocean in a foreign city, his lover—was astoundingly good at bothering him. She had a talent for getting under his skin in a way no one else could. Or ever had.

A reality that he had never come to terms with, though he had learned how to control his reactions to her over the years of their marriage. Tadeo, in truth, did not wish to come to terms with the ways Esme got to him. None of that mattered now.

“It all ends today,” he assured himself, his voice a dark spool of sound in the interior of the car.

He was glad he was alone.

Tadeo had driven himself, waving off his usual guards because he did not intend to leave the royal estate. Now, still on the garish drive, he slowed the vintage Rolls-Royce that had been a part of his grandfather’s collection and ordered himself to find his center. To remain calm.

Something that was normally not the least bit difficult for him.

Only Esme disrupted his equanimity. Only Esme forced him to confront the distasteful evidence that he truly was his mother’s son, made of all the wild, impossible parts of her that had led her to make such a display of herself for all the world to see. He loathed that he possessed such depths inside himself and had spent most of his adult life doing all that he could to keep them locked away.

He could not be the king his country deserved unless and until he removed Esme from his life. He had known this going in, but there had always been so much investment in the fairy-tale notion of the Prince of Bellaza marrying the Princess of Clarebonne from the neighboring kingdom. Not least because the two kingdoms had been one, long ago, and this only added to the fairy-tale mystique. After the scandal his mother had wrought on her marriage and therefore also on Tadeo’s father’s reign, a fairy tale had seemed like a gift. A gift that could fix what his mother had broken.

But the fairy tale had run its course. Now was the time to act, and Tadeo was ready. He was more than ready.

Their marriage would end quietly. There were no children after seven years of living completely separate lives in private, so there was no claim to the throne to worry about. Esme could go off to make a mess of whatever she wished, wherever she wished to do it, without it having any bearing on him.

Just so long as she left Bellaza and Tadeo never laid eyes on her again, he would be happy.

Because he would finally be able to breathe.

He would not let her damned flowers get to him, reminding him of too many things he did not wish to think about. All of them involving Esme and that recklessness only she conjured up in him. He would see to it that her gardening additions were summarily removed as soon as she left the manor house and replaced with a tidy hedge. There would be no sign of Esme’s disruptive presence once she left, and that was what mattered. This chapter of his life was finally ending.

And not a moment too soon.

The drive wound around at last to the house itself, which was a fine old Bellazan structure made in the late medieval period, then renovated time and again in the centuries since to suit the whims of a succession of queens. When Tadeo had handed it off to his brand-new queen on their wedding night, it had been a sturdy, quietly elegant monument of the kingdom’s history. He had not been here since.

An oversight, clearly.

Tadeo was not certain that he could entirely believe his own eyes as he gazed out at the monstrosity that loomed before him at the top of the drive.

She had…painted it, if that was what it could be called. What she’d done was gaudy. It was an assault.

In place of the expected white walls and red-tiled rooftops that nodded toward the kingdom’s Spanish neighbors, plus the hint of the nearby French countryside in the sprawling gardens that would not look out of place surrounding a chateau, the Queen’s Manor House—once considered the refined jewel of the royal estate—now appeared to have been vomited upon by an intoxicated rainbow.

Tadeo was so aghast at the tasteless horror show in front of him that he almost forgot to step on the brake in the car. He rolled to a stop only centimeters from crashing into the insufferably bright magenta wall before him. He continued to stare out through the windshield, not able to accept that he was truly seeing the ornate, excessive, and expansive palate of too many colors before him.

He wondered if it was possible that he was, in fact, having a stroke.

At least that sensation was familiar.

It was much the way he had felt the morning after his father’s death five months ago, when he had woken to find that it wasn’t a dream. Not only was his noble and admirable father truly dead, when the old man had always seemed so invincible, but Tadeo had actually gone and done the one thing he’d vowed he would never, ever do.

He had allowed Esme into his bed. Or rather, a couch in his father’s study, but it was the same regret either way.

Tadeo knew better.

God help him, did he know better.

He could recall that morning perfectly. How he had lain there on the couch in the study where she’d found him after the funeral, feeling as if he was fracturing into a thousand shards of jagged glass as she curled up at his side. She was so peaceful. She looked like an angel as she slept, the way she always had.

She still fit against his body perfectly.

It seemed impossible, after all those years, and yet there was no denying it.

Tadeo had felt as if his chest was cracked wide open, and she was to blame for it.

Just as she had been the first time, years ago, when they’d finally met each other on the other side of the world. He had been doing his graduate work in the sort of business, economics, and public policy issues that could only serve the kingdom. She had been an undergraduate in the same city. A city that seemed like a long-lost daydream to him now. The Boston of his memories was always covered in towers of snow to mark its bitter winters. There were no mountains to speak of, when Bellaza was ringed with them. More, the wild Atlantic was forever seething about at the end of streets and in the distance, as if keeping watch.

He liked to tell himself that he had been happy to leave that strange, small city—but he still woke up from dreams that smelled like the salt marshes of Cape Cod on a quiet spring morning, or sounded like the rattle of the T, or had him remembering walking along the Charles River on a picture-perfect fall afternoon.

Tadeo exited the car outside the manor house, shutting the driver’s door sharply behind him. Then realized that he was standing about because he wasn’t used to arriving anywhere and not being immediately greeted by staff. He was quite certain that there was staff at the manor house. What he did not understand was why none of them made themselves known as protocol demanded.

Thoughts of Boston felt like a reprimand, but then, he had known at the time that those years were an indulgence. That he was permitted to indulge in a kind of freedom there—the independence to walk where he pleased and live a life with far less scrutiny in a country not his own. He had known he never would again.

Still, he found himself shaking off unwanted memories yet again as he started for the main door, painted in a revolting shade of pink. If he was a vindictive man, he might have been tempted to make Esme pay to restore the house to its traditional state before releasing her. But that would only prolong this.

And to Tadeo’s way of thinking, their entire relationship had already been entirely too prolonged.

He had known that he was betrothed since he was a child. He was five years older than Esme and had been showed pictures of her over time. She had been raised in Clarebonne, which was even smaller than Bellaza and had always enjoyed favorable relations with it, dating all the way back to the time in antiquity when the kingdoms had been joined. Their betrothal had been speculated about in the press all throughout their teenage years because it was not a formal, legal betrothal in the old style. It was an understanding.

An understanding between two kings was as good as law, in some places, but the two kings in question had been very deliberate about the way they’d handled Esme and Tadeo. The two of them had not met. They were deliberately kept apart, in fact.

No one expects you and Esme to molder on shelves, at least until you meet, Tadeo’s father, King Hugo, had always said. You can enjoy yourself as you wish, as long as you remain ever-conscious of your duties and scrupulous about your reputation.

Yes, sir, Tadeo had murmured. He had been all of fourteen and did not wish to think about his duties any more than necessary, given he had already found them crushing. Much less his spotless reputation, though that part he was admittedly more concerned with.

King Alain and I are agreed that you and Princess Esme should meet when she is finished with her studies. What that means, his father had said, perhaps more sternly than before, is that you may do what you wish, but you should never be linked in public with another woman. Neither one of you must ever be seen in any kind of amorous situation, or in any questionable position that could be interpreted the wrong way. You might find this onerous. But it is excellent practice for your future. His craggy face, with the blue eyes Tadeo had inherited, had been somber. I expect there to be no scandals, Tadeo. Not one, not ever. Do you understand?

Tadeo had always understood.

He had only been eleven when his mother had died, off in a boating accident in Italy with one of her many lovers. Some had claimed that Tadeo was too young to understand what was happening then, but they were mistaken. He had understood completely. And even if he hadn’t, he certainly would have heard every sordid detail at school, where his status as crown prince had long since lost its luster.

Even if he’d wished to avoid his mother’s exploits, he’d been unable to.

For years at that point, it had been impossible for Tadeo to avoid the sordid details that his mother seemed to have no shame sharing with the whole world. Everybody knew the story of the selfish, unsatisfied Queen of Bellaza who had provided the kingdom with its needed heir and then declared her duties and responsibilities completed.

The rest of my life is mine, cries the Queen! the headlines screamed.

Tadeo had understood completely and totally that he could not, as that queen’s son, create that kind of scandal. No matter what.

Even if he hadn’t been told exactly that by his father, repeatedly, he would have come to the same conclusion himself. The kingdom prized its calmness. Its peace. Scandals were for other, more volatile nations.

It was Tadeo’s duty not to become a scandal. He took that seriously.

He had therefore enjoyed himself, but always with women who understood his position. And who, more to the point, he trusted not to sell him out to the papers. This meant that he was significantly less of a player than many of his boarding school friends, but he would not be the one to put the family’s name into the mud again.

He had vowed it after his mother’s funeral. It was the first, last, and only time he had ever seen his father cry. Or, more precisely, allow his eyes to look damp. For the smallest moment.

Tadeo had learned over time that there were warning signs when a woman he might have been interested in was the wrong choice. Bright red flags that would indicate when a woman was appropriate for him or not, and it was his duty to look for those flags and react accordingly. He liked the women he dated, very privately, to be circumspect in all things. Modest, practical, and smart enough to think twice when it came to exposing him.

He had never chosen wrong.

If it had been up to him, he would never have chosen Princess Esme.

Tadeo had been the one to initiate their meeting in Boston. He’d been in graduate school across the river in Cambridge and even though he did not go out of his way to keep up with the Princess’s every move, he could not avoid knowing that she was attending nearby Wellesley College, a very highly selective women’s college with an august reputation.

His palace handlers—now his team—made certain he knew.

They were both far away from the intense press interest that surrounded them in their own countries. They were both still immersed in their studies, so there would be no chance of accelerating the march toward their wedding. Tadeo had thought it would be safe. Easy. A smart move to build a friendship in advance, so that the years they would spend together as husband and wife could only be better for it.

Too well had he understood the point of the stories King Hugo had told about his own courtship of Tadeo’s mother. Lady Marisol had not been his family’s first choice. She had not been a choice at all. She had been impetuous, bright, and bold. The King had fallen hard and had insisted that he would marry her or he would not marry at all.

But soon enough, Marisol had grown bored of royal life. Just as everyone had warned the King she would.

What had followed had haunted his father for the rest of his life, and now haunted Tadeo too. The ghost of Marisol was what lay beneath every decision and every plan Tadeo made for his life and his reign. He thought about the scenes she had made, the extramarital affairs she had flaunted, the contempt with which she had treated the kingdom in general and his father in particular, and vowed to do whatever was necessary to protect the kingdom from a repeat of such embarrassment.

He had married Esme because their kingdoms were invested in their wedding, a choice he would make again if necessary. Just as he would divorce her now because she could never be an appropriate mother to his heir. She was too difficult. Too…problematic.

Back in Boston, Tadeo had possessed absolutely no desire to repeat history. He’d had no intention of ever allowing the kind of passion that that had blindsided his father and made him turn his back on his kingdom for the pleasures of the flesh to level him as well.

He had been completely and totally unprepared for Esme, in other words.

Another familiar feeling he very much wished to banish from his life entirely.

No servants appeared at the door, or responded when he knocked, so he opened it himself and went inside. And in case he’d imagined that the exterior of the building was the only place that his wife had allowed her creativity free reign, he was quickly disabused of that notion.

The color scheme—though that word, scheme, suggested some kind of a plan, which Tadeo doubted very much had been used here—continued inside. He walked through, finding that his jaw was tense and that he was grinding his teeth as he looked from one ruined room to the next. There was nothing in the whole of the historic house that she had not changed.

Nothing.

It felt like a metaphor for the way she had laid waste to Tadeo’s own principles and self-regard.

Tadeo hated fucking metaphors.

Though as he walked through one atrium that bled into the next, with more floral theatrics at every turn, he knew that he could not lay that solely at her feet. The woman could be as wicked as she liked, but it was the wickedness in him that had met hers.

He was the one at fault. He accepted that.

Now he wished to be done with it. There was no doubt a sweet, unassuming, deeply boring heiress somewhere that he could marry and never think about again. She would do her job and leave him to his. They would have a pleasant, comfortable, smooth sort of life, marked by nothing but the milestones of their children and the peaceful prosperity of the kingdom.

He could almost taste it. All that was needed was the quietly amicable divorce he had planned, with tasteful statements to the press about going their separate ways with no acrimony and the best of wishes for the other’s happiness, etcetera, and he could have peace at last.

At last.

On the other side of the ruined house, he stepped outside onto one of the back terraces and surveyed the gardens as they stretched out toward the horizon and the Pyrenees in the distance.

It did not take a degree in landscape architecture to realize that the gardens, too, had been changed.

In seven years, Esme had completely transformed the sophisticated, manicured gardens that previous queens who had lived here—excluding his mother, of course, who had never set foot on this property while the gleaming shores of the Côte d’Azur existed—had enjoyed. They had all taken pride in overseeing the tending of these gardens, always passing the torch along to keep them quiet, contemplative. A fitting place of respite for a queen. A place for meditation and relaxation.

There was nothing the least bit relaxing about the gardens greeting him now.

They were a deafening bugle of early spring exuberance.

There were daffodils and crocuses and cherry blossoms, and they were everywhere, bright and bold. Unseemly and overwhelming, Tadeo thought darkly, and he could not understand why he could not find a single, solitary soul to explain to him what was happening here.

He knew that Esme had not gone on a trip of any kind. Her schedule went through his office, for his review. The palace had only just begun taking on their outward-facing duties again as mourning for the late King had only this week come to an official end.

Esme should have been here. Doing whatever it was she did with her time.

Which was, he reflected now, wrecking heritage sites with the wanton application of tawdry colors slapped about with no thought whatsoever for the lines of the garden or its pathways or its internal logic, apparently.

He stood still in the not precisely warm air of the late February morning, generating more than enough heat on his own. The sun was already warm, hinting at the fairer months to come. The chill of winter almost felt like a memory when the sunlight moved over his face.

Tadeo needed her excised from this house, and the kingdom, and his life before another season passed. If he allowed himself the sort of dramatics he felt only when he was in Esme’s vicinity, he would be tempted to think his own life depended on it.

“But I do not allow it,” he growled out at himself. As a reminder he should not have needed, yet clearly did. Another reason this long, torturous chapter of his life needed to end.

He thought he heard a sound in the distance and he made himself walk toward it, scowling at the once-orderly flower beds everywhere, now showing no restraint or any evidence of planning. It was all too bright. Too out of control. As if someone had spun around in a circle like a child with bubbles, flinging seeds about.

The image he had then, of Esme doing exactly that, did not help his mood any.

Tadeo battled his way down an overgrown pathway where vines had been encouraged to do as they liked, making his way out toward the far end of the gardens, where a pergola sat between the garden proper and the start of the vineyards that some enterprising queen had insisted be grown here some while back. They did not produce a lot of wine, but every year, the queen’s vintners produced a specialized run of limited-edition bottles of the queen’s Pinot Noir. It had long been seen as something of a status symbol among certain sets in the kingdom’s society.

Tadeo half expected to find the vines torn up and discarded in favor of an amusement park or something equally hideous, but they were still there. Waiting for the summer to ripen into grapes suitable for wine.

He heard voices again and strode toward them, feeling more and more like a storm cloud as he went.

Then he walked up through the vine-laden path to the pergola and found his wife at last.

She was sitting at the long table in the shade there with what appeared to be her own staff members. There was food and drink in platters, but there were also swathes of fabric, and Esme herself seemed to be wearing half of them.

It took him long, heart-pounding moments to realize that he was reacting to two things at once. One, he had no idea what they were doing, and no one seemed to look at his direction or even notice he was there, which was unusual. Two, and more concerning, it was impossible not to notice that Esme looked…well.

Very well.

Glowing, in fact.

And his body, his temple that he preferred to keep completely under his control at all times like a bit of marble that he alone could sculpt, betrayed him yet again.

The way it had from the start where Esme was concerned.

Because every time he laid eyes on this woman, it was like he was burned alive. She was a poison in his blood, a curse upon his soul, and a great lamentation in the cock that he otherwise ruthlessly controlled. If a great lamentation was what to call it when he was nothing at all but hard and needy while the woman was doing nothing but sitting in a chair across a table from where he was standing, with very little of her visible aside from her face.

Damn her.

He waited. Esme didn’t look up. She was talking animatedly to one of the women dressed in black beside her. They were both moving their fingers over the fabric that was swaddled all over as if they’d been draping it over Esme on purpose, but he couldn’t hear what they were saying.

It was possible he had stood there a long while before a different woman altogether looked up, met Tadeo’s gaze, and gasped.

“Your Majesty!” she cried.

He watched the ripple effect as it happened. First everyone froze. Then, as if lit by the same flame, all of the servants leaped to their feet—pushing back their chairs so there were loud scraping noises against the tile patio, then dropping into deep, deep curtsies.

His queen, Tadeo noticed—his wife, though hopefully not for much longer—did not rise, though it was protocol that she do so. Esme stayed where she was, draped in so many different shades of billowing fabric that he could barely see her body beneath it.

“Leave us,” Tadeo told the staff, and did not watch them as they all fluttered off, like so many dark-feathered birds. He kept watching Esme. He studied her maddeningly perfect oval of a face with her dark flashing eyes and that lush, impossible mouth that he absolutely could not feel all over his body, because that was insupportable.

“Have you taken up sewing?” he asked her, not convinced he was entirely in control of his voice. He blamed her for that, too.

The proverbial straw on a camel’s back.

“I’m redecorating a room,” she replied.

In that same serene voice of hers. Brimming with that same abominable confidence that he found both atrocious and wildly compelling.

Tragically, she also remained the most beautiful woman he’d ever encountered.

This had been true when she was but a sophomore at Wellesley. It was even more true now. It was an outrage on every level, but she still looked like the model of the perfect woman, should he have been asked to draw such a creature.

Should drawing be one of his talents.

It was not that she was the most beautiful woman in the world, he supposed. But it was a cruel trick of fate that she managed to hit every single one of the buttons Tadeo had not entirely realized he had until he’d met her. She was elegant. She was graceful in everything, from her smallest gestures to the way she laughed—a sound that came from her belly and transformed her whole face. She had the sort of exquisite manners that were necessary for the circles they moved in, but Esme always made them seem as if they were innate.

As it was not something she was doing, but something that was simply a part of who she was.

She had been kind to his father, who had been less enticed by the fairy-tale argument and had been largely chilly in return. She was always kind to their subjects, no matter what sort of questions they tried to ask her while she was shaking hands and playing her part. It was his cross to bear that she also looked equally as stunning when she was in jeans and flats as she did in a bespoke gown made for ceremony and circumstance.

Today, she had her dark, glossy hair piled casually on the back of her head. It looked like she was wearing a simple T-shirt, which seemed to hug her curves more than usual. And yet she still simply emanated sophistication from every pore.

Only Tadeo knew that there were ways to touch this woman that lit her on fire. Only he knew what she looked like, her dark eyes glazed over with sex and longing, her mouth open while sounds of desire poured out, and how she writhed beneath him, taking more and more until he wasn’t certain if either one of them would actually survive—

But that was not the point of this visit.

“My father has been dead for five months,” he told her curtly.

“Five months and thirteen days,” Esme replied. Oddly specific, to his mind, but she said it so calmly. Her lips curved. “I am aware, Tadeo.”

If he could go back in time, he would not have given her access to his family name. By the end, only his father still called him that in person. Most of his friends from school called him variations on his title. Or other nicknames of one sort or another.

The press, of course, used all of his names as they pleased.

He could have had her call him by his proper first name and he often thought that would be easier, because he wouldn’t feel this tug of undeserved familiarity. Maybe the name alone would have done it. Maybe then he would never have become familiar with her at all.

But he couldn’t go back to that first dinner in a quiet restaurant overlooking the Charles and fix what happened.

He could only do the necessary damage control now.

“I told you long ago that we would remain married only as long as necessary,” he told her, no longer caring how dark he sounded. It needed to be done. It didn’t matter how it was done. “I’ve come here to let you know that I intend to begin our divorce proceedings. Immediately.”

Tadeo didn’t know what he expected. For her to cheer, perhaps? Sometimes he convinced himself that she was no more interested in continuing this marriage of theirs than he was. Perhaps he thought she might cry? After all, he hadn’t been so far gone that he’d forgotten the things she’d whispered in the night after his father’s death.

Sometimes he thought those words haunted him.

But of all the possible responses he’d imagined, it wasn’t the way she smiled at him.

Her lips curved gently. Even kindly, he thought.

And then she rose.

The fabric cascaded off her and slid in heaps of shimmering color to either side of her, landing on the tiles at her feet.

But Tadeo forgot all about that. He couldn’t take his eyes off her.

Because the Esme he had last seen five months ago had been lean and lithe and in some way resembled the ballet dancer she had once told him she would have liked to have become, in a different life.

She stood, the fabric fell, and she placed her hand on the shelf of the belly—her belly—that had swelled up to enormous size. A great deal as if she had a ball beneath her shirt, when, of course, she did not.

It was impossible. It was inconceivable.

It was a disaster of epic proportions and she was smiling—

“About that divorce,” Esme said, as if they were discussing the weather. Or what to have the staff prepare for a snack. As if she was not very obviously pregnant. “I wonder if you might want to rethink.”

End of excerpt