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Nico strode into his apartments in the palace and summoned his assistant. Once he gave the order to find out everything about Miss Margaret Lily Morgan—oh yes, that had been a surprise, finding out she used her middle name instead of her first; and yet it explained why he’d never found a trace of her when he’d inquired two years ago—he went onto the terrace and gazed out at the city below.
The encounter had affected him more than he cared to admit. Lily Morgan was not at all what he expected. She was not the soft, almost shy girl he remembered, his Liliana who was as pure and fine as the flower she was named after. The night in prison should have frightened her, made her cooperative. Yet this Lily was fierce, determined.
But determined to do what?
He did not know, but he would not leave her there for another night—was, in fact, somewhat appalled she’d been held there without his knowledge in the first place. Nico’s mouth twisted in distaste. It made sense that the old fortress was still used as a prison, but the conditions could be improved. Yet another thing he would change now that he was Crown Prince.
He slipped the photo from his pocket, held it between two fingers without looking at it. The photograph had been altered, he was sure of it. Any talented photographer with the right computer equipment could make a photo say anything he or she wanted it to say. How well Nico knew this. Today was not the first time he’d been presented with such a lie. The media tried all the time to place him somewhere he’d not been, or with someone he’d not been with. The photographs were doctored, easily disproved, though it was irritating and inconvenient to do so.
And yet it was the life he’d chosen, when he’d chosen to be the foil for Gaetano. Nico shoved a hand through his hair. He could handle it. He’d always been able to handle it. He would do so now, and he would send Miss Lily Morgan back to America where she belonged.
Madonna diavola, this was also not the first time he’d been presented with a paternity claim—though he’d never been presented with it in quite this way. Lily hadn’t mentioned the child at all until he’d shown her the picture. And then she’d been desperate to get the photo from him, had never actually come out and said the child was his. But it must be her intention. What else?
He lifted the photo, studied it—and felt that jolt of awareness and recognition he’d never experienced before. Unlike the children that two of his former lovers had tried to assert were his—each incident had been disproved and the claims retracted, though Nico still gave money for the children’s care since it was not their faults they’d been born without fathers—this boy had the look of a Cavelli. It was more than the eyes—something in the dark curls, the smooth olive skin, the shape of jaw and nose, the firm set—even in a toddler— of the lips. The likeness was remarkable, yet surely it was a trick.
He’d been captivated by her, he remembered it well, but not so captivated he’d forgotten to take precautions when he’d made love to her. He never forgot to take precautions. It was as necessary to his existence as sleeping or eating. He’d grown up the product of an indiscretion, and he would not ever cause a child to suffer the way he had. When he had children, they would be legitimate, wanted, and loved.
But what if those precautions had somehow failed? Was it possible? Could he be this boy’s father? And, if he was, how could she have kept him from his son for all this time?
But no, it was not possible. He would have remembered if something happened to the condom; nothing had. The child could not be his, no matter how strong the likeness. It was a photographic trick.
Satisfied, he dropped the photo into a potted plant. He would not be played for a fool by this woman. Soon, he would know the truth. And tonight he would formalize his engagement to Princess Antonella, would move forward with the effort to unite Montebianco and Monteverde by honoring the commitment his family had made to the Romanellis when Gaetano was still alive. Antonella Romanelli was a beautiful woman; surely he would be well pleased with her as his wife.
Nico turned from the view and strode toward the terrace doors. He only took a few steps before faltering. With a muttered curse, he retrieved the picture and tucked it against his heart.
Chapter Two
LILY BOLTED UPRIGHT on the musty cot, panic gripping her. Where was she? Why was she so cold?
A moment later, she remembered. The thin blanket she’d huddled under just wasn’t enough protection. She scrubbed both her hands through her hair and got to her feet, hugging herself against the chill settling into the damp fortress walls as night crept over the city. How had she managed to fall asleep after her encounter with Nico?
Her eyes were gritty and tired, and her head throbbed. She’d cried so hard she’d given herself a migraine, though it was thankfully nothing more than a dull pain now. The sleep had helped at least.
The sudden clanging of the metal door in the passageway startled a little cry from her. Her heart pounded as she backed toward the opposite wall of the cell. A naked bulb overhead gave off only meager light and she squinted into the darkness outside the bars. A big shape shuffled into view and thrust a key into the lock. The door swung open just as she made out the uniform of a Montebiancan police officer.
“Come with me, signorina,” the man said in thick English.
“Where are you taking me?” Fear, sharp and cold, slashed into her. Did the prince plan to have her thrown off a cliff somewhere?
Stop being silly.
“Come,” he said, motioning. She hesitated only a moment longer, deciding she might have a better chance once she was out of this cell. She could give him the slip if the opportunity presented itself, or perhaps she could scream for help. It wasn’t much of a plan, but it was better than sitting here another night.
The policeman ushered her up into the bright light of the rooms above the ancient cells. Before she could grow accustomed to the light, she was outside in the cool night air. A Mercedes limo idled near the exit and a man in a dark chauffeur’s uniform snapped the car door open.
Lily faltered. The policeman held out his hand, motioning at the car. “Please,” he said.
She hesitated, glancing at the street beyond the black iron gates. There was no escape that way, so she climbed into the car, her mind racing with possibilities. The door slammed behind her and a moment later the car whisked into traffic. Her questions about where they were going didn’t penetrate the glass between her and the driver, so she settled into the plush leather of the interior and watched the city lights slide by as she planned her escape.
Lily gripped the door handle in a damp palm, her heart racing. When the car came to a halt at a light, she pulled, intending to slip out and disappear into the night before the driver could blink—but the door was locked. She jerked it again and again, but it refused to open. The driver didn’t even glance at her. The car started moving, climbing steadily uphill, and Lily bit her lip, tears of frustration choking her.
Soon, they passed beneath an archway and into a courtyard. The car came to a halt. Lily pulled in a deep breath as her door swung open. Whatever was about to happen, she would not be a blubbering wreck. She was stronger than her fear, stronger than Nico Cavelli could ever imagine. She’d had to be.
A man in a colorful palace uniform beckoned her. Only then did it dawn on her that they’d arrived at the Cavelli Palace. The Moorish fortress sat at the highest point of the city, its white walls gleaming in both sun and moonlight. It commanded sweeping views of the sea and sparkled like a diamond in the center of a pendant. She’d gazed at it for two days, wondering if Nico was here, what he was doing, if he ever thought of her.
She’d certainly gotten her answer, hadn’t she?
She was hurried through a door and down a series of corridors, finally arriving at closed gilt double doors. The palace guard rapped and spoke in Italian. A moment later, a voice answered and the doors swung open.
Blood rushed to Lily’s head as she crossed the threshold. The room was a confection of ornate Moorish arches, mosaics, antiques, priceless artwork and tapestries. The gilt alone could pay for Danny’s college tuition wherever he chose to go. A massive crystal chandelier threw glittering light into every corner. Her senses were overwhelmed as she tried to take it all in.
The doors clicked shut behind her and she whirled, her gaze colliding with that of the man walking in from an adjoining room.
If he wanted to intimidate her, he was doing a fine job. He was tall and broad, his body encased in a glittering uniform that surprised her with its ornate formality. A red sash crossed from his right shoulder to his waist. The uniform was dark, black or navy, and studded with gold. Medals draped across his chest in a colorful row of ribbons and polished silver discs and stars. A saber, dripping with tassels, was strapped to his side.
He lifted his hands and peeled off first one white glove and then the other while she gaped. He tossed them onto a chair with the hat she hadn’t noticed before.
Desperately, Lily tried to conjure the image of the somewhat shaggy-haired student she’d thought him to be in New Orleans. He’d smiled a lot then. Laughed. How could this person be the same? Did he have a twin, perhaps? A twin who’d given her a false name?
For once, she wished she’d read more about him. Her knowledge was limited to gossip magazines and celebrity Web sites. She’d steadfastly refused to find out anything more once she’d discovered just how colossal a mistake in judgment she’d made. What good would it have done to pore over his biography when she was never going to see him again? Lily Morgan dating a prince—yeah, that was freaking hilarious.
“This is what is going to happen,” he said coolly. “You are going to answer me truthfully and completely, and then you will call your friend Carla—”
“I want to call her now,” Lily said firmly, only mildly surprised he knew her best friend’s name. He’d been busy the last few hours, that’s for sure. “She must be frantic with worry, and I want to know my son is well.”
Nico held up a hand. “All in good time, signorina. First, you answer my question, and then you call.”
Lily was tired and achy from too little sleep and the cold prison cell, and her head still throbbed dully. Her temper was on its last thread, and she no longer cared if she was talking to a prince or not. He put his pants on the same way as everyone else—not to mention he’d once deigned to sleep with her—so that gave her as good a reason as any to speak to him as an equal. “I’m calling her now, or I’m not answering.”
Nico’s eyes gleamed with suppressed annoyance. “You do not wish to test me, signorina. Your position is precarious enough, do you not think?”
Lily’s chin nudged up a notch. “What do you plan to do, throw me back in that dungeon?”
“Perhaps. Trafficking in stolen antiquities is a significant crime in Montebianco. We take our heritage very seriously here.”
Lily’s right temple pounded. “I didn’t steal anything. If you check with the street vendor, you’ll know it’s the truth.”
“We are having some difficulty locating him. Not to mention that street vendors do not typically sell priceless artworks as if they are cheap trinkets.”
“You’re lying.” The man had a stall in the market, for goodness’ sake. How hard was it to find him again?
“I assure you I am not. He seems to have disappeared. If ever he was there in the first place.”
Lily’s bravado leached away under the weight of his arrogant surety. She was too tired to fight him, and too worried about her son to care about matching wits with this coldblooded man any longer. She just wanted it over with. “Fine—what do you want to know?”
“I want you to tell me if this child is mine.”
Lily’s lungs refused to work properly. Liquid fear softened her spine, her knees, but somehow she remained upright. “What kind of question is that?” she asked on little more than a whisper.
His eyes flashed fire. “It is the kind of question you will answer truthfully if you wish to remain free.”
She nearly choked. “You call this free?”
“Lily,” he said, a hint of exasperation in his voice. And something else. Pain? Weariness?
She swallowed, dropped her gaze to study the tiles at her feet. Her heart pounded so hard she felt dizzy. It was the moment of truth, the one she’d never thought would come. Would he somehow care for her and Danny? Would he help them, be a father to her boy?
Of course he wouldn’t. He was marrying a princess, God help the poor woman, and he wasn’t about to change his ways just because he had yet another illegitimate child in this world. He might give her money to take care of Danny, but Lily knew that everything came with a price. She’d basically taken care of herself since she was fifteen years old, and she would continue to take care of herself and Danny on the strength of her will and determination. She would not accept handouts from Nico.
A finger under her chin tipped her head up. She hadn’t realized he’d moved so close. The touch stung, brought memories to the surface she’d rather forget. His eyes were mesmerizing, as pale and blue as a winter lake. She’d wanted to drown in them once. Wanted to drown in him.
Part of her still did.
“Why does it matter?” she said, fighting a wave of panic.
His gaze never wavered, piercing her to the core. The contrast of his soft words was jarring to her senses. “Is this boy mine?”
In a split second, a million possible outcomes crossed her mind. And yet there was only one answer she could give, no matter how it tortured her to do so. “Yes,” she whispered.
She was utterly still as his hand dropped. A moment later, while time stood still, he twirled a lock of her hair around his finger. “I remember this hair,” he said softly. “It is still like the finest silk in my hands.”
He’d moved closer than she’d realized, his body mere fractions away. The hilt of his sword grazed her beneath the ribs. “You remember?” she said, then cursed herself for sounding so desperate for an affirmative answer.
His gaze dropped to her mouth, lingered long enough that warmth blossomed between her thighs. Had she ever been kissed so thoroughly as when he’d kissed her? She stared at his lips, remembering the first brush of them. Remembering how his tongue dipped in to stroke her own, the way she’d sighed and opened to him, the utter rush of desire that flooded her as the kiss deepened into something that left them both gasping for breath and sanity when it was through.
He smelled so good, like citrus and spice and warm Mediterranean nights. She wanted to lean into him, wanted to kiss him again, wanted to know if what she’d felt with him had been real or a fluke.
“I remember you,” he said. For an insane moment she thought he might really kiss her. With a soft curse, he moved away, unstrapping the sword as he walked. It clattered to the floor beside the chair with the rest of his gear before he spun and fixed her with a glare.
“I remember that we met in Jackson Square when a pickpocket tried to steal your purse. I remember meeting you for three nights in a row in front of the cathedral. But most of all, I remember the last night. Mardi Gras. You were still a virgin.”
Lily didn’t care if she had permission or not. She moved to a plush couch and sank down on it, aware that she hadn’t showered since yesterday and that she probably smelled as musty as the dungeon. But her legs wouldn’t hold her up any longer.
“But when you came to the prison…” Her voice trailed off as she thought about how cold and cruel he would have to be to put her through that ordeal earlier. This was not a man to lose her head over, not a fairy-tale prince on a white stallion. This was a petty, privileged man who didn’t care about anything but his own pleasure.
“This is what you will do now,” he continued. “You will call your friend Carla and have her bring the boy to the airport. She will turn him over to a woman in my employ. Her name is Gisela—”
“No!” Lily shot to her feet. “I’m not telling Carla to give my son to a stranger—”
“Our son, is he not, Lily?”
Her heart battered her ribs. She would not lose her baby to this man! “Surely you can’t be prepared to take my word on it,” she flung at him with far more bravado than she felt. “Let me go home and you’ll never hear another thing from me, I swear.”
“That I cannot do, signorina.” Irritation crossed his features as he stalked toward her again. “And I already know the truth. Our son was born nearly seventeen months ago, on November the twenty-fifth, in a small hospital in Port Pierre, Louisiana. You were in labor for twenty-two hours, and the only person at your bedside was Carla Breaux.”
Lily sank onto the couch again as her legs gave way. He knew the truth. “Why did you ask me if he was yours if you know so much?”
“Because I wanted to hear you say it.”
Lily felt as if she were collapsing in on herself. Her body folded over, slowly, until her head was nearly between her knees. Fury and fear mingled in her gut, bubbled into a great howl of rage that erupted from her throat, astonishing her.
Astonishing Nico, if the alarm on his face was any indication.
“You are not taking my baby away from me,” she vowed. “I’ll go back to that cell and stay there, but I will not tell Carla to hand over Danny to you.”
He went to the bar set against one wall and poured a measure of caramel-colored liquid into a glass. Then he returned and held the cut crystal out to her. “Drink this.”
“No.”
“You are overwrought. This will help.”
She gripped the glass in both hands, more to make him go away than anything. When he stood so close, her head felt fuzzy. Thankfully, he retreated a few steps. He picked up a phone, issued what she assumed were a set of orders since whoever was on the other end never had time to speak before he hung up again.
“You will call your friend Carla and tell her to bring Daniele to the airport tomorrow morning.”
“I won’t,” she said quietly, resenting the way he so easily Italianized her son’s name.
“Indeed you will,” Nico replied. “You can make this easy, or you can make it hard. Should you not cooperate, you might never see Daniele again. Because you will not leave Montebianco. He could grow up motherless, and alone.”
Numbness crept over her. “You would do that to your own son? You would deny him his mother?”
She didn’t miss the nearly imperceptible clenching of his jaw. “I will do what it takes to make you see reason, cara. If you cooperate, this will not have to happen, si?”
“How can you be so cruel?”
He shrugged an elegant shoulder, and Lily saw red. The spoiled bastard! The glass tumbled to the floor and shattered against the tile as she lunged for him. Nico was faster, however. He swept her high into his arms and carried her across the room as she kicked and struggled.
“Dio, woman, you are wearing sandals. Do you want to slice your feet to ribbons?”
Lily didn’t care. She simply didn’t care about anything any longer. This man, this cold evil man, was trying to take away the one person in the world who meant the most to her. It was her greatest fear come to life. She would not allow it.
She twisted in his iron grip, throwing him off balance so that he stumbled. Lily pressed her advantage and they fell to the thick Oriental carpet together, Nico taking the brunt of the impact. A moment later, he flipped her and she found herself on her back, Nico’s hard form pressing into her, breast to belly to hip.
“Stop fighting me, cara,” he said harshly. “It changes nothing.”
Lily wiggled beneath him, tried to shake him off. His solid form didn’t budge. The point of a star-shaped medal dug into her ribs. “Why are you doing this to me?” she cried. “You have dozens of children with your mistresses, so why do you care about mine?”
Rage, disbelief, frustration—they chased across his face in equal measure. “I have one child, Liliana. Only one. And you have kept him from me.”
“I don’t believe you,” she gasped out.
Nico shifted and the medal’s point thankfully stopped pricking her. He gripped her arms, forced them above her head. He seemed to hover on the edge of control. “Have you never thought that gossip magazines might lie?”
“They can’t all be lies.” There had to be a grain of truth, right? Perhaps they exaggerated, but there must be something to it. Not one of the reporters she knew at the Register would dare write something so patently false.
Nico’s laugh was short and bitter. “You have obviously never been the victim of these carrion. They feed on outrage and misdirection. There’s hardly a single thing they print about me that is true.”
“Now I know you’re lying. I’ve seen photos of you with lots of women—”
“I have had many mistresses,” he said, cutting her off. “This is to be expected—”
“Why? Because you’re some kind of God’s gift—”
“Basta! You seek to exasperate me, signorina, and you succeed. Nevertheless, I have one child.”
Lily’s chest heaved in frustration as she stared up at him. But her eyes closed as the truth of his words sank in. Gossip magazines thrived on scandal. She knew that. But she didn’t want to believe he spoke the truth. Because if he did, so much she’d thought about him would be wrong. The blood drained from her head as the implications sank in.
“But if Danny really is the only one, that would mean—”
She couldn’t finish the sentence, uncertain what to say next. Was Danny in line for a throne? Impossible.
Nico said it for her. “Yes, cara, our child is my heir and second in line to the throne of Montebianco.”
Her insides were jelly. “How is that possible?” she managed. “We aren’t even married.”
“It just is,” he said, his accent thickening suddenly as she moved.
Lily took advantage of his distraction to try and buck him off. She arched her back and flexed her body upward, shoving into the cradle of his hips. His arousal sent a jolt of sensation sizzling through her.
In spite of her anger and frustration, the feeling was delicious.
Dangerous.
Nico’s breath caught as she shoved against him. The sound was slight, but she heard it nonetheless.
And just like that she was on fire, absolutely aflame with longing. How could it be possible? How could she feel sexual desire for him when he wanted to ruin her life? He’d given her the most precious thing in her world, and now he wanted to take it away. And her body didn’t seem to care. She redoubled her efforts to throw him off.
“Maledizione,” he ground out between clenched teeth. “Stop moving—or would you like to take this into the bedroom and do it properly?”
Lily’s palms pushed against the crisp material of his uniform. A desperate, greedy part of her did indeed want to do it properly. But her common sense, her anger, her sheer dislike of the man won out. “Get off me.”
“As you wish,” he said, then bounded up and left her to climb to her feet alone.
Lily hugged herself, her body still tingling with the shock of desire. How could she want him? She closed her eyes, squeezed her arms tight around her middle. My God, she really was her mother’s daughter.
She could not afford the distraction of such thoughts. She had to focus. “What now?”
He whirled on her, his uniform as crisp and perfect as if he hadn’t just been rolling on the floor with her. His royal bearing was absolute. She wondered that she’d never noticed it in the three days she’d spent with him in New Orleans.