Page 29 of Wedding Night In The King's Bed

SOME WEEKS LATER, Gianluca found himself standing in the midst of another gala.

He couldn’t have said what it was in aid of. He couldn’t recall how many engagements he’d had this week. He’d forgotten everything his staff had whispered in his ear about the various dignitaries and such promenading about before him.

Because the only thing he could seem to concentrate on for any length of time was Helene.

Especially when they did events like this, where he could watch the way she charmed every person who crossed her path without even seeming to try.

“You look displeased, my king,” she murmured through her serene smile when they took to the dance floor, always dancing for those few first moments before others joined them.

Though Gianluca never noticed the others.

“I am ruminating on your ability to hide the fangs I know you carry,” he said, but rather too late, because it was difficult not to get lost in all the ways she shone. “Right there behind that smile.”

Helene did not look abashed. If anything, her smile grew brighter. “Fangs? How marvelous. Unless what you’re telling me is that my dentistry needs work?”

Gianluca wanted to laugh, but controlled himself. Because he still couldn’t believe that he had been taken in by the very sort of woman he had vowed to avoid. A woman like his own mother.

Women like Elettra, his father had told him on his deathbed, hide in plain sight. A viper waiting to strike when you least expect it.

Yet his viper made cracks about dentistry, right here in the middle of a ballroom, and what was he meant to do with that?

There was nothing to do, he knew, but dance.

As if this wasn’t a game they played, but something real.

She had taken to her royal duties far too easily, he thought when the dancing was finished and they moved once more to the endless rounds of meeting and greeting the subjects who paid to attend galas like this for the chance to have a few moments of conversation.

So easily and so well, he couldn’t help but think as she dazzled the whole of the group before them, that it was tempting to ask himself what might have been. If she had been who she’d seemed to be on those summer walks in Provence.

He knew that was not a helpful line of thought.

But she acquitted herself beautifully at every engagement. She was charming, interesting, and the papers swooned daily not only over what they called the royal romance but the many ways their new queen epitomized all that a Fiammettan woman should be.

She was elegant. Poised. She was sophisticated enough to host a formal dinner consisting of heads of state and diplomats from afar, but down-to-earth enough to make everyone laugh, put everyone at ease, and make certain that no one at her table ever felt out of place.

And as many times as he told himself that it was that school she’d gone to, renowned as it was for turning out perfect hostesses just like this, Gianluca was well aware that there was something special about Helene.

Fangs, he told himself darkly as the night wore on. Stuck deep beneath your ribs.

It was no wonder he couldn’t seem to catch a full breath in her presence.

Later, when he had given the expected speech and they were sitting in the back of the car yet again, inching back toward the palace, she turned to him.

Gianluca expected barbs of some kind, no doubt involving those fangs she pretended she didn’t know she had.

He braced himself, because it was only a matter of time. Now he’d made it clear that she wouldn’t get her way, things between them would evolve the way his parents’ relationship had. He expected that she would strike out at him, becoming more and more bitter by the day. The only upside was that he knew precisely where that led.

And precisely where he intended to put her, no matter how she sparkled in public.

But instead, Helene smiled at him.

In that pretty way of hers that made the gold in her eyes glow all the brighter, without the faintest hint of a fang in sight.

“It’s going to be hard to act the broodmare if there’s no breeding,” she said.

And the shock of that went through him like an electric charge. “I beg your pardon?”

Gianluca couldn’t have heard her right. He was sure he hadn’t. He spent entirely too much time as it was replaying their wedding night on an endless loop in his head. And recalling those wild, hot hours filled him with a hard, edgy hunger that had him up and pacing, then trying to beat it out of himself in his workout room, to no avail.