Penny Jordan
THE FUTURE KING’S PREGNANT MISTRESS

TORONTO • NEW YORK • LONDON

AMSTERDAM • PARIS • SYDNEY • HAMBURG

STOCKHOLM • ATHENS • TOKYO • MILAN • MADRID

PRAGUE • WARSAW • BUDAPEST • AUCKLAND

CONTENTS

THE RULES

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The Rules

CHAPTER ONE

MARCO opened his eyes, and looked at the bedside clock: three o’clock in the morning. He’d been dreaming about Niroli—and his grandfather, the king. His heart was still drumming insistently inside his chest, its beat driven by the adrenalin surges of challenge and excitement that reliving one of his past youthful arguments with his grandfather had brought him.

It had been in the aftermath of one of those arguments that Marco had made his decision to prove to himself, and to his grandfather, that he was capable of achieving success somewhere other than Niroli and without his grandfather’s influence and patronage. He had been twenty-two then. Now he was thirty-six, and he and his grandfather had long since made a peace—of a sort—even if the older man had never really understood his grandson’s refusal to change his mind about his vow to make his own way in the world. Marco had been determined that his success would come not as the grandson of the King of Niroli but via his own hard work. As simple Marco Fierezza, a young European entrepreneur, he had used his shrewd grasp of finance to become one of the City of London’s most lauded financiers and a billionaire.

In the last few years it had caused Marco a certain amount of wry amusement to note how his grandfather had turned to him for financial advice with regard to his own private wealth, whilst claiming that their blood tie absolved him of paying for Marco’s services! The truth was, his grandfather was a wily old fox who wasn’t above using whatever means he could to coerce others into doing what he wanted, often claiming that what he did was done for the good of Niroli, rather than himself.

Niroli!

Outside, the icy cold rain of London rattled against the windows of his Eaton Square apartment, and Marco felt a sudden sharp pang of longing for the beautiful Mediterranean island his family had ruled for so many generations: a sun-drenched jewel of green and gold in an aquamarine sea, from where dark volcanic mountains rose up wreathed in silvery clouds.

The same sea that had claimed the lives of his parents, he reminded himself sombrely, and which had not just robbed him of them, but also made him heir to the throne.

He had always known that ultimately he would become Niroli’s king, but he had also believed that this event lay many years away in the future, something he could safely ignore in favour of enjoying his self-created, self-ruled present. However, the reality was that what he had thought of as his distant duty was now about to become his life.

Was that knowledge the reason for the dream he’d had? After all, when it came to the relationship he would have with his grandfather if he agreed to do as King Giorgio had requested and return to Niroli to become its ruler, wasn’t there going to be an element of the prodigal male lion at the height of his powers returning to spar with the ageing pack leader? Marco knew and understood the older man very well. His grandfather might claim that he was ready to hand over the royal reins, but Marco suspected that Giorgio would still want to control whoever was holding them as much as he could. And yet, despite his awareness of this, Marco knew that the challenge of ruling Niroli and making it the country he wanted to see it become—by sweeping away the outdated and over-authoritarian structures his grandfather had put in place during his long reign—was one that excited him.

There had never been any doubt in Marco’s mind that when ultimately he came to the throne he would make changes to the government of the island that would bring it into the twenty-first century. But then he had also envisaged succeeding his gentle, mild-mannered father, rather than having his tyrannical grandfather standing at his shoulder.

Marco gave a small dismissive shrug. Unlike his late father, a scholarly, quiet man who, Marco had recognised early in his life, had been bullied unmercifully and held in contempt by the King, Marco had never allowed himself to be overwhelmed by his grandfather, even as a child. They shared a common streak of almost brutally arrogant self-belief, and it had been this that had led to the conflict between them. Now, as a mature and powerful man, there was no way Marco intended to allow anyone to question his right to do things his own way. That said, he knew that taking the throne would necessitate certain changes in his own lifestyle; there were certain royal rules he would have to obey, if only to pay lip-service to them.

One of those rules forbade the King of Niroli to marry a divorcée. Marco was in no hurry to wed, but when he did he knew he would be expected to make a suitable dynastic union with some pre-approved royal princess of unimpeachable virtue. Somehow he didn’t think that it would go down well with his subjects, or the paparazzi, if he were to be seen openly enjoying the company of a mistress, instead of dutifully finding himself a suitable consort.

He looked towards the bed where Emily lay sleeping, oblivious to what lay ahead and the fast-approaching end of their relationship. Her long blonde hair—naturally blonde, as he had good reason to know—was spread against the pillow. To Marco’s surprise, he was suddenly tempted to reach out and twine his fingers through its silken strands, knowing that his touch would wake her, and knowing too that his body was hardening with his immediate need for the intimacy of her body. That he should still desire her so fiercely and so constantly after the length of time they had been together—so very much longer than he’d spent with any woman before—astonished him. But the needs and sexual desires of Marco Fierezza could not be compared with the challenge of becoming the King of Niroli, he acknowledged with his customary arrogance.

King of Niroli.

Emily knew nothing about his connection with Niroli, or his past, and consequently she knew nothing either about his future. Why should she? What reason would there have been for him to tell her, when he had deliberately chosen to live anonymously? He had left Niroli swearing to prove to his grandfather that he could stand on his own feet and make a success of his life without using his royal position, and had quickly discovered that his new anonymity had certain personal advantages; as second in line to Niroli’s throne he had grown used to a certain type of predatory woman trying to lure him. His grandfather had warned him when he had been a teenager that he would have to be on his guard, and that he must accept he would never know whether the women who strived to share his bed wanted him for himself, or for who he was. Living in London as Marco Fierezza, rather than Prince Marco of Niroli though he was cynically aware that his combination of wealth and good looks drew the opposite sex to him, he did not attract the kind of feeding frenzy he would have done if he’d been using his royal title. Marco had no objection to rewarding his chosen lovers generously with expensive gifts and a luxurious lifestyle whilst he and they were together. He started to frown. It still irked him that Emily had always so steadfastly—and in his opinion foolishly—refused to accept the presents of jewellery he’d regularly tried to give her.

He’d told her dismissively to think of it as a bonus when she had demanded blankly, ‘What’s this for?’ after he had given her a diamond bracelet to celebrate their first month together.

Her face had gone pale and she’d looked down at the leather box containing the bracelet—a unique piece he’d bought from one of the royal jewellers—her voice as stiff as her body. ‘You don’t need to bribe me, Marco. I’m with you because I want you, not because I want what you can buy me.’

Now Marco’s frown deepened, his reaction to the memory of those words exactly as it had been when Emily had first uttered them. He could feel the same fierce, angry clenching of his muscles and surge of astounded disbelief that the woman who was enjoying the pleasure of his lovemaking and his wealth could dare to suggest that he might need to bribe her to share his bed!

He had soon put Emily in her place though, he reminded himself; his response to her had been a men-acingly silky soft, ‘No, you’ve misunderstood. After all, I already know exactly why you are in my bed and just how much you want me. The bribe, if you wish to think of it as that, is not to keep you there, but to ensure that you leave my bed speedily and silently when I’ve had enough of having you there.’

She hadn’t said anything in reply, but he had seen in her expression what she was feeling. Although he’d never been able to get her to admit to it, he was reasonably sure that her subsequent very convenient business trip, which had taken her away from him for the best part of a week, had been something she had conjured up in an attempt to get back at him. And to make him hungry for her? No woman had the power to make herself so important to him that being with her mattered more than his own iron-clad determination never to allow his emotions to control him and so weaken him. He had grown up seeing how easily his strong-willed grandfather had used his own son’s deep love for all those who were close to him to coerce, manipulate and, more often than not in Marco’s eyes, humiliate him into doing what King Giorgio wanted. Marco had seen too much to have any illusions about the value of male pride, or the strength of will over gentleness and a desire to please others. Not that Marco hadn’t loved his father; he had, so much so that as a young boy he had often furiously resented and verbally attacked his grandfather for the way the older man had treated his immediate heir.

That would never happen to him, Marco had decided then. He would allow no one, not even Niroli’s king, to dictate to him.

Marco was well aware that, despite the fact that he had often angered his grandfather with his rebellious ways, the older man held a grudging respect for him. Their pride and their tenacity were attributes they had in common, and in many ways they were alike, although Marco knew that once he was Niroli’s king there were many changes he would make in order to modernise the kingdom. Marco considered that the way his grandfather ruled Niroli was almost feudal; he’d shared his father’s belief that it was essential to give people the opportunity to run their own lives, instead of treating them as his grandfather did, like very young, unschooled children who couldn’t be trusted to make their own decisions. He had so many plans for Niroli: it was no wonder he was eager to step out of the role he had created for himself here in London to take on the mantle his birth had fated him to wear! The potential sexual frustration of being without a mistress bothered him a little but, after all, he was a mature man whose ambitions went a lot further than having a willing bed-mate with whom he would never risk making an emotional or legal commitment.

No, he wouldn’t let himself miss Emily, he assured himself. The only reason he was giving valuable mental time to thinking about the issue was his concern that she might not accept his announcement that their affair was over as calmly as he wished. He had no desire to hurt her—far from it.

He still hadn’t decided just how much he needed to tell her. He would be leaving London, of course, but he suspected that the paparazzi were bound to get wind of what was happening on Niroli, since it was ruled by the wealthiest royal family in the world.

For her own sake, Emily needed to have it made clear to her that nothing they had shared could impinge on his future as Niroli’s king. He had never really understood her steadfast refusal to accept his expensive gifts, or to allow him to help her either financially or in any other way with her small interior design business. Because he couldn’t understand it, despite the fact that they had been lovers for almost three years, Marco, being the man he was, had inwardly wondered what she might be hoping to gain from him that was worth more to her than his money. It was second nature to him not to trust anyone. Plus, he had learned from observing his grandfather and members of his court what happened to those whose natures allowed others to take advantage of them, as his own father had done.

Marco tensed, automatically shying away from the unwanted pain that thinking about his parents and their deaths could still cause him. He didn’t want to acknowledge that pain, and he certainly didn’t want to acknowledge the confused feelings he had buried so deeply: pain on his father’s behalf, guilt because he could see what his grandfather had been doing to his father and yet he hadn’t been able to prevent it, anger with his father for having been so weak, anger with his grandfather for having taken advantage of that weakness, and himself for having seen what he hadn’t wanted to see.

He and his grandfather had made their peace, his father was gone, he himself was a man and not a boy any more. It was only in his dreams now that he sometimes revisited the pain of his past. When he did, that pain could be quickly extinguished in the raw passion of satisfying his physical desire for Emily.

But what about the time when Emily would no longer be there? Why was he wasting his time asking himself such foolish questions? Ultimately he would find himself another mistress, no doubt via a discreet liaison with the right kind of woman, perhaps a young wife married to an older husband, though not so young that she didn’t understand the rules, of course. He might even, if Emily had been sensible enough, have thought about providing her with the respectability of marriage to some willing courtier in order that they carry on their affair, once he became King of Niroli. But, Marco acknowledged, the very passion that made her such a responsive lover also meant she was not the type who would adapt to the traditional role of royal mistress.

Emily would love Niroli, an island so beautiful and fruitful that ancient lore had said Prometheus himself caused it to rise up from the sea bed so that he could bestow it on mankind.

When Marco thought of the place of his birth, his mental image was one of an island bathed in sunlight, an island so richly gifted by the gods that it was little wonder some legends had referred to it as an earthly paradise.

But where there was great beauty there was also terrible cruelty, as was true of so many legends. The gods had often exacted a terrible price from Niroli for their gifts.

He pushed back the duvet, knowing that he wouldn’t be able to sleep now. His body was lean and powerful, magnificently drawn, as though etched by one of the great masters, in the charcoal shadows of the moonlight as he left the bed and padded silently toward the window.

The wind had picked up and was lashing rain against the windows, bending the bare branches of the trees on the street outside. Marco was again transported back to Niroli, where violent storms often swept over the island, whipping up its surrounding seas. The people of Niroli knew not to venture out during the high tides that battered the volcanic rock cliffs of a mountain range so high and so inaccessible in parts that even today it still protected and concealed the bandit descendants of Barbary pirates who long ago had invaded the island. In fact, the fierce seas sucking deep beneath the cliffs had honeycombed them into underwater caves and weakened the rock so that whole sections of it had fallen away. The gales that stirred the seas also tore and ripped at the ancient olive trees and the grapevines on the island, as though to punish them because their harvest had already been plucked to safety.

As a boy Marco had loved to watch the wind savage the land far below the high turrets of the royal castle. He would kneel on the soft padded seating beneath an ancient stone window embrasure, excited by the danger of the storm, wanting to go out and accept the challenge it threw at him. But he had never been allowed to go outside and play as other children did. Instead, at his grandfather’s insistence, he’d had to remain within the castle walls, learning about his family’s past and his own future role as the island’s ultimate ruler.

Inside Marco’s head, images he couldn’t control were starting to form, curling wraithlike from his childhood memories. It had always been his grandfather and not his parents who had dictated the rules of his childhood, and who’d seen that they were imposed on him…

‘Marco, come back to bed. It’s cold without you.’ Emily’s voice was soft and slow, warm, full and sweet with promise, like the fruit of Niroli’s vines at the time of harvest, when the grapes lay heavily beneath the sun swollen with ripe readiness and with implicit invitation.

He turned round. He had woken her after all. Emily ran her small interior design business from a small shop-cum-office just off London’s Sloane Street. Marco had known from the moment he first saw her at a PR cocktail party that he’d wanted her, and that he’d intended to have her. And he’d made sure that she’d known it too. Marco was used to getting his own way, to claiming his right to direct the course of his own life, even if that meant imposing his will on those who would oppose him. This was an imperative for him, one he refused to be swayed from. He had quickly elucidated that Emily was a divorced woman with no children, and that had made her pattern-card perfect for the role of his mistress. If he had known then her real emotional and sexual history, he knew that he would not have pursued her. But, by the time he had discovered the truth, his physical desire for her had been such that it had been impossible for him to reject her.

He looked towards her now, feeling that desire gripping him again and fighting against it as he had fought all his life against anything or anyone who threatened to control him.

‘Marco, something’s wrong. What is it?’

Where had it come from, this unwanted ability she seemed to possess of sensing what she could not possibly be able to know? The year his parents died, the storms had come early to Niroli. Marco could remember how when he had first received the news, even before he had said anything, she had somehow guessed that something was wrong. However, whilst she might be intuitive where his feelings were concerned, Emily hadn’t yet been shrewd or suspicious enough to make the connection between the announcement of his parents’ deaths and the news in the media about the demise of the next in line to the Niroli throne. He remembered how hurt she had looked when he’d informed her that he would be attending his mother and father’s funeral without her, but she hadn’t said a word. Maybe because she hadn’t wanted to provoke a row that might have led to him ending their affair, the reason she didn’t want it to end being that, for all her apparent lack of interest in his money, she had to be well aware of what she would lose financially if their relationship came to a close. It was, in Marco’s opinion, impossible for any woman to be as unconcerned about the financial benefits of being his mistress as Emily affected to be. It was as his grandfather had warned him: the women who thronged around him expected to be lavishly rewarded with expensive gifts and had no compunction about making that plain.

Under cover of the room’s darkness, Emily grimaced to hear the note of pleading in her own voice. Why, when she despised herself so much for what she was becoming, couldn’t she stop herself? Was she destined always to have relationships that resulted in her feeling insecure?

‘Nothing’s wrong,’ Marco told her. There was a note in his voice that made her body tense and her emotions flinch despite everything she was trying to do not to let that happen. The trouble was that once you started lying to yourself on an almost hourly, never mind daily, basis about the reality of your relationship, once you started pretending not to notice or care about being the ‘lesser’ partner, about not being valued or respected enough, you entered a place where the strongest incentive was not to seek out the truth but rather to hide from it. But she had no one but herself to blame for her current situation, she reminded herself.

She had known right from the start what kind of man Marco was, and the type of relationship he wanted with her. The problem was that she had obviously known Marco’s agenda rather better than she had understood her own. Although she tried not to do so, sometimes when she was feeling at her lowest—times like now—she couldn’t stop herself from giving in to the temptation of fantasising about how Marco could be different: he would not be so fabulously wealthy or arrogantly sexy that he could have any woman he wanted, but instead he’d be just an ordinary man with ordinary goals—a happy marriage, a wife…Her heart kicked heavily, turning over in a slow grind of pain. She thought of children—theirs—and it turned over again, the pain growing more intense.

Why, why, why had she been such a fool and fallen in love with Marco? He had made it plain from the start what he wanted from her and what he would give her back in return, and love had never been part of the deal. But then, way back when, she had never imagined that she would fall for him. At the beginning, she had wanted Marco so much, she had been happy to go along with a purely sexual relationship, for as long as he wanted her.

No, she had no one but herself to blame for the constant pain she was now having to endure, the deceit she was having to practise and the fear that haunted her: one day soon Marco would sense that deceit and leave her. She loathed herself so much for her own weakness and for not having the guts to acknowledge her love or take the consequences of walking away from him, through the inevitable fiery consuming pain. But, who knew? Maybe walking away from Marco would have a phoenix-like effect on her and allow her to find freedom as a new person. She was such a coward, though, that she couldn’t take that step. Hadn’t someone once said that a brave man died only once but a coward died a thousand times? So it was for her. She knew that she ought to leave and deal with her feelings, but instead she stayed and suffered a thousand hurtful recognitions every day of Marco’s lack of love for her.

But he desired her, and she couldn’t bring herself to give up the fragile hope that maybe, just maybe, things would change, and one day he would look at her and know that he loved her, that one day he would allow her to access that part of himself he guarded with such ferocity and tell her that he wanted them to be together for ever…

CHAPTER TWO

THAT was Emily’s dream. But the reality was, recently, she’d felt as if they were growing further apart rather than closer. She’d told herself yesterday morning she would face her fear. She took a deep breath.

‘Marco, I’ve always been open and…and honest with you…’ It was no good, she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t make herself ask him that all-important question: ‘Do you want to end our relationship?’ And, besides, she hadn’t always been honest with him, had she? She hadn’t told him, for instance, that she had fallen in love with him. Her heart gave another painful lurch.

Marco was watching her, his head inclined towards her. He wore his thick dark hair cut short, but not so short that she couldn’t run her fingers through it, shaping the hard bone beneath it as she held him to her when they made love. There was just enough light for her to see the gleam in his eyes, as though he’d guessed the direction her thoughts had taken and knew how much she wanted him. Marco had the most piercingly direct look she’d ever known. He’d focused it on her the night they’d met, when she had tried to cling to reason and rationality, instead of letting herself be blatantly seduced by a pair of tawny-brown predator’s eyes…

Emily knew she should make her stand now and demand an explanation for the change she could sense in Marco, but her childhood made it difficult for her to talk openly about her emotions. Instead she hid them away behind locked doors of calm control and self-possession. Was it because she was afraid of what might happen if she allowed her real feelings to get out of control? Because she was afraid of bringing the truth out into the open? Something was wrong. Marco had changed: he had become withdrawn and preoccupied. There was no way she could pretend otherwise. Had he grown tired of her? Did he want to end their relationship? Wouldn’t it be better, wiser, more self-respecting, if she challenged him to tell her the truth? Did she really think that if she ignored her fears they would simply disappear?

‘You say that you’ve always been open and honest with me, Emily, but that isn’t the truth, is it?’

Emily’s heart somersaulted with slow, sickening despair. He knew? Somehow he had guessed what she was thinking and—almost as bad—she could see he was spoiling for an argument…because that would give him an excuse to end things.

‘Remember the night I took you to dinner and you told me about your marriage? Remember how “open” you were with me then—and what you didn’t tell me?’ Marco recalled sarcastically.

Emily couldn’t speak. A mixture of relief and anguish filled her. Her marriage! All this time she had thought—believed—that Marco had understood the scars her past had inflicted on her, but now she realised that she had been wrong. ‘It wasn’t deliberate, you know that,’ she told him, fighting not to let her voice tremble. ‘I didn’t deliberately hold back anything.’ Why was he bringing that up now? she wondered. Surely he wasn’t planning to use it as an excuse to get rid of her? He wasn’t the kind of man who needed an excuse to do anything, she told herself. He was too arrogant to feel he needed to soften any blows he had to deliver.

Marco looked away from Emily, irritated with himself for saying what he had. Why had he brought up her marriage now, when the last thing he wanted was the danger involved in the sentimentality of looking back to the beginning of their relationship? But it was too late, he was already remembering…

He had taken Emily to dinner, setting the scene for how he had hoped the evening would end by telling her coolly how much he wanted to make love to her and how pleased he was that she was a woman of the world, with a marriage behind her and no children to worry about.

‘Just out of interest,’ he’d quizzed her, ‘what was the reason for your divorce?’ If there was anything in her past, he wanted to know about it before things went any further.

For a moment he thought that she was going to refuse to answer him. But then her eyes widened slightly and he knew that she had correctly interpreted his question, without him having to spell it out to her. She clearly knew that if she did refuse, their relationship would be over before it had properly begun.

When she finally began to speak, she surprised him with the halting, almost stammering way in which she hesitated and then fiddled nervously with her cutlery, suddenly looking far less calm and in control than he had previously seen her. Her face was shadowed with anxiety and he assumed that the cause of the breakdown in her marriage must have been related to something she had done—such as being unfaithful to her husband. The last thing he expected to hear was what she actually told him. So much so, in fact, that he was tempted to accuse her of lying, but something he saw in her eyes stopped him…

Now Marco shifted his weight from one foot to the other, remembering how shocked he’d been by the unexpected and unwilling compassion he had felt for her as she’d struggled to overcome her reluctance to talk about what was obviously a painful subject…

‘I lost my parents in a car accident when I was seven and I was brought up by my widowed paternal grandfather,’ she told him.

‘He wasn’t unkind to me, but he wasn’t a man who was comfortable around young children, especially not emotional young girls. He was a retired Cambridge University academic, very gentle and very unworldly. He read the classics to me as bedtime stories. He knew so much about literature but, although I didn’t realise it at the time, very little about life. My upbringing with him was very sheltered and protected, very restricted in some ways, especially when I reached my early teens and his health started to deteriorate.

‘Gramps’ circle of friends was very small, a handful of elderly fellow academics, and…and Victor.’

‘Victor?’ Marco probed, hearing the hesitation in her voice.

‘Yes. Victor Lewisham, my ex-husband. He had been one of Gramps’ students, before becoming a university lecturer himself.’

‘He must have been considerably older than you?’ Marco guessed.

‘Twenty years older,’ Emily agreed, nodding her head. ‘When it became obvious that my grandfather’s health was deteriorating, he told me that Victor had agreed to look after me after…in his place. Gramps died a few weeks after that. I was in my first year at university then, and, even though I’d known how frail he was, somehow I hadn’t…I wasn’t prepared. Losing him was such a shock. He was all I had, you see, and so when Victor proposed to me and told me that it was what Gramps would have wanted, I…’ She ducked her head and looked away from Marco and then said in a low voice, ‘I should have refused, but somehow I just couldn’t imagine how I would manage on my own. I was so afraid…such a coward.’

‘So it was a marriage of necessity?’ Marco shrugged dismissively. ‘Was he good in bed?’

It continued to irk Marco to have to admit that his direct and unsubtle challenge to Emily had sprung from a sudden surge of physical jealousy that the thought of her with another man had aroused. But then sexual jealousy wasn’t an emotion he’d ever previously had to deal with. Sex was sex, a physical appetite satisfied by a physical act. Emotions didn’t come into it and he had never seen why they should. He still didn’t. And he still had no idea what had made him confront her like that, or what had driven such an out-of-character fury at the thought of her with another man, even though she had had yet to become his. It had caught him totally off guard when he had seen the sudden shimmer of suppressed tears in her eyes. At first he’d wanted to believe they were caused by her grief at the breakdown of her marriage, but to his shock, she had told him quietly:

‘Our marriage…our relationship, in fact, was never physically consummated.’

Marco remembered how he had struggled not to show his astonishment, perhaps for the first time in his life recognising that what he had needed to show wasn’t the arrogant disbelief so often evinced by his grandfather, but instead restraint and patience, to give her time to explain. Which was exactly what she had done, once she had silently checked that he wasn’t going to refuse to believe her.

‘I was too naïve to realise at first that Victor making no attempt to approach me sexually might not be a…because of gentlemanly consideration for my inexperience,’ she continued. ‘And then even after we were married—I didn’t want him, you see, so it was easy for me not to question why he didn’t want to make love to me. If I hadn’t lived such a sheltered life, and I’d spent more time with people my own age, things would probably have been different, and I’d certainly have been more aware that something wasn’t right. But as it was, it wasn’t until I…I found him in bed with someone else that I realised—’

‘He had a mistress,’ Marco interrupted her, his normal instinct to question and probe reasserting itself.

There was just the merest pause before she told him quietly, ‘He had a lover, yes. A male lover,’ she emphasised shakily.

‘I should have guessed, of course, and I suspect poor Victor thought that I had. He treated me very much as a junior partner in our relationship, like a child whom he expected to revere him and accept his superiority. For me to find him in bed with one of his young students was a terrible blow to his pride. He couldn’t forgive me for blundering in on them, and the only way I could forgive myself for being so foolish was to insist that we divorce. At first he was reluctant to agree. He belonged more to my grandfather’s generation than to his own, I suspect. He couldn’t come to terms with his sexuality, which was why he had tried to conceal it within a fake marriage. He refused to say why he couldn’t be open about his sexual nature. He got very angry when I tried to talk to him about it and suggested that, for his own sake, he should accept himself. The truth was, as I quickly learned, that to others his sexuality was not the secret he liked to think. There was no valid reason why he should have hidden it, but he was just that kind of man.

‘I’d been left a bit of money by my grandfather, so I came to London and got a job. I’d always been interested in interior design, so I went back to college to get my qualifications and then a couple of years ago, after working for someone else’s studio, I set up in business on my own. I wanted a fresh start and to get away from people who had known…about Victor. They must have thought me such a fool for not realising. I felt almost as though I was some kind of freak…Married, but not married.’

‘And a virgin?’ Marco added.

‘Yes,’ Emily agreed, before continuing, ‘I wanted to be somewhere where no one was going to make assumptions about me because of my marriage.’

Their food arrived before Marco had the chance ask her about the man whom he assumed must have eventually taken her virginity. But he wondered about him. And envied him?

Marco frowned now, not wanting to remember the fierce sense of urgency to make Emily totally his that had filled him then and that had continued to hold him in its grip even when he had ultimately possessed her.

He walked back to the bed whilst Emily watched him, her heart thumping unsteadily into her ribs. They had been lovers for almost three years, but Marco still had the same effect on her as he had done the first time she had seen him; the impact of his male sexuality was such that it both enthralled and overwhelmed her, even now when she could feel the pain of the emotional gulf between them almost as strongly as she felt her own desire. When they had first met, she had immediately craved him, though she hadn’t known then that her desire for him would enslave her emotionally as well as physically. And if she had, would she have behaved differently? Would she still have turned on the heels of those expensive Gina shoes she’d been wearing and have tip-tapped away from him as fast as she could?

Emily was glad of the night’s shadows to conceal the pain in her eyes—a pain that would betray her if Marco saw it. It had been just before Christmas when she had first noticed that he’d seemed irritated and preoccupied, retreating into himself and excluding her. She had thought at first he must have some big business deal going down, but now she was beginning to fear that the source of his discontent might be her and their relationship. If his withdrawal had begun in the months immediately after the accident in which Marco had lost both his parents, she might have been able to tell herself that it was his grief that was responsible. After all, even a man who prided himself on being as unemotional as Marco did was bound to suffer after such a traumatic event. However, the first thing he had done on his return was take her to bed, without saying a word about either the funeral or his family, making love to her fiercely and almost compulsively.

Marco had rarely talked to her about his childhood, and never about his family. That had suited her perfectly at first. She had looked on her relationship with him initially as a necessary transition for her from naïveté to experience, a much-needed bridge across the chasm dividing her past from her future, her passport to a new life and womanhood. Because even then she had hoped that, one day, she would find a true partner: a man with whom she could share her life; a man to whom she could give her love as freely as he would give his to her; a man with whom she could have children.

But how foolish she had been, how recklessly unaware of the danger she had been placing herself in. It had simply never occurred to her then that she might fall in love with Marco! He had been totally open with her about the way he lived his life and what he looked for in his relationships: whilst they were together she could rely on his total fidelity, but once their relationship was over, it would be over, full stop. He wanted no emotional commitment from her nor should she expect one from him. And most important of all, she must not get pregnant.

‘But what if there’s an accident and…?’ she asked him uncertainly.

He stopped her immediately

‘There will not be any accidents,’ he told her bluntly. ‘With modern methods of contraception, there is no reason why there should be an accident—if you have any reason to suspect there may have been, then you must ensure that the situation is rectified without any delay.’

She wanted him too much to allow herself to admit how shocked she was by his cold-hearted attitude. Instead, she told herself that it didn’t really matter, since she wanted to wait to have her children until she had found the right father for them and the right man for her.

Marco had pursued her so relentlessly and determinedly and she had wanted him so badly that the truth was whatever doubts she might have had had been totally overwhelmed by the sexual excitement they generated between them. For the first time in her life she knew the true meaning of the word ‘lust’. Her every waking thought—and most of her dreams too—were of him and what it was going to be like when he took her to bed.

Thanks to the kindness of her first employer, who had passed on to her some of his clients when she had started up on her own, she had established a good and profitable business, which earned her enough to enable her to visit one of London’s more exclusive lingerie shops in search of the kind of discreetly provocative underwear her fevered imagination hoped would delight and excite Marco. Within a week of meeting him, she had taken to wearing the seductively skimpy bits of silk and lace to work, just in case Marco appeared and insisted on taking her to his apartment to consummate their relationship. It made her smile now to remember how sensually brave she had felt. And the things she had imagined might happen…

Her fevered imaginings had come nowhere near to matching the reality of her reaction to Marco’s skilled lovemaking. He had undressed her slowly and expertly, in her pretty bedroom in her small Chelsea house, almost teasing her by making her quivering body wait for his touch. And then, even when he had finally touched her, his caresses had been tantalisingly—tormentingly—light, the merest brush of fingertips and lips, which had fed her longing for something darker and far more intimate. Just thinking about it now was enough to make her heart turn over inside her chest and make her go weak with longing for him. She remembered how she had tried to show him her impatience, but Marco had refused to be hurried. His lips had teased the tight flesh of her nipples, and his fingers had brushed her belly and then stroked lightly against her thighs whilst she had sighed with arousal. His hand had parted her thighs, his fingers stroking over her sex, his touch making her want to moan out aloud with hunger.

He had just begun to kiss her more passionately when the telephone beside her bed had begun to ring. Idiotically she had answered it, only to discover that the caller was one of her more difficult clients who wanted to discuss her idea for a new makeover. By the time she had got rid of the client, Marco had got dressed, smiling urbanely at her, but making it clear that he was not going to take second place to her business.

The incident had shown her that he would always have it his way and she had not made the same mistake again. Or had her mistake been in tailoring her working life around him? That hadn’t been just for his benefit though; she had wanted to make room in her life for him. Something deep inside her, which she had only recently begun to recognise, was showing her that she was the kind of woman who secretly longed to be the hub of her family, both as a wife and a mother. She didn’t want to be on the other side of the world helping a client to choose the right paint shade for her new décor, leaving her partner to come home from work to an empty house and an empty bed. When she did marry and have children, she wanted to be the one those children ran to with their small everyday triumphs and hurts. She enjoyed her work, and she was proud of the ways in which she had built up her business, but she knew that it was the pleasure of creating a happy environment for those she loved that truly motivated her, rather than the excitement of a large bank balance.

Nonetheless, Marco was the kind of man who enjoyed a challenge, and it had made her feel a bit better when, later, he’d admitted how much he had ached for her that night. It could not have been any more than she had ached for him, she knew. Less than three months after they had first met he had asked her to move in with him. And then they’d had their first quarrel, when she had discovered that he’d expected her to give up her business, saying imperiously that he would give her an allowance that would more than compensate her for any loss of income.

‘I want to be with you,’ she told him fiercely. ‘But I will not give up my financial independence, Marco. I don’t want your money.’

‘So what do you want?’ he demanded, almost suspiciously.

‘You,’ she told him simply, and their quarrel was forgotten, as he was appeased by her bold request—or so she had thought. It was only later she had learned that, far from respecting her for refusing his money and his expensive gifts, he was both suspicious of her and slightly contemptuous. Perhaps if she had heeded the warning that knowledge had given her, she would not be in the situation she was now.

CHAPTER THREE

THEY had shared such wonderful months. Marco worked hard, but he believed in enjoying the good things in life as well. He had the air of someone who was used to the best of everything. But whilst sometimes she had deplored his inbuilt arrogance, and had teased him gently about it, Emily admitted that she’d enjoyed the new experiences to which he’d introduced her. Marco had taken her out several times a week but, best of all, as a lover he hadn’t just fulfilled her fantasies, he had exceeded them and then taken her with him to realms of sexual discovery and delight she had never imagined existed.

Within weeks of them becoming lovers she had been so exquisitely sensually aware of him that just the touch of his hand on her arm, or the look in his eyes when he’d needed her to know that he wanted her, had been enough to have her answering with a look of her own that said, ‘Please take me to bed.’ Not that they had always made it to a bed. Marco was a demanding and masterful lover who enjoyed leading the way and introducing her to new pleasures, sometimes taking her quickly and erotically in venues so nearly public that she blushed guiltily af-terwards when she remembered, sometimes ensuring their lovemaking lasted all night—or most of the day. And she had been an eager pupil, wanting him more as time went by, rather than less, as her own sexuality and confidence grew under his expert guidance.

The first Christmas they had shared together, Marco had given her a beautiful three-carat diamond, which he had told her she could have set in the ring design of her choice. Emily knew that it had surprised him when she’d asked him instead to make a donation to her favourite children’s charity.

Marco hadn’t said anything, but on her birthday he had taken her away to a romantic hideaway and made love to her until she had cried with joy. He had then presented her with a pair of two-carat diamond ear-studs, telling her, ‘I have sent a cheque of equivalent value to your charity.’

It had been then that she had realised that she had done the unforgivable and fallen in love with him!

Yes, how very foolish she had been to do that. He was back in their bed now, but lying with his back to her. Outside, the gale that had begun to blow earlier last evening hurled itself against the windows as the storm increased in force.

Normally, the knowledge that she was safe and warm inside whilst outside ice-cold rain sleeted down would have given her a feeling of delicious security, especially if she was wrapped up tightly in Marco’s arms. But of course she wasn’t. Was he tiring of her?

Marco could hear Emily breathing softly behind him. His body craved the release physically possessing her would bring, and why shouldn’t he have it? he asked himself. He had already decided on the financial amount he was prepared to give Emily in recognition of the time they had spent together—a very generous one. So generous that he felt justified now in thinking that he might as well continue to enjoy her. He couldn’t entirely get his head around the fact that he wanted Emily still, when other women who had shared his bed before her—women who had been so much more experienced and sexually enterprising—had bored him so quickly. It surprised him even more that he had actually grown to want her company away from bed, to the extent of talking to her about his business, and allowing her to persuade him to make donations to her precious charity. He had scarcely even been able to believe it at first when he had found out how much of her modest income she gave to helping a foundation set up to help London’s deprived children and teenagers. Emily would not approve of his grandfather’s refusal to do anything to help the least wealthy of Niroli’s people; King Giorgio did not see the sense of educating the poor to expect more out of life than he felt the island could give them.

No, Emily was definitely not suitable material as the King of Niroli’s mistress. But, of course, he was not yet King. Purposefully Marco moved, swiftly reaching for her, briefly studying the outline of her figure, the curve of her breast making him remember how perfectly its softness fitted into his cupped hand. As always, the strongly sensual core of his nature reacted to Emily’s nearness. He might have already made love with her a thousand times and more during their relationship, but that couldn’t dim the fierce desire he felt now. Some-where deep down within himself he registered the potential danger of such a compulsion and then dismissed it. He intended to end his affair with her before he left for Niroli. He’d make sure that no vestige of longing for her would cling to his memory or his senses; he was determined she would be easily replaced in his bed. If his body recognised something in her that was particularly enjoyable, that did not mean that he was in danger of craving her for ever. He relaxed as he dismissed as ludicrous the notion that he was at any kind of risk from his desire for her.

The moment Marco touched her, Emily could feel her body becoming softly compliant, outwardly and inwardly, where it tightened and ached, the desire for him that never left her ramping up with a swift familiarity. Marco pushed back the bedclothes; a thin beam of moonlight silvered her breast, plucking sensually at her nipple and tightening it for his visual appreciation and enjoyment. He traced its circle of light, making her shiver with pleasure whilst her back began to arch in an age-old symbolic female gesture of enticement in offering her flesh to her lover.

Marco’s hands tightened on Emily’s slender form. She looked up at him, her eyes wide with arousal and excitement as she reached up to him. All that mattered to him right now was his possession of her, his pleasure found in witnessing her ecstasy as he took her and filled her, losing himself in her and taking her with him. His need pounded through him, obliterating everything else. He pushed aside her hair and kissed the side of her neck where he knew his touch reduced her to quivering delight, his hands cupping her breasts, kneading them erotically, his erection already stiff against her thigh where he had locked her to him with one out-flung leg.

Emily smiled to herself. Sex to Marco meant physically claiming every bit of her. Even when he kissed her casually, he liked to have her body in full contact with his. Not that she minded. Not one little bit! She loved the possessive sensuality of his desire for her. It was only in his arms, here like this, that she was truly able to let her real feelings have their head, instead of fighting to preserve the protective air of calm control she normally used to conceal them. When he made love to her, Marco never held back from showing her his passion for her, which, in turn, allowed her to set free her equally passionate longing for him. There was sometimes something almost pagan in the way they made love that secretly sometimes half shocked her. Always attuned to Marco’s moods, tonight she sensed an urgency about him that added an extra edge to her own growing sexual tension. She gave a soft whimper as his mouth took the silvered ache of her nipple and his hand accepted the invitation of her open legs.

Once in their early days as lovers, sensing her uncertainty and slight awkwardness with her own sexuality, he had relaxed her with an evening of champagne and slow lovemaking, before coaxing her to let him position both of them where she could see the reflection of their naked bodies in a mirror. Then carefully, and with breathtakingly deliberate sensuality, he had revealed to her the mysteries of her own sex, showing her its desire-swollen and flushed outer lips, caressing them so that she could see her body’s reaction to his touch, sliding his fingertip the whole length of her wetness before focusing on the tight, excited and oh-so-sexually-sensitive flesh of her clitoris. He had brought her to orgasm there in full view of her own half-shocked, half-excited gaze.

But she’d had her own sweet revenge later, turning the tables on him by exploring him with shamelessly avid hands and lips, spreading apart his heavily muscled male thighs so that she could know the reality of his sex with every one of her senses.

Now, as his fingers probed her wetness, she rose up eager to accept their gift of pleasure. But, for once, he didn’t seem inclined to draw out their love-play, instead suddenly groaning and reaching for her, covering her and thrusting powerfully and compulsively into her, as though he couldn’t get enough of her, driving them both higher, deeper, closer to the sanctuary that waited for them.

Instinctively Emily clung to him, riding the storm with him, welcoming him and sharing its turbulence.

Marco could feel an unfamiliar urgency possessing him and compelling him, demanding that he thrust harder and deeper. Emily shuddered beneath the intensity of his passion, immediately responsive to it. Her nails raked his back where his flesh lay tightly against his muscles, inciting him to fill her and complete her. The sensation of the tight heat of her wetness as it gripped and caressed him flooded everything but his ability to respond to her sensual urging from his mind. A primitive need surged through him. It had been some time since he’d last used a condom when they had sex; their relationship was of a long enough duration for him to know that there were no health reasons for him to do so, and that Emily was on the pill. Also, he knew how much she herself loved the skin-on-skin contact of their meshing bodies.

Was Marco aware of how deeply he was penetrating her, Emily wondered dizzily, or how intense and primeval a pleasure it was for her, as surges of sensation built, promising her orgasm? Did he know that when he came he would spill so very close to her womb? Did he know how much she wanted him; how much she ached now, right now, for him? She gave a low soft, almost tormented cry as her orgasm began, clutching at Marco, her head thrown back in pagan ecstasy as her pleasure shuddered through her, only to intensify into a second spiral of even greater intensity that shook her in its grip and melted her bones as Marco came hotly inside her.

Emily blinked fiercely. What they had just shared had been incredibly close and physically satisfying. Emotional tears slid down her face. Surely it wasn’t possible for Marco to make love to her like this and not be in love with her? Perhaps the change she had sensed in him was because he was falling in love with her and he was reluctant to admit it? Tenderness for him, and for the vulnerability she knew he would never admit to, stole through her. She snuggled closer to him, warmed by his body and the intimacy they had shared, and most of all by the glow of the hope growing inside her. She would teach him that their love would make him stronger, not weaker; she would show him, as she’d tried to do all along, that he was what mattered to her and not the things he could give her. Marco had never told her why he was so adamant that love wasn’t something he believed in or wanted, and she assumed that it must be because as a very young man he had been badly hurt and had vowed never to fall in love again. In a man as proud as Marco, such a wound would go very deep. Although people had been quick to gossip to her about him when she’d first met him, and about the stream of glamorous women who’d graced his arm and his bed before her, no one seemed to know much about his life before he had come to London. Marco was fiercely protective of his past and his privacy, and Emily had learned very early on in their relationship how shuttered he could be when she tried to get him to open up to her. So, it had to mean something that they were still together, Emily told herself sleepily. Why shouldn’t that something be that he had fallen in love with her without even realising it?

CHAPTER FOUR

‘AND I want the whole place to—y’ know—like be totally me. So there’ll have to be plenty of pink and loads of open-plan storage for my shoes. All my fans know that I’m a total shoe-freak.’

Emily was finding it a struggle to focus on what her latest client was saying, and not just because the reality-TV star’s views on how she wanted her apartment designed and decorated were depressingly banal, she admitted.

The truth was that her normal professionalism and love of her work had in recent weeks become shadowed by her almost constant tiredness and bouts of sickness that had to be the legacy of a virus that she didn’t seem to have entirely thrown off.

The reality-TV star was pouting and looking impatiently at her watch.

‘Do we have to do this?’ she asked the PR executive who was ‘minding’ her. ‘I thought you said that I’d be doing a TV documentary about me designing my new apartment, not doing boring stuff like listening to some decorator.’

Whilst the PR girl attempted to soothe her charge, Emily moved discreetly out of earshot. Marco had left early this morning for his office whilst she had still been asleep, leaving her a scrawled note on the kitchen counter to say that he had some work he needed to catch up on. There was nothing particularly unusual in his early start. As an entrepreneur he often needed to be at his desk while the Far-Eastern financial markets were dealing. But today, for some reason, Emily was conscious of a deep-rooted emotional need to see him, be with him. Why? Surely not just because he had left without waking her to give her a good-morning kiss? A little rueful, she shook her head over her own neediness, determined to dismiss it. But it refused to go away, if anything sharpening so that it became a fierce ache of anxious longing. She looked at her watch. It was almost lunchtime. In the early stages of their relationship before Marco had told her that he wanted her to move in with him, she had, with some trepidation, and with what she had considered to be great daring, taken him up on what she had believed to be a casual invitation to drop in on him if she was ever passing by his office. Emily’s heart started to go faster in a sudden flurry of excited little beats, the grating sound of the TV star’s voice fading, as she recalled how she had taken him up on his offer…

Marco’s initial greeting of her had not been welcoming. ‘You were beginning to annoy me with the way you’ve been deliberately keeping me waiting,’ he told her flatly, after his secretary had shown her into his office and then discreetly left them alone together. ‘In fact you were beginning to annoy me so much that if you left it another day to visit, you wouldn’t have got past my receptionist,’ he added arrogantly.

His verbal attack stunned her into a bewildered silence, which had her shaking her head in mute protest.

‘If you think that by holding me off, and making me wait, you’ll—’

‘Why on earth should I do that?’ Emily interrupted him, too shocked by his accusations to recognise what she was giving away until she saw the satisfaction gleaming in his eyes and he came towards her saying softly,

‘Well, in that case, we’ve got some catching up to do, haven’t we?’ When he took hold of her hands and drew her towards him, she was trembling so much with arousal and excitement that he smiled again. Not that he wasn’t equally turned on; he told her with sexy intent in between his kisses how much he wanted her and what that wanting was doing to him.

If his telephone hadn’t rung, Emily suspected that she would have let him make love to her there and then in his office. She certainly hadn’t tried to stop him when he had unfastened her blouse and peeled back the lace of her bra, exposing her breast to his glitteringly erotic gaze and the skilled touch of his hand. His lips had been on its creamy slope when his phone had rung. She had tried to straighten her clothes as he’d answered the call, but he had stopped her, very deliberately tracing the tight excitement of her nipple with one lazy fingertip whilst he’d spoken to his caller. Emily could feel her body tightening now as she remembered the effect the highly charged atmosphere between them had had on her, and the contrast between the calm, businesslike tone of his voice and the deliberately sensual way in which he had been touching her. By the time he had finished his call she had been aching with longing for him to take their intimacy to its natural conclusion, but instead he had released her, fastening her top and then saying calmly,

‘Come on, let’s go out and have some lunch.’

She hadn’t known him well enough then, of course, to realise that his deliberate arousal of her had been his way of punishing her for what he believed had been her attempt to control their relationship, and him.

Those had been such achingly sweet times, when they had first met. Suddenly she yearned to recapture them. Impulsively, she went over to the PR girl and told her firmly, ‘I’m afraid I have to go. You’ve got my e-mail address if you need to contact me.’ Emily suspected from the look the TV star was giving her that she wasn’t going to get any commission for this project. But then, she told herself, right now being with Marco was more important to her than anything.

Marco stood beside his desk in the sleek modern office suite where he conducted his global financial affairs. When he had left Niroli vowing to make his own mark in the world without his royal status, his grandfather had laughed at him and warned him that he would be back within six months with his tail between his legs. He could have been, Marco admitted: at twenty-two, his belief in his own abilities had been far greater than his financial astuteness; initially he had lost money as he’d played the international stock markets. But, just when he had begun to fear the worst, his mother’s great aunt had died in Italy, leaving him a substantial amount of money. A second stroke of luck had led him to come to the attention of one of the City’s richest entrepreneurs, who had taken Marco under his wing, teaching him to use his skills and hone his killer financial instincts. Within a year, Marco had doubled his inheritance, and within five years he had become a billionaire in his own right.

Emily had designed Marco’s office for him. On the traditional partners’ desk she had given him as a birthday gift, there was a silver-framed photograph of the two of them, taken on the anniversary of their first year together, before the death of his parents. Marco now studied it: he saw Emily looking up at him, her expression filled with laughter and desire, whilst his own was shadowed and half hidden. But then, Marco knew, his eyes reflected the physical hunger he had seen in hers, just as the positioning of their bodies mirrored one another. Emily was gazing at him with open happiness in her eyes, because she knew he was a wealthy man and a skilled lover.

‘Niroli’s kings receive love, Marco,’ his grandfather had told him when he was a young adolescent, ‘they do not give it. They are above other, weaker men, and they do not try to turn physical desire into mawkish sentiment like other, lesser men. They do not need to. You are maturing fast and you will discover very soon that your royal status will draw to you your pick of the world’s most beautiful and predatory women. They will give you their bodies but, in return, they will try to demand that you give them money and status. They will try to scheme, lie and cheat their way into your bed, and if you are foolish enough to let them they will present you with bastard sons who will become permanent remind-ers of your own folly and permanent dangers to Niroli’s throne. It is not so many centuries ago that a newly crowned sultan would order the death or the castration of all his many male half-siblings in order to prevent them from trying to take his place. You’re welcome to taste the pleasure of the women who offer themselves to you as much as you wish, but remember what I have told you. Ultimately you will make a necessary dynastic marriage with a young woman of royal and unimpeachable moral virtue, and she will give you your legitimate heirs. Your only heirs, if you are wise, Marco.’

Well, he had been wise, hadn’t he? Marco told himself grimly. And he intended to continue to be so. He looked down at the letter on the desk in front of him. It had arrived the previous day, its royal crest and the Nirolean stamp immediately marking it out as the reason why he was in the office so early this morning. It was from his grandfather, setting out the final details of his abdication plans. The people of Niroli, King Giorgio had written, were already being encouraged to expect Marco’s return and to welcome him as their new ruler. He needed to speak with his grandfather. But protocol meant that, yesterday, Marco had patiently followed an archaic, convoluted procedure, which had ensured that none of the ancient statesmen who surrounded his grandfather would have their pride dented, before finally arranging to speak directly to the king. Marco intended to make a clean sweep of these elderly statesmen once he was on the throne. His plan was to bring a forward-thinking modern mindset to the way Niroli was ruled, via courtiers of his own generation who shared his way of thinking. In fact, this new regime was something he already had in hand after a few discreet one-to-one telephone calls.

He looked at his watch: in another twenty minutes exactly, the telephone on his desk would ring and the Groom of the Chamber would announce in his quavering voice that he was going to connect him to his grandfather. Marco sighed. The elderly courtier was hard of hearing, as indeed was his grandfather, although King Giorgio denied it! Marco had a rueful fondness for his older relative, and he knew that Giorgio had a grudging respect for him, but he also knew that both of them were far too similar to ever be willing to be open about those feelings. Instead they tended to conform to the roles they had adopted in Marco’s teenage years, when his grandfather had been the disapproving disciplinarian and he had been the rebellious black sheep. He checked the time again. All this simply so that he could assure his grandfather that he would be returning to Niroli just as soon as he had dealt with his outstanding business in London, something that should have been a simple matter of a quick phone call rather than this long-drawn-out ceremonial.

The part of Marco’s outstanding business that concerned Emily was of course something he did not intend to discuss with the old king. He estimated that it would be a few weeks yet before he would be ready to leave, and he had already decided that there would be no sense in telling Emily their relationship had to end until then. One single clean cut, with no possibility of any come-backs, was the best way to deal with the situation. He would tell her they were finished and that he was leaving the country—and that was all. He had taken her to his bed as plain Marco Fierezza and he saw no point in revealing his royal status to her now. She had known him as her lover and a wealthy entrepreneur, not as the future King of Niroli. It was true that she might at some future point come to discover who he was—the paparazzi took a keen interest in the Royal House of Niroli—but by then their lives would be entirely separate. Their relationship had never been intended to end in commitment. He had told her that right from the start. But they had been together for almost three years, when previously he had become bored with his girlfriends within three months. Marco shrugged away the dry inner voice pointing out things to him he didn’t want to acknowledge. So, sexually they might have been well suited, or maybe at thirty-six the raw heat of his sex drive was cooling and he demanded less stimulation and variety, which made him content to accept a familiar physical diet? It would do him good to get out of that kind of sexual rut, he told himself coolly.

It would do them both good. Marco started as, out of nowhere, a sharply savage spear of sexual jealousy stabbed through him. What was this? Why on earth should he feel such a gut-wrenching surge of fury at the thought of Emily moving on to another man? His mouth compressed. His concern was for Emily, and not for himself. She was after all the vulnerable one, not him. Emily’s sexual past was very different from his own, and because of that—and only that, he assured himself—he was now experiencing a completely natural concern that she was not equipped to deal with a lover who might not treat her as well as he had done.

Marco looked at her picture, reluctantly remembering the first time he had possessed her. He’d planned to surprise her, but in the end she had been the one who had surprised him…

He had seen how excited she’d been when he’d walked into her shop and told her that he was taking her away for a few days, and that she would need her passport. When he’d picked her up later that day, he had seen quite plainly in her expression how much she’d wanted him. As he had wanted her.

He had been totally—almost brutally, some might have said—honest with her about the fact that he had no time for the emotional foolishness of falling in love. He had informed her calmly that he had ended previous relationships for no other reason than that his girlfriends had told him that they were falling in love with him. Emily had greeted his announcement with equal calm. Falling in love with him wasn’t something she planned to do, she had assured him firmly. She was as committed to their relationship being based on their sexual need for one another as he was himself, she had smiled, adding that this suited her perfectly, and Marco had felt she was speaking the truth.

He had booked the two of them into a complex on a small private island that catered exclusively for the rich and the childfree. Everything about the location was designed to appeal to lovers and to cocoon them in privacy, whilst providing a discreet service.

The individual villas that housed the guests were set apart from the main hotel block, each with its own private pool. Meals could be taken in the villas or in the Michelin-starred restaurant of the hotel, where there was also an elegant bar and nightclub.

Amongst the facilities included for the guests’ entertainment were diving and sailing, and visits to the larger, more built-up neighbouring islands could be arranged by helicopter if guests wished.

They had arrived late in the afternoon, and had walked through the stunningly beautiful gardens. Marco recalled now how Emily had reached out to hold his hand, her eyes shining with awed wonder as they had paused to watch the breathtaking swiftness of the sunset. He remembered, too, how he had been unable to resist taking her in his arms and kissing her, and how that kiss had become so intimate it had left Emily trembling.

They had returned to their villa, undressing one another eagerly and speedily, sharing the shower in the luxuriously equipped bathroom. Emily’s physical response to him had been everything Marco had hoped it would be and more. She had held nothing back, matching him touch for touch and in intimacy until he had started to penetrate her. It had caught him off guard to have her tensing as he thrust fully into her, believing she was as eager to feel the driving surge of his body within hers as he was to feel her hot, wet flesh tightening around him.

At first he had assumed she was playing some kind of coy game with him, mistakenly thinking that it would excite him if she assumed a mock-innocent hesitancy. His frustration had made him less perceptive than he might otherwise have been, and more impatient, so he had ignored the warning her body had been giving him and had thrust strongly again. This time it had taken the small muffled sound that had escaped past her rigid throat muscles to make him realise the truth: she was still a virgin.

His first reaction had been one of savage anger, fuelled by the toxic mingling of male frustration and the blow to his own pride that was caused by the fact that he hadn’t guessed the truth. Sex with an inexperienced virgin—and the potential burden of responsibility that carried, both physical and emotional—was something he just had not wanted.

‘What the hell is this?’ he swore. ‘Okay, I know about your marriage, but I would have thought that…if only because of that…’

‘That what? That I’d jump on the first man I could find?’ Emily retaliated sharply. But beneath that sharpness he caught the quiver of uncertainty in her voice, and his anger softened into something that caught at his throat, startling him with its intensity.

‘Well, it did cross my mind,’ she told him. ‘But in the end I was too much of a moral coward to go through with it. Blame my grandfather, if you wish, but the thought of having sex with a man I didn’t truly want, just to get rid of my virginity, has made it harder rather than easier for me to find a man I did want enough.’

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