In the shower, Zac was weighing up the use of birth control against his legal need for a child and marvelling at the unexpected direction his thoughts were wandering in. Freddie could conceive immediately, which would kill the fun angle because he knew from his mother’s experience that pregnant women got sick, tired and hormonal. If he used condoms, however, they could enjoy carefree sex for as long as they liked. He was already wondering how soon he could enjoy her again. He couldn’t wait to see that dreamy, dizzy expression of bliss on her face again and revel in her honest, innocent openness because he had never had that connection with a woman before.
Freddie was a rare find, he conceded with satisfaction. Should he have told her the truth about that night at the ball? He grimaced. He didn’t believe in baring his soul and he didn’t want to risk hurting her. If he told her the truth she would misinterpret it and make feminine assumptions that would not fit the frame. Wouldn’t she assume that she meant more to him than she did? He didn’t want to do that to her. Inevitably what he felt would wear off and he would want other women and the freedom to enjoy them anywhere, any place, any time. He knew his own flaws. He was not a for-ever kind of guy and there was a limit to how honest he could afford to be.
CHAPTER SEVEN
IT WAS A breathtaking dress, Freddie reflected, dizzily studying her appearance in the mirror in Claire’s bedroom. Getting ready in her own room had proved impossible because there simply wasn’t enough space.
The sleek handmade lace bodice with a low back clung from shoulder to hip, playing up her small curves and making her look taller. The skirt fell in intricate cobweb-fine lace folds shimmering with beadwork. At her throat glittered a diamond pendant, a wedding gift from Zac. Her hair was up in an elaborate coronet to support the diamond-studded tiara that Zac had told her had belonged to his late mother, along with the diamond earrings and bracelet she wore.
‘Do I look like a Christmas tree?’ she asked her aunt worriedly.
‘Like I should have that problem!’ Claire quipped enviously. ‘But diamonds are the family business, so I suppose you have to put the finest on display. Your life will be so different, Freddie. It’ll be champagne and caviar all the way now.’
Freddie swallowed hard at the thought because she still couldn’t imagine it. A hair stylist and a beautician might have come to the house to prepare her for the wedding, but that had seemed more of a necessity than a luxury when she was marrying Zac and she needed to look like the sort of woman that he would marry. Heaven forbid that he would ever look at her and feel embarrassed by her and, thanks to that family dinner, she already knew that even those closest to him could be both critical and judgemental.
Zac, waiting at the church, forced a polite smile when Vitale came to join his two brothers. ‘Your majesty,’ he said, acknowledging that his half-brother had become the King of Lerovia since his mother’s abdication even though the formal coronation would not be held for several months. ‘I should be bowing, right?’
‘No...not within the family,’ King Vitale declared. ‘And I intend to have a modern court, so there’ll be a lot less bowing and scraping in Lerovia as well. By the way, our wedding present, which is car-shaped, is on its way back to you.’
Zac frowned at that reference to the prized sports car he had lost in that ill-judged bet with his half-brother. ‘Back to me?’
Vitale shrugged. ‘Nobody won that bet. You may not have brought Freddie to the royal ball but now you’re marrying her—’
‘You won fair and square,’ Zac began inflexibly.
Angel frowned with the air of a man who would have liked to knock both his stiff-necked brothers’ heads together. ‘He’ll be delighted to accept his car back.’
With a stark exhalation of breath, Zac accepted that loaded hint and murmured through gritted teeth, ‘That’s very generous of you, Vitale...thanks.’
‘And within the family circle there will be neither bows nor any more bets,’ Angel suggested with quiet emphasis.
Zac sank back into brooding silence, disturbed that he was so tense. People got married every day, he reminded himself. He didn’t, though, and the surroundings and the stifling traditions made him feel constrained. The whole event was much more formal than he had expected.
The bride made quite a picture walking down the aisle with Jack, loveable with his hair in corn rows and clad in a miniature suit toddling along beside her and Claire. Eloise was walking very carefully behind her aunts clutching a basket of flowers and clad in the pink flouncy princess dress that was the summit of her little-girl dreams. Zac discovered that he couldn’t take his eyes off that little tableau. His family, his new family, he realised suddenly as Jack beamed trustingly at him and Eloise waved from behind her aunts as if afraid that he might not notice her.
Without the smallest warning, the enormity of the responsibility he had taken on engulfed Zac. He tried to concentrate his attention on Freddie, who looked stunning, sexy and cute as hell, but all the while his brain was running at a mile a minute, telling him that freedom of any kind would be an unattainable luxury with one woman and two...eventually three...children depending on him to be a good husband and a good father. He lost colour, his spectacular bone structure tautly delineated below his bronzed skin as the ramifications of such a marriage finally sank in on him: he would never be totally free again because parenting was for ever, with no get-out clause. It was a sobering moment, most particularly when he was willing to admit that he didn’t know the first thing about how to take care of anyone but himself.
Freddie’s hands almost crushed her bouquet of white and pink roses when she glimpsed the cool bleak light forming in Zac’s gorgeous eyes and the absence of his trademark grin. Her heart sank like a stone. He was disappointed in her. Did she not look the way he had imagined she would? Had he believed a designer dress and all the trimmings, not to mention the family diamonds, would transform an ordinary waitress into something rather more special? Or did he have cold feet about getting married? Whatever it was, he did not look happy, which he should have been, considering that their marriage was supposed to provide what he most wanted as well.
A child. Their first child to add to the mix of Eloise and Jack, whom Zac had insisted must share their day with them because he wanted them to have that first memory of the four of them becoming a family. Zac had never had that family experience, although Freddie had happily enjoyed it for the first ten years of her life. Zac, however, had known only rejection from those who should have given him love and support. By the time he got to know his real father, who was a caring man, it had been a case of too little too late. Of course, Zac was damaged by such a loveless childhood but wasn’t it her role to ensure that he realised that together they could make things different for their own children? Or was that too tall an order for a new bride, who wasn’t loved, to take on? She was rather afraid that it might be...
Her anxiety about Zac shielded her from the pressure of the church packed with rich, smartly dressed guests. Zac had many business acquaintances and his father, still keen to show off his newly discovered son, had invited his friends to share their day as well. His brothers were attending with small parties, further pushing up the numbers. Freddie, however, had only had a few friends to invite because her social life had been very much curtailed by the children.
The priest welcomed them to the altar and gave a serious opening speech about the responsibilities of marriage. When she reached for Zac’s hand, it was ice cool in hers. She had a sudden disturbing and panic-inducing vision of him walking out on her at the last possible minute and, instinctively, she held on tight. The ceremony began and Jack escaped Claire to cling to Zac’s knees like a limpet and loudly wail in disappointment when someone lifted him away. Zac raised Freddie’s hand and slid the twisted platinum ring onto her wedding finger.
They had picked it together but there hadn’t been much choice because her extravagant engagement ring took up so much space that there was little left to spare for th
e wedding ring she would wear. Zac had laughed heartily at the time, teasing her about her little hands and short fingers, and without warning tears stung her eyes at that memory. He had been so laid-back and light-hearted that day only a week earlier and his current change of mood unnerved her. He had wanted to marry her, he had asked her to marry him, she reminded herself to bolster her spirits.
They signed the register with his brother and Claire as witnesses and by the time they walked down the aisle at speed it was obvious that Zac could not wait to get out of the church.
On the steps, as the guests held up phones to photograph them, he expelled his breath in a hiss. ‘Meu Deus...glad that’s over!’
Eloise clung to the foot of his jacket and Jack held out his arms, almost toppling out of Claire’s hold.
‘Tough, isn’t it, Jack?’ Zac derided, reaching out to take the over-eager baby into his arms, recognising that his shenanigans had taxed Claire’s low patience threshold.
It was a challenge for Freddie to hold onto her bridal beam in Zac’s radius, particularly after she saw Angel and Vitale exchanging meaningful looks across the disenchanted bridegroom. Getting into the limousine even with the children clambering over them was a relief because at least there were no watching eyes and listening ears there.
‘What’s wrong, Zac?’ Freddie asked levelly.
‘Nothing’s wrong,’ Zac intoned. ‘I’m just not cut out for this kind of stuff.’
‘You insisted on this being what you called a normal wedding,’ she reminded him.
His strong jaw line clenched and his wide sensual mouth compressed, his crystalline eyes sombre below his semi-lowered lashes. ‘We all make mistakes,’ he said very drily, thinking that he should have opted to avoid the traditional hoopla and travel a simpler route.
Freddie froze. ‘Am I a mistake?’ she suddenly demanded loudly.
Zac groaned long and low. ‘You know I didn’t mean it like that...inferno, I don’t know what I meant! But that priest lecturing us on our marital duties reminded me of being at school,’ he bit out impatiently.
Freddie embraced silence all the way to The Palm Tree, where the reception was being staged. Zac had dispensed with a greeting line as being too official and instead the guests mingled over drinks when they arrived. The hotel nanny was at their disposal and the children were borne off for lunch and a nap. Zac vanished into the bar before they sat down to their meal, reappearing just in time to make a very short speech in the wake of his father’s. He ate little and drank a lot, responding to Freddie when she spoke but initiating no other conversation. He seemed bleakly set on just going through the motions and getting through what he clearly saw as an ordeal.
A weathered stone building loomed ahead of them, every tall window brilliantly lit up in welcome. Zac removed Jack from Freddie’s arms. ‘I’ll take him. You look exhausted.’
Zac had returned to planet earth again, she registered irritably, feeling that she could have done without being told that she looked so tired. She wasn’t vain but she had lived through a disastrous wedding day polished up to her very best and had received not a single compliment from her uninterested bridegroom. She said nothing as they trudged up the path towards the brightly lit frontage of the massive house.
The house reminded her of a postcard of a fantasy Provencal retreat, replete as it was with regimented lines of painted smoky blue shutters and flowers and terracotta vases ornamenting every window and door. But even with the light fading fast she could see the bulk of the house stretching back, recognising that it far outstripped in size any normal house. The number of staff waiting to greet them in the marble-floored hall was another reminder that she had married a man who was unaccustomed to looking after himself in any way. He handed Jack straight over to a young woman. ‘This is Jennifer, Freddie. She will be helping Isabel with the kids.’
Jack screeched at physical contact with yet another stranger and almost threw himself out of the unfortunate Jennifer’s arms. Freddie grabbed him back. ‘It’s all right. I’ll see to settling the children down tonight. They’re overtired and nervous of strangers,’ she said apologetically.
Jennifer showed the way upstairs to the rooms readied for the children and Freddie heaved a sigh of relief at the freedom to do something familiar even if it was in an unfamiliar place. Two nannies? Was he crazy? Was he expecting Eloise and Jack to be kept out of sight by staff as children had been for centuries in well-off families? Who did he think he was to make such arrangements without involving her?