Modern Romance March 2020 Books 5-8

CHAPTER THREE

LEON FELT HIS expression freeze. Felt everything in him freeze. Then, like a sudden thaw across a frozen lake, he felt everything un-freeze—melt into the wash of sheer, gratifying release of every last fragment of the frustration he’d felt just a few moments ago.

He felt his features lighten—everything inside him lighten. Because everything now was just perfect.

As perfect as she is!

His eyes rested on her, his gaze brilliant.

‘Princess…’

He heard his voice husky on her title. Without conscious awareness he reached for one of her hands, saw her eyes flare as he did so, and her lips part as if she was taking in an urgent breath of air.

Then, with absolute deliberation, Leon raised her hand to his mouth and gave the slightest bow of his head. With the same absolute deliberation he let his lips brush the back of her hand, infinitely lightly. He felt it tremble in his.

He relinquished her hand, letting his glance linger on her. He heard her murmur his name—a low ‘Mr Dukaris…’ that was even fainter than her sister’s voice. But Leon could see the colour flaring out along those delicate cheekbones, and that was enough for him. And he saw the speed with which she had clasped the hand he’d just kissed, as if to stop it trembling.

Satisfaction filled him. And something much, much more than satisfaction.

He turned his head now to his guests, the Duke and Duchess. His smile flashed broadly. ‘Champagne?’ he invited.

Expansively he gestured towards the back of the box, where the requisite bottles were nestling in their ice buckets by a little table holding flutes on a silvered tray.

Champagne was exactly what was needed now. He’d never been more sure of that in his life.

Ellie was trying to hold on to the shreds of her composure—but it was impossible, just impossible! She should be used to hand-kissing—it was nothing out of the ordinary in Karylya for a female royal. Old-fashioned, perhaps, and somewhat formal as a deferential greeting. But nothing to set her fighting for composure the way she was now.

But then, never had a man as outrageously attractive as Leon Dukaris kissed her hand.

She gave a silent gulp, hoping her colour had returned to normal.

‘Princess…?’

Their host for the evening, who was paying for the champagne he was now offering her with a polite smile, who was paying for this box at the opera—she dreaded to think how expensive that was—who was paying for the astronomically expensive suite at the Viscari St James, and paying for Ellie dared not think how much more, was standing in front of her, holding a flute brimming with gently beading champagne.

She took it, murmuring her thanks and adopting an expression of extreme graciousness that would have befitted her ultra-gracious regal stepmother. It gave her the protection she urgently needed. She took a sip from the flute, hearing Leon Dukaris speak again, asking her if she was enjoying the opera. His English was accented, she noted, but not much—less so than her father’s.

There was a slight smile on his mouth—beautifully sculpted, with deep lines incised around it—and she felt another silent hollowing of her stomach. The planes of his face were strong, his nose bladed, his jaw edged. There was a toughness, a determination, underlying the relaxed slanting smile that invited her to respond to his conversational gambit.

‘Torelli is as outstanding as ever,’ she replied, echoing her stepmother’s viewpoint readily enough, ‘but the role is hardly endearing. Turandot can’t be anyone’s favourite heroine.’

She was making small talk, nothing more, and had done so a thousand times in Karylya when in princess mode.

She saw a faint frown on Leon Dukaris’s face.

‘No? But she’s a very strong woman,’ he replied. ‘Insisting on not marrying just because that’s what everyone expects her to do.’

Ellie felt her face harden. ‘Strong? She’s brutal! She has her suitors murdered and her rival tortured!’ she bit out.

His rejoinder was immediate. ‘The slave girl, Liu, could have avoided her fate any time she wanted, simply by telling Turandot the name of the unknown Prince.’ There was a sardonic note in his voice.

‘Whom Turandot would then have had killed!’ Ellie shot back. ‘Liu refuses to betray him—she loves him!’

Leon Dukaris lifted his flute to his mouth, taking a mouthful of champagne before he answered her. ‘Much good it does her—he rejects her for another woman who’s a better proposition than a mere slave girl!’

That sardonic note was more pronounced—harder. With something underlying it that for a moment Ellie wondered at. Then she realised that she suddenly had an opening to move the conversation away from a fictitious drama to the reality that she and her family were facing—a reality she must confront, for there was no other option but to do so if she were to protect Marika from an unwanted suitor.

‘Well, yes,’ she murmured, taking a sip of her champagne, pitching her voice carefully, ‘Turandot is a princess—and there are, indeed, men who would like to marry a princess…’

She let her eyes rest on Leon Dukaris, mindful of her expression, nervous after her impetuosity in making so pointed an observation. Would it draw him out—make him say something that could give her any indication at all as to whether Marika’s fears were justified or not?

Almost immediately, his expression was veiled. She saw his long lashes—ridiculously long lashes, inky dark and lush, she found herself noting with complete irrelevance—dipping down over those amazing dark eyes of his, tautening the muscles of her stomach.

‘Well, that depends…’ he replied.

And now there was no trace of any sardonic note in his voice—rather, she realised, with another pull on her heightened awareness of him, a trace of amusement…and, more than amusement, a sensual drawl that did things to her they should not…must not.

‘On the princess in question…’

‘Indeed,’ she returned. ‘And therefore perhaps you should be aware, Mr Dukaris, that my sister is in love with another man.’

She spoke in a low voice, for only him to hear. But even as she spoke she feared she had said too much—assumed too much.

What if Marika’s fears were entirely groundless, the product of fear and distress? Well, it was too late now. She’d all but warned off Leon Dukaris from getting any ideas about her sister—ideas he might never have entertained in the first place.

It took all her training to keep her expression composed, as if she had said nothing out of the ordinary at all.

For a moment nothing changed in his expression. Then, as tension clawed in her, she saw his stance ease, a wash of relaxation go through him, and in his dark, dark eyes glints of sheer gold suddenly gleamed like buried treasure.

He raised his flute and quite deliberately tilted it to touch hers with a crystalline click of glass.

‘I wish her as well as can be expected,’ he said.

There was a carelessness in his voice, and again that underlying sardonic note that Ellie had heard before but had no time now to pay any attention to. For now all she had attention for was the way his eyes were holding hers, the expression in them, the way she could not move in the slightest.

‘But I fear you have misunderstood the situation, Princess. I have not the slightest interest in your sister.’

He paused, and in that pause she could not breathe, for Leon Dukaris was dominating her body space, dominating her consciousness, smiling down at her with that smile that was not a smile, that smile that had nothing to do with humour in the least and everything to do with the complete lack of breath in her lungs and the bonelessness of her limbs, the hot rush of blood to her body.

‘I would far prefer,’ he said, and there was a sudden intimacy in the way he spoke to her, a sudden huskiness in his voice that weakened her boneless limbs, ‘you to be my bride…’

He touched his glass once more to hers. Raised it to his mouth and, smiling still, drank from it. Then, as if he had said nothing more to her than that he hoped she would enjoy the evening, despite disliking the heroine of the opera, he turned and strolled towards his other guests.

Behind him, Ellie felt her cheeks burst into flame, and the hand holding her champagne flute shook.

He couldn’t have just said what he had.

He couldn’t!

But he had.

She waited to feel the outrage she surely must feel—but it did not come. And she could only stare after him, motionless, hearing his outrageous words echoing in her head.

Leon stood by the plate glass picture window of the apartment above his offices. It was his London pied-à-terre, and furnished in ultra-modern, ultra-expensive style by top interior designers. He did not care for it, but it was prestigious enough for the business entertaining he did—and from time to time for the personal entertaining of those women he selected for the interludes in his life which had punctuated the years of his adulthood.

He made it crystal-clear to each and every woman that their affair would be brief, would be a passing mutual, sensual pleasure—nothing more. Never would he deceive any woman and pretend that he was offering any more than that.

His thoughts flickered as he took a meditative mouthful of cognac, staring out unseeing over the City skyline, glittering like jewels in the night at this late hour.

He was done with this lifestyle. Of that he was sure. It had served its purpose over the years of accumulating his vast wealth, but it had run its course. He wanted something different now.

Someone different.

His expression changed. How had it happened? That extraordinary confluence of two quite separate desires? The fanciful notion that had beguiled him last year in the fairy-tale Grand Duchy of Karylya, that he could crown his achievements with the most glittering prize of all—a royal bride… Then encountering a woman who, in his very first glimpse of her, had set his senses afire in an indelible instant—and then, in a veritable gift from the gods, to discover that she might be the royal bride he sought…

The woman I desire and the princess I aspire to marry—one and the same… The alluringly beautiful Princess Elizsaveta.

Dismissing the lovelorn Princess Marika from his thoughts for ever, he let the syllables of her older sister’s name linger in his head, let memory replay every moment of their encounter, their conversation. He did not mind that he had declared his hand—he welcomed the opportunity she’d given him to do so. It cut to the chase—made things crystal-clear.

She was the princess bride he wanted.

Now all that remained was for her to agree…

And why should she not?

A slow, sensual smile pulled at his mouth, and his eyes glinted gold with reminiscence. The breathtaking blonde who had so incredibly fortuitously turned out to be a princess had not been able to hide from him the fact that she returned his attraction—her responsiveness to him had blazed in every glance, in her shimmering awareness of him as a man.

She desires me even as I desire her.

And added to that desire, which curled even now, seductive and sensual through his bloodstream, all the worldly advantages that would accrue with their marriage, for both of them—how could there be any argument against it?

It was the perfect match.

And, best of all, both of us will know the reasons we are marrying—and that the meaningless charade of ‘love’ has nothing to do with it!

And never would.

He lifted his cognac glass, toasting the one and only royal bride he wanted—the beautiful, the breathtaking Princess Elizsaveta.

The week that followed was the most tormented of Ellie’s life. Her head ached with it. Had Leon Dukaris really meant what he’d so outrageously declared at the opera? Or had it been only a flippant remark in riposte to her warning him off Marika? If he’d actually needed warning off?

But if he wasn’t entertaining such ambitions, then why was he forking out a fortune on keeping her family in horrendously expensive luxury?

His intentions remained impossible to determine.

When he invited the royal family to luncheon, two days after the evening at Covent Garden, to be taken in a salon privé at the hotel, she could detect nothing in his manner beyond formal civility. For herself, though she called on her training in royal etiquette to remain outwardly composed, it was a quite different matter.

The visceral impact Leon Dukaris made on her the moment he entered the room had strengthened, not lessened—she was even more hopelessly aware of him than ever—and it was the same yet again when, the day after, he took herself and Marika to afternoon tea at Meredon, her stepmother having graciously approved the outing for her confined daughter.

As they sat on the terrace of the ultra-prestigious country house hotel just outside London, overlooking the green sward stretching down to the River Thames, Ellie was burningly conscious of their host. Doggedly, she pursued safe conversational topics—from the history of the politically powerful Georgian family who had once owned Meredon to the flood protection measures needed for the River Thames in a warming world.

Marika was little help, merely picking at the delicious teatime fancies while staring off forlornly into the distance.

For his part Leon Dukaris, sporting a pair of ultra-fashionable designer shades that made him look even more devastatingly attractive than ever, kept the conversation going by asking lazily pertinent questions and giving the impression that his heavy-lidded gaze, screened by his dark glasses, was resting steadily on her…

As if, she thought wildly, he were assessing her…

For what? For my role as his royal bride?

A bead of hysteria formed in her throat, but she suppressed it. Suppressed all her emotions until finally, after a stroll through the manicured grounds, and a short excursion along the river in the hotel’s private launch, she and Marika were finally returned to the Viscari St James.

She thanked Leon with what semblance of composure she could muster, only to have him glance a slanting smile at her, his long lashes dipping in a way that brought a flush of colour to her cheek.

‘The pleasure was all mine, Princess,’ he murmured.

He helped himself to her hand, bowing over it, and Ellie was sure he was doing so to remind her of how he had kissed her hand that night at the opera. There was something about the glint in his eyes that told her so…

Colour ran into her cheeks again and she turned away, glad that her stepmother was making some remark to him. Whatever it was, Ellie caught only his reply.

‘Alas, Highness, I am scheduled to be out of the country for several days on business, but when I return I would be delighted if you would permit me to invite you to dine with me—and the princesses, too, of course.’

He swept a benign smile over Ellie and Marika—who was busying herself with her phone, frantically texting in a way that sank Ellie’s heart. The distant beloved, no doubt. Distant and utterly ineligible…

She dragged her mind away from her sister’s hopeless predicament, her eyes going to her father and his wife. With their visitor gone, she could see that they were allowing the front they’d put on for him to collapse. Her father looked old and tired—her stepmother tense and strained. They might not say anything to her or Marika, but it was evident that the stress of their precarious situation was eating into them. They knew, even if they did not say it, how grave their predicament was.

If Leon Dukaris pulls the plug on them what will happen to them?

Impossible to imagine—just impossible! A penurious exile? But where? Where would they go? What would they live on?

Fear bit at her, and she could feel it resonating in the room. Could hear, leaping into life yet again, that other question circling in her head.

A princess bride—is that what Leon Dukaris expects for the money he’s spending on us? Can he truly be thinking that?

And what if he were? She felt emotion clutch at her. What answer could she possibly give?

What on earth do I tell him if he really, truly wants to marry me?

The only sane answer was no—no, no and no! How could she possibly contemplate even entertaining such an idea? To marry a stranger…a man she barely knew…

Everything in her revolted. All her life she had vowed to marry only for love. Hadn’t her own parents’ sad example shown how vital that was? Her mother was very open about how she’d felt so pressured by her father—flattered that his daughter was being wooed by a prince, he’d pressed her into a marriage that her royal husband had wanted only to please his own father and beget an heir to the throne.

It was a marriage that had never worked for either of them, and they’d parted from each other with relief, each of them glad to find love and happiness in their second marriages.

‘Never do what I did, darling,’ Ellie’s mother had warned her all her life. ‘Only marry for love—nothing else!’

She felt her emotions twist inside her, tearing her to pieces, making sleep impossible as she lay tensely staring up at the ceiling in Malcolm’s flat that night. For herself, it would be easy to reject Leon Dukaris’s ambitions for a royal bride. As Ellie Peters her own situation was perfectly secure—a home in Somerset with her mother, a modest salary working for her stepfather’s production company. The freedom to marry for love and only for love…

But she was more than just her mother’s daughter—more than just Ellie Peters.

I am also Princess Elizsaveta, daughter of the Grand Duke of the House of Karpardy, and I have duties and obligations and responsibilities that are not mine to evade.

And the difference was everything.

She took a deep, decisive breath. Resolution filled her. No more endless circling, no more questioning, no more confusion. She must embrace the responsibilities of her royal heritage. Her face tautened. And if that meant setting aside her own personal desires and marrying a man she barely knew—well, so be it.

Decision made, she felt a kind of peace—a feeling of resignation and resolve—come over her. Sleep, long delayed, made her eyelids flutter shut. And as it did, it brought dreams with it—dreams of a strong-featured face, of heavy-lidded, night-dark eyes resting on her. Desiring her… Impatient to make her his bride. His princess bride.

CHAPTER FOUR

LEON WATCHED THE PRINCESS being ushered to his table across the restaurant and felt the familiar kick go through his system at the sight of her. The days he’d spent away from London had only increased his desire to see her again—and now here she was, walking towards him in all her breathtaking beauty.

She was wearing, he discerned, an outfit by a designer much favoured by the young British royals—a tailored suit in pale green, adorned with very correct pearls, yet again. But there was something about the air with which she carried herself that marked her out as different from just another wealthy young woman.