Page 26 of Wedding Night In The King's Bed
Over and over and over again.
And admit to herself that it did not feel much like a reprieve at all that he had taken that away from her. That wonder and heat. That soaring, life-altering delight.
It felt like cruelty.
But that was the nighttime. The first few days of their so-called honeymoon, ever cognizant of the fact they were under scrutiny from the palace staff and the typical tabloid spies within, Gianluca insisted—coldly—that they do the kinds of things they had done while courting.
Quote marks implied.
They took walks in the palace gardens, every day the weather was clear enough. When it was not, they toured the palace galleries. They made polite conversation, as if they were very distant strangers. Breathless accounts of these moments made their way into the papers and if they ventured outside, usually with a picture to match.
“I thought you wanted there to be no discussion of anything we do in the papers,” Helene said on one of these promenades across the snow-cleared pathways under which, she knew from photographs, glorious flowerbeds waited for spring.
Gianluca shot her a glimmering sort of look as he kept pace with her, in a manner she knew too well the public interpreted as him hanging on her every word. “That is not realistic. And that being so, I prefer to offer them the content I wish to see rather than having them dig up things on their own.”
Though he made that sound as if there was a great wealth of digging to be done, and all of it to expose her.
She endeavored to ignore that. “There have been a great many pieces about the Royal Family since our wedding. Takes on history from various viewpoints. I’m enjoying them all, though I keep reading references to your father’s moods that seem to be nearly in code—”
“Helene.” And he was still glimmering at her, so she was the only one who could see that he was not hanging on her words. He wanted them to stop. Now. “Unless you see that an article came directly from the palace, you can assume that it is fiction.”
Helene only smiled noncommittally, gazed at the snowbanks, and kept her questions to herself for the rest of their walk.
At least these forced interactions were mercifully brief. Perhaps an hour each day of pantomime, and otherwise, Helene was given the run of the palace libraries to do as she would. And it wasn’t that spending her days eating marvelous food, reading books, and going on walks—with or without the company of a brooding, furious male—was torture in any real sense. She knew that. In many ways, it was the life she’d always dreamed she might have, having digested every possible version of Beauty and the Beast ever made.
It was only that everything felt so fraught. And she couldn’t help but think this was all a lot of tiptoeing around land mines while hoping for the best.
Instead of worrying about the inevitable explosion, she dedicated herself to the task of answering her own questions. There were very few papers or magazines allowed in the palace, so she scoured the libraries for primary sources when it came to the Royal Family in general and former King Alvize in particular.
Because she couldn’t help but think that the key to Gianluca, and his wild reaction to their wedding night, was caught up somehow in those moods everyone seemed to know about but no one dared mention directly.
She didn’t find much, but what she discovered was that if the staff saw her curled up in armchairs with stacks of old books, no one questioned what she was reading online.
After a week or so had passed, her aides woke her up one morning to announce that it was time she took on her expected royal duties. This meant they shuffled her between tutors again, so that she might learn everything there was to learn about the Kingdom. And more, the historic role of the Queen.
Or rather, the spouse of the monarch, for Fiammetta had enjoyed three queens in its time. One had maintained what was considered a perfect marriage to a man who was perfectly happy to loom about in the background, assisting the throne, which her tutors told her was the sort of marriage Helene should view as her guide. The second queen had ruled only a few short years and had been married to the Prince of a neighboring land, but had died without issue. Throwing the Kingdom into chaos, according to her tutor, who had waxed on about the war that had raged for many years after that short-lived queen’s death, as various would-be heirs vied to take their place on the throne.
“This is the one who interests me,” Helene said, smiling winningly at her tutor while tapping her finger on the picture of the third queen, who had married as she had been ordered to do. And then, when her prince turned out to have his own aspirations for the throne—and wasn’t above a plot or two to get his way—had first had him imprisoned, then assassinated. “It’s a bit of a lovely bedtime story to tell the children, isn’t it?”
“Your Majesty is very droll,” her tutor replied.
Quelling.
But she was curious, not droll. Because all these lessons about historical queens made her think more about the only other queen she knew—from a distance. That being the Dowager Queen Elettra, about whom Gianluca had nothing at all to say. He refused to discuss her.
That left Helene no recourse but a forensic examination of the tabloids. She enlisted Faith’s help, claiming she wished only to get to know the way her new family was portrayed over time in the popular imagination.
Faith was only too happy to dedicate herself to the task of tracking down chatrooms and message boards and vitriolic social media threads, but it all painted the same picture. Yes, King Alvize had been a touch moody—if the “palace insider” reports were true, and always in private—but everyone agreed that Queen Elettra’s whorish ways drove him to it.
It was that word whorish that Helene couldn’t seem to let go of. It was the universality of the response to Elettra, which she knew by now had to be a specific and deliberate campaign. And not one that benefited the woman in question.
After all, Helene knew a thing or two about being called a whore.
One night, as they departed the palace in the royal motorcade with flags flying, she opted to regale Gianluca with the entire bloody story of his ancestress, the assassin, whom history unfairly called the Killer Queen. “She had good reason to do what she did, if you think about it.”
“He was the King and she plotted against him, Helene. I think you’ll find that’s more commonly known as treason.”
“He was plotting against her first,” she argued. Then smiled when Gianluca raised that brow of his at her. “And you know what they say.”