Page 39 of Wedding Night In The King's Bed

But she already knew.

She thought of her listlessness. How outside her own skin she felt. How raw she was lately. How incapable of the simplest things, when she’d used to pride herself in taking refuge in perfect dinner table conversation.

It was no fairy tale that she had been here two months and had been both having sex and doing nothing to protect herself from its consequences that whole time. She hadn’t had a period since some two weeks before her wedding.

That was truth. That was reality.

And she knew.

Helene sat there on the high bed, her hands over the belly she’d never really given much thought to before. Did she already feel some kind of thickening? She’d thought that was simply all the rich food she ate now that there was no wedding gown to model for half the world...

But it wasn’t the food.

Helene was pregnant.

She was pregnant.

And it was as if a kind of floodgate burst open, then.

Because once she accepted what a missed period indicated, when she had never missed a period in her life, it was as if everything else fell into place.

She felt kind of wild clarity that she’d never felt before.

And there was a peace in it, too.

Because there was absolutely no way in hell that she was letting her child grow up like this.

There would be no boarding schools at six years old.

There would be no chilly parents, tearing strips off of each other for the child to hear.

She had loved her mother, she would always love her mother, but Helene had no desire whatsoever to become her. And she knew, because she’d tried.

While it was always possible that her parents had a different relationship behind closed doors, Helene had no intention of showing her children weakness or acceptance in the face of cruelty.

And she had no intention of becoming his parents, either.

She would not raise a child who would pretend not to remember whether or not his own mother had read them stories.

Her children would not grow up the way that he had. Or the way that she had, either.

Gianluca had been right when he’d said that she was not of the sort of aristocratic blood that he was. Her people had fought across the ages for every scrap of what they had. They had not had palaces to retreat into or armies to carry their banners. They had done it all themselves.

And she, Helene Archibald San Felice, the Queen of Fiammetta, would do no less.

Starting now.

CHAPTER NINE

AT FIRST GIANLUCA thought that Helene was having the same sort of hangover that he was after that night. When things had become entirely too raw between them, in ways he wasn’t sure he wanted to analyze.

Nor could.

On the surface they carried on as they had been. They had a full roster of royal engagements and neither one of them was the sort to scrimp on such things. He might not trust her, as he had said. But he did know her to be a hard worker in that sense.

Is that the character of a liar? came that voice again, and again he ignored it.

Tonight they were at yet another formal event. And Gianluca, who prided himself on knowing as many details as possible about everything that went on in his kingdom, in his name, and with all the charities that he spearheaded, had completely forgotten what this event was even for.