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If she could have spoken then, if she dared, Cesca would have told him that she had never put much stock in chemistry. It had always seemed like a terrible excuse for her friends to wave away bad choices they’d made.

Though she wondered if the real truth was that she’d never really experienced the kind of wildfire chemistry she couldn’t deny she and Saviero had.

“You know as well as I do that what we have is unusual,” he was saying. “It doesn’t grow on trees and it certainly doesn’t happen every day. And would you like to know why?”

Cesca found that she would like to know why, in fact. But she wasn’t allowed to say so. So instead she lifted her chin and stared back at him, mutely.

“You may speak,” Saviero told her. “But only if you tell the truth. No matter how much it hurts.”

And Cesca didn’t see how the truth could hurt, especially not here—but all she could seem to make herself do was frown at him.

He nodded as if that confirmed something for him. Then he moved closer, taking her face in his hands and holding her there, suspended in his grip.

“I love you,” he told her in that fierce tone of his, stern and forbidding, that brooked no argument. “I love you, Francesca, and it seems to me that I’ve loved you a long while. Ever since I found you right here in this room and you shoved me sideways without even trying.”

She felt a kind of shock go through her. Because Cesca remembered that interaction. She remembered hiding away here in the gallery, having a private little conversation with her mother, only to see this man walk in. This beautiful, impossible man, who was representative of all the things she wasn’t.

Saviero, then and now, was a straight arrow. Indispensable to her brother. Even her mother had adored him when she’d usually been so reserved. Not only that, the Queen Mother had always made certain to let everyone know how highly she thought of him.

And at that time, Cesca had wondered if she was ever really going to find her feet. It wasn’t as if she, as a Royal Princess, could go out and find a job or start a career. She was expected to be decorative, yet not too pretty. She was expected to be charming, but not too interesting.

She was a spare, not a star, but no one wanted her shining anywhere else.

Cesca had been sitting here, wishing her mother was still alive. Wishing that she had someone to talk to who understood. Wishing that she could see her mother’s face just one more time, even if she got a little lecture to go along with it.

And in had walked Saviero Cimarosa, who had looked at her as if he alone could see straight through her. As if he could see all the insecurities and concerns she hid away under her devil-may-care attitude. As if he knew that she was not the role she played.

She remembered wishing that he really could see the truth of her—and then being horrified by that wish.

How funny that she hadn’t thought of that since. Not even during their wedding, when surely it should have dawned on her that there was a precedent here.

She had liked him a lot more than she wanted to admit, and a lot longer than she’d let herself remember.

Almost as if, a voice that sounded a lot like her mother’s whispered inside her, you knew that the moment you gave him a chance, you’d be done with all your wandering around. As if you knew that he would be the one for you all along.

“I love you,” Saviero said again, even more intently this time, “and I vow to you that it is not something that your rank or reign can change. If you leave the throne, my darling wife, I will go with you. If it is a choice between my duties to the crown and these vows I make to you here, I will choose you. Now and forever.”

Once again, Cesca felt a storm inside her, shaking through her, electric and dangerous and yet somehow, she felt as if what she really wanted was to open her arms wide, tip her head back, and wait for the rain she could feel coming. To dance a bit in the crackling energy of it all, and let the lightning do what it pleased.

It would be reasonable to lock herself away. To tie herself up, keep herself safe, and never take the kind of risks that could lead to her feeling the way she had at that conference table earlier.

But that wasn’t what she wanted.

Because what she wanted, what she really and truly wanted, was right here in front of her. And what she wanted was something a tiny little man like Lord Frick could never touch, much less understand.

It was true that so far, Cesca found being Queen a better prospect than she’d thought it would be. A much better deal than it had ever looked when Vesuvius was the monarch.

But she suspected that might have a lot to do with being a wife, and not just any wife.

Saviero’s wife.

And Cesca just didn’t see why she should have to choose between the two. Her brother had because he’d been given no other choice. But she intended to be a different kind of Queen. She intended to make this position bright and new instead of old and hidebound, because there was no other way to really move forward.

And she didn’t see any way that could happen without him.

In fact, if she was being brutally honest with herself, she didn’t see how anything could happen without him.

None of this would be possible or even conceivable unless he was right here. At her side in public and deep inside her in private.