“What?”
“Don’t let your chance at love get away, Helene. Don’t let you father take that from you, too.”
“But...” Hel shook her head, unable to get the words out.
Her mother waited, patient and steady.
She looked away. “You loved him, and look what it did to us.”
“Oh, Helene.” Her mother’s utterance of her name sat heavy between them, bearing the weight of a thousand feelings, most of them tangled and dark. Seraphina closed her eyes and took a shuddering breath. As she exhaled, tears slipped from between her eyelids.
She stayed like that, breathing, still though she shook, for a while before she spoke. “Oh, Helene. Helene. Helene. Helene. I should have told you. Oh, my sweet, I should have told you so long ago. When you were so little and would ask me so many questions, I couldn’t bear to tell you the truth. And later, well, I guess there were no more questions. But no, my darling, I never loved your father. He slapped any delusions of that out of me that night so soon after our engagement.”
Hel opened her mouth. “But you said...”
Seraphina gently pressed her fingers against her daughter’s mouth. “I told my daughter a fairy tale to spare her a nightmare. I was infatuated with your father, the way young girls are wont to get, but that is a far cry from real love. What I sense you have with Drake.”
Hel shook her head. “It’s not possible.”
“I’m afraid so, my greatest love. You wouldn’t be having his baby if you didn’t love him.” Her mother patted her knee, a grin lightening her features. “You’re not that kind of girl.”
Hel snorted. “I’m no kind of girl.”
Seraphina smiled, wide and soft. “There’s my girl. And speaking of girls, I’m certain you’re having one.”
Hel brought a palm to rest lightly on her stomach, hoping to settle the disturbed butterflies that fluttered there. She was pregnant. That she had passed even an instant with that not being the foremost concern on her mind spoke volumes.
It suggested she loved him.
If that was the case, other things began to make sense: the precision with which her mind recorded every detail about him, the way her body was drawn to his, the way she’d run away from him.
Her heart rate picked up, sweat beading at her brow.
She had done everything in her power to ensure that she didn’t end up like d’Tierrza women before her—just another entry in the annals of aristocratic girls played out as pawns to advance the aims of their grand families.
She had thought she’d been the rebel heiress, a duchess and the captain of the queen’s guard, that she’d refused to marry so many times that no one would bother trying any longer. And that she’d taken a vow of chastity to give him his ultimate comeuppance, that she’d done it all to frustrate and thwart her father’s will and desire at every turn, but that wasn’t right. She’d done it all because he terrified her. He terrified her so much she’d done everything in her power and imagination to keep safe from him. She’d lived in the public eye, endeared herself to the most elite security force in the country, and guarded her heart, the most dangerous thing of all, ingeniously ensuring that she’d never fall for a man like her father.
“Helene? Are you all right, Helene?”
Hel stared into the face that was a sneak peek into her future. She was taller than her mother, but otherwise her spitting image.
“I love him,” she said dumbly, as if, as with her pregnancy, her mother could be the one to confirm for her.
Heart in her eyes, Seraphina opened her arms wide, and Hel fell into them, silent sobs raking her sinew-and-bone frame.
She loved him and it was too late. They’d already said their goodbyes in the dusty light of the pantry, the salt and pepper in his beard and hair layered wisdom and gravitas over his foundation of sheer male perfection, and she knew he’d thought through everything—word, deed and action—before making a move.
He was autocratic and driven, but he was still the best man she had ever met.
She had broken her vow for him, and he had broken her understanding of the limits of joy and love and pleasure in return. And so she’d pushed him away.
Her heart squeezed, but even with her mother, she didn’t cry. D’Tierrzas didn’t cry. According to her father, d’Tierrzas struck.
But she would not add insult to her open heart by allowing this moment to be the one that turned her into her father.
She was cut from a different kind of cloth. The kind attracted to hard men. It seemed she was more like her mother than she realized.
She was the kind of woman who loved hurt. Strange, how often the two feelings danced together within her, as if they were each other’s favorite partners.
Love made her vulnerable.
She couldn’t breathe.
And to top it all off, she was pregnant.
CHAPTER TEN
SHE WAS AS beautiful asleep as she was awake, Drake noted, as he slipped into Helene’s room long after she’d settled into the movement and breathing patterns of deep sleep.
She had been even more attractive in her street clothes earlier that day, all legs and platinum and blue, absolutely thirst-quenching when the only thing he wanted was a long drink of water.
That had been his first thought when she’d popped into view.
There was just something sexy about knowing all that dangerous and deadly power was wrapped up in something as innocuous as blue jeans and tennis shoes.
His second thought was that she was a liar. By omission, yes, but a liar nonetheless. But he’d already known that.
Now, looking at her, he thought she was a beautiful sleeping liar, clad only in a T-shirt.
He had trusted her and she had turned out to be as treacherous as her father had been.
Moving in silence, he traversed her room with ease. Taking in the design as he went, he scanned the space for whatever revelations it might have to share
