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‘Just who do you think you are? You can’t just take me like this.’
Cool as you like, he simply said, ‘Watch me.’
She sucked in air through her nose. ‘Are you playing with me? You’re taking me to the Altiport, right? I have a plane to catch.’
‘We are going to the Altiport, si.’
‘Good. That’s good.’
Though he hadn’t really said what was happening when they got there, had he?
Warily, she ventured, ‘And you’ll let me get on my own plane to Arunthia, yes?’
‘No.’
Mouth falling agape, she coughed out an incredulous laugh. ‘Are you serious?’
‘Deadly,’ he said, as sharp as a blade.
His eyes were as cold and hard as steel. Where once they’d been tender and warm. Had she known him at all? she wondered, fighting a miserable flare of anguish. Even a little bit? Or had the last few years killed any ounce of decency and compassion he’d possessed?
Icy fingers of dread curled around her throat. ‘So where are you taking me?’
‘Galancia.’
The world tilted as if the car had skidded down an embankment with a five-score gradient and she went woozy. Galancia? No, no, no!
Luciana scoured his expression, desperate to find even a flicker of his dry humour, and came up blank. Galancia… She shuddered in her own skin.
‘No way. You haven’t got a hope in hell of getting me to that place. I have to go home.’
He pursed his lips and cocked his head in faux contemplation. ‘Not today. Today you will go where I ordain.’
‘But…but that’s tantamount to abduction!’
‘I suppose technically it is. Yet during the several minutes we’ve been in this car I haven’t heard you call for assistance once.’
It didn’t bode well that he was right. But, honest to God, the man was so distracting. Still, why wasn’t she petrified out of her mind, screeching her head off?
‘Give me a second and I’ll scream blue murder. Though let’s face it,’ she said, gesturing to the luxurious car. ‘There’s no one to hear me, is there?’
‘Not now, no. You are seven minutes too late, princesa. Though Seve may help you.’
‘Who on earth is Seve?’
‘The driver.’
She almost shuffled to the edge of the bench seat and raised her fist to knock on the glass partition. Almost. Frankly, she knew better.
‘Friend?’
‘Cousin,’ he drawled, a flicker of a devilish smile playing about his mouth.
It was obscene how relieved she was to see that tiny flirtation with humour—that hint of the man she’d fallen for on a raucous, cluttered muddy field in Zurich. Particularly since it suggested he was enjoying her discomfort. What was all this? Payback for her walking away? Some kind of twisted revenge?
‘You can’t go about kidnapping people. It isn’t civilised behaviour.’
Lord, she sounded like her mother. And, honestly, only a dimwit would put ‘civilised’ and ‘Thane’ in the same sentence. It had been his untamed earthy savagery that had attracted her in the first place. Obviously she had a screw loose.
Blasé, he gave her an insouciant shrug that said, try and stop me, and it made her anger boil into lava-hot fury until she felt like a mini-volcano on the verge of eruption. What was it about men trying to govern her life? She’d just escaped one control freak and run headlong into another.
Smouldering with resentment, she decided she wanted him to erupt too. It was as if he’d switched off his emotions. He was far too cool and collected over there. While she was sitting here losing it!
Look at him, she thought. Sitting at an angle, one leg bent and resting on the bench seat, he sprawled like a debauched lion, taking over half the enormous car—and all of the oxygen—in that outrageously expensive Italian suit. It should have oozed elegance and debonair refinement, but it made him look like pure wickedness and carnal sin.
And she detested him for making her hormones whisk themselves into a deranged frenzy over him. Wasn’t she in enough of a mess?
Which reminded her… Woman on a mission, here. She wanted the playing field levelled.
‘So the rumours are true, then?’ she said, with as much chilly, haughty daring as she could muster.
Thane arched one arrogant brow. ‘There are so many I’m at a loss as to which particular falsehood you refer to.’
‘That your men steal women. That your father took your mother from her bed—stole her from her intended.’ And by all accounts made her life a living hell in Galancia Castle. Rumour had it she’d thrown herself to her death to end the torment. Not that Luciana had ever believed that bit. No mother would do that to her son, surely?
Luciana waited him out. Expecting some kind of reaction. Something. Anything. What she got frustrated her even more. Nothing. Not even a flutter of his ridiculously gorgeous lashes.
‘Ah, that one. Perfectly true. Indeed, we take what is rightfully ours.’
She was going to slap him in a second. ‘And where, pray tell, do you get the idea that I am rightfully yours?’
Aha! As if she’d flipped a switch emotion stormed through his eyes. The dark variety. But right now she’d take what she could get.
‘What is rightfully mine, Luciana, is an explanation. Answers.’
‘That’s all you want from me. An explanation?’ It seemed a bit too easy to her, but she could answer fifty questions before they got anywhere near a plane. It was a thirty-minute drive at least. ‘Fine,’ she bit out. ‘Ask away, Prince Thane. What do you want to know? Why I bolted in the dead of night?’
‘Ah…’ he said, with an affable lilt that belied the fury now emanating from him. ‘So you do acknowledge that we have a history. Yet not thirty minutes ago you denied we’d ever met.’
Blast her runaway mouth. She should have known that would antagonise him.
‘Yes, well, I don’t want Augustus knowing about my personal life.’
‘Worried, Luciana? That the prissy Viscount will not wish to bed you or wed you any longer when he discovers you’ve been tarnished by our depraved association?’
She huffed. ‘Hardly.’ That would only be a good thing. And, absurd as it was, she suddenly had the strangest compulsion to thank her kidnapper for rescuing her from tonight’s unpalatable proposal. Clearly she’d lost the plot.
As for his darkly intoned question—she’d lied through her teeth because all she cared about was making sure Augustus never put two and two together if he was ever faced with Natanael.
Natanael… Oh, Lord. She’d wanted to text him before he went to sleep. But it was far too risky to fish her phone from her handbag right now. The bag she clutched to her stomach like a lifeline. Thank goodness she’d carried it and not left it with her case.
More to the point, thank heavens she hadn’t brought Nate to the Alps with her. The thought of Thane discovering him…carting him off to Galancia… No, that could never happen. Never. Thane was descended from a long line of militia. Royal males trained in guerrilla warfare. The best fighter pilots in the world. Some said all the boys were taken to the barracks to learn how to become soldiers at eight years old. The mere thought of Nate holding a weapon in four years’ time made acid rise and coat her throat. Plus, she really had no idea what Thane was capable of. Considering abduction was his modus operandi for their reunion.
She shuddered where she sat, swelling until she felt she might burst with the need to protect Nate at all costs. She hadn’t kept his identity a secret all this time to lose him now. Her little boy was having a long, happy and healthy life even if it killed her.
At this rate, Luce, it just might.
When she realised Thane was speaking again, she turned to face him and watched the soft skin around his eyes crinkle as he narrowed those black sapphire peepers on her.
‘So you do not care? You do not care that your fiancé may no longer want you—?’
‘He is not my fiancé.’ Not yet anyway. And she’d rather bask in the fantasy of freedom a while longer, thank you very much.
‘Now, are you sure about that, Luciana?’ he jeered. ‘Because he seemed to think you are. Or is your word now as empty as it was five years ago?’
She made a tiny choked squeak of affront. ‘And what exactly do you mean by that?’
Brooding and fierce, he leaned forward, attacking her brain with another infusion of his darkly sensual scent. ‘You made a promise to me. That you’d stay another week. That we would talk.’
She could virtually feel how tightly reined in he was, and Luciana delved into his turbulent stormy eyes because…was that hurt in his voice? Surely not. How could she possibly hurt this man? No. If anything she’d bruised his male ego. A man who wielded his kind of power likely wasn’t accustomed to being deserted.
Though either way, to be fair, she had promised him she would stay. Hadn’t she?
Yes. She had. They’d become hot and heavy so fast she’d wanted to tell him who she really was. Not to have lies whispering between the damp, tangled sheets. Because in her mind there’d been something so beautiful and pure about what they’d had together the dishonesty had shredded her heart.
She swallowed around the great lump in her throat. It was torture to remember. Utter torture. ‘I did promise you—you’re right. But that was before I found out who you were.’
With his bent elbow resting on the lip of the window, he curled his index finger over his mouth pensively and stared at her. ‘So you didn’t know who I was all along?’
Mouth arid, she licked over her lips. ‘No, I didn’t know who you were. Of course I didn’t.’
‘Are you telling me the truth? You swear it?’
‘Yes.’ Did he think she’d duped him? ‘I couldn’t have set up the way we met even if I tried, Thane. Don’t you remem—?’
Slam! She locked the vault shut before all the memories it had taken her so long to ensnare were unleashed. Escaping to create havoc in her soul. Best to forget. For all their sakes.
‘Let’s just call it an ironic twist of fate,’ she said, hearing the melancholy in her voice. ‘We were young. Stupid. Reckless. I didn’t know you at all. I’d fallen into bed with a stranger…’ And I awoke to a nightmare. ‘I found your papers, Thane.’
She’d never forget that moment as long as she lived. Standing in the dim light of their bathroom, feeling naked and exposed, his nationality papers for travel that she’d stumbled across quivering in her hand. The realisation she was sleeping with the enemy.
‘And after three, almost four weeks,’ he said fiercely, ‘of our being inseparable, spending every waking and sleeping moment together, your first instinct was to run? With not one word? Do you have any idea…?’
Veering away from her, he clenched his jaw so tight she heard his molars groan in protest. And she swiftly reassessed the idea that she’d caused him pain by leaving the way she had.
Remorse gathered in the space behind her ribs and trickled down into her stomach to merge with the ever-present pool of guilt that swelled and churned with her secrets every minute of every day. The painful struggle between truth and darkness.
But, looking back, she remembered she’d been consumed with the need to flee.
First had come denial and bewilderment. She’d been unable to match the dark, dangerous, merciless Prince with the somewhat shy—at least around women—rock music lover who’d held her cherishingly tight through endless nights of bliss. Then terror had set in, leaving her panic-stricken, contemplating how he’d react when he discovered who she was. And heartache, knowing she had to leave before he found out. Knowing that while she toyed with the temptation of staying in touch, meeting up again, suddenly another hour was too much of a hazard, a risk, never mind some far-off midnight tryst.
So she’d run. Taken the good memories instead of tainting them with bitterness and regret. Run as fast as she could with her heart tearing apart.
Glancing out at the snow-capped peaks of the Tarentaise Valley, she took a deep breath and then exhaled, her warm breath painting a misty cloud upon the window. If he needed closure in order to forget and let her go, then so be it.
‘I’m sorry I didn’t let you know I was leaving. Write you a note or something. I didn’t mean to hurt you that way. But it was over. We had an affair—that’s all. There could never have been a future for us.’
Chills skittered over her skin and she crossed her arms over her chest, rubbing the gooseflesh from her shoulders. She was so lost in thought she didn’t notice his hand reaching across the back of the bench seat until it was in her periphery and she flinched. Hard. Unsure what to expect from him.
‘Are you afraid of me now?’ he asked, his voice gruff as if she’d sanded the edge off his volatility.
Was she afraid of him? Genuinely?
No. Though she couldn’t really understand why.
Because deep down you know he won’t hurt you. Deep down you know the man who took your innocence with such gentle passionate persuasion would never physically hurt you in a million years.
But that didn’t mean he couldn’t emotionally destroy her. And Nate. That he was capable of.
So maybe she did fear him. Just not in the way he meant.
Luciana gave her head a little shake and he picked up a lock of her hair and rubbed the strands between his fingertips. ‘I wouldn’t have recognised you. How different you look this way.’
She had the ludicrous desire to ask him if he liked the way she looked. The real her. Or if he’d fallen for a black-haired hippy who didn’t exist. But the reality was it was best she didn’t know.
‘It was a lifetime ago,’ she said, immensely proud of her strong voice when she felt so weak when he was close. ‘Forget the person I pretended to be in Zurich. I was just…’ She had to swallow hard to push the words out. ‘Acting out. Letting loose. Having a bit of fun.’
Such a lie. But maybe if he thought their wild, hedonistic fling meant nothing to her he’d hate her. Let her go…
Et voilà.
Easing back, he created a distance that felt as deep and wide as the Arunthian falls.
‘Fun,’ he repeated tonelessly. ‘Well, that makes both of us.’
Her stomach plunged to the leather seat with a disheartened thump. Because it was just as she’d always suspected.
Stiffening her spine, she brushed her hair back from her face. ‘There you go, then. There really is no point in dragging this out.’
He said nothing. Simply leaned back and glared at her with such intensity she felt transparent.
Jittery, she shifted in her seat and rammed her point home.
‘Thane, you have to let me go back to Arunthia. To my family. They need me. I’ve got to get married soon. I—’
‘No.’
‘No? But haven’t I given you an explanation? What more could you possibly want from me?’
‘That is a very good question, princesa.’
And Luciana had the feeling she wasn’t going to like the answer. Not one bit.
CHAPTER THREE
THANE IGNORED THE EYES that were boring into his skull and riffled through the mini-bar of the limousine for some hard liquor. She was turning him to drink already—he was insane even to contemplate what enticed his mind.
Snatching a miniature of bourbon, he unscrewed the lid, then tipped the contents onto his tongue and let the fiery liquid trickle down his throat in a heavenly slow burn.
From the corner of his eye he saw Luciana pick up a bottle of sparkling water and commanded himself not to look, to watch. To devour all that beautiful, riveting bone structure—her nose a delicate slope of pure femininity, pronounced razor-sharp cheekbones a supermodel would kill for—those intoxicating brandy-gold eyes and that glossy, over-full wanton mouth as she drank.
Dios, she made his flesh and blood blaze. And it had been so long since he’d felt anything that he was consumed. By want. By hate. It was a terrifically violent and lethal combination that was taking all of his will power to control.
While she speared darts of ire or disbelief in his direction, poised and elegant in her glamorous couture black and white ensemble, all he could think of was her pupils dilated, her hair tossed over his pillow in gloriously messy abandon, and raw, primal sheet-clawing passion.
But it was more than that, wasn’t it? He’d thought his memories were long dead, murdered by the passage of time and the strife in Galancia, but since he’d touched her he’d started to remember.
Remember being held close against her bare skin, feeling truly wanted—a real man made from flesh and hot blood, willing to pay whatever price it took to sustain that feeling a while longer. And, while he wanted that back, he knew it was lost to him.
‘Having a bit of fun. Letting loose.’
Any molecule of hope he’d harboured that she’d felt something for him disintegrated, and inside his chest that lump of stone where his heart should be cracked down the centre and crumbled to dust.
Good. He didn’t want the weak and tender emotions involved in this. Never had to begin with. But the beguiling creature had lured him in. Lesson learned.
‘Are you going to tell me what’s going on in that head of yours?’ she asked, before gnawing on her crimson bruised bottom lip.
‘As soon as I figure it out, yes.’ Because despite his misgivings, despite what she’d said, something…something told him she held the key to his fate. He couldn’t explain it if he tried—just as he’d never been able to explain how he’d known she was in grave danger the day they’d met. How when their eyes had locked he’d known she belonged to him.
Ignorant of his internal debate, she heaved a great sigh at his cool reply. But it had taken him less than ten seconds to figure out the best way to play this game: total emotional lockdown. Which was no inconsiderable feat when that aloof haughtiness kept invading her body like some freakish poltergeist and he was overcome with the violent need to grab her and shake it loose. Then there was the way her mind clearly often wandered down a path that he suspected was paved with turmoil, because guilt would walk all over her face. It made him want to climb into her brain and seduce her secrets.
The bright lights of the Altiport runway came into view, as did his sleek black private jet embellished with the Guerrero family crest—a large snake curling around the blade of a sword—and she clutched her bag to her chest as if it held the crown jewels. Which, he conceded, might be true. His knowledge of women’s paraphernalia was zilch.
‘Thane, look. Be reasonable about this. I’m your enemy—there isn’t anything I could give you but trouble. For starters, the bellboy saw me drive away in your car. Does he know who you are?’
He shrugged his wide shoulders. ‘I imagine so. I believe I am very difficult to miss.’
She rolled her eyes. ‘Arrogance really should be your middle name. My point is: come morning, Augustus will know I’m with you. Then he’ll call my father—because, let me tell you, they are as thick as thieves. Soon after my father will be on the warpath. So you have to let me go home. My family will worry if I just vanish into thin air.’
‘Let them suffer,’ he said. Just as he’d done. Trying to fill the empty, aching void of losing her. Had she cared for him? Obviously not.
She huffed in disgust. ‘Well, how gallant of you. How would you feel if someone you loved disappeared off the face of the earth?’
His mouth shaped to tell her he knew exactly how it felt, but first his pride stopped him, and then her words. Love? This had nothing to do with love. He was a protective man by nature, and naturally that extended to her. She’d been his. Correction: she was his. Regardless of her true identity. Moreover, he would kiss Arunthian soil before he admitted any hint of vulnerability to her. To anyone. He’d been nine years old when he’d last made that mistake—telling his father that enclosed spaces made him violently sick. Twenty-four hours down an abandoned well had taught him much.
‘Honestly, could you be a more heartless brute?’
It didn’t escape him that he’d been called worse things in his time—a murderer, a mercenary, a traitor—so why the devil it stung coming from her was a mystery.
‘I’m sure I could if I put my mind to it,’ he drawled darkly.
‘But you’re going to be a wanted man. Do you want to spend the rest of your days in a jail cell?’
Thane turned to face her and raised one mocking eyebrow. ‘Your father would have to catch me first princesa—and, believe me, that is impossible.’
‘It’s not about catching you,’ she said, pointing at his shirt before turning the same finger back on herself. ‘He’ll come for me. Do you want an Arunthian army on your doorstep?’
As if.
‘They would never get through Galancian airspace. Do you forget who I am? Your security and your army are no match for mine.’
‘You’re probably right. But that’s because we are peacekeepers. Not fighters. Our people don’t live in fear of an iron-fisted rule. We are rich in life and happiness and that is more important to us.’
Thane scoffed. Did she think he didn’t want those things for his own people? What did she think he fought for? The good of his health? But the topic did bring him full circle to his hellishly risky concept. She could, in effect, help him gain a better life for them. Relax that iron-fisted rule she’d just accused him of by placing his crown in his hands.
Dios, it was mad even to think any union could possibly work, but the notion spun his brain into a frenzied furore. Snagging on one name: Augustus.
He was the biggest unknown in all of this. What the hell was a woman like Luciana doing with a scumbag like him? He was missing something vital here, and he did not appreciate having only half the intel on a situation.
During the twenty minutes he’d waited for her to emerge from the lodge he’d accessed every file he could uncover.
Princess Luciana Valentia Thyssen Verbault. Born and raised in Arunthia. Schooled at Eton and Cambridge, England. No record of her time in Zurich. No surprise there, since she’d been a carousing black-haired gypsy. Five years in China. Low-key. There was only the odd photograph during that time, either with a dark-haired friend and two small boys, or back home at a royal function—as if she’d returned to Arunthia for that purpose entirely, only to travel straight back to China. So what had been there to lure her back again and again? A job? Maybe. But why did his instincts tell him it was a man?
One thing was clear: unless he got a better picture of her life his plans would be dead in the water before he’d even launched them off the jetty.
While all this circled around in his head like manic vultures, Luciana launched into another talkfest about Arunthia: how content the people were, how he could learn a thing or two. The bare-faced cheek of it! Her arms wafted in the air as she warmed to her subject. And, Dios, no matter what crap came out of her mouth, she was the picture of enthralling passionate beauty.
He’d adored that about her. How she could talk for hours. About nothing in particular. Silly, mundane things—music, movies and architecture. He’d revelled in that freedom from his responsibilities, the chance to forget the trouble at home for a while. Ironic that he’d chosen a Zurich festival, having been once before in his uni days, to get away from it all and met a woman from his own sphere who’d been doing exactly the same thing.
An odd memory hit and a smile curved his lips. One she caught.