With visible difficulty, Gaetano dragged his eyes back from her lovely face and began snapping open several ring boxes. ‘Pick a couple...’ he invited.
‘Oh, that’s gorgeous!’ Lara prised a beautiful solitaire diamond out of a box and tried it on her finger beside the wedding ring. ‘And as it fits it was obviously meant to be!’
‘It was my grandmother’s... I believe. She was gone before my birth, but Vittorio and Giulia once sat me down to talk me through all this stuff and its provenance. Somewhere there is an official catalogue. Try another ring and some earrings,’ he encouraged.
Lara slid a square-cut sapphire dress ring on her other hand.
All the earrings he unveiled were either too fancy or for pierced ears and her ears were unpierced, so Gaetano had to be satisfied with the rings now adorning her fingers.
Lara collected Freddy from the nursery. Like her, he had enjoyed a wardrobe refresh and he looked adorable in embroidered dungarees and a matching sweater. Olivier met them at the foot of the stairs and said to Gaetano, ‘I can take it from here and you can go back to work. I’ve been using the palace as a backdrop for portraits for long enough to know all the best locations.’
‘I’ll stay. I haven’t seen much of Freddy today,’ Gaetano announced.
Olivier definitely seemed to know what he was doing behind a camera, giving her detailed instructions of how to pose, where to look, with slick directions and amusing comments that made her relax and laugh more than once. They had to be a little more active to please Freddy and keep him in one place long enough to be photographed.
‘I’m really enjoying winding Gaetano up,’ Olivier murmured quietly after an hour as he bent down to Freddy’s level and play-fought the little boy to make him chuckle. ‘I’ve never seen him so gone on a woman that he would stand around watching just to make sure I don’t gettoofriendly with her!’ Laughing with satisfaction, he backed away from mother and son again.
It was frustrating for Lara not to be able to look around right at that moment to see if Gaetano really was there watching. Olivier was an old friend and his frank words lifted her to a height. The idea that Gaetano could be recapturing some of the emotion she had once inspired in him was extremely appealing now that she had accepted that she was as much in love with him today as she had been two years earlier.
The main difference between then and now was that she understood how much more complex a character Gaetano was than she had once assumed. And how volatile he could be, she acknowledged ruefully, beneath the hard shell of equable cool that his royal role had imposed on him. Without knowing who and what he really was, she hadn’t grasped what that conflict in his nature meant, nor had she been aware that she and Freddy saw a side of him that few other people, if any, had had the benefit of experiencing.
Gaetano had a flinty darkness to his gaze when he gathered her up after the session ended and Freddy was borne off to have his supper by his nanny. ‘You should have told Olivier to back off,’ he breathed unreasonably.
Lara lifted a brow. ‘He’s a happily married man with two kids. You can’t be serious. He was winding you up deliberately.’
Gaetano frowned and stiffened. ‘Stai scherzando...are you kidding me?I felt that he was being disrespectful.’
‘No, not at all,’ Lara disagreed. ‘He’s a friend and he was teasing you.’
Gaetano gritted his teeth and said nothing more. Seeing Olivier, one of the worst womanisers in Europe before his marriage, getting that close to Lara had inflamed him. Clearly, Lara liked Olivier—well, most women did, he conceded grudgingly. But the more she had laughed and responded to Olivier’s undoubted charms, the angrier Gaetano had felt. Obviously, he was a rather territorial man, who preferred that other men respect clear boundaries rather than flirt with his wife in front of him. There was nothing wrong with that. Olivier had been in the wrong,nothim.
‘Oh, yes, Dario’s wife, Carla, is dying to meet you and I said we’d drop in on them later for supper,’ Gaetano imparted. ‘She’s very friendly and warm. I think you’ll like her.’
‘Would you have a minute?’ Antonella asked Lara as she was walking through the big hall towards the lift, intending to join Freddy in the nursery.
‘There’s some ideas I wanted to run by you. Mosvakia needs to meet their new queen properly,’ she told Lara cheerfully as she invited her into one of the offices on the ground floor.
Lara swallowed hard, recalling how Gaetano had promised her that she only had to be a queen behind closed doors. ‘Is it really important? I don’t want to put myself out there if I don’t have to.’
‘You and Gaetano are a double act. How could you not appreciate that he needs your support?’ Antonella asked in almost exaggerated surprise. ‘Charities and other organisations, not to mention the government’s scheduled events, require more time than the King has in his day. You could relieve some of the pressure on him by taking on some of those duties.’
Lara had paled. She levelled her shoulders, trying to stand taller because, although she was accustomed to being smaller than most of the people around her, inexplicably Antonella made her feel like a small person on the inside as well as the outside. ‘Of course, I’ll help if I can,’ she murmured limply, terrified that she was being selfish and determined to make Gaetano proud of her. Antonella’s surprise made it obvious that skulking behind closed doors was not going to impress anyone. ‘I didn’t appreciate that Gaetano was under so much pressure. This is early days for us.’
‘The King works very hard. When I was with him...oh, forgive me.’ Antonella studied her with an apologetic grimace. ‘I meant not to remind you of that. It just slid off my tongue.’
‘Don’t worry about it. I’m well aware that I’m not the only woman whom Gaetano has had in his life,’ Lara managed to respond in an upbeat tone, resolute, as she was, not to be oversensitive, but perhaps itwastime for her to talk to Gaetano more honestly about the time they had spent apart rather than dancing round the sticky subject and avoiding it. In some cases, such as right there at that very moment, ignorance was not bliss.
‘Well, of course, I knew the King before you entered his life,’ Antonella began in a remorseful tone.
‘Before?’ Lara queried, her spine snapping rigid with sudden fierce tension.‘Before?’she repeated helplessly.
‘I’m sorry. I assumed he would have mentioned it by now. We were dating before he disappeared the way he did.’ Antonella had lowered her voice. ‘I only know aboutthatepisode because my father is Prime Minister. For obvious reasons, it’s been kept very quiet. He forgot that he already had a girlfriend, but I can hardly complain when he had a medical reason for doing so.’
‘My goodness,’ Lara exclaimed in response to that revelation. She contrived a stiff smile and struggled to maintain her composure when, in actuality, she felt as though she had received a hard punch in the stomach. ‘That must have been very difficult for you. Do you mind me asking how close you were?’
Already regretting asking such an intimate question, Lara watched Antonella bend her head, her face colouring. ‘I don’t think we should get into that, but I was like any other woman in a relationship with a man of the King’s standing... I did hope that it was a lasting bond, of course I did. And unfortunately, nothing was explained when he first came back, and he stayed away from me.Nobodyknew that the King had married—well, possibly Dario did, but the rest of us didn’t. That was a very well-kept secret.’
‘I’m so sorry you had that experience,’ Lara murmured tightly. ‘Look, Freddy’s waiting on me. Could we discuss those events you mentioned on some other day?’