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This couldn’t continue. If he wasn’t careful, he was going to waste the time needed to prepare for his imminent meeting thinking about Elsbeth. He’d wasted enough time as it was.
This was the kind of behaviour he’d been infuriated at his brother for displaying, the lapses of concentration when he’d known damn well Marcelo was thinking about Clara instead of the important work at hand.
It was the kind of behaviour he’d never been susceptible to before and he wasn’t going to start now.
He forced his entire focus onto the pages before him.
Elsbeth could wait.
Late afternoon and Elsbeth stood at the edge of the garden watching as a team of landscapers, supervised by head gardener Pep, excavated sections of the lawn to the design she and Pep had agreed between them. This was the manual part of the landscaping project that she couldn’t be physically involved in, but it brought her joy to watch the slow transformation, and she took frequent photos on the professional camera she’d bought for herself to document it.
She sensed Amadeo’s approach before he stood beside her, and turned her face to smile at him. ‘Good day?’
‘Long day. I’m sorry, I didn’t get a chance to call you back.’
She shrugged. ‘That’s okay. I knew you were busy. I was just going to see if I could tempt you into sharing lunch with me before your meeting started.’
‘Sorry. Another time.’
‘I’ll hold you to that,’ she said softly.
The pause that followed passed just a fraction too long before he nodded at the landscape team. ‘Looks like they’re making good progress. Are you pleased with what they’ve done so far?’
‘Very much, although I think they’re less pleased that I’ve spent most of the day openly spying on them. They’ll be glad I’ll be out of their hair tomorrow.’ They had a full day of engagements scheduled.
He gave a quick smile. ‘Let us hope the presence of a beautiful princess isn’t too distracting for them.’
‘They do seem very keen to work without tops on,’ she mused. ‘But as they haven’t yet invited me to take my own top off, I’m sure they’re managing the distraction just fine.’
His next smile was fractionally warmer and almost met his eyes. Then he looked at his watch. ‘I need to go back in. Oh, and before I forget, I’m going to have to cancel our plans for tomorrow night—I need to do an overnight in Milan. There’s a couple of issues the art team have brought to my attention that need to be resolved in person. I’ll fly there straight from our last engagement and return Friday morning.’
Elsbeth, determined to keep her composure, arranged her face before saying, ‘Am I not invited too?’ Now that the frequency of their engagements had lessened, their schedule until the end of the year consisted of the majority being condensed into two days a week. Her diary for the next day was empty.
He shook his head and grimaced. ‘It’s purely work. You’d be bored...’ a glimmer suddenly flashed in his eyes ‘...anda distraction.’ He looked at his watch again. ‘I really do need to go. My mother’s expecting me. Enjoy your spying.’
Elsbeth waited until he’d disappeared from view, then sedately made her way back into her quarters.
Alone, she sat on her new red armchair and breathed in slowly ten times.
After they’d laughed off her ‘I love you’, they’d returned to the castle, where Amadeo had promptly made love to her in the shower and stayed until the sun had come up. When he’d left, it had been with the promise of dinner in his quarters on that Wednesday evening, a promise that hadthrilledher. Increasing the times they were together privatelyandbeing admitted into her husband’s private sanctuary after all this time and making love in his bed...?
Slowly but surely, the rules he’d laid down on their wedding night, those said and those unsaid, were being dismantled. For the first time she’d allowed herself to dream of a future where they lived together as husband and wife, not separately as two individuals who just happened to be married and were trying to make a baby together. It was a dream that made her heart sing and her veins fizz, and made her confront a truth—that though her unbidden declaration of love had been a slip of the tongue, she could no longer deny that it contained more than a grain of truth. She was falling for him.
It was a truth she wished had kept itself hidden.
Her first real inkling that something was wrong had come yesterday during their engagements. They never showed any affection in work time. They didn’t touch each other. That was normal. Amadeo was heir to the throne and she would be his queen consort. Standards needed to be maintained and that meant a dignified front befitting their status.
It was his eyes that had changed. The way he looked at her. She’d caught a few hungry looks from him but there had been no stripping her naked with his stare. The only thing it had felt like he was trying to strip was her skull so he could bore into her head. Conversation between them had been as easy as it had grown to be in recent weeks but there had been no hint of intimacy in his tone. Just little things that had made her feel that something was off and that he was pulling away from her, but small enough to make her uncertain whether or not she was being paranoid.
And now he’d cancelled their date.
But he’d looked stressed, she argued with herself. Maybe those issues identified with the art collection were more serious than she’d supposed. As the Berrutis did not accept a single cent from the public purse, amongst many other sources of income they monetised their highly prized art collection. Amadeo had taken control of the billion-euro collection on the family’s behalf when he turned twenty-one, and it was a lot of work, even with a team running it on his behalf.
Or, even better, maybe he was stressed because he had to cancel their date. After all, hehadcalled her a distraction. And promised they would do it another time.
Having successfully cheered herself up, she pulled her phone out of her pocket, called Clara and arranged to spend Thursday at a master sculptor’s workshop as inspiration for her garden... And as a distraction to stop herself mooning and talking herself into making mountains out of molehills.
Late Saturday night, Amadeo lay on his back, Elsbeth using his chest like a pillow, her leg hooked around his thigh, an arm draped across his stomach. Her fingers were making idle circular sweeping motions over his skin.
