Page 31 of Wedding Night In The King's Bed
When the morning dawned, Gianluca redoubled his efforts to dig into her past. People never hid their sins as well as they imagined they did, so he knew he would uncover the real story about how she’d spent the past few years soon enough.
Yet in the meantime, he unlatched that door between their bedrooms and congratulated himself on persevering. Because, of course, he did this entirely for the bloodline.
Let her imagine he was the sort of man she could manipulate into abandoning his plans, if she liked. That changed nothing. She could brood about it up in his grandmother’s retreat of stone and silence.
He was doing his duty, as he had always done. And as he would do again, when she bore him children and they were old enough to live without her.
“And what age is that, exactly, Gianluca?” Helene asked one night, in her mild way that he no longer quite believed. Because he could hear the edge beneath it now, that she hid beneath her lovely manners, and her cultured tones. “The age at which children are only too happy to live without their mothers?”
He had, for no reason at all, reiterated his precise plans for her. It had nothing to do with the fact that they had turned to each other when they walked into the royal apartments tonight, that he’d waved away his staff with a dismissive hand, or that he’d then carried her bodily to his bed. It had no relation to what followed from there, or to the fact that now they lay on the soft rug before the fire, both of them naked and gleaming with the force of their exertions.
All three times.
Helene sounded almost lazy as she asked him that question, and one thing he knew now about Helene was that she was in no way lazy.
“I was sent to boarding school when I was six years old,” he said abruptly.
And he expected some sort of arch response, but all she did was prop herself up on one elbow. She raked the mess he’d made of her hair back from her face, then regarded him solemnly. “Six years old?”
Gianluca had the strangest urge toward defensiveness, then, when nothing could have made less sense to him. What did he have to be defensive about? He had been a crown prince, not a regular boy. Royal personages such as himself had been sent off to boarding school at young ages as long as boarding schools had existed.
“Some of my classmates began their education even earlier,” he said, in freezing tones, and he would have sat up, perhaps removed himself from his conversation entirely, but he felt that would be more telling.
He did not want to tell her anything. Not about himself.
Especially not when a more layered version of the truth was that, despite his loneliness, he had often found school a reprieve from the dread and calamity of this palace. He had counted the days until he could return, no longer relegated to be as invisible as the furniture or a handy bit of cannon fodder.
Gianluca was appalled that he even thought such things. There was no possibility that he would say them. To anyone.
And certainly not her.
She was frowning at him as if what he said hurt her. “That doesn’t sound like an education at all. It sounds like daycare. Or proper full-time care, I suppose.”
“I’m deeply surprised by this attitude, Helene.”
He did rise then. Gianluca stalked over to the bedside table, where he rang to have a light selection of food brought up, as he found himself famished.
It was no doubt his hunger that was affecting his mood.
When he was finished placing his order, he expected to find that Helene might have wrapped herself in something, but instead she stayed where she was.
Wholly naked, stretched out before the fire like every fantasy he had ever had, brought to vibrant and alluring life.
It was the lushness of her curves. It was the dark waves of her hair that spilled all over her, dancing this way and that and making her more sensual every time she breathed. It was her eyes of melting brown and brilliant gold that made him—the King of Fiammetta, who bowed to no one—feel as if he was to prove himself to her.
Or for her, something in him whispered, but it was a voice he refused take on board.
He pretended he could not recognize it.
“You spent a great many years of your life in boarding school,” he said, frowning at her because it was that or go to her again, to try once more to slake his unquenchable thirst for this woman. “And you credit your education for the ability to execute your duties as Queen in the way that you do. I would imagine you would exult in allowing your children to follow much the same path toward excellence.”
He did not choose to recognize the way his pulse seemed to rush in him. He told himself it was a simple physical reaction, nothing more. Chemicals, that was all. Nothing he needed to consider any more closely than not—especially not when all he could see was that solemn gaze she aimed his way.
“I was sent to boarding school after my mother died,” Helene said softly. But he was learning, too, that when her voice was soft, it did not make her weak. Or lessen the blow of anything she might be saying. And he did not like the fact that he knew such things. They made him wonder who she really was, this woman he had married under false pretenses that he still could not prove. “I was twelve. And all things considered, I would have preferred to have my mother.”
“Children are not meant to stay forever with their parents,” Gianluca gritted out, as if this was a fight he needed to win right now. As if this was about him instead of their hypothetical children.
“But they are expected to stay for some while, surely. Or why bother having them at all? You could as easily adopt a few stray orphans off the street when they hit eighteen and they wouldn’t know the difference.”