She avoided his gaze. “Nothing, I’m just really overwrought and I think my blood sugar is low because I was too nervous to eat much at dinner.”
“Is that why you were eating these?” He picked up the crackers and held them before her.
“Whenever my stomach gets upset, I eat crackers to absorb the acid.” Her words made sense, but something about her tone told him she wasn’t giving him full disclosure.
“My mother told me she used to eat crackers when she was pregnant,” he said. “She claimed it helped with nausea.”
Brooke’s body tensed. “I’ve heard that before. I think if you keep something bland in your stomach it settles it.”
Nic’s irritation was growing by the second. Brooke was a terrible liar because she believed in being honest. So much so it had gotten her into trouble a number of times. Her behavior while answering his questions demonstrated that while she hadn’t actually said anything false, she was keeping things from him.
“Are you pregnant?”
“We’ve been careful.”
“That didn’t answer my question.” He leaned down and grabbed her chin, pinning her with his gaze. “Are you pregnant?”
“Yes.” Her voice came out small and unsure.
He sat back with a muffled curse. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“That was the plan when I came to Ithaca.” She pushed into a sitting position and retreated away from him as far as the headboard would allow. “I couldn’t tell you something like that over the phone, but then I showed up and you were so unhappy to see me.” She wrapped her arms around herself and stared at her shoes. “And then you announce that you are a prince and you need to get married so your country could have an heir and that your wife needed to be an aristocrat or a citizen of Sherdana.”
“So you were planning on leaving without ever telling me?” Outrage gave his voice a sharp edge.
“Don’t say it like that. You made a choice to come back here and do the honorable thing. I made a decision that would save you from regret.”
“But to never see my child?”
She put her hands over the lower half of her face and closed her eyes. After a long moment she spoke. “Don’t you think I considered that? But I knew you would have other children, hopefully lots of them.”
Her every word slashed his heart into ribbons. The woman he loved was having his child and he’d been days away from never knowing the truth. “Well, there’s no question of you going home now.”
“What? You can’t make that decision for me. My job, friends and family are in California. That’s where I belong. Just like you belong here in Sherdana with your family and your future wife.”
She was crazy if she thought he was just going to let her vanish out of his life. “You belong with me just like I belong with you and our child.”
“Maybe if you were the ordinary scientist I first fell in love with, but you are a prince with responsibilities that are bigger than both of us combined. Do the right thing and let me go. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”
“I refuse to accept that.” Nic got to his feet and stared down at her. Where a moment earlier she’d seemed fragile and lost, her passionate determination to do what she perceived as the honorable thing gave her the look of a Valkyrie. “Get some rest. We will talk at length later.”
Nic should have gone straight to his mother to deliver the confirmation of Brooke’s condition as he’d promised, but found he needed some privacy to absorb what he’d just learned. He headed to his suite in the royal wing, curious to see if it was in the condition Gabriel had said. But just as Ariana had said, there was no leak.
The rooms that had been his growing up couldn’t feel any less familiar than if he’d never seen them before. The past ten years of his life, first living in Boston, then California, felt much more real to him than the first twenty-two being Sherdana’s prince. But that had been the case before he’d found out Brooke was pregnant. If he put aside duty and engaged in an honest conversation with himself, he’d accept that he no longer felt connected to his birth country. Yet his failure in the Mojave Desert meant that California was no longer a welcoming destination, either.
Never had he felt so conflicted about his future path. No matter what direction he chose, he was destined to leave disappointment and regret in his wake. Staying in Sherdana and marrying a suitable bride would require him to give up the woman he loved and abandon his child. But if he chose to make a life with Brooke could he convince her that he would never regret turning his back on his country when he knew it would always haunt him? And what would he do in California without the Griffin to work on? Teach at a university? He frowned.
When an hour of self-reflection passed without a clear solution presenting itself, Nic left his suite and sought his mother. He found her and his father in the king’s private office deep in discussion.
“Well?” the king demanded, his eyes reflecting disappointment. He was seated behind a large mahogany desk that had been a gift from the king of Spain back in the early eighteenth century. “Is Dr. Davis pregnant?”
“Yes.” Nic refused to feel like a chastised teenager. “And the child is mine.” This last he directed to his mother, who sat on one of the burgundy sofas in the office’s sitting area.
She was in the process of pouring a cup of tea and sent a pained look to her husband. “It seems as if none of my grandchildren are going to be legitimate.”
“I won’t apologize for what happened,” he told his parents. “And I won’t shirk my responsibility to Brooke.”
“What does that mean?” his father said, his deep voice charged with warning.