Page 42 of Wedding Night In The King's Bed
He had never felt like this before this woman had entered his life, and he had no wish to feel it again. But it did not go away as she stared back at him. And when he said nothing, she continued.
“She said that in some ways, your father was lovely,” Helene told him. And everything inside of him was on high alert, warning him that he wasn’t going to like whatever she was about to say. Or perhaps it was that something in him knew it would be one more of these explosions she was far too good at doling out. He wanted to tell her to stop, but he worried that would seem like a weakness. And worse, that she wouldn’t. Especially as her expression shifted into compassion. “But only if he wasn’t crossed. Get on his bad side, however, and he could be vindictive. Petty. She said he had a nasty temper.”
He did not want to hear this. He could not hear this. There was no point digging up a dead man—much less that temper of his that Gianluca had long believed had been saved for his family alone.
Because it was unthinkable that anyone else might know of those black rages.
If they did—if anyone did—then everything his family was, everything he was, could be no more than another lie.
He ran a hand through his hair and hated that he was betraying his own agitation. “And you believe that I am the person to whom you should repeat this bit of fantasy? From a woman discarded by a king?”
There was too much of that compassion, all over her. “Why would she lie?”
It would have been different if Helene had seemed insistent. If she had poked or prodded in some way. If she had treated this like some kind of a grand exposé. Instead, she sounded...
Not sad. Not quite. Rather as if she felt sorry for him, and Gianluca would obviously have taken immediate exception to such an outrage, but having never experienced it before, he found that the best he could do was stand there, wondering why it felt so much like a heart attack.
“If she wished to profit off such claims, she would have done so many years ago, in the wake of her actual relationship with your father,” Helene pointed out when he did not reply, sounding quite reasonable. “She would have made a tremendous amount of money. She said she had people at her door night and day, bothering her parents and chasing her friends. While she was dating your father and then twice as many after. She could easily have dined out on her stories of dating the King for years. Instead she said nothing. And her reward was finding herself cast as a participant in a love triangle she had never taken part in.”
“Why are we standing here in the cold, litigating ancient history?” Gianluca demanded. “I lived through the aftermath of this, Helene. I do not need a primer.”
“You never speak much about your father, did you know that?” When he glared at her, she smiled, though her gaze remained direct and solemn. “Lady Lorenza didn’t wish to speak about him either. Do you know what she told me?”
“I do not.”
One of the reasons this woman was so confounding was that she ignored him completely when she chose. As she did now. “She told me, with a sincerity that made her voice shake, that her relationship with your father had been a whirlwind. So wildly intense that she’d never quite known where she stood. She’d never known if she truly loved him or if she was swept up in his insistence that he loved her. And he was the King!”
“You might be surprised how little some women find themselves in awe of kings,” Gianluca said darkly. “It is the scourge of modernity.”
She acknowledged that with the faintest smile, but kept going. “But she found that breaking up with him felt like a relief, not a disaster, no matter the carrying-on in the gossip columns. And then she finally met her husband, who she’d been promised to when she was young but had not met as an adult. She said that the moment she did, that she had ever imagined that a royal three-ring circus—her words—could have anything to do with her was a joke. Because it seems that she and her husband have been quietly and completely in love with each other since first sight.”
“Did you read this in one of your fairy stories?”
“Where I didn’t read it was in the tabloids, where she was cast as a villain at best. And it certainly didn’t stop your father from trying to involve her in his games.”
Gianluca was rapidly reaching his limit. “My father did not play games, Helene. If you wish to muck about in other people’s history, I suggest you get your facts straight.”
“He didn’t need to play games when he had the tabloids to do it for him,” Helene said softly. “And look. He’s been dead for ten years and now you do it too.”
And that, Gianluca decided, was his breaking point.
That was enough—
But he was the King of Fiammetta, so he certainly could not break in public. He could not let the things that roared inside of him out.
He did the next best thing, bowing curtly to his queen and then ushering her back inside, so they could finish out the rest of this formal evening without becoming the only story that would be told about the event.
Later they sat in the car on the way back to the palace the way they always did, and he knew that he was not alone in thinking of the many times by now that he had closed the distance between them. Or she had. The many times they had found their way beneath each other’s formal clothes to find the truth about themselves beneath.
Or a truth, he amended.
And that was not the way this night was going to go.
Not when he couldn’t get the things she’d said about his father out of his head.
When they got to their apartments, she turned toward her own rooms and he did not stop her. But he didn’t go to his bedchamber either. He dismissed his staff, finding his way to one of his private studies where he was drawn, unerringly, to a framed old picture he kept on the wall.
It was a famous photograph, one that had been published all over the world. It showed the young, vibrant King Alvize playing with his young son one summer afternoon in the palace gardens. Queen Elettra sat behind them, laughing happily in the sunlight.