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She stared at him, not knowing what he meant.
His eyes closed briefly again, the rise and fall of his shoulders and chest less pronounced. ‘Elsbeth...’ He grimaced and shook his head. ‘I do not say this with the intention of hurting you, but all your smiles...they’re too much. It seems to me that you hide behind them. They have their place when we’re out on engagements, but when it’s just you and me they’re unnecessary. That painting makes you feel warm... Well, your smiles make me feel cold. Because they’re not real. It’s like being married to a blank canvas. I don’t want a wife who hides behind a fake smile and agrees with everything I say. I want to know the real Elsbeth, the Elsbeth I just caught a glimpse of. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life married to a stranger.’
The good Lord help her, she felt like a deer caught in the headlights. As hard as she tried to think, her thoughts were too many and too jumbled for any coherence. Panic swelling, she couldn’t even think of something to say in response and, from the expression on his face, he was waiting for her to say something, but she didn’t know what to say and, even if she could, she didn’t know how to say it, not when she’d spent her whole life having it drilled into her that the best decorative adornment to a man’s arm was a silent one.
After far too long of this excruciating silence he rubbed his knuckles to his forehead and sighed. ‘We should go or we’ll be late.’
Her cheeks automatically tried to pull her lips into a smile, but she stopped them by the skin of her teeth. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘And no more apologies,’ he said roughly.
‘Sorry,’ she whispered. Like her smiles, apologies were an automatic response.
His grimace looked more rueful this time, the shake of his head less one of exasperation. ‘Elsbeth...just be you. Okay?’
‘What happens if you don’t like the real me?’ she surprised herself by saying.
She caught a glimmer of something like sympathy in his eyes. ‘Then there will be no real change, will there?’
Surprisingly, the blunt honesty and directness of his answer didn’t puncture her as deeply as it should.
Elsbeth liked Marcelo and Clara’s quarters from the moment she stepped inside. As regal and chintzy as the rest of the castle, it had warm undertones she thought perfectly suited the couple who lived there, especially when Clara threw her arms around her.
Unprepared for such a gregarious welcome when the most she was used to was air kisses, she froze in Clara’s tight embrace.
Laughing, Clara let her go, but only so far as to take Elsbeth’s hand and drag her through to the bar at the far end of the dining room, speaking at a hundred miles an hour as she’d done during their walk together. As Elsbeth’s English was minimal, she couldn’t understand a word of it, but Clara’s body language was enough for her to know how happy the Englishwoman was to host her, just as her body language on their walk had told her how happy she was in Elsbeth’s company. It had been a lovely warming feeling and she’d been sorry when their walk had come to an end. When a glass of champagne was thrust into her hand and Clara held hers aloft with a beaming, ‘Cheers,’ she knew exactly what was meant and chinked her glass to it.
Somehow, with two native Italian speakers, an English speaker and herself a native French speaker, communication was no issue at all throughout the meal. Amadeo and Marcelo were both fluent in English and French and able to make any translations when Clara spoke too fast for Elsbeth to keep up or when Elsbeth’s English failed her. By the time their main course was cleared away she found she’d relaxed so much that she was practically slouching in her chair!
But how could anyone fail to relax in such generous company? Generous in the sense that they made her feel she’d completed their year simply by being there. She’d never heard such laughter before. Not real laughter. Clara had a ready smile that Elsbeth studied, wondering how it differed to her own smile that left Amadeo cold. And then she saw for herself what the difference was—Clara’s smiles came naturally. There was nothing practised in them, nor in her infectious laughter.
‘You have had happy life?’ she asked in tentative English. How else could it be possible for someone to be so free within their own skin?
Clara pulled a face that made Elsbeth giggle. She caught the sharp turn of Amadeo’s face to her from the corner of her eye but then Clara answered, saying, ‘Gosh, no, before I met Marcelo my life was hard. My mum died when I was a little girl, my father died when I wasn’t much older and left me in the care of my brother, who hated me and packed me straight off to boarding school, and then I got expelled from that horrible school, which was excellent because I hated it there and, quite frankly, it hated me, and then my brother sold me to your cousin, King Pig and...’
Even with Amadeo translating as quickly as Clara spoke, Elsbeth struggled to keep up, and when it came to her cousin she could listen no more. ‘I am very sorry for what he did to you.’
‘It wasn’t your fault,’ Clara dismissed cheerfully. ‘I’m just glad you weren’t one of the women he sent to guard me and stop me escaping. I’d probably have to hate you then!’
Even Elsbeth laughed at that. ‘I couldn’t have,’ she said when the laughter had died away. ‘I would never have.’
‘I know,’ Clara said with a smile. ‘And that’s why I don’t hate you. I imagine you suffered at his hands too?’
‘I...’ Elsbeth shrugged helplessly and strove for the correct English. ‘All women suffer under Dominic.’ It was the reason she’d been too cowardly to do anything to help Clara. The whole palace knew, despite Dominic’s assertion that the Englishwoman he’d locked away was there willingly, that she was being held against her will and forced into marriage.
‘Then I’m glad I only had to put up with him for a couple of weeks before Marcelo saved me.’ She looked adoringly at her husband and was rewarded with a look so loving that Elsbeth felt a huge pang of envy and had to stop herself from glancing at Amadeo.
The sun would expire before he looked at her like that. Or consistently lean his body into hers the way Marcelo did with Clara. Or follow her every move with his eyes. This was a couple madly in love and lust, and it was almost painful to witness their constant need to touch each other. Were they afraid the other would disappear if they didn’t have that anchoring contact?
She knew with instinctive clarity that the moment she and Amadeo left them they would be ripping each other’s clothes off in the way she had seen couples behave in movies. Their lovemaking would be exuberant. Filthy. Loving. Everything her own couplings with Amadeo were not.
When this evening was over, Amadeo would come to her bed and they would do their duty and attempt to create the next heir to the Ceres throne. He would be naked but she would be wearing her nightdress. There would be no effort to remove it. She would climax. He would climax. And then he would wish her a goodnight and leave, and she would lie in her bed alone, her skin and pelvis still thrumming but her heart a gaping wound.
Lemon tarts were placed before them and, once demolished, coffee was brought out. Even two sugars and a thick swirling of cream couldn’t disguise the underlying bitterness, but she sipped politely at it, unaware how sharp Clara’s eyes really were until she said, for once at a speed Elsbeth could keep up with without translation, ‘Don’t drink it if you don’t like it. What would you prefer?’
Amadeo twisted his stare back to his wife. Her cheeks had caught fire. The image of the coffee profiteroles at their wedding floated into his mind. ‘You don’t like coffee?’
She looked trapped, fearful blue gaze stark on his, white teeth slicing into her bottom lip. Instantly, he understood. To admit to disliking coffee—and, of course, she did dislike it or she wouldn’t be looking so panicky—would be to admit to lying to him.
