“Maybe that’s the truth.”
The curse he uttered snapped her head back. “We have a peace treaty, Sofía. He played me. Five men are dead because of my decisions. My naïveté.”
Her insides twisted. “You were trying to avoid a war, Nik. You are doing everything you can to protect this country, but it can only happen so fast. No one can fault you for that.”
“I could have been more vigilant. If I had listened to my instincts, I could have anticipated he’d do something like this. Instead I listened to everyone around me.”
“You had to do that. You have a council and advisers for a reason.”
He gave her a scathing look as if to say look where that’d gotten him. Then turned on his heel and headed for the bathroom.
She sat on a chair in the bedroom and waited for him. He was hurting. He felt he had to take responsibility for those men’s deaths. He was the head of the armed forces. The king of this country. It must be humiliating to be betrayed by Idas like that. But it didn’t mean anything he’d done had been wrong. It had all been right.
Nik walked into the bedroom after his shower and pulled on a pair of boxers, barely sparing her a glance. “Go to bed, Sofía. You need sleep.”
She stared at him, waiting, wondering what to do. He moved past her into the salon. The sound of the whiskey decanter being opened, the clink of ice hitting crystal and whiskey being poured filled the silence. The terrace doors clicked open, then shut. He needed time to process. To decompress. She should leave him alone. And for once she did. She was too exhausted not to.
She woke sometime later, something instinctively telling her Nik was not in bed. A look at the clock told her it was 2:00 a.m. Rubbing her eyes, she let them adjust to the darkness, then she slipped out of bed and went to find Nik. He was reclined in a chair on the terrace, the near-empty bottle of whiskey now sitting on the table beside him.
His eyes were glazed as she knelt down beside him.
“You need to sleep, Nik.”
“I can’t.”
Her chest tightened at the haunted look on his face. She took his hands in hers. “I know you consider this your responsibility. I know you are angry at yourself for letting Idas make a fool of you. But you negotiated the release of those men. You sent them home to their families, Nik. Now you need to get some rest so you can deal with this tomorrow.”
“Five men died today,” he rasped. “More will follow if I don’t handle this correctly.”
“Many more will follow if you don’t get some rest and get your head on straight.” She shook her head. “I know it’s painful to lose those men. But this is what you do. You make the tough decisions so the rest of us don’t have to. But you can’t do that if you’re beating yourself up over a mistake, if you’re too tired to think.”
He turned his gaze back to the floodlit gardens. She knew what he wanted, but she wasn’t leaving him alone.
She slid onto his lap. His face tightened. “Sofía—” She pressed her fingers to his mouth, took his hand and guided it to her stomach. To what had woken her. She thought maybe the baby had gone back to sleep when there was no movement beneath their fingers for a good five seconds. Then the kick came, fast and powerful.
Nik’s eyes widened. The baby kicked again.
“This,” she said to him, “is what you are doing this for. For your child. So that he or she will know the freedom your great-grandfather fought for. Stay the course, Nik.”
His gaze lost its glassy look, dark emotion filtering through it as another kick came. “Sofía—”
She cupped his face in her hands and kissed him. Deep and slow and soulfully to banish the demons. He lifted a palm to cup the back of her head, returning the kiss with a hot fervor that told her she’d broken through.
She kissed him until they were all each other could see. Then he picked her up, wrapped her legs around him and carried her inside.
He laid her on their bed, stripped off his boxers and followed her down. Her heart pounded as he positioned himself between her legs, his heavy thighs parting hers. She closed her eyes, bracing herself for the explosive power of him because she was ready for him, always ready for him. Instead he worked his way down her body, lingering over the tiny swell of her stomach, waiting for another kick to come. Absorbing it with a reverent press of his lips, he moved farther down, between the heat of her thighs. His mouth found her most sensitive skin, laved her, licked her until she was crying out his name, begging for him.
Covering her with his heavy body, he sheathed himself inside of her in one powerful movement that stole her breath. The need to forget, the need to cleanse himself of what had happened chased their coupling. She wrapped her thighs around him and brought his mouth down to hers with fingers that cupped his head. He murmured her name hoarsely into her mouth as he plunged inside her again and again until there was only them, as deeply connected as two human beings could be.