Page 38 of Wedding Night In The King's Bed

Because his eyes were on hers and she could see those stars again.

And Helene knew she wasn’t the only one who understood that there was something profound in this moment. That despite themselves, they had moved into a different place.

That this was the kind of prize she had only hoped she’d find when she’d decided that she wouldn’t hide from him. When she’d decided that she would fight for the both of them whether he wanted to help her or not.

This was what she won—the glory of it built high—and she hurtled over the edge once more. And when she floated back again, he was still inside her, huge and hard.

But this time, he lowered himself against her, drawing her legs around his waist.

And then, keeping that gaze of his locked on hers, Gianluca went slow.

Time spun out and lost all meaning.

Helene clung to him, but even as she did, she felt as if she was inside him as he was inside her. As if they were both a part of the same thing, wrapped up tight like this. Made new every time he found himself inside her.

Sanctified here, together.

Something broke over her that wasn’t another shattering, not yet. Helene shifted, reaching up to cup his dark, stern face between her palms. And he looked even more austere now, the stark lines of desire making him seem something like cruel, when she knew he wasn’t. Not really.

No matter how he liked to pretend, because there was this.

A cruel man could not make love.

Maybe this was the truth she’d been looking for all along, because it settled in her now like sunlight. As if it was a fact she had always known.

“Your problem,” she whispered, because there were other things she knew, “is that deep down, you trusted me all along.”

She watched her words wash over him, then through him. And then become a part of that same pure sunlight as he roared out his release, flooding her and sending her catapulting over that edge once more.

Into nothing but the brightest light.

And for a long time after that, neither one of them could move.

When he did, he pulled her up so she was sitting there with her legs dangling off the table, dazed.

But, something in her whispered, defiant, too.

Maybe that was what the truth did. Or better still, speaking it out loud.

Gianluca gazed down at her, his face stern.

“I wish I could believe you,” he told her, his voice gravelly. Rough. “Just as I wish I could believe those fairy stories my mother read me.” He reached over to trace the line of her lips with his thumb, as if he couldn’t help himself. Yet in those night sky eyes of his, Helene saw only dark. “But I don’t.”

And she was both unsurprised and deeply shocked that he walked away and left her there.

She put her clothes back on, carefully, as if she was hurt when she wasn’t. Maybe she wished she was, as then she might have something to tend to. Instead she set the dining room to rights and only then, having hidden the evidence from any staff members who hadn’t heard the table moving, did she wander out. Then make her way back to her own bedroom, where she curled herself up in a ball and wished that she could cry.

Instead, she lay awake until late, wishing she didn’t feel as if all the skin had been flayed from her bones.

And the next morning she woke up to Faith’s monthly complaints about how wretched she felt, because she and Helene usually felt the same sort of wretched at the same time. She started typing back—

Then stopped.

Helene sat straight up in her bed, and even though she hadn’t slept well, too caught up in dark eyes filled with stars, then not, and all the things they hadn’t said that had flowed between them last night and left her flayed and raw, she was filled with a wild energy.

A certainty, more like.

She scrolled through the calendar on her phone. She started counting back on her fingers, to double-check.