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And Cesca knew her role, because she did not meekly bow her head. She did not avert her gaze like some meek little virgin being married off today. Her gaze was calm. Commanding, he would even have said, and she let it move over the congregation as if daring anyone there to compare her to the tabloids she’d starred in over the years.

Saviero’s tongue felt thick in his mouth. His throat was tight.

All he could think about was that moment in her bedroom. Cesca in nothing but a robe with a towel on her head, and his hand on her face.

He had to order himself to breathe normally. To relax, here with too many eyes upon him, and not all of them friendly.

It didn’t work.

She was too stunning. Too compelling. And Saviero was entirely too aware that he was reacting to her not as the politically appropriate consort and former High Minister he was meant to play here today to help the kingdom through this tumult, but as a man.

A man who was forced to admit, at the worst possible moment because it was so public and required sheer perfection from all corners, that he had wanted Cesca for a long, long while.

He had never imagined that there would come a day when he would have the opportunity to indulge that wanting, so he had buried it away. But now he was standing before the whole of the kingdom, preparing to marry her.

For the good of the kingdom, of course, which allowed him to be pious about it and feel virtuous besides.

But it didn’t change the truth of things.

Seeing Cesca fully embodying her royal destiny did something to him. He knew without having to ask that she would tell him it was simply because he was such a loyalist. The king’s puppy, he believed she had called him once or twice.

A title he had never been ashamed of.

He and Vesuvius had played together as boys, as the Cimarosa family’s ancient aristocratic bloodline was seen as appropriate enough for Saviero to be acceptable as a companion for the heir to the crown. Saviero had not realized until he was older that to some, from the outside, it all looked opportunistic.

But here was the truth. He and Vesuvius had become more than friends over the years. They had long considered themselves brothers, and had expanded their circle by exactly one person when they’d met Kyriakos of Zaccaria at university.

Saviero had never been his friend’s puppy. What he’d always been was focused on was making sure that whatever Vesuvius got up to, it never tarnished the crown—because that was what was good for the kingdom. He didn’t care what anyone thought about that.

That was the point of their brotherhood, in his opinion. And it was why there was complete and total trust between all three of them.

As he watched his bride make her sedate and stately approach to the altar, he wondered if Cesca could boast any similar friendships. She was vastly popular, of course. She had a seemingly infinite and inexhaustible number of friends.

But he doubted very much that she considered any of them family.

It was too rare. Too impossible, really, for people in their position. It was difficult to trust anyone’s motives and far easier to isolate oneself. Vesuvius was an outlier where that sort of thing was concerned.

Saviero had no doubt that Cesca would tell him that she was about as far from isolated as possible, and use that rave he’d found her in as an example. But he knew what he’d seen when he’d waded into the cavernous space. There had been a huge crowd packed in tight to the old warehouse.

But Cesca had danced apart. In her own little pocket, never quite part of the surging sea of bodies.

As if they were aligned in the belief that closeness was for others, not them.

He studied her as she moved ever closer to him down the long aisle, and remembered her response to the notion that he did not wish to have sex with her earlier.

She could not have been more wrong about that, but her response had told him more than he thought she meant to reveal.

He had decided, when he had finally accepted that Vesuvius truly was leaving and that this marriage would therefore be a necessity, that he would need to play a long game with Cesca. She would be the Queen, and he would never do anything to subvert her command.

Not in public, anyway.

But he felt certain that she was used to calling the shots in the bedroom, too. And that, he imagined, was going to be a rude awakening for Her Majesty. Because Saviero did not take orders in bed. He issued them.

And he insisted on complete and total obedience.

It was also the only way he would allow himself to indulge his long-buried desire for her. Under strict command. And only physically.

Emotions were too risky in general, and far too dangerous for them, when there was a kingdom to run.