Page 49 of Wedding Night In The King's Bed

She didn’t plan it. The word simply slipped out, shocking her with its power.

Perhaps it shouldn’t have shocked her. After all, it was the only word the Institut had always forbid them to use. They were taught to go under, over, or through.

The point of being obliging, the teachers would always tell them, is to appear so even when you’re being nothing of the kind.

It is your appearance of meekness that is your greatest weapon, the headmistress had told them, time and again.

But out here in the dark, with clouds scudding across the waxing moon, Helene stopped being meek.

She stopped worrying about weapons.

Because she already had one and he didn’t even know it.

It was high time he did.

“No?” Gianluca repeated, as if he’d never heard the word before. “I don’t recall asking for your permission.”

“I’m pregnant, Gianluca,” she told him, and she did nothing to soften the blow of those words. She did nothing to cushion him or protect him. This was not the time for softness. “And that means a great many things, but most of all this. You have to decide what kind of life your child is going to have. You have to decide what kind of family you are going to give him or her.”

She thought he said her name, but she wasn’t finished.

Helene drifted closer to him, tipped her head back, and looked him in the eye. “Starting right now.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

SHE COULD NOT have said anything that could have cut him in half more neatly.

Gianluca stared down at her, feeling as if he’d fallen from some great height and landed hard on his back, knocking the wind straight out of him.

This time, it was far more than the usual unsteadiness in Helene’s presence.

This time it felt like a mortal wound.

He could hear her breathing, or maybe it was him, his own wind kind of stalling deep inside him. He felt a kind of sundering, deep within.

He could think of no other word for it.

He wanted to reach out and pull Helene close. He wanted to sink down onto his knees before her, put his hands on that belly he knew so well, yet had not sensed any changes in.

He wanted to make it clear to her, however he could, that he had no intention of being the kind of father his own had been—

But he did not do any one of those things.

Because wasn’t he on track to being exactly like his father?

And tonight, as the clouds danced across the moon, he couldn’t pretend his father was the innocent victim any longer. He couldn’t pretend he hadn’t spent most of his adult life tamping down on the memories that he’d long ago decided could not possibly help him.

His father had been cold and distant, violent on bad days, and then he had been dead.

When there were others around, he had been handsome and awe-inspiring. He had seemed everything a king and a father should have been—but it had never lasted.

Hoping it might had been almost as bad as weathering one of Alvize’s rages.

Gianluca had learned how to hide. He had escaped to school. He had stopped hoping. When he finished school, he dedicated himself to a life of preparation for the crown. He made himself a beacon of duty.

He made himself the man he’d wished his father really had been.

Anything to be someone other than that terrified small boy.