Page 27 of Wedding Night In The King's Bed
“Be careful who you marry?”
She smiled wider. “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.”
He did not speak to her directly again that night unless it was necessary.
Oh, he put on an act. It was humbling, really, to see how good he was at acting. It made her question every single moment she’d spent in his presence. Had it all been an act? Helene had been so certain that despite their circumstances, and despite the arrangements that had to be made for a man in his position—not to mention, the arrangements her father had always intended to make for her no matter if a king turned up or not—there had still been something between them.
The way he had smiled at her, surely, had been real.
If rare.
She was still holding on to that.
“You did well enough,” he pronounced on the way home from the gala, the two of them tucked away again in the dark backseat of the limousine. “It is heartening to see that I can depend on you to play the appropriate role. If nothing else.”
“I’m very well trained,” Helene agreed. Mildly enough. “You should direct any and all compliments to the Institut, however, as this is their entire purpose for existing.”
“If I were you,” he said, in that dark-night-of-the-soul sort of voice of his that she wished did not make her ache, “I would not be so flippant. I have no reason to think that any of the things I was led to believe about you are true, do I?”
She turned to him as the motorcade sped through the narrow streets of the old city, all cleared in advance to make way for the King and Queen. “I don’t think you’re in a position to speak on such matters when it turns out that you, apparently, could be an award-winning actor. If I didn’t know any better, I would have thought that you were desperately in love with me tonight.”
Helene shouldn’t have said it like that. That was clear the moment the words cleared her lips, because the look on his face changed. It became darker, deadlier. Or perhaps it was simply that she felt it as it thudded through her, then seemed to squat there inside, a thorny, pulsing thing she really didn’t want to look at too closely.
Because she also didn’t want to think about the way it had felt, circling around a glittering gala on this man’s arm, too aware of the way he looked at her. As if he was the besotted yet capable king she’d imagined he would be.
It had been too easy to believe, for a few hours, that they hadn’t taken this bizarre turn.
“What you must understand, Helene, is that I will always give my people what they want,” he told her. And every word felt like a knife. Like a blade he was specifically aiming directly at her, each syllable precisely uttered to pierce her poor heart.
She made herself smile anyway. “And you think that’s what they want? An act?”
“I know what they don’t want. My parents’ endless operatics, each and every salacious headline making a mockery of the duty they were called upon to perform for this kingdom. My people want a love story, and they will receive one.” His gaze made her heart feel even more perforated. “No matter what I have to do.”
“It will be a tender love story indeed,” she replied, and did not shrink from that gaze, no matter how she might wish to, “and will seem especially so when I am carted off to a mountaintop prison, without my children, to live out my days in isolation.”
But Gianluca smiled, and not in the way that made everything around her feel like an endless summer. This was a cruel crook of his lips, nothing more. “You must have more faith in the palace’s ability to spin a story, Helene. When they are finished, the Kingdom will rejoice. They will tell the story as if it is our very own Fiammettan fairy tale. Watch and see.”
“I believe the palace can spin anything,” she replied quietly, and had to take what satisfaction she could from the way his lips pressed together.
That night, she lay in her bed while her body still ached in all these new ways that he had taught her, then taken away from her. He was pretending to love her in public. She was pretending she didn’t care that he despised her in private.
And none of that helped with this ache at all.
It was possible that nothing ever would.
Once the tears started, they didn’t stop.
Helene sobbed. She sobbed until her head hurt almost as much as her heart. And when she staggered into her bathroom suite, all the mirrors and marble reflected back her own red eyes and swollen face, and she thought, At least I finally look the way I feel.
But that was so tragic it made her laugh at herself, and she ran cold water over her wrists for a while until she calmed. Then wet a cloth so she could press it to her eyes.
And when she’d gotten the swelling down a bit, she went back out into the bedroom and wrapped herself in her favorite cloud-like throw that was always folded so neatly over the chair near the fire. She wrapped herself in it, sighing at the touch of warm cashmere against her skin, and then moved over to the windows she could curl up in the window seat and press her face to the cold glass.
It was still January. It was breathtakingly cold. Earlier tonight, as she’d stood outside so briefly to go in and out of the palace and the gala wrapped in warm things, she’d felt the sharp alpine air cut all the way through her. She’d taken a deep, shuddery breath each time, as if she was afraid it would be too cold for her lungs to work.
That was what she felt like now, gazing out at the bright lights of the long, narrow valley that made up the bulk of this kingdom. This kingdom that was now hers, whether the King liked her or not.
And Helene had always considered herself something of an indomitable spirit, but tonight, the self-pity took hold. Hard. Because she had only been said indomitable spirit because she’d always hoped, deep down, that things would end well.