Page 34 of Pregnant After One Forbidden Night

She eyed him closely. “What did the king have to say?” she asked. She was probing, testing how much he could, or would, tell her.

The urge was there to share without reserve, so he hedged. “Let’s take a walk,” he said. She would come back to the question, he knew, but the invitation bought him time. Only Jenna seemed to have the ability to put him in the position of being short on said time.

She held his stare for a moment, those deep dark lances of hers piercing him without hesitation, and then nodded.

“There’s a chill in the air outside,” he said.

She flashed a small smile at his words, as if they’d surprised her. Walking past him, she said, “I’ll grab a coat,” leaving the room to, he presumed, retrieve her coat.

They met again in the kitchen, both of them somehow knowing that was where they would reunite.

He had installed her in his preferred bedroom, the one near his office, as opposed to the master suite, which he had taken, and he knew she knew the way.

In preparation for their walk, her attire was a study in contradictions.

She wore a long, tailored overcoat above her airy red dress and had matched it with a pair of floppy boots.

Together, the boots with the dress should not have worked—the style part country maiden, part grizzled dairy farmer—and yet it did, and somehow elegantly.

She brought the masculine and feminine, the sophisticated and the natural, into perfect balance effortlessly.

With her long braid, she looked entirely ready for a moonlit stroll in the countryside. Did he, he wondered, look as carefree and natural? Did he present the picture of a hearty and happy man of the landscape? Somehow, he doubted it. But he took her arm nonetheless, leading her outside through a side door that led into the woodland trails that constituted his landscaped forest garden.

Though they were here to discuss the future, one made infinitely more complicated by the intensity of the attraction that flared between them, walking through the moonlit woods with Jenna—even when that moon was little more than a thin sliver in the sky—came with a sense of peace that Sebastian had never experienced before.

The day with her had been a conflux of emotions, his control tenuous at best. At worst, well...at worst it had been the sweetness of kissing her in the kitchen and the inferno of touching her in the library.

Had he once again chosen the mistaken course with her? Should he have installed her somewhere other than Redcliff, at a more comfortable distance?

The idea offended both the father and the man within him. He refused to keep any child of his at a comfortable distance and he had at least enough control to keep his hands to himself. Was that not one of the basic tenets of manhood?

The day’s ups had been a testament to the strengths of his plan and the downs, merely a side effect of delaying this conversation too long.

Once they’d laid down parameters—one of which would be physical distance—neither would get carried away.

The trail ahead of them was lovely, wide and laid with a soft, sound-absorbent natural bedding of shredded bark. In the dim lighting, her hair shone like a raven’s wing, her thick eyebrows drawn together making her look like a grave woodland witch from another era.

“What did the king say?”

What a strange thing it was to walk with Jenna in the woods.

Another woman might have gone immediately to the most pressing issue at hand—their baby—but not Jenna. She was a terrier and, though she continued to bafflingly rebut the idea, a professional.

Duty to the monarchs was more than a job to her, it was a part of her being. Her rejection of the reality of that—her rejection of the attempts that had been made to reinstate her to her position as guard—was the only lie he’d witnessed her utter.

Truth had always proven to be more powerful than lies, but he understood that people more often feared it than revered it. His father had belonged to that category of people.

But not Jenna. She had proven fearless in the face of the truth time and time again. He wondered what scary truth hid beneath the lie this time, but he did not ask. Now wasn’t the time and if it was large enough to scare Jenna, it was best to approach with caution.

“The queen is pregnant,” he finally answered her question.

Coming to an abrupt stop at his side, Jenna sucked in a hiss of air at the news, her hand coming to her abdomen in a protective gesture.

Ever the defender was Jenna, he observed, even when the heartache was her own.

“That’s wonderful,” she croaked thinly.

Eyeing her, he was ruthless, if only for her sake. “It’s not. It hurts you to find out this way.”

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