His brow creased as if he’d never heard of dinner before. The surround of his mouth was smeared red with her lipstick.
She laughed for absolutely no discernible reason. Maybe she was delirious? She didn’t care. She felt like she could spring onto a cloud and float into the stratosphere. ‘The staff will be bringing our dinner in at any second.’
Firm lips crushed against hers, teeth capturing her bottom lip as he pulled away from her with a growl.
Hastily, they scrambled to make themselves presentable. Alessia had a much easier time of it seeing as she still had her skirt and top on, and she tried to help Gabriel button his shirt but it buttoned differently to what she was used to and she was more a hindrance than a help.
She opened the dining room door and took her seat exactly ten seconds before the servers arrived.
Three days later, the paparazzi were waiting in their usual spot outside the castle grounds. That they pursued them all the way to the airfield where Gabriel’s jet awaited them reinforced the impact the release of the wedding statement had had. The royal family always travelled in official cars and were always followed, but the times Gabriel had come and gone from the castle before had evoked only cursory interest from the vultures. Now, even though they were in the back of a non-official car, the paparazzi were clearly taking no chances that their cash cow might be inside it.
When they arrived at his home a few miles north of Madrid a few hours later, his heart sank to find another pack of paparazzi staked outside his estate. Fortunately, they preferred to move out of the way than get run over by his driver.
‘I’m sorry,’ Alessia whispered, squeezing his hand.
He gave a rueful smile. ‘You have nothing to be sorry for. They will get bored soon.’
‘I’ll only be encroaching your space for a few days. Once I’m back home, they’ll leave you alone here.’
His next smile was grim. Bringing her hand to his mouth, he kissed it and inhaled heavily. Alessia’s birth and the resultant attention it brought her was not her fault. She played the media game because it went hand in glove with her role but she didn’t court publicity for personal vanity like his mother did. He should never have made her feel bad for something that was beyond her control.
‘You are my wife and what’s mine is yours, which means this is your home too,’ he told her seriously. ‘Don’t ever think you’re not wanted here or not wanted by me.’
Her eyes held his. Her chest rising as slowly as the smile on her face, she placed a palm to his cheek and a dreamy kiss to his mouth. ‘Thank you,’ she said when she pulled her mouth away. ‘I needed to hear that.’
He kissed her. ‘And I needed to say it.’
It astounded him how quickly things could change. Opinions. Feelings. Desires.
Before their wedding a week ago, the thought of Alessia in his home had made his chest tight. Now, it was knowing that on Sunday she would fly back to Ceres without him that made it tighten.
Before their wedding, he’d known he wanted to be a good husband and a good father but they had been driven by the circumstances of their child’s conception. His own father had been a good father—those two years of warfare with his mother not withstanding—and Gabriel wanted to give the same feeling of love and security to his own child. As he knew how damaging it could be for a child to witness parents at war, he knew the best way to achieve love and security for his child was by being a good husband.
The more time he’d spent with Alessia and the more he’d got to know the woman behind the princess mask, though, the more he wanted to be a good husband for her sake too. He wanted to make her happy for her own sake. Nothing made his heart lighter than to see her smile and hear her laugh.
Was he falling in love with her? It was a question he’d asked himself more and more since they’d become lovers.
Three days, that’s all it had been. Three days of hedonistic bliss that had blown his mind, but it had been a hedonism that had to be rationed to the evenings and nights. Here, in his Madrid home, there was nothing to stop them spending their entire days and nights making love, and he imagined all the places they could...
‘Oh, my, yourhouse!’
For the first time in three days, Alessia found her attention grabbed by something that wasn’t entirely Gabriel. They’d driven past the security gates and now she was trying to stop her mouth gaping open. Surrounded by high, thick trees for privacy, white-edged cubes infilled with glass were cleverly ‘stacked’ to create a postmodern structure like nothing she’d seen before. Where the castle her family had called home for five hundred years was believed to have had the first wing built around a thousand years ago, this home could be set a thousand years into the future.
Driven into a subterranean car park with a fleet of gleaming supercars lined up, a glass elevator took them up to the next level. A butler was there to greet them. Other than shaking his hand at the introduction, Alessia was still too dazed about the futuristic world she’d just landed in to summon her Spanish and follow the conversation.
‘Are you okay?’ Gabriel asked, an amused smile on his face, once the butler had left them in a vast white living area that looked as if it would repel dust from fifty paces.
She shook her head, noticing an abstract bronze sculpture taller than Gabriel that she was sure was the one that had made the news earlier in the year by breaking records when it had been sold at auction. ‘I’m just trying to take everything in. I’ve never seen anything like your home before...’ Movement caught her eye and she turned her head and did a double take. ‘Is that awaterfall?’
She hurried over to the wall of windows the water was pouring down outside of, but before she’d reached it, the glass began to slide open. Still shaking her head, she stepped out into a vast outdoor area with plentiful seating and plentiful sun loungers that lined a long swimming pool the waterfall was falling into. Craning her neck, she gave a squeal to find there was another glass swimming pool jutting out over her.
‘It’s a trio of infinity pools,’ Gabriel explained, standing beside her. ‘The one above us extends from the private balcony in our bedroom.’
Walking to the edge of the decking area, Alessia looked down over the glass perimeter railing and saw the third swimming pool.
‘That one extends from the spa,’ Gabriel told her. ‘There’s an indoor one too, for when the weather is cooler.’
‘Amazing,’ she breathed, still craning her neck up and down to take the three infinity pools in. The top one was the shortest and narrowest, the bottom the longest and widest, which she guessed meant the swimmer could swim in the sun or the shade on the lower two levels. ‘I’ve spent twenty-three years begging my parents to have an outdoor swimming pool put in but they always say no because they fear it will ruin the picture-perfect architecture of the castle. And you’ve got three!’