Princess in the Iron Mask

CHAPTER THREE

DON’T YOU DARE crumble in front of this man, Claudia. Don’t you dare.

An hour ago she’d prayed for a miracle and, as if the gods were playing tricks on her, they’d sent a warrior hell-bent on her destruction. The stronghold she kept on her emotions teetered precariously and her bones throbbed with the effort to stand tall.

Three weeks in exchange for three and a half million pounds.

Breathing in and out, slow and even, she locked her knees so tightly, a sharp pain shot up her thighs. But it was nothing compared to the blood dripping from her heart.

Lucas, the blackmailing beast, stood in the centre of the room, a dark lock of his hair falling over his brow in bad-boy disarray. Tall and gladiator-strong, he waited patiently—no doubt for a sign of her surrender. If she didn’t loathe him so much she would melt at the sheer sight of him. He’d played her since the moment he’d arrived.

‘Choice?’ she said, and thank God her voice didn’t falter. ‘My so-called choice is either to follow you or lose my job, Mr Garcia. I’m fairly certain my refusal to comply with your conditions would land me in the unemployment line.’ Oh, she could beg Ryan Tate to give her time to find the money elsewhere, but it would be a useless pursuit. There was a reason he was known as a hard-ass among her colleagues. Ryan Tate would question her sanity. Tell her to swallow her damn pride and think of the bigger picture. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth and all that. ‘Then again, you knew that, Lucas, didn’t you?’ she said bitterly.

His throat convulsed and after a few seconds he relaxed his stance and rolled his broad shoulders. The fact that he didn’t answer made her madder still.

‘Who on earth do you think you are?’ she said, her control slipping a notch. ‘You went to Tate’s office without even consulting me. Is this what I have to look forward to? A life of being coerced, controlled and dictated to?’

A light flashed in his intense stare before his face contorted with stunned incredulity. ‘Since when does three weeks equate to a lifetime?’

It might seem a measly three weeks to him, but what would they demand after that? It didn’t bear thinking about. ‘Since you’ve given me a taste of the new regime!’

Lucas scrubbed his palm over his mouth, his chest heaving. ‘Claudia,’ he growled, his hand dropping into a large fist by his side, ‘I am attempting to do my job, but your obdurate attitude leaves me with few options. Instead of focusing on how this happened, why not take some pleasure from what you will benefit from. Three and a half million pounds, to be precise.’

‘But at what cost to me?’ she asked. Then immediately bit her lip when the words echoed through the room.

‘Three weeks of your time. It is nothing,’ he said, with a savage slash of his hand.

A pitiful laugh broke through her thick throat. How wrong he was. Lucas had no idea of the personal price she’d pay. He was oblivious to her inner turmoil. But that didn’t excuse his behaviour in her eyes. She was dedicated to her job, but did she go around blackmailing people? No.

‘You speak of the strength of your dedication. Your work taking priority. Yet if that were true the money would make your decision in an instant. Or,’ he continued, his mouth twisting, ‘is it a case of you using your job as a convenient excuse?’

‘No!’ she cried.

Lucas’s head reared at her outburst and she winced inwardly.

‘No,’ she tried again—softer, quieter. But it was altogether too late. The hitch to his brow told her so. And to some extent he was right.

When the effects of her illness had waned in her late teens her parents had visited once, maybe twice. Other times they’d sent messengers, and for years she’d declined everything from a short vacation to a simple dinner on her own turf, using her work as an excuse. Avoiding her own parents because they’d hurt her, betrayed her, cast her aside. When she’d needed them the most. If she took the money this day she would be giving them the power to destroy her all over again. But you can keep your distance, Claudia. You’re adept at doing just that.

Three weeks of God knew what, in exchange for her funding.

Taking short ragged breaths to ease the pain in her lungs, she squeezed her eyes shut. In the space of two seconds her mind began its attack, assaulting her with a multitude of visions and images.

Arunthia—a world in which she’d been deemed unworthy and dispensable.

St Andrew’s Hospital—where she could make a real difference. And—oh, God—the children trying to smile through the pain, the misery. If she lost her job work on their case would scream to a halt. Claudia was their advocate. They needed her. Could she ever look at them in the face again, knowing she could have helped if only she’d faced her past?

Pain cracked through her mind and her eyes pinged open. Lucas was staring, his eyes curiously hot and heavy, fixed on her mouth where she tore at her bottom lip. Gooseflesh pimpled every inch of her skin and she shuddered ferociously. Why did he have to stare at her so much? It was as unnerving as it was confusing. Made her want to reach up. Touch. Check her skin. Bury her face in her hands. Hide. But she couldn’t. Wouldn’t.

As if he’d caught himself, he scrubbed his hands over his face and combed his glorious hair back from his brow with long blunt fingers. Heat flushed through her core and her breasts grew strangely heavy. She stroked her clavicle and felt the burn sear her palm. Oh, great. Her body wasn’t complying with the new hate programme.

‘Accompany me to Arunthia, Claudia,’ he said, in a persuasive drawl that made her quiver. How was she meant to stay sane with a man who made her spontaneously combust? ‘Despite what you think, I understand your desire to crack the elusive code of an illness that must’ve been difficult for you, but surely you can continue to work from home during your stay? With your family’s support?’

Support? She almost choked. The very last thing she would ever get from her parents was support.

Lucas’s gaze dropped to her hands and she realised she was tugging at her cuffs with the tips of her fingers. Again. Her stomach nose-dived to the floor. His eyes were like fidget-seeking missiles. She couldn’t think straight around him. Instead of controlling her habits, which she usually managed to hide unerringly, she kept being distracted by him. Her attention constantly snagged on his long, powerful legs, his huge, masculine hands, his utterly contemptuous handsome-as-sin face. And no matter how hard she tried her traitorous mind kept imagining things—like those big hands touching her in all the places she felt warm and sensitive. Kissing her. Caressing her.

Heat slapped her cheeks. This had to stop!

Her life was crumbling before her eyes—her career, her life’s work, slipping through her fingers like grains of salt—and all she could think about was being kissed. If that wasn’t bad enough, she wanted the man who’d plotted her destruction to do it! She was seriously beginning to question her mental faculties.

Panic fired a shot of adrenaline down her spine, surging to every extremity. Her feet were the first to move and she swerved around the desk, walking towards the door with no forethought to her destination. But getting away from Lucas sounded like paradise.

Before she made it past he bolted forward, one hand outstretched, reaching for her. ‘Claudia. Dios! Stop. Do not walk away from me,’ he growled. ‘We are not done.’

Oh, God. She flinched, jerked backwards, and almost lost her footing. ‘Oh …’ Steely hands closed around her upper arms, steadying her, and she scrunched her eyes shut, unable to look at his face for fear of what she might see. Pity? Or, worse still, disgust?

Through two layers she could feel the heat of his palms, and the power of his grip fired a blaze of sorcery through her bloodstream. His breath tickled over her face and the scent of warm strong coffee wafted over her, making her crave a caffeine fix. As soon as she regained her balance his hands fell away and Claudia yearned for them to come back. Which was crazy for all kinds of reasons.

The noise of his throat clearing told her he’d moved back a pace or three, and Claudia opened one eye to check. Sure enough, he stood a few feet away, fists clenched, eyes raging with a storm. Darkness tainted his tone. ‘Where are you going, Claudia?’

Somewhat safer, she opened her other eye and practically ran towards the door. ‘I have to see Ryan Tate,’ she murmured, grateful for the excuse that flashed into her brain.

‘What?’ His thunderous voice became a distant blur as she swerved into the corridor. She imagined him standing there, his gorgeous blue eyes glittering with ire, his fists balled to stop himself from wrapping them around her throat.

‘Claudia, wait!’ he hollered. ‘We need to finish this. Now!’

‘Go to hell, Lucas.’

She kept on walking, blinded by a mind-fog, and within minutes, oblivious as to how she descended three floors, she was standing in front of Ryan Tate’s door, her fist hovering over the solid oak panel.

And then she saw it. The violent tremble in the hand poised in front of her. Then she felt it. The pain searing up her legs, crippling her entire body. Quickly she turned and leaned against the wall before her knees surrendered. Tipping her head back, the beige paint a glorious pillow, she closed her eyes and swallowed hard.

Come on Claudia, get a grip, she mouthed silently. Three weeks. Three and a half million pounds. Keep your distance. Stay away from Lucas the Devastating. You can do this.

She just had to remain strong and self-reliant. Always self-reliant.

You don’t get close, you don’t get hurt. Breathe, Claudia, breathe.

Time ticked by, the trembling subsided, and the pain dulled to its usual ache. Finally able to stand tall, she inhaled a lung full of fortifying air, lifted her chin, raised her hand to knock once, twice…and walked through Ryan Tate’s door.

‘Claudia, my girl. Good news, aye?’

After years of honing her brave face, Claudia slipped behind her iron mask and smiled.

Sweat pierced the base of his spine as Lucas stalked the lab, focusing on breathing and formulating a new plan. As long as it involved getting out of this white box he’d be slightly mollified. Claudia might prefer her small hideaway, but he required vast open space to feel alive.

It hadn’t escaped him that when the prickly Princess had been in the room he’d been less aware of the enclosure. Probably because you only had eyes for her. Lucas growled, satisfying himself that it was more a case of distraction.

Was she pleading with Tate to give her more time to find the money elsewhere? Dios she was the most awkward, feisty, self-centred, gorgeous woman he’d ever met.

She also despised him with a passion. The disgust in her eyes had almost floored him. Only a fool would have walked in here without the necessary weapons at his disposal. God knew he’d have preferred to reach some kind of compromise, but she was recklessly tenacious and ignoble at best.

Yet as soon as he’d revealed his tactical strategy his stomach had ached as if she’d punched him in the guts. How did she manage to unearth emotion from him? He knew she selfishly pursued her own agenda. Knew she’d given him no choice but to push her. It was bewildering. Unnerving. Inappropriate and unwelcome. For Lucas had buried his emotions twenty years ago, and that, he thought, hardening his heart, was the way they must stay.

Glancing down at his hands, he curled his fingers into his palms. He could still feel her; he’d swear it. Warm, toned, yet lusciously soft. And her scent—Dios, she smelled of summer. Warm notes of vanilla blossom and honey. Up close she was impossibly more beautiful, and as he’d held her he’d willed her to open her eyes. But the hate had still been there and she could not bear to look at him. Which was good—great, fantastic. Being likable was not in his job description. Getting her home, however, was.

‘Why are you still here?’

His stomach flinched but he managed to become fixated on her fascinating collection of test tubes. It was her voice: snippily sexy beyond belief. Why a schoolmarm tone should flick his switch he’d never know. He’d never had a teacher in his life. Children from the slums were not afforded such privileges. No books, no paper nor pens to draw with. Only walls stained with tobacco, bloodied fists and a penknife beyond decay.

‘A trip to hell was unappealing,’ he replied thickly, knowingly. He’d been there plenty of times, after all. ‘And, with the greatest will in the world, I cannot deliver a package I do not have in my possession.’

‘Quite.’

Lucas swivelled on his heels in time to see her arch one dark brow, her eyes firing with newfound determination. And his chest seized with such force his lungs pinched with deprivation.

‘You knew I’d come back, didn’t you?’ she asked.

‘Let’s just say I had faith you would come to your senses.’ While she’d virtually admitted that she used her work as a shield to hide from her parents, he believed she loved her job. If he could admire her for anything, it was the strength of her dedication. What he struggled to comprehend was why she couldn’t extend that devotion to her role in Arunthia. He wanted to ask her, to try to understand. But the longer he stood here, skirting quicksand, the more entrenched he became.

Pouting her luscious lips, she canted her head like an inquisitive meerkat. ‘I can’t work out whether you’re extremely diplomatic or downright arrogant.’

‘I shall leave that for you to decide.’

She walked farther into the room, snatched a pair of spectacles from a plastic tub on the bench, and pushed them up her pert nose. With steel in her spine, her head high in a model-type pose, Lucas was smacked with a vision: Claudia Verbault, strutting down a catwalk, wearing a ruffled blouse and a tweed skirt, sucking on a pencil. Seductively intellectual.

Blood pooled in his groin and his mouth turned as dry as Arunthian dirt. He had to drench his lips with moisture in order to speak.

‘I have a jet on stand-by. We’ll leave the country within two hours.’ Lucas could have her home within five and his job would be done. In future he’d only have to see her at state functions. By then, having appeased his newfound sexual appetite, he’d be able to look at her without imagining her naked. For he knew her body would be sublime. Soft and pliable to his steel and strength, and tall enough to be the perfect fit.

‘Rather presumptuous of you, isn’t it?’ she said.

Madre de Dios! Had he said that out loud? Lucas focused on her bent head as she slid the files lying on her desk into a large briefcase, one on top of the other.

He cleared his throat of pure want. ‘What is?’

‘To assume I’m leaving with you.’

The tightness in his neck drained down his spine. ‘Apologies, Just Claudia.’

Her hand stilled, and from his sideways vantage point he watched one eyelid shutter while she inhaled deeply, her breasts rising with life, pinky rouge blooming up her cheeks.

Did he affect her? The notion sucker-punched him straight in the solar plexus.

Her gentle touch forgotten, she began to ram two or three more files into the case, pushing until the bag was fit to burst. Maybe she was imagining it was his head. Oh, he certainly affected her. With annoyance rather than sexual attraction. Instead of relief he felt ridiculously irked.

How typical that the one woman in the world he could never have was a nemesis he instinctively wanted to devour.

‘So. What is your decision?’ He already knew it, but if she wanted to put up the pretence of a fight he would humour her. For now.

Kid gloves were his current choice of weapon.

‘I’m coming with you.’

His lips curved.

‘But not today.’

They flattened faster than a bomb detonation site.

‘What?’

‘I need three days,’ she said, adamant.

‘Impossible.’ He wouldn’t last two days without assaulting her gorgeous mouth.

Lucas worked to his own schedule, but just the thought of spending time near that sensational body while his stomach churned with a noxious mixture of frustration and fury ratcheted his deadline up into the red zone.

‘Delaying the inevitable is not only a foolhardy display of awkwardness on your part but a waste of time.’

‘Not for me. I need to go back to my apartment and pack. I have a personal matter to attend to, and most of all I need time to think,’ she said, tucking a wayward curl around the delicate shell of her ear.

‘Think?’ What did she need to think about? How many lab coats to pack? ‘I have no time to spare.’ Lucas blinked. Wait a minute … Personal matter? Dios, he’d never thought of that. And why did it make him feel like punching the wall?

‘Tough. Find time. Because I’m not going anywhere today.’ There it was again—that surge of heat when she used that sexy, stern voice.

And there she was, being selfish again. Why did he keep forgetting what kind of person she was? ‘Claudia, I cannot stay in London. I have to work.’

‘Oh, really?’ she said, yanking the case off the table and almost toppling over as it fell to the floor with a thud. ‘Well, now you know how I feel. I’m being dragged away from mine for three weeks. I’m sure you can afford to take three days.’

His nostrils flared. ‘My terms—’

‘Lucas,’ she said, attempting to disguise her rude interruption with an untried honeyed tone that made his skin prickle, ‘you will quickly come to realise I forget nothing. Your terms are—and I quote—three weeks’ leave, effective from nine this morning. Coupled with my return to Arunthia. On no occasion did you state a day of departure.’

Dios! Lucas seethed. She was impossible. ‘It is almost noon. You have eight hours.’ Let it not be said that he couldn’t compromise.

Arms crossed tight, her full breasts were pushed upwards to stretch the stiff cotton and she canted her hip in a sexy pose. The ten-bell alarm siren going off in his head almost rendered him deaf. Almost.

‘Two days,’ she bartered.

Lucas ground his jaw. ‘Twenty-four hours. Final offer.’ He was crazy. Certifiable. A day of Claudia would tip him over the edge of reason to plummet headlong into insanity. He did not negotiate. Ever. People obeyed him. Always.

She smiled. It might have been small and somewhat triumphant, but she actually smiled at him.

Lucas felt his eye twitch.

‘Done,’ she said, all smug sweetness.

God help him if she ever put her heart and soul into it. Because Lucas had an uneasy feeling it would be him that would be ‘done’.

‘Fine,’ he snapped, his abnormal behaviour pushing his soaring anger levels from dangerous to critical.

He only prayed her apartment on the Thames had separate floors. Or at least a fifty-foot distance between bedrooms. Fighting with bloodthirsty night demons would be child’s play in comparison to the blistering temptation that would be down the hall.

Lucas didn’t look happy, Claudia mused. Waves of dark fury poured from his tight shoulders, much like the rain streaming in rivulets down the black bodywork of his Aston Martin Vanquish.

The engine of his Aston Martin Vanquish roared like a sleek panther as he revved his displeasure, and she wiggled on the cream cowhide in an attempt to cover her quivering reaction. She’d never thought of a car as arousing before. Well, she’d never thought of anything as arousing before. Today seemed to be a day for firsts. Even the heady smell of leather and damp clothing couldn’t douse the warm, woodsy scent of Lucas lingering in the air.

With the exception of his barking request for her to enter her address into the sat nav, their drive to her apartment had been deadly silent. Now, parked at the kerb, she was desperate to be away from his fiercely primal aura. She was so tired she no longer had the strength to argue, and her legs throbbed so viciously she’d be lucky if she made it inside the building, let alone up the stairs.

‘Erm…thanks for the lift, Mr Garcia. Unless the gods grace me with a reprieve, I’ll see you tomorrow.’ Without further ado, she yanked hard on the door handle. After a third kerthunk, she surrendered, directing her voice to be sweet. ‘Could you open the door, pleeease?’

‘Claudia,’ he growled, nostrils flaring, his chest heaving with barely suppressed anger. Staring out of his window at the three-storey townhouse where she lived on the second floor, he twisted his long fingers around the dark wood steering wheel. Maybe he was imagining it was her neck. ‘Have you ever once acknowledged who you actually are?’

‘Who I am?’ she asked wearily, not entirely sure what he was getting at and unable to summon the energy to care.

‘Yes, Claudia,’ he said slowly, as if speaking to a child. ‘A member of the Arunthian Royal Family.’

Never. ‘Not really. Can I go now?’ She gave the handle another tug. Kerthunk. A long sigh poured from her lungs.

‘How long have you lived in this…this place?’ The way he said place, as if the word was rat poison on his tongue, was like taking a grater to her nerves. Without bothering to look out of the window, her mind’s eye recalled a picture of the tired frontage of this Victorian townhouse on a less than stellar street. What was he getting into a funk about? He didn’t have to live here.

Claudia bit her tongue and thumped her head off the rest. ‘Oh, about eighteen months, I think.’ She slept most nights in the lab—more for convenience than because of the emptiness that shrouded her body when she lay between cold damp sheets, she was sure—but she kept that titbit to herself.

Lucas continued to fume, steam blowing from his nose as he stared out of the front windscreen. ‘You could’ve been abducted fifty times over,’ he growled, and she lifted her head from the buttery soft leather to see him scrub his face with rough hands. ‘Burgled, raped, assaulted,’ he went on. ‘What the hell were you thinking, Claudia?’

Pushing down on the froth of fury bubbling up her throat, she pursed her lips. He’d turned from blackmailer to over-protective bore!

‘You’re overreacting, Mr Garcia,’ she said calmly. ‘This is a decent area and I have an excellent alarm system. Anyway, who would look at…?’ The words died on her tongue as she realised how pitiful she would sound if she said me. She knew she wasn’t pretty, and she’d given up wishing she looked like one of her famed-for-their-beauty sisters long ago. Right now, faced with the most astoundingly handsome man she’d ever seen, she couldn’t face the prospect of his sympathy or his averment.