Chapter Nine
ALESSIA’S MOUTH DROPPED OPEN, her eyes widening in shock.
‘Monica Binoche is my mother and the reason I value my privacy so highly,’ Gabriel explained evenly. ‘My father was Pedro Gonzalez. You probably haven’t heard of him but he was a well-respected acting agent. He died in his sleep five years ago. Heart failure.’
She sat back on her armchair, her face expressing nothing but compassion. ‘That’s awful. I’m so sorry.’
He smiled grimly. ‘Thank you. It was not unexpected. He was seventy-eight and not in good health. I loved him, I miss him, but it’s my mother I want to talk to you about.’
He’d never discussed either of his parents with anyone but his sister in his entire adult life other than in generic terms, but Alessia wanted to know who he was and why, and until she knew, she would never trust him.
He could see too that she deserved to know his past so she could understand that his refusal to play the royal media game was not anything personal or a slight against her or her family.
‘There is nothing my mother enjoys more than attention,’ he said.
‘It’s what feeds her. As children, my sister and I were accessories to her.
I don’t mean to paint her as a bad mother—she tried her best—but she thought nothing of using Mariella and I as props for photo opportunities.
For my mother, it’s a terrible day if she leaves the house and there isn’t a swarm of paparazzi waiting on the doorstep.
I used to have to fight my way through them just to go to school.
On quiet celebrity news days, they would sometimes wait outside the school gate for us. ’
‘But I thought France had strict privacy laws?’
‘It does. Much stricter than what you have here in Ceres. What you’re not taking into consideration is that my mother encouraged it. She wanted her privacy invaded. It’s how she found validation—how she still finds it.’
‘That must have been rough for you,’ she said softly.
‘It was infuriating. And it was the reason I didn’t invite her to our wedding.
She hasn’t used me as an accessory in twenty years, not since I gave her the ultimatum, but I didn’t want to put temptation in her way.
Inviting her to a royal wedding, no matter how small it was, and expecting her not to put it on her social media feeds would be like locking a recovering alcoholic in a fully stocked English pub. ’
Her eyes hadn’t left his face since he’d started his explanation. ‘What was the ultimatum you gave her?’
‘That either she stopped using Mariella and me as props for her ego or we’d move in full-time with our father.’ He gave a wry smile. ‘See? She does love us in her own way because it all stopped right then.’
‘Your parents divorced?’
‘They separated when I was twelve.’
‘Because of your mother’s behaviour?’
He laughed. ‘His behaviour wasn’t much better.
My father was her agent and credited himself with ensuring her big break.
As her fame grew, his jealousy grew and he started having affairs, I think to validate himself and to humiliate her.
He wasn’t very discreet about it. He was thirty years older than her screwing around like a teenager.
She was an aging ingenue terrified of the aging process and being thought irrelevant.
It was a toxic combination that eventually turned into warfare between them.
Both of them blamed the other for the destruction of their marriage and both refused to move out of the marital home or give an inch on custody of me and Mariella.
Neither of them was prepared to give an inch on anything. ’
Alessia’s head was reeling. Whatever could be said about her own childhood and upbringing, the security of her parents’ marriage had never been in doubt. She’d rarely heard them exchange a cross word. ‘That must have been tough to live with.’
‘It was. They both tried hard to be good parents to us but there were a few years when they were too wrapped up in their mutual loathing to notice the damage they were doing.’
‘What made them see sense?’
‘Me.’
‘You?’
He inclined his head. ‘I’d listened to so many of their screaming matches that I knew exactly what their issues with each other were and what they both wanted, so I sat them down individually and brokered peace negotiations.’
‘You did? When you were twelve?’ At twelve, the only brokering Alessia had done was when trying, unsuccessfully, to negotiate the right to read books with rather more salacious material than her Enid Blyton’s.
‘I was fourteen at this point. It took a couple of weeks of negotiating between them but eventually they agreed to sell the house and split the profits.’ He flashed a quick grin.
‘That way, neither of them “won.” I also got them to agree to buy a new home each within a mile of mine and Mariella’s school, and drew up a custody plan that gave them equal access to us. ’
‘How did that work?’
‘There’s fifty-two weeks in a year. We spent twenty-six with each parent, with each year carefully planned to cater for their individual work schedules. We alternated Christmases and birthdays.’
‘A fair compromise to them both,’ she mused dubiously.
‘Exactly. Neither won. Neither lost.’
‘What about you and your sister, though? Wasn’t it hard carving up your time between them and never being settled in one home?’
‘That brought its own challenges but it was easier than living in a war zone. I also had it written into the contracts that they were forbidden from bad-mouthing each other to us.’
She rubbed the back of her head. ‘You were one mature teenager.’
‘My mother used to say I was born serious.’
Her eyes were searching. ‘Do you agree with her? Or was it circumstances that made you that way?’
He considered this. ‘A combination of both, perhaps. The circumstances certainly made me the man I am today. Pursuing a career in diplomacy felt natural after negotiating their divorce and custody arrangements.’
‘And the circumstances gave you a pathological loathing of the press?’ And, Alessia suspected, a loathing for conflict and a need to always be firmly in control of himself and his surroundings.
He nodded. ‘I changed my surname legally when I turned eighteen—my father’s name isn’t as well-known as my mother’s but their marriage made him a celebrity in his own right. I value my privacy because I never had it when I was a child.’
‘And now you’ve married a princess,’ she said quietly, now understanding why he was so adamant in his refusal to be a ‘proper’ royal. ‘A life you never wanted.’
He shifted forwards in his seat and stared deep into her eyes. ‘I married you, Alessia, and I need you to understand that though I don’t want the princess, I do want the woman. I want you.’
So many emotions filled her at the sincerely delivered words that she couldn’t even begin to dissect them.
It frightened her how desperately she longed to believe him, believe that he did want her, but even that longing was fraught because she didn’t know if he meant he wanted her, body, heart and soul, or just the first part, and she couldn’t bring herself to ask because she didn’t know if she’d be able to take the answer.
She was saved from her tortured thoughts by the ringing of the bell and the simultaneous trilling of both their phones, but there was no relief in the interruption, only a plunge in her heart as she immediately understood what it meant.
It meant the media circus Gabriel so despised and had spent his adult life avoiding had come for him.
She closed her eyes briefly and sighed. ‘I think the announcement of our marriage has just gone out.’
It took three days before Gabriel and Alessia were able to inspect the place that was going to be their marital home.
Gabriel had expected news of their marriage to cause a sensation but, when it broke, sensation was an understatement.
The east side of the castle, the half open to tourists, was so besieged by press that it had to close to visitors.
The rotors of helicopters ignoring the no-fly zone above the castle was a constant noise for hours until the Ceres military put a stop to their illegality.
Gabriel’s phones, business and personal, didn’t stop ringing.
It seemed that everyone he’d ever been acquainted with felt the need to call and congratulate him.
Once the press obtained his number, he’d had enough and turned it off, but not before his mother, furious not to have been invited to the wedding, cried and wailed down the phone like the good actress she was for an hour before ringing off so she could call his sister, who’d stayed for the wedding night in the castle’s guest quarters, and sob theatrically down the phone to her.
Alessia’s phone rang non-stop too, her private secretary and other clerical staff rushing in and out of their quarters with updates and messages, the usual buzz of activity within the castle walls having turned into a loud hum.
He’d not needed to step foot out of the castle grounds to feel the impact of the circus.
Gabriel knew the stables, which had once housed hundreds of horses, had initially been converted for the reigning queen’s mother to live in, but it was still much, much bigger than he’d expected.
U-shaped with a bell tower in its centre, it was built with the same sand-coloured stone as the rest of the castle, its roof the same terracotta hue that topped the castle’s turrets, and was situated close to the side of the castle where the Berruti family lived and worked but far enough from it to feel entirely separate.
Even before Alessia unlocked the grand front door, he knew this would make the perfect home for them.