Page 34 of Wedding Night In The King's Bed

Elettra’s eyes flashed. “How poetic, darling,” she said. “I didn’t know you had it in you.”

And yet he felt as if something was lost when all she did was pick up her tea once more.

“I must thank you.” He straightened from the mantel and affected his own bow, deep enough to be mocking. “You are, as ever, precisely as I expected you to be.”

“You’re so discerning,” his mother murmured, as if in agreement. “And in no way afflicted by confirmation bias, my son and king.”

“I’m certain you’ve cast yourself the victim of your own crimes,” he said, but he was already heading for the door. “Thank you for reminding me why I keep you separate from everything that matters.”

It was good that he’d come here. She was his past, but also his future if he did not handle this terrible attraction to his own queen, herself a proven liar as well.

He hated that he’d needed the reminder.

And he told himself that he was dismissing her once again as he pushed his way back outside into a day gone grayer, colder.

But he heard her parting shot anyway.

And with that laugh of hers that made it all the more damaging, hitting him right between the shoulder blades.

“Because, of course, the King of Fiammetta could never be wrong. By definition. Just like your father, is that not so?”

CHAPTER EIGHT

FAITH MESSAGED ONE MORNING, some two months into Helene’s marriage.

Why did I have to read about the fact that you met my most favorite singer in all the world in a tabloid magazine?

Then she devolved into shouting by text.

YOU KNOW HOW MUCH I LOVE HIM!

Helene dutifully texted back a full play-by-play of her interaction with the singer in question, and even indulged in the sort of silly, make-believe gossip she and her cousin had enjoyed in the past. Where they made up a wild speculation about people they would never meet, and then treated it as fact. Helene thought that was the least she could do, having actually met the man.

While she left her cousin satisfied that Faith, and Faith alone, was the one true love of a rather odd young man she was unlikely to ever meet, the exchange left Helene unsettled.

The feeling followed her through a day of her usual duties. A morning of classes and correspondence, because it was her office that was responsible for sending out cards for all manner of occasions to the Fiammettan subjects. And because it offered her a way to ask her aides about all kinds of subjects that interested her after, like the previous king and queen. And the day’s headlines, chock-full of palace intrigue.

She wrote cards, asked questions, and listened not only to what her staff said—but what they didn’t.

“My mother always said that any man must know trouble, whether in a crown or in a quarry,” one of her aides said in German after one of Helene’s leading questions about Gianluca’s parents.

“Heavy is the head,” another replied in French, with significant looks all around.

This was standard. They would deny if asked—Helene had tried—but none of her staff cared for the former king. And they were all of them staunch royalists, or they wouldn’t be here, tending to her.

She tucked that away with all of the other details that she hoped she could weave into some kind of tapestry that, one day, she could look at and make sense of her husband at last.

Every day she got a little closer. She was sure of it.

But for some reason, over the last ten days or so, she’d begun to find all of it, all the waiting and weaving...exhausting.

And today when she was free, instead of taking her usual walk in the palace gardens—which she did no matter what the weather or Gianluca’s desire for photo opportunities, though those were fewer now that they were seen together so often at events—Helene headed down to her favorite library instead.

Outside there was another snowstorm brewing, this one extreme enough that even the natives had raised a brow or two in concern. Helene sat by the fire, and for once, didn’t find herself a few books to read. Not today. Somehow, she wasn’t quite in the mood.

Instead, she found herself gazing into the fire, and trying to reason through why it was that a perfectly normal exchange with her cousin this morning had left her feeling so...bereft.

And the answer didn’t take long, but still, it seemed a bit longer than it should have. The way everything did lately.