Page 4 of Wedding Night In The King's Bed

She had squatted down to get a really deep breath—or ten—of her favorite fragrance, a mixture of all those hints of herbs and flowers that reminded her so strongly of her mother, and so he had seemed tall enough to block out the sky itself. Helene had stopped breathing. Her throat had gone almost painfully dry. At the same time, there was a sudden deep and thudding thing that nearly knocked her back on her behind into the dirt—

And it took her far too long to understand it was her own heart.

She gazed up at him, all the way up at him, and deep inside her—low and insistent—that humming thing took root.

He made her shake from the inside out.

She did not ask it was really him. She knew him at once, without question. She had seen the photographs of him that his own staff had presented her, and the many pictures of him that littered the internet, but Helene knew she would have recognized him all the same.

Because he stood there at the top of the patio stairs as if he expected nothing else than to find women—if not everyone, everywhere—writhing about in the dirt at his feet.

As if they often did exactly that.

Helene knew full well that they did. She’d seen the pictures. He was, according to many sources, the most eligible man in the world.

And for a moment there, she couldn’t decide if she ought to throw herself face down on the dirt before him or not, because every lesson she had ever learned about comportment and elegant manners at the Institut seemed to have deserted her entirely.

There was nothing of her left. There was only that humming. There was only him, the actual king, and somehow, one single stray thought: that this man was not the least bit photogenic.

He was widely held to be handsome. She’d thought so herself when she’d studied the many pictures of him and had even harbored a thought or two—that she would deny if asked, because it seemed silly and unseemly at once—that perhaps this whole arranged marriage deal might not be as terrible as she’d imagined because of this handsomeness.

Perhaps he would be wretched, she’d told herself, but at least he would be pleasant to look at. For Helene was astonished to discover that, if anything, every photograph she’d ever seen of Gianluca San Felice, King of Fiammetta, made him look ugly.

That was the effect of his stark, stern, overwhelming male beauty. It was so much more in person. It was like a force field.

He struck her like a natural disaster. A storm of epic proportions.

That was the sort of beautiful this man was.

Helene was not certain how she withstood the first sight of him. She had stood up, somehow, though her body had not felt like her own. She’d felt sunburned, suddenly, as if she’d been out in the summer sun for hours instead of mere moments. As if it had roasted her very bones.

The cold, German-accented voice of the Institut headmistress made itself known inside her then, counting out seconds like a metronome. And she remembered, almost too late, to drop into the appropriate curtsy one typically offered at the sight of royalty.

Helene was grateful, in a way she never had been before, for the headmistress’s insistence that they practice these things again and again and again. She was grateful that her body did what it had practiced so many times with ease, as if it was all muscle memory, because it gave her time to figure out how to breathe again. How to keep herself from toppling over. How to try her best to wrestle with that bizarre sunburn that seemed as prickly and hot on the inside as it was on her skin.

“Rise,” the King ordered her softly enough, but with evident command, and she did.

And then, for an endless, airless moment, he simply studied her.

That prickling sensation got worse. Or better, maybe. In any case, it was more and it washed over her, changing her as it went. Shifting things she hadn’t known were there, or moveable. There were too many competing urges inside her, then. She’d wanted to say something smart to impress him. She’d wanted to prove, with a few carefully chosen words, that she was so much more than whatever he’d seen in whatever dossier he’d received on her. That she wasn’t her father, who she understood was not a man that other men admired.

She was this close to announcing to this impossibly compelling man, this king, that she was a whole person, brimming with contradictions and obsessions and marvelous, secret bits that she hardly knew herself.

But she didn’t dare.

In a few moments I am going to go around to the front of this château and make my official entrance, he told her. Eventually. He did not smile, but she felt the urge to smile back at him as if he had. But you see, I have learned that it behooves me to take a sneak peek first at whatever woman I am set to meet.

She started to speak, then remembered that he was no ordinary man. He was a king and there was etiquette for all interactions between kings and commoners, and for all she knew this was a trap.

But his eyes were so dark, like the middle of the longest night, and they gleamed. You may speak freely. After all, I am the one lurking about in your garden, am I not?

She knew better than to take him at his word. Not entirely. This was a game, and obviously one he had played before. But she did not remain silent, either. What is it you’re hoping to find? she asked. When you take these sneak peeks of yours?

It is hugely instructive, he replied, easily enough that she realized, with a certain dizzy sensation, that he could be charming. This immensity of a man who stood before her so easily, so used was he to being gazed up at in this manner. Often the house is in disarray, or too clean, like a crime scene of some kind. Often the woman I am to meet is barking unhinged orders at servants, screaming at everyone she sees, and otherwise behaving in a manner she would not if she knew I was watching.

Forgive me, Helene had said. But I am given to understand that a great many royal personages often behave in precisely this manner.

It had been a risky gambit. She’d waited for him to draw himself up in umbrage and affront, and march away, having crossed her off his list. And she’d wondered what had possessed her when it surely would have been easier to simply murmur something inoffensive instead.