Page 5 of Wedding Night In The King's Bed

Perhaps she had even been holding her breath.

Though she forgot about that—and everything else—when he smiled.

If his gaze was night, his smile was a whole, bright summer, and as he beamed it down at her she saw entirely too much. That he was a man, a mortal, and more—that he could indeed make a woman a fine husband, if he chose. And then, in a rush of heat and wonder and something sharp, like need, she saw the kind of future she hadn’t dared imagine for herself unfurl before her. A hand to hold quietly, in the back of a car, no words required. Dancing with her head tipped back and his smile all the music she needed. Laughter, and children, and rooms they made sing with the force of all the things they were to each other—

All of that as he gazed down at her, that smile such a bit of unexpected magic that she rather thought the deep black night of his eyes was shot through with stars.

A great many royal personages are appalling human beings, he’d said, the smile in his voice now too, like dawn breaking over a new day, all of it laced with the very things she’d just seen stampede through her. Why do you imagine I have come to look for this behavior in advance? I know it too well and wish to avoid it, at all costs.

I’m sorry to disappoint you, she replied, and her smile felt reckless. But it was impossible to contain. I suppose I could soundly abuse the plants, if I liked, but I doubt if I did that they would bloom as they do. This was my mother’s garden and I tended it with her when I was small. The fragrance of the things she planted makes me happy. That’s all.

His smile faded, but what took its place was more complicated. More...considering. And this is what you wished? To be happy, today of all days?

This is what I wish every day, Helene corrected him, still smiling, though she dropped her gaze to the shoots of lavender and ran her fingertips down the buds. It is not always achievable, I grant you.

It occurred to her that could be taken as a slight, but he’d still been looking at her in that narrow manner, as if she was a calculation he needed to solve. And if I told you that I do not believe in happiness? His tone was light.

We must all believe in something, Your Majesty. Surely.

I believe in duty, Miss Archibald.

My mother used to say that we must plant flowers wherever we can make them grow, instead of waiting for flowers to bloom. Duty is what you make of it, in other words.

He’d studied her for another moment, and she had never felt anything like the weight of his gaze. The intensity of his attention. The heat of him, like his very own sun.

That prickling within her seemed to melt into the humming until it was all one thing, shivering and hot, a beautiful tornado. It tore through her, laying waste to whoever she’d been before, so sudden and so devastating that she wasn’t sure if she’d drawn a single breath since the moment she’d looked up and seen him there.

King Gianluca inclined his head, and some odd sort of light or other gleamed then, in the encompassing darkness of his gaze.

I look forward to meeting you, Miss Archibald, he said in his commanding way, and then he turned and strode back around the side of the house. Taking the air and the blue sky and the gold and purple of Provence with him.

For a moment she’d stood there, dazed. She wasn’t sure if she’d imagined the whole thing—but then her body was moving of its own accord again. It carried her back up the stairs, into through the same mullioned glass doors to settle herself on that delicate settee as if she was still the same person she’d been before she’d gone out into the garden.

As if she could ever be the same again, seared straight through as she was.

It had seemed a lifetime, though she supposed it could as easily have been mere moments, before her father’s voice could be heard in the hall outside. Before the palace aides found their way inside, and then, with great fanfare, announced His Royal Majesty, King Gianluca of Fiammetta himself.

Helene rose, then sank into the curtsy that was expected of her—no matter that she had already performed this mark of respect outside, he had acted as if that meeting was to be kept between them, surely—and when she rose, he was smiling directly at her once again.

Not the same smile. This one was a slight curve of his hard, stern lips and no more, but Helene had known all the same. She had known, at that very moment, that she was going to marry him. That she would marry him and that whole future she could see sweeping out before her would be hers.

It was sweeping through her now, here in the cathedral at last. It had carried her along through the rest of the summer, walks in that garden and visits in her father’s parlors, that smile of his so rare and unpredictable and yet world-changing every time. It had buoyed her during her father’s lectures and critiques that grew more scathing in the lead-up to the actual proposal, such as it was, involving as it did meetings with her father and staff and stacks of contracts to sign and too much attention given to the few words he said to her personally, where everyone else could hear, that smile she’d come to think of as hers turned to stars in his gaze.

Stars and a smile, that was what she’d held on to that fall, as her life turned inside out and she became the property of the palace, trotted out for photo opportunities at events both grand and humble. The King’s date for another royal’s wedding abroad. Or a seemingly casual walk together on a crisp afternoon in Fiammetta, caught by engineered “happenstance” and plastered across every gossip rag in existence.

They had never been truly alone, and so she’d taken that smile and their imagined future and the stars in his dark night gaze with her to bed, curled around them like pillows she could shape to hold her as she wished, and dreamed about what was to come.

And when she lifted her gaze toward the end of the aisle once more, she found him standing there at last.

Resplendent and self-possessed, and even more shockingly magnetic than she’d remembered, when she’d last seen him the night before during a highly photographed celebratory dinner.

His dark black gaze seemed to hold fast on her as she moved down the aisle and as it did, it kicked off a new lightning storm within her even as it settled her, somehow, in the same breath.

There had to be another mile to walk, at the least, but Helene scarcely noticed.

All she could feel was him. That gaze. That storm inside her. She trembled, and knew her father felt it where their arms were linked because the crook of his elbow tightened around her hand, and the look he shot at her was more of a shout.

It confused her for a moment. But then she realized. Herbert thought she was having second thoughts.