LITMIR.BIZ

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interested in his bride at the moment than stale jokes about royal succession, though the guests laughed heartily—as they were expected to do. It was only polite.

      Gabrielle, however, did not laugh with the rest. The color was high on her soft cheeks, and she had been sitting far too still beside him since she’d returned from the powder room, her long skirts rustling as she attempted to angle her body away from him. He preferred her attempts at sparring with him, he thought, amused.

      “And what about you?” he asked, picking up their conversation from before as if she had not run away in the middle of it. He wondered idly if she believed she’d fooled him—if she believed he was unaware she had made an excuse to escape him. He dismissed the thought. Let her believe it if it made her feel better about her situation.

      She threw a cautious look his way, her eyes more blue than green in the dim glow of the ballroom. She vibrated with tension—and, he thought, awareness. Though Luc considered the possibility that she was too innocent to realize it. It seemed impossible in this day and age, but then Luc was used to achieving the impossible. It was one of his chief defining characteristics.

      “Me?” she repeated.

      “Why did you choose to marry now?” he asked. Once again, he found himself trying to put her at ease, and was amazed at himself. He had stopped trying to charm women when he was little more than a boy. He didn’t need it. No matter how he behaved, they adored him and begged for more. But none of them had mattered until this one. For her, he would be charming. Her perfection deserved nothing less.

      “Choose?” She echoed him again—and then smiled, though this was not her usual gracious smile, the one that she had been wearing all day, beaming around the room. This one was tighter and aimed at her lap, where she clasped her hands in the folds of her wedding dress. “My father expected me to do my duty. And so I have.”

      “You are twenty-five.” He watched her closely as he spoke, attuned to the way she worried her full lower lip with her teeth. “Other girls your age live in flats with friends from university. They prefer nightlife and the party circuit to marriage or talk of duty.”

      “I am not other girls,” Gabrielle said.

      Luc watched, fascinated, as the pulse in the hollow of her neck fluttered wildly. In her lap, her fingers dug into each other. She betrayed no other sign of her agitation.

      “My mother died when I was quite young and I was raised to be my father’s hostess.” She expelled a breath. “I will be Queen. I have responsibilities.”

      As she spoke, she kept her eyes fixed on her father, who had said something very similar, if Luc recalled correctly. Luc followed her gaze, not at all surprised to see that the King had retaken his seat, without any words specifically directed to his daughter. Evidently this bothered Gabrielle, though she fought to conceal it. Luc could see the sheen of emotion in her eyes, could read her agitation as clearly as if it was in schoolboy Italian.

      Luc detested emotion. He loathed the way people blamed their emotions for all manner of sins—as if emotions were separate, ungovernable entities. As if one did not possess a will, a mind.

      But Gabrielle, for all the emotion he had sensed in her today, was not letting it rule her. She did not inflict her emotions, her passions, on everyone around her. She did not cause any scenes. She simply sat in her seat, smiling, and handled herself like the queen she would be someday. His queen.

      Luc approved. He reminded himself that her finer sensibilities were one of the reasons he had chosen her. Her charity and her empathy could not exist in a vacuum. Perhaps emotion was the price.

      He decided it was a small one. He decided that he, Luc Garnier, who prided himself on a life lived free of the cloying perfume of emotions, could tolerate hers. Even indulge them on occasion.

      “You have made him proud,” he told her, nodding at her father, feeling benevolent. “You are the jewel of his kingdom.”

      Finally she turned her head and met his gaze. The shine of tears was gone, and her sea-colored eyes were clear and grave as she regarded him.

      “Some jewels are prized for their sentimental value,” she said, her musical voice pitched low, but not low enough to hide the faint tremor in it. “And others for their monetary value.”

      “You are invaluable,” he told her, assuming that would be the end of it. Didn’t women love such compliments? He’d never bothered to give them before. But Gabrielle shrugged, her mouth tightening.

      “Who is to say what my father values?” she asked, her light tone unconvincing. “I would be the last to know.”

      “But I know,” he said.

      “Yes.” Again that grave sea-green gaze. “I am invaluable—a jewel without price.” She looked away. “And yet somehow contracts were drawn up, a price agreed upon, and here we are.”

      There was the taint of bitterness to her words. Luc frowned. He should not have indulged her—he regretted the impulse. This was what happened when emotions were given rein. Was she so foolish? How had she imagined the courtship of a royal princess, next in line to her country’s throne, would proceed?

      “Tell me, Your Royal Highness,” he said, leaning close, enjoying the way her eyes widened. Though she did not back away from him. He liked her show of courage, but he wanted to make his point perfectly clear. “What was your expectation? You are not, as you say, other girls. Did you expect to find your king in the online personals? How did you think it would work?”

      Her head reared back, and she straightened her already near-perfect posture.

      “I…Of course I didn’t—”

      “Perhaps you thought you should have a gap year from your duties,” he continued in the same tone. Low and lethal. “A vacation from the real you, as so many of your royal peers have had—to the delight of the press. Perhaps you could have traveled around the world with a selection of low-born reckless friends? Taken drugs in some dirty club in Berlin? Had anonymous sex on an Argentine beach? Is that how you thought you would best serve your country?”

      If he’d thought she was in the grip of emotion before, that had been nothing. Her face was pale now, with hectic color high on her cheeks and in her eyes. Yet again she did not crack or crumble. Someone sitting further away would not have seen the difference in her expression at all.

      “I have never done any of those things,” she said in a tight, controlled voice. “I have always thought of Miravakia first!”

      “Do not speak to me of contracts and prices in this way, as if you are the victim of some subterfuge,” he ordered her harshly. “You insult us both.”

      Her gaze flew to his, and he read the crackling temper there. It intrigued him as much as it annoyed him—but either way he could not allow it. There could be no rebellion, no bitterness, no intrigue in this marriage. There could only be his will and her surrender.

      He remembered where they were only because the band chose that moment to begin playing. He sat back in his chair, away from her. She is not merely a business acquisition, he told himself, once more grappling with the urge to protect her—safeguard her. She is not a hotel or a company.

      She was his wife. He could allow her more leeway than he would allow the other things he controlled. At least today.

      “No more of this,” he said, rising to his feet. She looked at him warily. He extended his hand to her and smiled. He could be charming if he chose. “I believe it is time for me to dance with my wife.”

      His smile was devastating.

      Gabrielle gulped back her reaction to it, suddenly worried that she might scream, or weep, or some appalling combination of the two. Anything to release the pressure building inside her, restless and intense all at once. But that smile—

      It changed him. It took stone and forbidding mountain and softened it, illuminating his features—making him magic. He was, she realized

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