A Ring To Secure His Crown

CHAPTER TWO

SEBASTIAN SET HIS shoulder to the stiff door that opened out onto a small Juliet balcony. It gave suddenly, filling the warm room with a welcome breeze. The view was as dramatic as the plumbing was idiosyncratic. His shower had run cold and then it had almost scalded him. Oh, well, maybe it was time he learnt how the other half lived, even if that half could claim a heritage as illustrious as his own, such as it was.

For a moment his lip curled into a cynical smile. For reasons obvious when you considered his nickname at school had been the royal bastard, Sebastian had never been able to take the whole heritage thing seriously.

A tap on the door made him turn, but before he could respond Luis walked into the room, his normal smile absent.

‘Reading your body language I’d guess you were just told you’ve got weeks to live, or you’ve just had a heart to heart with our father. How is His Royal Highness?’

Luis’s heavy sigh and despondent attitude would normally have evoked a sympathetic reaction from Sebastian, but today the only thing he felt was a surge of irritation. Didn’t Luis realise that until he showed a bit of backbone the King was never going to stop trying to micromanage his life? Maybe not even then, Sebastian, a realist, conceded. If he were in his brother’s shoes...

But you’re not, are you, Seb?

Luis gets the crown and the girl.

‘I didn’t think you’d come, neither did...anyone.’

‘You asked.’

Actually his father had ordered, which under normal circumstances would have guaranteed Sebastian’s nonappearance, and yet he was here. So why? He rubbed the towel across his dripping hair and veered away from the question in his head before it formed.

‘I asked the last three times I came to visit the Summervilles.’

‘You know I have an allergy to duty.’

‘So you keep telling everyone. Seriously—’

‘It is a very serious allergy.’

‘I wanted you to get to know Sabrina.’

‘It’s you she’s marrying.’ And me she’s kissing, he thought, the sharp twinge of guilt he felt drowned out by the stronger slug of lusty heat that accompanied the memory of those soft, sweet-tasting lips. If Luis had kissed her more often maybe she wouldn’t have melted in his arms.

That’s right, Seb, because it’s never your fault, is it?

He waited for the familiar hit of mingled frustration, sympathy and affection as he watched Luis walk, shoulders hunched in defeat, across the room. Instead, Sebastian found himself feeling anger and something that, had the circumstances been different, he would have called envy.

But of course it wasn’t.

Envy would mean that his brother had something that he wanted, and Luis didn’t.

Luis was welcome to the crown.

There had been a time when they were growing up that being pushed into the background and being referred to as the spare had got to Sebastian, but that had been before he had recognised that it was a lot worse for Luis, carrying the expectations of a country on his young shoulders. Luis had no choices—even his wife was picked out for him.

Luis was welcome to his bride; Sebastian had his freedom. His father had told both of his sons that privilege came with a price; well, so far he’d been proving his father wrong. Sebastian enjoyed the privileges that came with his title without any of the responsibilities.

And Sebastian didn’t want to marry Sabrina—he didn’t want to marry anyone—he just wanted to take her to bed. Even thinking about her now, and that miracle of a mouth of hers, made smoky desire slither hotly through him.

He ignored it. He’d kissed Sabrina and he wasn’t going to do it again, even if the primal attraction that drew him to this woman was stronger than anything he could ever remember feeling. He knew himself well enough to know that it would pass—it always did.

And in the meantime there were plenty of women to kiss who were not about to marry his brother, who were not about to throw away their lives. Her business, he reminded himself, her choice.

Luckily he had recognised, before the entire kiss incident in the car had got out of perspective, the real danger of building it up into something it was not. She had an incredible mouth, beautiful lips and they made him hungry. The need to taste had swept away every other consideration in his head, but it had been what it was: a ‘perfect storm’ moment. Or maybe a perfect moment of madness, fuelled by the alcohol he’d imbibed much earlier in the morning at the nightclub, where he had been even more bored than usual.

The chances were, seeing Sabrina here, in her natural environment, as a woman who represented everything he had been rebelling against and rejecting all his life, that he would regain his normal objectivity.

‘I didn’t expect you to come, but I’m glad you did. I do appreciate the support.’

‘Support?’ Sebastian queried with a frown.

‘I can’t say I’m exactly looking forward to tonight.’

‘Performance anxiety or...don’t tell me you’re having second thoughts?’

Luis turned away but not quickly enough to hide his flush of annoyance at the joke that presumably offended his highly developed sense of duty. If it was annoyance?

Guilt? Could he have hit a nerve? Was his brother having second thoughts? Sebastian dismissed the possibility almost straight away, no matter what his personal feelings. For Luis, duty, no matter what form it took, came first.

‘So how is the blushing bride?’

‘Fine... I guess.’

‘You guess? You mean you didn’t spend the night saying hello?’ Sebastian said, immediately imagining himself saying a very long hello.

‘I only just arrived and she...we... She doesn’t blush.’

Sebastian’s brows lifted. ‘Oh?’ he said, remembering the delicious rosy tinge that had washed over Sabrina’s pale skin.

‘Not that that is a bad thing.’

Sebastian’s eyes narrowed in his brother’s face. ‘Which means that you think it is.’

Luis looked guilty. ‘She just isn’t always what you’d call very spontaneous.’

Sebastian cloaked his expression as he heard the echo of that soft little mewling cry as she’d opened her mouth to him. His body hardened helplessly at the memory of her soft breasts pushing into his ribcage.

The effort of fighting his way free of those intrusive memories delayed his response. ‘Spontaneity can be overrated.’ It could also be great...she would be great in bed.

Never going to find out, Seb.

He was a bastard but not that much of a bastard.

‘Exactly, especially when your every move is being scrutinised. She has all the qualities to make the perfect Queen.’

The speculative furrow between Sebastian’s dark brows deepened as he listened to his brother, sounding very much like a man who was trying desperately to convince himself that he believed in what he was saying.

‘I’m sold,’ he murmured drily. ‘How about you?’

Luis dodged the soft question and his brother’s speculative stare. ‘Marriage is all about teamwork.’

‘So I hear.’ He had never given marriage much thought aside from concluding fairly early on that it was not for him, about the same time that he had nearly made a fatal error. ‘I nearly proposed once,’ he remembered, a rueful smile tugging the corners of his mouth upwards as he tried and failed to visualise the face of the woman who he had decided, at nineteen, was the love of his life.

‘You!’ His brother’s jaw hit his chest before he recovered. ‘You’ve been in love?’ Luis shook his head. ‘Who? When? What happened?’

‘What always happens—the glitter rubs off. I found out she snored and her laugh grated, but for a while I believed that she was perfect. Actually, I’ve believed quite a few were perfect since, the difference being I no longer expect it to last.’

In Sebastian’s opinion, if you were looking for a formula for unhappiness it would be hard to come up with a more sure-fire method than tying yourself to one person for life based on a short-lived chemical high.

‘Perfect? Like you, you mean?’

Sebastian winced and grinned, watching as Luis, his expression growing distracted, moved to one of the two chairs arranged at the foot of the bed. Sebastian held up a warning hand.

‘I wouldn’t do that. I made the same mistake. The leg dropped off. I’ve propped it.’

Luis made a detour to the other chair.

Sebastian’s gaze moved around the room of faded grandeur. ‘It’s not what I was expecting. They really are strapped for cash. No wonder,’ he observed cynically, ‘they are so willing to sell their daughter off to the highest bidder.’

‘They’re not selling her!’ Luis protested. ‘Sabrina understands. She respects—’

‘Our mother understood,’ Sebastian interrupted, wondering if the anger he felt would ever go away. Anger at the system that had trapped his mother in a marriage that had, in the end, destroyed her. ‘And that didn’t turn out so well.’

‘It’s not the same!’ his brother protested, flushing as he surged to his feet.

Sebastian arched a brow. ‘From where I’m standing it looks like a classic case of history repeating itself.’

Luis’s horrified rebuttal was immediate. ‘I’m not like...him.’

Then break the blasted cycle!

Sebastian didn’t voice his thought. What would be the point? He knew his brother would never challenge their father, and, if the positions were reversed, was he so damned sure that he would? Easy to criticise from where he stood.

‘I wonder, Seb. What do you think he’d do if he knew...?’

Sebastian’s irritation slipped away as he walked across to where his brother stood and laid a hand on Luis’s shoulder. ‘He won’t,’ he said firmly. ‘We burnt the letters. No one knows they ever existed.’

The young brothers had not known at the time they discovered the love letters hidden under a floorboard that despite breaking off the affair after she discovered she was carrying her lover’s child she had continued to see him after the child she had conceived with him had been born.

The irony was that they were right, there was a royal bastard, only it wasn’t the son that the scandal-mongers had identified.

‘As far as the world is concerned, the affair only started the year I was born.’ Sebastian could see no reason anyone should ever know. ‘We are the only two people who know, unless you plan on telling him?’

Luis shuddered. ‘I stood by and watched you being bullied at school and then at home when we both know that you should be King. I have no legitimate claim to the throne. I’m not even his son.’

Sebastian shook his head. ‘Be glad of that every day. Be glad of it, Luis!’ he said, his voice gruff with ferocious sincerity. ‘You’ve escaped the taint that I carry. I’m the son the bastard deserves. You will make a better King than I ever could be. You’re the one who has made all the sacrifices...and you are still making them.’ Sebastian straightened up, relaxing the grip on his brother’s shoulders. ‘You don’t have to marry her, you know. You could say no.’

Luis shook his head and dodged his brother’s gaze. ‘Easy for you to say. I’m not—’

‘Selfish as hell?’ Sebastian thought of where being unselfish had got his mother. He’d choose selfish every time.

Luis’s gaze lifted, just as his brother vanished into the bathroom. ‘I’m not a rebel like you. I need to... I care about what people think about me.’

Sebastian re-emerged with a fresh towel, which he rubbed vigorously over his damp hair.

‘And this marriage isn’t about me, it’s about bigger things. I’m realistic about it.’

‘So how does she feel about it?’

Luis gave an uncomprehending shrug. ‘How do you mean?’

‘I mean what does Sabrina expect from this marriage? Is she realistic too?’ He gave a sudden shrug, annoyed with himself for wasting time on a subject that was none of his business. ‘Is the warm glow of doing the right thing enough for her too?’ He began to vigorously rub his already towel-dried hair, asking himself where this swell of outrage was coming from. She’d made her bed and she seemed happy to lie in it...with his brother. ‘Hell, Luis, do you two even talk?’

‘We have a lifetime to talk,’ Luis responded, not sounding as though the life he saw stretching ahead filled him with joy. ‘But you mean sex, don’t you? It’s not like you to be so squeamish. Actually no, I haven’t slept with her.’

‘That’s not what I meant, but as you’ve shared aren’t you taking this untouched virgin bride stuff a bit too far, Luis?’

Luis laughed. ‘Even father doesn’t expect that.’

‘How incredibly liberal-minded of him.’ Sebastian was still struggling with the implication of some of Sabrina’s unguarded comments. Was it really possible that Sabrina had not had a lover, out of fear of falling in love?

‘What if you’re not compatible? Have you thought of that?’

Luis for once looked annoyed. ‘For God’s sake, Seb, this isn’t about how good she is in bed!’

As the comment unlocked a stream of graphic images that flowed relentlessly through his head, Sebastian lowered his eyelids to half-mast. His jaw clenched as he struggled to stem the flow and pretended an amusement he was a long way from feeling. ‘But it would help.’

It would help him even more, Sebastian mused darkly, if he could stop thinking of unfastening glossy honey hair and watching it fall over bare shoulders, pushing it back to reveal small firm breasts...

Oblivious to the tension underpinning his brother’s taut delivery, Luis laughed. ‘I really like her.’

‘Like?’

Luis tipped his head in acknowledgment. ‘She’s sweet,’ he began with the attitude of a man who was clutching at straws.

‘And,’ he ploughed on with determination, ‘she has a lot of common sense.’

Were they even talking about the same woman? Sebastian wondered, thinking about the woman who had attempted to punch her way out of his locked car just to avoid being shut in there with him.

He recognised she’d been driven to this drastic move by desperation and fear and he had fully intended saying something to soothe her, but the expression on her face when she’d recognised him, the fact that she’d looked as though she had just discovered she had jumped into a car beside the Devil himself...he simply hadn’t been able to resist playing up to her prejudices a little.

But then she had challenged his own firmly embedded prejudices. In the abstract he had been able to despise Sabrina Summerville, or at least the idea of her, a woman who, despite coming from a different generation, was just as willing as his own mother had been to be a compliant, political pawn.

The first surprise had been the desire that had twisted inside him when he’d found himself sitting just inches away from her, which shouldn’t have happened. He had seen the photos. He already knew that she was good-looking, admittedly more classy than classically beautiful. But what those photos had not prepared him for was the crystal clarity of her skin, the sprinkling of freckles across the bridge of her small straight nose, the deep liquid darkness of her eyes that seemed to reflect her every mood like a mirror. And last, but definitely not least, the pink lushness of her amazing lips.

The blood-roaring primal intensity of his reaction had effectively blocked everything else from his mind for what might only have been seconds, but could have been an hour.

And the hits had just kept coming!

He’d expected a passive victim; he had got a feisty fighter, who clearly thought he was a total waste of space. What had got to him the most had been the conflict in her eyes, her vulnerability.

He’d just wanted to tell her not to do it. Not to marry Luis. Instead he’d kissed her...a greedy response to a need that had been visceral in its intensity.

‘I’ve never seen her lose her temper,’ Luis said.

Sebastian could not control the bark of laughter that bubbled up from his chest as he lifted a hand to his cheek where the imprint of her fingers had lasted, but he didn’t react to his brother’s puzzled look.

‘Perhaps you should try giving her cause and see what happens?’