Page 7 of Wedding Night In The King's Bed

He would never allow any queen of his to behave as his own mother had, making a mockery of her vows and dragging the crown through the mud. Parading the private business of the palace out into the public eye and making certain it stayed there in some twisted, misguided bid for revenge because—as far as Gianluca could discern—her feelings had been hurt.

And if the feelings he recalled most vividly from his childhood had been vile and unsettling, alarming and often frightening—

But no. That was a story his mother told, when surely, if it had been as bad as all that, she would not have stayed. The truth, then and now, was that she was addicted to the drama. And the attention she could wring from it all.

He checked himself then because too many eyes were upon him now, as always. He inclined his head toward a pack of diplomats. He gave his public version of a smile to a set of his distant cousins. But he did not beckon anyone to approach him and thus no one dared.

Not even the loathsome Lady Anselma, one of his mother’s boon companions, who had made herself a tidy little cottage industry over the years as his mother’s “unnamed source from within the palace.” He smiled, as he knew he must, but Gianluca had no use for her or the rest of the many Dowager Queen Elettra apologists in the Kingdom, forever making up excuses for his mother’s actions and trying them out one after the next when the previous one failed to garner enough sympathy. As it always did, eventually.

He knew all the excuses by heart. They claimed she had been too young when she’d married King Alvize a few months shy of her nineteenth birthday, when Gianluca had already been in the military at the same age—an adult in every sense of the term and expected to act accordingly. Elettra had been an adult who had been perfectly capable of competing in her beloved dressage circles at the highest levels. The Champion Queen, they had called her when she’d won the highest medal in the sport six months before she’d been elevated to the Fiammettan throne.

No one had ever suggested she was too young or too foolish to compete at that level.

They claimed she hadn’t known any better, which Gianluca had never understood. For it was made perfectly clear in the wedding vows themselves. Were her supporters truly claiming that an aristocratic young champion gold medalist...could not comprehend a set of wedding vows? One either followed them or did not, but they were not confusing.

Surely his mother’s behavior made her character plain.

It always had for him.

His favorite—which was to say, the least persuasive argument, to his mind—was that his own father was to blame for the betrayals that had been practiced upon him. Sometimes he remembered those stormy nights inside the King and Queen’s apartments, when he’d hid from the shouting—but he knew, now, that his father’s reactions had been warranted. Because there were always the endless stories of his father’s first great love, the Lady Lorenza, who had been promised to another and raised by a man who kept his vows to his daughter’s betrothed. No matter that Lorenza had dallied with the King before her official engagement.

Not to mention, it was accepted fact that Alvize and Lorenza had consummated their feelings in a scorching affair that had rendered the tabloids breathless with speculation that Alvize might reverse centuries of Fiammettan tradition by marrying her.

When everyone knew that it was written in the law of the Kingdom that the King must marry a virgin bride.

His mother was the one who had accused his father for the sake of that drama she craved, he thought now, firmly, as he always did. When she was the one who had sinned.

Gianluca had no sympathy for anyone involved. His mother had been a disaster but his father had been the King and should have handled her better, he thought now, gazing out at the many luminaries who graced the great hall of the palace tonight. Lady Lorenza and his mother were among them, of course, because he upheld the traditions and expectations and customs of his position. No matter what.

He could not help but reflect, as he had many times before, that his father had known perfectly well what the rules were. They had been made abundantly clear to Alvize in the same way they had been imparted upon Gianluca when he was still a small child. The many palace tutors whose job it was to see to it that the young kings knew their own traditions made certain of it.

What Gianluca could not get past was one simple truth: if his father had intended to marry the woman he seemingly loved so deeply, then he should not have let himself get so carried away with her. Even if the so-called scorching affair had been perfectly innocent in private, which Gianluca doubted, his father should have made certain the tabloids never got wind of his attachment to the Lady Lorenza in the first place. If he had been swept away by her, as everyone seemed to think, he should have dedicated himself to negotiations with not only his beloved’s father, but the match she’d been meant to make all along.

That he had not done so, to Gianluca’s mind, meant that he had not been quite as madly in love as everyone liked to pretend. While either excusing him or demonizing him.

And yet he had knowingly walked wide-eyed into his own destruction, because he’d chosen a woman like Elettra, who craved attention above all things. She could have been in no doubt that Alvize’s affections were engaged elsewhere, though she still claimed she had not known of the King’s very famous love affair until after the wedding. And it did not matter to Elettra that the object of her husband’s supposed affections was married to another by then, and was, by all accounts, faithful to him.

What mattered to Elettra was that she was not the center of the King’s attention, then or ever, and so she had acted out.

Again and again and again.

She had made no secret of her affairs. She’d thrown them not only in her husband’s face, but had made sure that her exploits were tabloid fodder at all times. She sent out her minions to keep her name forever in the press, forever stoking that same fire, forever embarrassing the palace, forever carrying on in full view of all of Europe and the whole of the world besides.

Elettra thought she was thereby punishing the King.

And Gianluca could not say whether that had worked, because his father’s emotions had always been hidden in public, but volatile in the palace. And this particular topic had been one his father had declared off-limits when Gianluca had still been an adolescent—unless Alvize was the one raging about it.

The people, meanwhile, had chosen sides in the streets and otherwise told poll after poll that they would prefer a lot less of a soap opera from their monarchy.

What Gianluca did know, however, was that he was the one who had to clean up the mess they’d left behind after his father’s death. His parents’ scandals were now his problem. Not that he could recall his father, in the whole of his lifetime, ever indicating that he was aware his only son and heir would be left to handle the fallout of the soap opera he’d let play on.

His mother, on the other hand, knew all too well. She was here tonight on sufferance.

Yet Gianluca was not particularly surprised that his mother had somehow failed to get the message he knew full well must have been delivered to her by every aide in the palace and half of the royal guard. Because there was a ripple in the crowd below the raised dais where he sat and there she was. As perhaps he should have expected. Marching right up to him as if she had that right. As if he did not normally make certain she was kept from his sight.

But then, Elettra knew that he would not behave with anything but the utmost courtesy in front of all these people and his proper new bride. She was counting on it.

Gianluca disliked that she was right.