Page 36 of Wedding Night In The King's Bed

“You do not seem your normal self.”

And this was clearly true, because she shot back, “I didn’t realize you knew what that was, Gianluca.”

And she expected him to glower, but to her surprise, he tipped his wineglass in her direction. “Fair enough.”

And Helene felt...listless and yet half frenzied, all at once. She had the urge to leap up from her chair and do something. Dance down the length of the table, for example, kicking the fine china to and fro and watching it shatter. Whatever it took to break all these unspoken rules they followed these days.

That they would have these excruciatingly civilized dinners, then tear each other apart after dessert. But never, ever, both at once.

It was always the same sequence of events and while it was true that they knew each other intimately, in ways she hadn’t known one person could know another, what did it mean? She knew the precise shape of that tender place between his ear and the sideburn he kept trimmed short, and how it fit her fingertip when she stroked him there. She knew the entire vocabulary of his moans and groans and how to make them into a kind of song as she took her time with him. She knew his scents, his tastes, and the shape their bodies made together when they were both asleep.

And she knew every thread of the tapestry she was building, every color and weight of each story she read or heard, all leading her closer to him. Everyone she encountered added to it. Everyone they met contributed a tale about his parents or him, and she thought that really, she was the reigning expert on King Gianluca.

Save him.

But he wouldn’t discuss it.

And tonight she was tired of quietly weaving.

“Tell me,” she demanded without any preamble, “one happy memory from your childhood. Can you do that?”

“Do I appear to you to be riddled with childhood wounds, Helene?”

And on another night she might have made an elegant sort of demurral and waved that away. Tonight she only sat back in her chair, held his gaze, and raised a challenging brow instead.

Because she knew the answer—that there was not one part of him that childhood hadn’t touched, warped, even ruined—but she also knew he would likely get up and leave if she shared her learned opinion that he was, in fact, a walking wound from the things that had happened to him during his childhood.

He let out one of those laughs of his, short and sharp, more a surprised bark than anything else. And she rather thought that he would storm off, though he hadn’t done that in some while...but he didn’t.

Instead, he looked at her as if he was trying to see beneath her skin, and she became aware of too many things all at once.

That everything was different tonight, or she was. She could feel too much, as if the Vivaldi that played gently in the background was winding its way in and around her body instead of simply filling the air.

And she felt desperate straight through, when that was the most absurd feeling of all. She was a queen. Sitting in a king’s private dining room, in the palace they shared, eating another feast prepared by the finest chefs in all of Europe, according to her husband. She was listening to classical music while making awkward, yet polite, conversation about charity events and current issues.

There was nothing desperate about this.

So maybe it was her.

“My father was always quite busy with matters of state, appropriately,” Gianluca said into the messiness swirling around inside her, and even though moments before—seconds before—Helene had wanted to kick off her shoes and dance on the tabletop, she was suddenly riveted by him. Gazing at him, just there on the other side of this corner of the long table they shared, as if she had no intention of ever looking away again. “I was left in the care of tutors and nannies and the like. But at night, a woman would come into the nursery, take me in her lap, and read me a nighttime story. Every story was...a different world. I suppose even a prince in a castle liked the idea of imagining himself somewhere else.”

He looked very nearly defensive then, and she felt almost breathless, as if the slightest move on her part would ruin everything and break whatever fragile thread this was between them, suddenly.

Because, for once, Gianluca did not look serious or betrayed. For a moment, she could almost see the little boy he must have been. Before they’d sent him away from here to whatever dire boarding school took in six-year-olds. When that smile she might not have seen too often, but could recall perfectly, wasn’t so rare.

“My mother used to read to me too,” she said.

But it was the wrong thing to say. She could see it in the way his brows drew together. “I didn’t say it was my mother.”

She blinked. “You said it was a woman, and it sounded as if it wasn’t a nanny or a tutor...?”

“I have long since left escapist fiction behind, I’m afraid.” He sounded curt. Dark. “That’s what happens as a person grows up. There’s no time for such stories when there are so many real-world things to consider instead.”

“I don’t think you could say anything I would disagree with more.” But she smiled a little as she said it, because she knew, somehow, that he was remarkably vulnerable just now. She just knew. “I think that human beings need stories. We need to engage our imagination or we are doomed to lose ourselves.”

“In what? Reality?” He shook his head. “That is not doom. That is life.”

“But if you can’t imagine yourself out of a bad reality, what will become of you?” she countered. “And what better way to train for that than reading stories?”