Page 43 of Wedding Night In The King's Bed

A vision of a happy family, everyone had agreed. Everyone so beautiful, so covered in joy, so perfect in every way.

But it was all a lie.

One he had been telling himself ever since.

Though he had to have been only five years old, Gianluca could still remember that afternoon clearly, though he rarely allowed himself to stick his fingers in that particular wound. He didn’t remember this moment, captured forever on film. But here, tonight, he let himself remember his mother flirting with the photographer—or rather, that his father had accused her of flirting later. From those actual, long-ago moments in the sun, what he remembered most was the terrifying force of his father’s attention. And the agony he had felt to perform perfectly for the man, lest it be his fault that Alvize’s good mood go away.

As it so often was.

It was not a good memory, that photograph.

Yet he had chosen to keep it where he could see it, always, though he hadn’t allowed himself to really think about that day in years.

And it was only now, standing here after one more confounding evening with his own queen, that Gianluca questioned himself. He was forced to wonder if the reason he held on to this photograph, and kept it displayed where he would see it often, wasn’t for any sense of nostalgia as he imagined others might think.

As he had convinced himself he felt.

Because he kept hoping that if he looked at this picture long enough, he would forget what had actually happened between the people in that photo and instead see what everyone else did.

Or what he had hoped they did.

A happy family. A sweet moment. A light so bright that winter could never come again. No rain, no snow, not even the faintest shadow.

He made a low noise that he didn’t recognize as himself. Then he wheeled around, making his way almost blindly to the door that connected his apartments to Helene’s. The hallway was too long. There were too many rooms.

He didn’t recognize himself and that was impossible.

Because he knew who he was. The whole world had known who he was before he’d drawn his first breath. He had been born to his role and there was nothing else.

Surely there could be nothing else.

He found her sitting at the vanity in her dressing room, taking down her hair. She had dismissed her staff too, as she usually did, so used was she to fending for herself.

Tonight he was glad of it. He walked up behind her, watching the shifting emotions as they played through the gold in her gaze, the softness of her wide mouth.

The graveness of her expression.

“Gianluca,” she began.

“You have said quite enough tonight, mia regina,” he said, and it, too, was someone else’s voice, rough and raw.

Helene swiveled around on her seat as he drew close, and that suited him. He went down before her and ran his hand up her legs and over her thighs, urging them apart as he moved to kneel between them.

She whispered his name again, but he could feel the heat of her.

When he leaned in, he could smell her, too. The hint of the perfume she used and beneath it, far more potent, that scent that was only hers. That scent that made his mouth water and his sex ache.

He shifted her, tilting her hips up so he could drape her knees over his shoulders and spread her wide for him.

Like dessert.

She did not bother with undergarments any longer, because they only ever got in the way, and Gianluca was glad of it.

As he did not want to think. He did not want to interrogate the strange things he felt, or wonder why it was that he had locked them away inside himself all this time. Too many unwieldly truths. Too many intensities he did not wish to face.

He did not understand how she had managed to find the key to all these things.

But he didn’t want to think, he wanted to feel.