to familiarise yourself with it as much as possible. Each word she correctly identified felt as though she had found a nugget of gold!
‘Come!’ she called, and saw the tall, dark figure of Alesso, his face unsmiling. ‘Oh, hello, Alesso!’ she said brightly.
‘Majesty.’ He gave a deep bow.
‘I’m just finishing up here.’ She glanced at her watch, wondering what had prompted this rare and unheralded visit. ‘I don’t have to be at the Women’s Refuge for another hour, do I?’
‘The King wishes to speak with you.’
It was pointless to say, Couldn’t the King have come and told me that himself? Because that wasn’t how it worked. Millie rose to her feet. ‘Very well. He is at work?’
‘He awaits you in your suite, Majesty.’
‘At this time of day?’ she asked in surprise. But it was a rhetorical question and Alesso said nothing. Even if he had known the answer he would still have said nothing, for his first loyalty lay towards Gianferro. As did everyone else’s.
Still unsmiling and unspeaking, Alesso accompanied her through the long portrait-lined corridors towards their suite of rooms, and Millie began to feel unaccountably nervous. ‘I do know the way!’ she joked.
‘I gave His Majesty assurance that I would conduct you there myself,’ he said formally.
The unwelcome thought flitted into her mind that it was like being led towards the gallows. A little knot of unknown fear at the pit of her stomach began to grow into a medium-sized ball, and by the time Alesso knocked and then opened the door her heart was racing.
It raced even harder when she saw Gianferro standing there, his face a study in anger, dark and brooding, and looking like she had never seen him look before.
‘Grazie, Alesso,’ he clipped out.
There was silence as she heard the door being closed behind his aide, and then Gianferro spoke, in a harsh voice she didn’t recognise.
‘I think you owe me some kind of explanation, don’t you, Millie?’
MILLIE stared at the unfamiliar sight of a Gianferro whose face was contorted by fury. Normally it was implacable. Enigmatic. It wasn’t just that he had been brought up to conceal his innermost feelings—Gianferro didn’t do big emotions. She felt the shivering of apprehension suddenly tiptoeing over her skin as she stared at him.
‘Explanation for what?’
The fury became transmuted into a look of icy disdain, and somehow that made her even more apprehensive. ‘Oh, come, come, Millie,’ he said silkily. ‘I am not a stupid man.’
‘Perhaps not,’ she said shakily. ‘But you are being a very confusing one right now. How can I give you an “explanation” when I don’t have a clue what it is I’m supposed to have done!’
The black eyes narrowed and he regarded her silently, and Millie was reminded of some dark, jungle predator in that infinitesimal moment of stillness before it pounced.
‘How is Oliviero?’ he clipped out.
For a moment she had no idea what he was talking about—and when she did it made even less sense. Millie frowned. ‘You mean my Italian teacher?’
‘Or your lover?’
She stared at him. ‘Are you…crazy?’ she whispered.
‘Maybe a little, but perhaps I am not the only one.’ His mouth curved into a cruelly sarcastic smile. ‘Does it feed your ego to make some poor little teacher fall in love with you?’
‘What are you talking about?’ she asked, in genuine confusion. ‘Oliviero is not a “poor little” anything—he happens to be a brilliant linguist.’
‘My, but how you defend him!’ he mocked.
Millie felt as though someone had just exploded a bomb in the centre of her world, and she had no idea why. But Gianferro was angry—really, really angry—and the first thing she needed to do was to calm him down.
‘Won’t you tell me what this is all about?’ she pleaded.
Gianferro’s breathing was ragged, rarely could he remember feeling such an all-consuming rage, and yet her face betrayed nothing other than what seemed like genuine confusion. Unless she was a better actress than he had bargained for.
‘Very well.’ His dark eyes sparked accusation. ‘The editor of the Mardivino Times rang Alesso this morning to ask whether anyone would like to comment on the rumours sweeping the capital about my wife.’
‘R-rumours?’ she stammered, in horror. ‘What kind of rumours?’
He heard the faltering of her words with a grim kind of understanding. Now, that—that—sounded like guilt. ‘You don’t know?’
‘Of course I don’t know—Gianferro, please tell me!’
He felt the acrid taste of jealousy and rage tainting his mouth with their poison as he glanced down at a piece of paper which was covered with Alesso’s handwriting. ‘Apparently you have grown close to—and I quote—“the devastatingly handsome young Italian who has broken hearts all over Solajoya”.’ He looked at her trembling lips, cold to their appeal. ‘Well?’ he shot out. ‘What have you to say?’
The accusation was so unjust and so unwarranted that part of her wanted to just tell him to go to hell and storm out of the room. But she couldn’t do that—and not just because that wasn’t the way queens behaved. She was his wife and this was a genuine misunderstanding.
‘It isn’t like that at all! He has just been…kind to me.’
His mouth twisted in scorn. ‘I’ll bet he has.’
‘Gianferro, please.’ Her voice gentled. ‘Stop it.’
But he couldn’t stop it, nor did he want to. It was as if he had stepped onto a rollercoaster with no idea of how to get off again. If she had obeyed his orders then she would never have found herself in this position! Black eyes bored into her. ‘So you do not deny that you have spent time alone with him after every class?’
‘That’s one way of looking at it,’ she said calmly. ‘But that isn’t how it—’
He sliced through her words. ‘Just you and him? No one else?’ If she denied this then he would know that she was lying, for had not her bodyguard been questioned just minutes earlier?
‘Well…yes. But nothing has happened—’
‘Yet.’
‘How dare you?’
‘No, Millie,’ he said heavily. ‘How dare you? How dare you be so thoughtless, so naïve?’
‘I
