Page 35 of Wedding Night In The King's Bed

She was stuck in a gloomy marriage she couldn’t escape if she wanted to, so that giggling about make-believe relationships her cousin wasn’t having seemed like a reprieve.

Though even as she thought that, she knew that the true problem with her marriage was that it wasn’t gloomy at all.

On the contrary.

Everything with Gianluca was white hot and wild.

And to her astonishment, there was no getting used to him. There was no reaching a saturation point. Every time he touched her it was better than the time before. Every time they came together, no matter where they came together, it was as if it was the first time. And the last time.

It was that epic. It was that unbearably beautiful.

It was that catastrophic.

Because the truth was, Helene thought as she watched the dancing flames of the fire before her, she really did want those fairy tales. The ones her mother had told her when she was a girl. The ones she and Faith created for each other about pop singers who fancied themselves ambassadors to the world, and anyone else who took their fancy. She wanted all those stories. She wanted to be an old woman who could look wisely at young girls like the ones at her luncheon today and tell them that it was all worth waiting for, whatever perfect fairy tale they carried within them, because it would happen.

If they believed. And if they let it come.

And sometimes letting it come took too long, so a woman did what she needed to do to prod a man along.

It wasn’t that she defied Gianluca. Not outwardly.

But she used the weapons she had.

Without mercy.

She had to believe that if she could only show him how, he might come around to her way of seeing things. And that maybe if she showed him who she really was, in bed and out, he would finally believe her.

And maybe then she would get to see that smile of his again.

That practical girl inside her, who had thought she could march into a frigid marriage with a total stranger only to fall in love at first sight, wasn’t so sure. Because she might believe in fairy tales, but now she knew too well that even when something seemed to be moving in that direction, it could turn out to hinge entirely on an innocence she could not prove. And that he would not believe.

No matter how many times he called her mia regina and made her sob out his name in reply.

“In other words,” she muttered into the fire, “you’re doomed.”

Helene woke sometime later, surprised to find she’d drifted off into a very uncharacteristic nap. But there was no time to worry over it, because while she and Gianluca had no outside engagements tonight, her aides had come to ready her for one of their private dinners in their palace apartments. The dinners Gianluca insisted on, because, she thought, it made him imagine they were more civilized than they were afterward, in his bed. Or hers. Or wherever they found themselves in a set of apartments with so very many rooms.

And though she might think differently in the aftermath, Helene could find nothing gloomy about spending time with her husband.

It was the way Gianluca waited for her each evening. He stood there looking resplendent as always, even though their private dinners were meant to be casual. He usually wore only a shirt and trousers, while she liked her jeans and something pretty on top.

But there was never any doubt that he was the King, no matter what he wore.

Or didn’t.

He was there before the windows, so that the lights of this beautiful kingdom glittered behind him through the storm. Sometimes she thought she saw the same lights in his dark night gaze, the way they’d been there that first night.

Before everything changed.

And maybe that unexpected nap still had its claws in her, because her usual jolting reaction to the sight of him didn’t seem to translate into the lightheartedness she liked to use at dinners like this. If only to confound him.

It hadn’t occurred to her that not doing it would confound him too.

Halfway through the meal he sat back in his seat and eyed her even more closely than usual. “Are you unwell?”

“Not to my knowledge,” she replied, frowning at him. “Why?”

He studied her frown, making Helene wonder if she’d never actually frowned at him before now. Surely not.

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