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The only precious thing broken here was trust. ‘Never broken anything, no. I was the perfect child.’
‘Of course you were. Striding the halls with purpose, even as a ten-year-old.’
No, he’d been playing hide-and-seek with Stefano in places he should not be, when he’d sneaked into the forbidden throne room. Seen his father, with a woman bent over the arm of the throne. Alessio’s stride faltered. Hannah almost crashed into him but pulled up close. He knew. He could almost feel her enticing warmth. He turned to the window overlooking a garden.
‘I thought you might enjoy the view. Stefano’s ancestors designed the garden in the formal Italian style. I’m sure he’d like to tell you about it.’
Any more quizzical looks from his best friend and Stefano’s brows would end with a permanent home in his hairline. Alessio allowed him to tell the story of the famous garden with its clipped hedges and fountains. He stood back, letting the chatter wash over him. Taking slow breaths.‘You will not tell your mother. This is our secret.’Both his father’s cold eyes and the glassy ones of the woman had been on him that day. He could barely understand why his father’s hands twisted into her hair as if it had to hurt, though the look on her face spoke nothing of pain, even to his young brain. He hadn’t known why their clothes were in disarray, or why his father’s free hand had seemed to be in places it shouldn’t on a woman, or so he’d thought as a child.
All he knew was that what he was seeing waswrong. He’d come to realise later what had been going on in the throne room. How his father had been defiling it. Each day he felt tainted by the creeping guilt at keeping his father’s dirty secrets, because the man had made him party to more than one young boy should know. It was as if he’d been trying to mould Alessio into his own, dissolute image to spite his mother.
Lost in his own thoughts, Alessio had failed to realise Stefano and Hannah were now silent.
‘Enough of gardens?’ he asked, trying to sound suitably composed and regal. He hadn’t been assailed by that memory for years and couldn’t fathom why it would creep out of its dark, muddy hole to ambush him now.
‘It’s very beautiful and...ordered.’
‘That’s the way I like it.’ His own thoughts right now were a messy jumble of memories that should never have seen daylight again.
‘Do you ever walk in it? Take time to, I don’t know, smell the flowers?’
‘I... There are no flowers.’ Where was all this uncertainty coming from? His role and what was required of him wasallabout certainty. He straightened, remembered exactly who he was. ‘As for aimless wandering, I don’t have time.’
Stefano had stepped back to his position three paces behind, but Hannah stood right next to him. Looking up with her entrancing green eyes. Lips slightly parted as though there was something always on the tip of her tongue to say.
He had no doubt she’d say it.
‘Important prince and all, I know. That’s something I need to talk to you about. The time you’ve allowed for me.’
He’d asked Stefano to schedule the barest minimum for formal sittings. She was following him about like a shadow for the next fourteen days. What more did she need?
‘I’m a busy man.’
‘Places to be. Country to run. I’ve seen your diary, but I need more. And I’m talking hours, not minutes.’
They neared the door of her rooms and the adjoining parlour which he had thought would be the perfect place for her to work. Like her studio in England. He’d searched the palace for somewhere with the same alignment. A similar light to fill the room, although here the sun streamed in a bit more brightly than in her own studio. There was no rambling garden outside, but the view was pleasant enough, he supposed. He never really looked any more, too occupied with briefings from his government to gaze at the horizon and contemplate the landscape.
‘I can find more, if it’s what you require. Perhaps you could accompany His Highness on some...unofficial engagements.’ Stefano this time. It was as if both were conspiring against him. ‘There’s a hospital visit, to see children.’
Those visits wereprivate, never made for accolades. ‘The children aren’t some circus where you watch them perform.’
Hannah frowned. ‘I’d never treat sick children that way. But I need to see all aspects of you, not just the official ones. That’s what will make my portrait the best.’
Before he could protest, she turned to Stefano and smiled. Wide, warm, generous. The type of smile which sent a lick of heat right to his core. One you could bask in. It had no agenda or artifice at all to add a chill to the edges of it. ‘Thank you. Any extra time you can find me would help my work.’
Better her smile be for his friend than him. There was no place for it in his ordered, planned life. One where everything was cool and clinical. That was the way he preferred things to be. Like the hedge garden, clipped and precise. Even though he now felt inclined to take to the palace gym and hit a punching bag, hours earlier than his normal training session, rather than speak to the finance minister about fiscal policy and Lasserno’s deficit.
The doors of the room where Hannah would live loomed large. ‘Stefano will show you where everything is. I’ll leave you to him.’
A gracious host would escort his personal guest in, ensure she was settled. That she was happy with everything, so she’d gift him some genuine smiles which chased away the cold. Instead Alessio strode down the corridor away from Stefano and Hannah, protocol and graciousness be damned. The temptation snapped at him like a whip and he never gave in to temptation.
Smiles like Hannah’s were dangerous, because they chased away common sense.
CHAPTER THREE
HANNAHSTOODINwhat was best described as an expansive parlour, in the suite of her rooms. It was if she had been dropped into a fairy tale, except she didn’t feel like a princess, but an impostor.
Everything here was too magnificent to touch. Her canopied bed with its silks and embroidery in the palest cerulean blues. Magnificent tapestries of pastoral scenes with shepherdesses and frolicking lambs adorning the golden walls. The deepest of carpets she stood on and wiggled her toes into, as if she were walking on a cloud. It reminded her of how threadbare her life back in England seemed to have become, because there was never a time here that anything would be hard or cold. In this palace, nothing would deign to be anything other than perfect. As perfect as the man who ruled here.
