by Jane Porter
Gabrielle blanched at the bleakness in his voice, then shook her head. She racked her brain for any possible issue that could have upset him this much, but couldn’t think of anything.
Except her meeting with Silvio.
“There is something I haven’t told you,” she said, fighting to remain calm—or at least sound calm. “But even if you know about it, I don’t know why you should be so angry with me. I thought I was doing the right thing.”
“Did you?” He sounded only mildly interested—halfway to being bored—but Gabrielle knew better. She knew this was Luc at his most lethal.
“Yes,” she said. She felt her confusion melt away in a rush of overdue anger that punched into her gut and hummed through her—how could he speak to her this way? After they had come so far? Had he been pretending all this time?
“You call this the right thing?” he said, with a nasty, sardonic inflection that made her want to slap him—an urge she had never had before in her life. “You can say this to my face?”
“Of course,” she said tightly, and lifted her chin.
He could go to hell—with his anger and his coldness and this insane line of questioning, as if she was a common criminal. Who did he think he was? And here she was, so in love with him—it was infuriating.
Her hands balled into fists. She raised her eyebrows in challenge. “Of course I thought so. Why else would I meet with Silvio?”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“SO YOU admit it.” Luc could not believe it. He could not believe she would defend what she had done! He felt frozen, and yet nearly liquid with fury—all at the same time. He felt as if everything shook—as if the city of London wavered beneath his feet—but nothing moved. Not even him. “You do not even try to lie to protect yourself? You announce it freely!”
Her gaze darkened, her mouth flattening into a thin line.
“I don’t know what you want me to say.” She crossed her arms over her chest. Hugging herself tight or fending him off? He couldn’t tell. “Why engage in this exercise? Why not simply ask me about it if you already know?”
“This is how you respond?” He was so angry he felt his hands twitch and his blood pound against his temples. His suspicion that she had planned this from the beginning—first his humiliation when she disappeared, then this betrayal to the vile tabloids just as he began to trust her—crystallized in the vicinity of his chest. “This is your defense of something so low, so disgusting, that it demeans us both?”
“I thought I was helping you!” She enunciated each word, showing her temper, no longer so perfectly composed. But even that added to his fury. Now she showed him cracks in her well-mannered façade? Now, when it couldn’t—shouldn’t—matter any longer?
The emotions he’d spent his entire adult life avoiding filled him now, in a churning mess, and they were as unpleasant and unhelpful as he recalled. Anger. Hurt. What was the point of either? He tried to wrestle the emotional wave that crested inside of him into line—to tamp it back down beneath the smooth exterior he’d worked so hard to have define him—but it was too late. He had the sudden notion that he and Gabrielle were the same—with the masks they each wore, the calm surfaces with so much hidden beneath. Too much hidden.
And what does it matter now? he asked himself bitterly. She was the one he had trusted. She was the one he had married. And yet it turned out she was the same as all the others, the same as his deceitful mother—worse, because he had believed better of her. Because she had somehow convinced him that she understood him. What had he been thinking?
“You thought you were helping?” He had to turn away before he did something he would truly regret. Like show her these things he didn’t want to feel—all of them, in all their raw and vulnerable ugliness.
No. He would not. He could not bear to be so exposed. Not now, not ever—and certainly not after she had so betrayed him. No.
“Yes, I thought I was helping.” She blew out a ragged breath. “Why else?”
When he turned to look at her again she had pressed her fingers to the frown between her eyes. She rubbed at it, then dropped her hand to her side. She regarded him warily, her eyes too wide and too dark—as if he had wounded her somehow!
“Silvio approached me yesterday,” she said quietly. “He told me your—that there was a tape.”
“Stop,” Luc ordered her with a slash of his hand through the air, as if to cut her words off himself. The chaotic emotions inside him intensified—burned—fought to come out. “I cannot hear any more lies!”
“Lies?” She raised her gaze to his, anger and confusion and something else mixed together in the blue-green depths.
“I don’t know what I was thinking,” he raged at her, his voice like a low, angry throb in the otherwise hushed room. He could feel his own vulnerability like a sharp pain, and he hated the fact that he could not control it—could not control himself. Hated more that she had brought him to this. That she had planned to do this to him, and now stood before him and denied it. “I have become everything I despise. That is what is most clear to me in all of this. I am no better than my father in his day, dancing to her tune—”
“I am not your mother,” she interrupted him. Her voice was even, her eyes steady on his. But he ignored her.
“This—this—infatuation has made me a stranger to myself,” he continued, as if she hadn’t spoken.
He had been bewitched, enchanted—but these were simply other ways of saying he had been played for a fool. She had played him—he who had never let his guard down before. And look what happened when he did! When he made romantic gestures to a woman who had run away from him at his own wedding! Anger. Hurt. Fear that now he had let these emotions out they would rule him. That he would become a slave to them, like his parents before him.
He had the terrible notion that it was the fact that she had done this that hurt—not simply that it had been done. That she, Gabrielle, was no different from the others. He had trusted her more—he had liked her more—
“But no more,” he snapped. No more, damn her.
She moved toward him then, her frown melting from anger to cautious concern. She reached out to touch him—but he intercepted her hand before she could make contact with his cheek and held it out between them like a weapon. Hers or his, he did not know.
“Je sais exactement ce que vous êtes—plus jamais ne me tromperez-vous,” he spat out. “I know what you are, Gabrielle. I won’t be fooled by you again.”
“Luc—”
“This is over,” he threw at her.
Even to his own ears the words sounded as if they came from far off—some faraway rage, someone else’s fury. Better that than the keening mess in his gut, his fury like some kind of flu, ravaging through his body. How could this be happening to him?
“This marriage should never have happened. I should have known that no one could live up to my standards. That even in Nice you were nothing more than a carefully constructed lie. Did your father plan it? Or was that you, too?”
He could feel her pulse flutter wildly in her wrist.
“What …? Nice?” she asked, reeling. “What would my father have to do with—?” She cut herself off, trying to make sense of his angry words. “You were in Nice when I was? This past spring?”
“I followed you,” he told her, without a shred of apology, forcefully—wanting to rip into her with the knowledge. Anything to make her hurt as he hurt. Anything to ease the force of it inside his own body. “I wanted to make sure you had no skeletons in your closet—no secret lovers, no dirty laundry. What does it matter now? You never saw me then, and believe me, Gabrielle, you will never see me again.”
He saw the color drain from her face. He wanted to soothe her pain even as he caused it. He wanted to pull her close and crush her mouth to his. He wanted her even now, and he hated them both for it.
“You cannot mean that!” she cried.
He watched her pull herself together—he wondered what it cost her.
“This is crazy—a misunderstanding—”
“I want an annulment.”
The words fell between them like stones from a great height. Gabrielle flinched, her eyes wide and shocked.
“But you … We …” She couldn’t seem to form sentences. She cast around for words, her mouth working, her eyes glued to his. “We cannot annul, surely—?”
“I have already contacted my lawyers,” he told her, taking satisfaction from the way his words hit her body like blows, making her falter on her feet. Though he still held her hand in his—a pale imitation of the way their hands had once touched and would never touch again. Why did thinking that deepen his pain? Where was the indifference that should accompany his realization that she was as fake as the rest—as untrustworthy, as disappointing? “I suggest you do the same.” He sneered at her—anything to create distance, to make her like the others. “I will be claiming fraud, of course.”
“Luc—” She had to clear her throat, and she sounded like a stranger, hoarse and choked. “Luc, you cannot do this.”
“Why can’t I?” He moved close—too close, tempting himself with the wild madness of her mouth so near to his—and bared his teeth. “You abandoned me on our wedding day. You besmirched my name across the globe. You are no better than the paparazzi scum you are so friendly with. I have no doubt you planned this with them for the maximum amount of embarrassment.” He remembered he was holding on to her hand and let go of it abruptly, releasing her so she stumbled backward. “You are nothing to me.”
“But—but—I love you!”
She gasped even as she said it—and her hands flew up to cover her mouth, as if she could stuff the words she’d cried back inside. Her breath came in agitated pants. Her eyes were dark and glazed with emotion, but he wanted more. He wanted her to deny that she could ever have dealt with Silvio—could have sold him out. Barring that, he wanted her to hurt, to howl. He wanted to make sure she felt every bit as empty as he did.
“I beg your pardon, Gabrielle?” He snarled her name like the snap of a whip against tender flesh. “What did you just say?”
But she surprised him. She curled her hands into fists again, and then dropped them to her sides. She was still dressed in pristine, snowy white, the only color her overbright eyes, like the sea in a storm. The cowl neck of the top she wore showcased her delicate collarbone and the elegant line of her neck. He hated that she could look so beautiful, so regal, even now.
“I said that I love you,” she said, her voice thick but her head high. Her eyes glittered, but stayed steady on his. “I do.”
“You love me?”
It was as if she’d spoken in one of the few languages he didn’t know. He pronounced the word love as if it were some kind of disease, as if he could be infected by saying it aloud. Inside him, something broke. He felt it—felt the rising tide of an emotion like grief that accompanied it. But he could not allow what he feared would follow any acknowledgment that her words had gotten to him. He would not.
He cocked his head to one side and looked at her as a snake might look at a mouse. “And what reaction do you expect me to have to this convenient announcement, Gabrielle?”
“I have no expectations.” He saw her throat work. “It is no more and no less than the truth.”
He let out a filthy Italian curse that made the color flood her face. Then he closed the distance between them, his palms wrapping around her bare shoulders and hauling her to him, bringing her face scant inches apart from his.
Was it love or was it madness? Or was love itself madness, as he had always believed, though he had never felt as mad as he did now? Why did he yearn to touch her, again and again, stripping them both naked and sorting it out with their bodies? It was only sex, he told himself desperately. It had to be.
“You love what I can do to your body,” he snapped at her. “You love the way I make you feel. That is all. That is nothing!”
“I can’t help what you think,” she whispered back, a sob in her throat. “But I do love you. Even now.”
“I am touched, Gabrielle, but somehow unimpressed with such a brave declaration at such a time,” he bit out, his fingers digging into her soft flesh, though she made no sound of protest. He bent her backward in some grotesque parody of a kiss—and he loathed himself because he wanted to kiss her, to lose himself in the heady insanity of her taste, her body. “You can explain to your father that you love me—and that is why you betrayed me, that is why I am throwing you back to him like something defective.”
“Luc …”
Finally. Finally her tears spilled over and flowed down her cheeks. He exulted in them—and wanted to reach inside himself and physically rip out the part of him that still wanted to protect her, despite everything.
Despite what she had done to him. Despite how little she must care for him and about him if she could do it—if, as he believed more and more with each second, she had planned this from the moment her father told her she was to marry. And there was no mistaking it. He had seen her sell him out with his own eyes.
“I would never betray you! I love you!” she cried.
How could he want so urgently to believe her—even when he knew better?
“You and your love can go to hell,” he told her, with cold, brutal finality. He didn’t know where it came from—but the coldness was like a savior, descending upon him and muting the turbulent mess inside him. Masking it. He forced himself to let her go. He stepped away from her and told himself he didn’t care when she sank to the plush carpet before him, the marks from his fingers standing out against the pale white silk of her skin.
He had to leave her before he lost himself. That much was perfectly, terrifyingly clear.
He walked out, and he forced himself not to look back.
Gabrielle did not get up from the carpet for a long time.
It seemed to take forever for her to accept that Luc had left her—left the house, left London, left her—and even so, she did not fully come to terms with it until a full two weeks had passed.
He did not answer his mobile, and he did not return. He’d sent staff to collect his belongings within twenty-four hours of his departure—none of whom acknowledged her beyond a stiff announcement of their purpose. But she was still holding out a kind of desperate hope—something her father crushed in one short telephone call to London.
“You might as well come home,” he barked into the phone, his displeasure evident even from as far away as Miravakia. “Your antics have lost you your husband, it seems. Best ensure they do not also lose you your throne.”
Gabrielle couldn’t think of any reason to stay in London if Luc had already started the process of dissolving their marriage. What would be the point? She might as well be in Miravakia as anywhere else—what did any of it matter?
She did not realize that she was in some kind of shock until she found herself back in Miravakia, ensconced in her father’s palazzo as if she had never left. She had the sense that she was suspended in some kind of bubble, underwater, far away from whatever happened around her. In the middle of the night, when she could not sleep and could only lie awake, her body in a fever and her heart pounding with the enormity of her loss, she knew that she was hiding from the pain of Luc’s desertion—afraid to really let herself feel what she was not at all certain she could survive.
She might have remained there forever—hidden away, protected, distanced entirely from what she shied away from feeling—had it not been for her father.
“You have proved yourself useless and ruined your reputation, so there can be no more trading on it,” King Josef said one morning at the breakfast table, when Gabrielle had been home for some weeks. If he had broken his customary silence before, Gabrielle had not noticed. “I’m afraid I don’t possess the necessary imaginative prowess to make a silk purse out of this sow’s ear.”
She realized two things simultaneously as she stared down at her bowl of muesli, his cold, brutal words falling around her like so
many blows. One, that this was not the first time her father had spoken to her like this—not by a long shot, and this was not even the worst example of his cruelty or his callous disregard for her feelings. And two, she was not required to listen to it.
A part of the hard shell she’d gathered around herself cracked wide open.
She was done with it. With him. With his casual cruelty and his offhand treatment of her. She was required to respect him as her king, and even on some level as her parent. But that did not mean she was required to suffer his behavior for one moment more.
What was the worst that could happen? The King had already married her off to a stranger. Luc had already left her. There was no worst.
It was as if the sun had broken from behind the clouds.
Gabrielle raised her head and fastened her gaze on her father. It was as if she’d never seen him before. He was dressed, as ever, impeccably. His light brown hair was smoothed back from his aristocratic brow, and his handsome features were set in their usual expression of stern displeasure.
She had always disappointed him. Because she was not a boy. Because she was not able to read his mind, anticipate his needs. Because her mother had died and left her care in his hands. Because he was a man who would always be disappointed.
She remembered thinking that he was like Luc, that they were the same kind of man, and almost let out a laugh. The two men could not be more different. King Josef was petty, mean. Luc was elemental, unstoppable. King Josef dominated a room because he thought his consequence demanded it. Luc because he could not fail to do so—it was who he was, not what he did.
Most important, Luc had made her feel free. She had been more herself with him than she had ever been before. She hadn’t had to be the constrained, quiet princess that King Josef demanded for Luc. Luc had liked it when she did not hide. He’d liked her wild, free—and only with Luc had she let herself be both proper in public and unrestrained in private.
Only with Luc …
“What do you have to smile about, may I ask?” King Josef asked, bristling. He put his silver fork down against his plate with a loud clunk. “When I think of the shame you have brought upon this family, this nation, I cannot imagine I will ever smile again.”