Page 33 of Wedding Night In The King's Bed

Adequate preparation for an interaction with Elettra, to his mind.

He nodded to the guards and was instantly admitted, and though he immediately wished he had not come at all, he walked through to get this done.

“To what do I owe this unimaginable honor, Your Majesty?” asked his mother as she rose from the seat where she waited for him in her lovely drawing room, sketching a perfectly appropriate curtsy that still somehow managed to scrape at him, as if she was mocking him. “When your secretary called and ordered me to clear the afternoon, I could hardly believe my ears. The King of Fiammetta? Polluting the very shades of the dower house?”

Gianluca ignored all that. He would ignore his mother entirely if he could, and he usually did, but he had come here to speak to her. Ignoring her would be a waste of time.

He looked around this room that he had entered only a handful of times before. If he remembered right, while his grandmother had still been alive. And though the furnishings were very much the same, they were brighter than he recalled. Happier.

As if his mother liked to let in the light, when there was light to let in.

He didn’t like how that sat in him, like a hint he ought to take.

Just as he didn’t like the fact that most of the pictures on her mantel were not of her with various celebrities, as one would expect from such a dedicated attention-seeker as Elettra.

Instead, they were all of him.

There was even the official wedding photo that had been released worldwide, showing Gianluca and Helene gazing at each other as they exited the cathedral. He did not wish to investigate why it was he didn’t like that picture here, either.

“I did not come here to fence words with you, Madam,” he told her with as much formality as he could muster.

Elettra sighed as if he’d said something provocative, then sank back down on the nearest settee, where she set about pouring out hot cups of tea. When Gianluca was certain she must remember he could not abide the stuff.

“Afternoon tea is not, strictly speaking, a Fiammettan ritual, though we have adopted it,” his mother told him, and he felt some great storm inside him, though he refused to acknowledge it.

He wanted no part of it, but there was something about her voice. Gianluca had the strangest memory then that he rejected almost at once, certain it was far more likely to be an invention of that six-year-old child who had cried himself to sleep every night in that school where he’d been sent. Something he had never admitted to another living soul.

Gianluca had learned to tell himself that he was merely imagining things. That he had no memories of his childhood. That his mother had certainly never gathered him onto her lap, and read to him.

That she had never told him stories or taken his little hand in hers to walk with him around the palace, telling him made-up names for things that he absolutely did not remember today, damn it.

She was still going on about tea. “It was when one of your great-grandfathers procured himself an Englishwoman for a queen. She brought the wonderful tradition of afternoon tea in the British style with her when she came here, and so there have been Fiammettan tea shops ever since. Do you not remember? I used to take you there—”

“I have always hated tea,” he told her, sternly.

But Elettra did not seem dismayed. She merely set down a teacup in his direction, then sat back with her own and sipped at it.

It made him want to shout, though he restrained himself.

“And here I thought you wanted to meet with me so we could debate, once again, whether we prefer scones or crumpets,” she murmured.

He wanted to dismiss that as a kind of foolishness too, but Gianluca found that it hit him strangely. His mouth almost watered. He could almost taste the scones he loved so much, though he did not associate them with his mother. Still, it was true that he indulged himself from time to time, in the privacy of his own quarters.

“How many lovers did you take when you were married to my father, the late King?” he asked icily instead.

And his reward, such as it was, was the slight widening in his mother’s eyes, dark like his. She set her teacup down in the saucer she held with a click, then placed them both on the table before her. He thought that it took her a moment or so to raise her gaze to his, but when she did, her expression was smooth and unreadable, the way it always was.

“I wonder,” Elettra said quietly, “what would become of us, you and I, if just once we stopped playing these games.” He said nothing, and her lips curved into something sad. “If you and I stopped having arguments with people who are no longer in the room.”

“Is it an argument?” He watched her closely. “Or is it that I find myself wondering, from time to time, if I have been less merciful with you than I should. If perhaps I should look to my benevolence in my dealings with you and revise my impressions. So I ask again, how many lovers did you take? And of them, how many did you leak to the press yourself?”

Elettra folded her hands in her lap and sat there with a dignity that enraged him, as certainly she did not deserve it. Surely her own sins should have precluded her from even the faintest shred of dignity, assumed or otherwise.

Yet somehow, without changing her expression, she managed to make it clear that he had disappointed her once again.

Gianluca did not sit taller, as he had half a mind to do at that—some deep-seated vestige of the child he must once have been. Instead, he relaxed as he stood, and leaned against the mantel, his back to all those pictures of himself through the ages.

“Come now. You had so much to say in all of those interviews, one after the next, each one a nail in the coffin not only of your marriage, but of our people’s trust in their leaders.” He shook his head. “Not once did it occur to you that you were leaving me to clean up after you. A king in name only, because in truth I am a janitor, forever trailing after you and attempting to make your trash disappear.”