About the Authors

JULIA JAMES lives in England and adores the peaceful verdant countryside and the wild shores of Cornwall. She also loves the Mediterranean—so rich in myth and history, with its sunbaked landscapes and olive groves, ancient ruins and azure seas. ‘The perfect setting for romance!’ she says. ‘Rivalled only by the lush tropical heat of the Caribbean—palms swaying by a silver sand beach lapped by turquoise water… What more could lovers want?’

USA TODAY bestselling author JENNIE LUCAS’s parents owned a bookstore, so she grew up surrounded by books, dreaming about faraway lands. A fourth-generation Westerner, she went east at sixteen to boarding school on a scholarship, wandered the world, got married, then finally worked her way through college before happily returning to her hometown. A 2010 RITA® Award finalist and 2005 Golden Heart® Award winner, she lives in Idaho with her husband and children.

Also by Julia James

Securing the Greek’s Legacy

The Forbidden Touch of Sanguardo

Captivated by the Greek

A Tycoon to Be Reckoned With

A Cinderella for the Greek

The Greek’s Secret Son

Tycoon’s Ring of Convenience

Heiress’s Pregnancy Scandal

Billionaire’s Mediterranean Proposal

Irresistible Bargain with the Greek

Mistress to Wife miniseries

Claiming His Scandalous Love-Child

Carrying His Scandalous Heir

Also by Jennie Lucas

The Sheikh’s Last Seduction

Uncovering Her Nine-Month Secret

Nine Months to Redeem Him

A Ring for Vincenzo’s Heir

Baby of His Revenge

The Consequence of His Vengeance

Carrying the Spaniard’s Child

Claiming His Nine-Month Consequence

Chosen as the Sheikh’s Royal Bride

Christmas Baby for the Greek

Secret Heirs and Scandalous Brides miniseries

The Secret the Italian Claims

The Heir the Prince Secures

The Baby the Billionaire Demands

Discover more at millsandboon.co.uk.

The Greek’s Duty-Bound Royal Bride

Julia James

Her Boss’s One-Night Baby

Jennie Lucas

www.millsandboon.co.uk

ISBN: 978-0-008-90015-1

THE GREEK’S DUTY-BOUND ROYAL BRIDE & HER BOSS’S ONE-NIGHT BABY

The Greek’s Duty-Bound Royal Bride © 2020 Julia James Her Boss’s One-Night Baby © 2020 Jennie Lucas

Published in Great Britain 2020

by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF

All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.

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Table of Contents

Cover

About the Authors

Booklist

Title Page

Copyright

Note to Readers

The Greek’s Duty-Bound Royal Bride

Back Cover Text

Dedication

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

EPILOGUE

Her Boss’s One-Night Baby

Back Cover Text

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

About the Publisher

The Greek’s Duty-Bound Royal Bride

Julia James

A convenient marriage deal...

Sealed in the royal bed!

Princess Elizsaveta must walk down the aisle. It’s the only way to save her exiled family from bankruptcy. For duty, she’ll accept brooding Greek Leon’s bargain: her royal status in exchange for his financial support. And she’ll bury her dreams of a real relationship...

Ellie’s wholly unprepared for the all-consuming chemistry that ignites between them! But although his touch is addictive, falling for Leon’s masculine appeal is deeply dangerous. He’s always been clear: his heart is under lock and key. Unless Ellie can change his mind...

For Ilona—and the cultural heritage you gave me.

CHAPTER ONE

LEON DUKARIS GLANCED at the invoice on his desk and then, with an indifferent shrug of one broad shoulder, initialled the hefty sum for payment.

The Viscari St James was one of London’s most expensive and exclusive hotels, and the coup that had ejected Mikal of Karylya from his Grand Duchy in the heart of central Europe had happened with lightning speed less than two weeks ago, so it was not surprising that the Grand Duke was finding it difficult to adjust his royal lifestyle to that of impoverished former ruler, with none of the wealth of his small but highly prosperous fiefdom at his disposal any longer.

It was a difficulty that suited Leon—bankrolling the Grand Duke’s exile was not largesse on his part in the slightest. He gave a tight smile, accentuating the strong planes of his face and indenting the deep lines around his well-shaped mouth, sharpening the gold flecks in his eyes. It was, rather, an investment.

One that he fully intended to pay out handsomely.

His eyes darkened. Suddenly he was not seeing the expensively furnished office, towering over the City of London far below, the private domain of a billionaire and his working environment. His vision went way beyond that—way back into the past. The bitter, impoverished past...

The line for the soup kitchen in the bleak Athens winter, holes in the soles of his shoes, shivering in the cold, queuing for hot food to take back to the cramped lodging where he and his mother had to live now they’d been evicted from their spacious apartment for non-payment of rent. He is all his mother has now—the husband who professed to love her for all eternity has run out on her, abandoning her and him, their young teenage son, to the worst that the collapse of the Greek economy in the great recession over a dozen years ago can do to them...

And the worst had been bad—very bad—leaving them in an abject poverty that Leon had vowed he would escape, however long it took him.

And he had escaped. His success, doggedly pursued, his focus on nothing else, had lifted him rung by rung up the ladder of financial success. He had taken risks that had always paid off, even if he’d had to steel his nerves with every speculative gamble he pulled off. It had been a relentless pursuit of wealth that had seen him become a financial speculator extraordinaire, spotting multi-million-euro opportunities before others did and seizing them, each one taking him further up into the stratosphere of billionairedom.

But now he wanted his money to achieve something else for him. His smile widened into a tight line of satisfaction. Something that had now come within his reach, thanks to the coup in Karylya that had ousted its sovereign.

The gold glint in Leon’s night-dark eyes came again at the thought. A princess bride to set the seal on his dizzying ascent from the lines for the soup kitchen.

Grand Duke Mikal’s daughter.

‘Ellie! There is news about your father! Bad news!’

In her head, Ellie could hear the alarm in her mother’s voice, echoing still as she emerged from the tube station at Piccadilly Circus, hurrying down St James’s and into the Hotel Viscari.

A stone’s throw from St James’s Palace, Clarence House and Buckingham Palace itself, it was often frequented by diplomats, foreign politicians and even visiting royalty.

Including deposed visiting royalty.

Deposed.

The word rang chill in Ellie’s head and she felt her stomach clench. The coup causing her father and his family to flee their fairy-tale palace in Karylya had turned the Grand Duke into nothing more than a former sovereign in exile. Ellie’s glance swept the Edwardian opulence of the Viscari’s marbled lobby. Albeit a very luxurious exile...

She hastened up to the reception desk. ‘Grand Duke Mikal’s suite, please!’ she exclaimed, breathless from hurrying and agitation.

‘Whom shall I say?’ asked the receptionist, lifting her phone.

She sounded doubtful, and Ellie could understand why. Her work-day outfit, crumpled from an overnight transatlantic flight, was more suited to the life she lived in rural Somerset with her mother and stepfather, where she had been since an infant, than to someone who had an entrée to a royal suite at a deluxe London hotel.

‘Just say Lisi!’ she replied, giving the Karylyan diminutive of her name.

Moments later the receptionist’s attitude had changed and she was briskly summoning a bellhop. ‘Escort Her Highness to the Royal Suite,’ she instructed.

As she sped upwards in the elevator Ellie wished her identity had not been guessed—she never used her title anywhere outside Karylya, except on rare state occasions with her father. Instead she used the English diminutive and her British stepfather’s surname—the name on her passport. Ellie Peters. It made life a lot simpler. And it was also considerably shorter than her patronym.

Elizsaveta Gisella Carolinya Augusta Feoderova Alexandreina Zsofia Turmburg-Malavic Karpardy.

She must have been named after every single aunt, grandmother and other female member of every European royal house her father claimed kin with!

From Hapsburgs to Romanovs, and any number of German royal houses, not to mention Polish, Hungarian and Lithuanian ones, and even an Ottoman or two thrown in somewhere for good measure, the nine-hundred-year-old dynasty had somehow, by luck, determination, shrewd alliances and even shrewder marriages, clung on to the mountain fastness that was the Grand Duchy of Karylya, with its high snow-capped peaks and deep verdant valleys, its dark pine forests and rushing rivers, glacial lakes and modern ski slopes.

Except now—Ellie felt her stomach clench in dismay and disbelief at the news her mother had announced—that nine-hundred-year possession had suddenly, devastatingly, come to an end...

The elevator’s polished doors slid open as the car came to a halt and Ellie stepped out into the quiet, deserted lobby of this exclusive floor of suites and residences. One of the doors opposite was flung open and a figure came hurtling through, embracing her as she hurried forward.

‘Oh, Lisi, thank heavens you are here!’

It was her younger sister, Marika—her half-sister, actually, one of her two half-siblings, offspring of her father and his second wife. Although Marika was here with her parents, Ellie knew from the fractured phone call she’d made from the airport that her younger brother, Niki, her father’s heir—his former heir, she realised now, with a start of dismayed realisation—was still at school in Switzerland, in the throes of critically important university entrance exams.

How he had taken the grim news Ellie didn’t know—but Marika, as was clear from her heartfelt cry now, was not coping well.

‘I can’t believe this has happened!’ she heard herself cry back, answering her sister in the Karylyan Marika had used.

‘It’s like a nightmare!’ Marika said, drawing Ellie into the suite.

‘How is Papa?’ Ellie asked, her voice sombre.

‘Shell-shocked. He can’t take it in. No more can Mutti—’ Marika gave a shuddering sigh. ‘Come on...come in. Papa’s been waiting and waiting for you.’

Ellie hurried forward into the spacious reception room beyond the suite’s hallway. Absently, she took in the luxury of the place—though, of course, compared with the palace it was nothing at all...

Inside, she saw the room was crowded—her father, his wife the Grand Duchess, and several of the palace staff were there. Her father was standing immobile by the plate glass window that opened on to a private terrace, staring out over the rooftops. He turned as Ellie came in, and instinctively she rushed to hug him.

A sharp voice stilled her. ‘Elizsaveta! You forget yourself!’

It was the Grand Duchess, her stepmother, admonishing her. Realising what she was being called to do, she took a breath, dropping an awkward curtsy in her knee-length skirt. But as she did so she felt her stomach hollowing. Her father was no longer a reigning sovereign...

He came forward now, to take her hands and press them in his cold ones. ‘You finally came,’ he said. There was both relief and a tinge of criticism in his tone.

Ellie swallowed. ‘I’m sorry, Papa—we were in Canada...far in the north. Filming with Malcolm. Communication was difficult, we were so remote, and then I had to get back here and—’

She stopped. In the disaster that had befallen him her father would hardly be concerned about her mother and her stepfather, a distinguished wildlife documentary filmmaker, whose work took him all over the world and for whom her mother had left her royal husband when Ellie had been only a baby.

‘Well, you are here now, thankfully,’ her father said, his voice warmer. Then he turned to one of the nearby members of staff. ‘Josef—refreshments!’ he commanded.

Ellie bit her lip. She’d always believed her father’s stiffly imperious manner had contributed to his growing unpopularity in Karylya. And her unspoken thoughts had been echoed in all the political analyses she had read since the news had broken, giving the reasons for the coup.

That and his intransigent refusal to entertain any degree of constitutional, fiscal or social reform in order to defuse the potentially toxic and historically fraught ethnic mix of the population, whose internecine rivalries had always required careful and constant balancing against each other to prevent any one minority feeling slighted and ignored.

Ellie sighed inwardly. The trouble was her father lacked the astute political management skills and charismatic, outgoing personality of his own father. Grand Duke Nikolai had successfully steered Karylya through the diplomatic minefield of the Iron Curtain decades, maintaining the duchy’s precarious independence against huge foreign pressures and gaining the great prosperity the duchy now enjoyed. Her father’s reserve and awkwardness had, in the ten years of his reign, only managed to alienate every faction—even those traditionally most supportive of him.

Which had left none to support him when the coup, led from the High Council by the leader of the ethnic faction with the strongest perceived grievances, had erupted.

Now her father and his Grand Duchess were harbouring a deep and, she allowed, understandable anger and resentment at their fate. It was evident in their condemnation of all who had contributed to their ignominious flight. For her part, Ellie merely murmured sympathetically—it was obvious her father and stepmother needed to vent their understandably strong emotions. More rational discussion could take place later—she hoped. And all the awkward questions could be asked later, too.

Finally taking refuge in Marika’s bedroom, Ellie asked the question which was most concerning her, which she could not possibly have asked in front of any member of the remaining royal staff, however loyal they were.

‘Marika, what’s happening about Papa’s finances? What has the new government agreed to? It must have been quite a generous settlement...’ She glanced around her at the luxuriously appointed bedroom. ‘This place doesn’t come cheap, that’s for sure!’

But her sister was looking at her with an expression that struck a chill through her. And her features were strained.

‘Papa isn’t paying for this hotel, Lisi! He can’t afford it—oh, Lisi, he can’t afford anything at all! We’re completely penniless!’

The blood drained from Ellie’s face. ‘Penniless?’ she echoed in a hollow voice.

Her sister nodded, her features still contorted. ‘He’s been told by the new head of government that he won’t get any kind of financial settlement at all, and that all the royal assets have been frozen!’

‘Nothing?’ Ellie gasped disbelievingly. Then her eyes went around the luxuriously appointed bedroom again. ‘But...but this place...? You’ve been here nearly a fortnight already...’

Consternation was flooding through her as Marika’s expression changed. Now awkwardness was vivid in her pretty features.

‘Like I said, Lisi... Papa isn’t paying for this suite—someone else is.’

Ellie stared, dismay filling her like cold water. ‘But who?’ she demanded.

Marika’s answer was fractured and disjointed. ‘He’s called Leon—Leon Dukaris—and he’s a billionaire—Greek. He was in Karylya last summer, on business. He came to the summer opera gala that Mutti is patroness for. He was introduced to us—and Papa invited him to a garden party at the palace. Then he came to a reception and a dinner, too—I didn’t really pay any attention. It was a business affair with some of the ministers and other foreign investors. He was mostly talking to them and Papa. I... I don’t really know much more, except that when we arrived in London he got in touch with Papa and told him he would underwrite our expenses...’

Ellie was still staring. ‘But why? Why should this...this Leon Dukaris care about Papa? Let alone fork out for this place! If he wants to do business in Karylya it’s not Papa he should be making up to,’ she finished bitterly.

A tide of colour washed up her sister’s face, and something about Marika’s expression curdled Ellie’s blood.

‘Marika, what is it?’ she asked urgently.

Her sister was twisting her hands, a look of anguish in her face. ‘Oh, God, Lisi—there’s only one reason he’s paying for everything! He wants...’ She swallowed. ‘He wants to marry me!’

Ellie’s eyes widened in total disbelief. ‘Marry you? You can’t be serious!’

‘He’s making it obvious!’ Marika cried. ‘He’s been here several times, always very attentive to me. Way more than just being polite! I do my best to put him off, but I know Mutti is hoping I’ll encourage him. She’s worried sick about what’s going to happen to us now, and if he really wants to marry me—’

She broke off, her voice choking. Ellie’s dismay doubled. It was bad enough learning that her father was penniless, and that he was being bankrolled by some unknown Greek billionaire...but that her sister should believe the Greek billionaire wanted to marry her...?

Surely Marika was imagining it? Upset and overwrought as she so obviously was right now by the disaster that had befallen their family?

In a macabre attempt at humour, at a time when humour was absolutely impossible, Ellie heard herself blurt out, ‘Just please don’t tell me that this Leon Dukaris is some creepy, lecherous old man with a fat gut and piggy eyes!’

‘No, not exactly,’ Marika answered in a shaky voice. But then her eyes welled with tears. ‘Oh, Lisi, it doesn’t matter what he looks like or who he is!’ Her tears spilled over into open weeping. ‘I’m in love with someone else!’ she cried. ‘So I can’t marry Leon Dukaris! I just can’t!’

Leon vaulted from his limo, now drawn up in the entrance sweep of the Viscari St James, and strode into the lobby. It was time to visit the royal family again.

He had called upon the Grand Duke several times since his abrupt arrival in London two weeks ago—ostensibly to give him his assurance that all his expenses would be underwritten by himself for the duration of his stay, until such time as he had decided where to live out his exile and do whatever it was that former monarchs did when their countries no longer wanted them. But the real reason for his visits was quite different.

He was trying to decide whether he was truly going to go ahead with claiming a princess for his bride—the ultimate prize.

Thoughts played across his mind as the elevator doors to the penthouse floor slid shut. Was he simply being fanciful in even giving house room to the idea? It had come to him the previous summer, when he had been visiting Karylya on business, being invited to the palace, socialising with the royal family, meeting Princess Marika...

At the time he had given it no serious thought, but the idea had grown on him during the intervening months. The girl, though a brunette, and quiet in her manner, was very pretty, and if his own tastes actually ran to blondes—well, for the sake of a princess bride surely he could change his tastes...

Nor was she unintelligent, from what he could judge of her, and that was another key advantage. His features hardened momentarily. So was the crucial fact that, as a princess, she’d be perfectly open to the idea of marrying for practical reasons. Love—his mouth tightened—would not get to taint their marriage...

He snapped his mind away from his darkening thoughts. No, there was nothing to rule Princess Marika out of his consideration...and now that events had taken such a disastrous turn for the Karylyan royal family, from the princess’s point of view—and her parents’—there was every incentive for her to consider his proposal seriously.

If he were to make one, of course...

But should I?

That his suit would be favoured by her parents was obvious—what could be more desirable than a very wealthy son-in-law to keep on bankrolling their exile indefinitely? As for the princess herself... He knew without vanity that he was highly attractive to women—his life, even while he had still been in the process of making his huge fortune, had been filled with eager females demonstrating that undeniable fact to him. Now, in his thirties, he was done playing the field. He would be perfectly happy to settle down with one agreeable female and he would make the princess a good husband.

And theirs would be an honest marriage. He wouldn’t delude and deceive his bride with hypocritical declarations of undying love and endless mouthing of romantic flummery that meant nothing when the chips were down.

Leon’s dark eyes hardened with harsh memory. His father had made such endless declarations—Leon had grown up hearing him telling his mother how devoted he was to her, how much he loved her, how she meant the world to him, how she was the moon and the stars and all the other romantic verbiage he had lavished upon her.

It had counted for nothing.

When the Greek economy had crashed his father had taken off with another woman—conveniently wealthy—leaving his heartbroken wife and his teenage son to cope on their own. Abandoning them totally.

His mother had been devastated by the betrayal—Leon had been only angry. Deeply, bitterly angry. And contemptuous of the man who had abandoned them.

I will never be like him—never! I will never do to a woman what my father did to my mother! Because I will never tell a woman I love her. Because I will never fall in love. Because love doesn’t exist—only meaningless words that lie...and destroy.

The elevator glided to a halt, the doors sliding open, and Leon shook his dark memories from him. The miseries of his teenage years were gone and he would not be haunted by them. He had made his life on his own terms—and those were the terms he would make any marriage on. Terms that would never include what did not exist—would never include love...

His wife, when he married—whoever she was, princess or not—would get respect, regard, friendship and companionship.

And, of course, desire. That went without saying...

It was a word he should not have admitted into his thoughts at that moment. Because as he strode out of the elevator the door to the royal suite opened and a woman emerged.

Instinctively his eyes took her in, in one comprehensive sweep.

Tall, blonde, slender, with grey-blue eyes and her hair caught back in a ponytail. Not wearing any make-up. Her clothes non-descript—certainly not couture or designer. Yet that didn’t matter in the least. Because she was, without doubt, breathtakingly, stunningly beautiful... Instantly desirable.

He felt a rush of adrenaline quicken in his bloodstream.

Who is she?

He had never seen her before—no woman that stunning would have escaped his eye.

He realised she was gazing at him, stopped in her tracks just as he was. For a moment—an enjoyably adrenaline-fuelled moment—Leon allowed himself the pleasure of meeting her gaze full-on, letting her see just how pleasurable it was for him to look at her...

Then, abruptly, her eyes peeled away from his and he saw colour flare across her high-cut cheekbones. Dipping her head, she hurried forward, veering around him to dive into the waiting elevator behind him. He gave a low laugh. Whoever she was, if she had joined the entourage of the Grand Duke, in whatever capacity, he would at some point see her again. And that would suit him very well...

His thoughts cut out. Realisation slammed into him. Hell, no, it would not suit him to see the breathtaking blonde again!

Taking an incised breath, he strode forward again, heading for the door of the royal suite. The breathtaking blonde, whoever she was, could be no concern of his. He had a princess to woo...

CHAPTER TWO

ELLIE SLUMPED BACK against the wall of the elevator car, feeling weak. Her heart was thumping like a sledgehammer. Oh, sweet heaven, what had just happened?

She had issued from her father’s suite and, without the slightest warning that it was about to happen, had all but rushed right into the most devastating male she had ever set eyes on in her life...

Talk about tall, dark and handsome!

She felt weakness flush through her again, her heart-rate quicken. It had lasted only a handful of moments—a silent gasp from her, a sweep of night-dark eyes. That was all she’d needed to take in his Savile-Row-tailoring, his six-foot-plus height, broad shoulders and lean hips, his planed features... And those night-dark eyes, looking her over, liking what he was seeing, making no secret of it.

She shook her head angrily, as if to dissipate the after-burn on her retinas. Oh, what did it matter who that man had been? She had far more important things to think about.

Disbelief was still uppermost—surely her sister was just imagining what she’d told her? That some unknown Greek billionaire thought he could marry her? It was outrageous—just outrageous!

She’s upset, that’s all. Upset, shocked and distraught after what has happened.

And then she remembered what Marika had gone on to say.

‘I’m in love with someone else!’

Ellie heard her sister’s tearful voice as the elevator plummeted to ground level. And when she’d learned just who it was that Marika was in love with, her heart had sunk yet further.

A man Marika’s parents would never allow her to marry...

Leon was bowing over the Grand Duchess’s regally outstretched hand.

‘Herr Dukaris.’ She smiled with an air of stately graciousness, her Germanic accent courtesy of her long lineage of Austrian aristocracy.

‘Highness...’ Leon intoned dutifully, having already made a brief bow to the Grand Duke.

He himself did not stand on ceremony, but what was the point of paying the exorbitant bills of European royalty if he did not acknowledge royal protocol? After all, either they were royal, and marrying into their family would set the glittering seal on his worldly success, or they were simply penniless refugees in a turbulent world, seeking a new life in a less troubled spot.

His eyes went to the royal couple’s daughter. She looked drawn and anxious, and Leon could understand why. Two weeks ago she’d been a princess in a fairy-tale castle in a fairy-tale realm—now she was just a penniless young woman with no prospects other than those an accident of birth had conferred upon her.

Well, if he did marry her, her fortunes would be restored and she would smile again.

He let his gaze rest on the princess with a warmth he hoped she might find encouraging. She was, he acknowledged, very attractive in her own way, with soft features and dark eyes, dark hair and a tender mouth. Yet before he could stop himself memory flashed in his head of that fleeting encounter just now in the penthouse lobby. Now, if that stunning blonde had been the woman now sitting beside the graciously smiling Grand Duchess...

He tore his inappropriate thoughts away again, warming his smile for Princess Marika. But she remained stubbornly woebegone, as if his smiling alarmed her. He gave an inward frown. But then the Grand Duke was relating, with understandable schadenfreude, how the new regime in his homeland was having difficulty getting endorsement from other governments.

‘Perhaps when there has been an election, as promised?’ Leon ventured.

It was the wrong thing to say.

A snort came from the Grand Duke. ‘A stage-managed, propaganda-fuelled plebiscite in order to elect a dictator! That’s all it will be!’

Leon made no reply. Like too many small countries in that highly volatile area of Europe, Karylya was a complicated cocktail of historic rivalries that still ran deep, despite the duchy’s new prosperity as a financial hub for the emerging economies of the former Eastern Bloc. ‘The Luxembourg of Central Europe’—that was the way the country was usually described, which was why he’d visited the place last summer.

And thereby made the personal acquaintance of the royal family and the princess...

His eyes rested on her now, their expression veiled, his thoughts inward. Was he seriously thinking of marrying Princess Marika?

Again the image of that breathtaking blonde out in the lobby fleeted across his consciousness. How could he be considering marriage to one woman if he was still capable of having his attention caught by another one?

Wariness filled him suddenly. Though he would never declare love for a woman, he would never be disloyal to any woman he married. Not like his despised father.

Where his father was now, he had no idea—and he did not want to know. His boyish idealisation of his father, his wanting only to grow up like him, had crashed and burnt to ashes the day he’d deserted him and his mother. His father had put his own selfish interests first, abandoning his heartbroken wife, making a mockery of all those endless romantic declarations of eternal love—and abandoning his own son, betraying his paternal responsibility towards him. Thinking only of himself.

He dragged his thoughts back to the present. Whatever he decided to do now, he must not, out of decency, lead the princess or her parents to hope he would offer for her and then not.

I have to decide.

But to decide meant getting to know her better—and that, after all, was what he was doing here in the Grand Duke’s suite.

‘I was wondering, Highness,’ he said now, addressing Princess Marika’s mother, ‘knowing your love of the opera, whether you might permit me to invite you to Covent Garden tonight? It is very short notice, and I apologise, but Torelli is to sing Turandot—and I recall from last summer that you hold her in some admiration.’

‘Turandot!’ exclaimed the Grand Duchess promptly. She bestowed her gracious smile upon Leon. ‘How very kind. It will help to divert my daughter at this distressing time—will it not, Marika?’

The princess managed a smile, albeit a wan one.

‘Then I will make the arrangements,’ Leon said.

He would hardly get Princess Marika to himself, but it would be a start, and being seen conspicuously in public with the Karylyan royal family would begin the process of associating himself with them. And, of course, he added cynically, them with him.

Satisfied, he took his leave. Only as he headed back towards the elevator did he find himself wondering, yet again, just who that breathtaking blonde had been. And trying not to wonder whether he would ever see her again. Trying not to want to see her again...

Sternly he admonished himself.

I’m here to marry a princess—not have my head turned by another woman!

Like it or not, he had better remember that.

Ellie was hurrying again—this time into the foyer of Covent Garden’s Royal Opera House. It was difficult in high heels and a full-length gown. Unlike her mother, who relished no longer having to meet the formal dress codes required of her when she had been Grand Duchess, Ellie’s stepmother had insisted on evening dress tonight.

‘It was quite bad enough you arriving the way you did, dressed like some sort of servant! It’s out of the question that you should not remember your position from now on. Especially now.’

The Grand Duchess had said no more, but Ellie had got the message.

Especially now that her father had been deposed and sent into exile...

Well, she’d done her best this evening, but her couture wardrobe had not made it out of Karylya with her father, and all she’d had on hand at Malcolm’s London flat was the outfit she’d worn to the last TV awards bash she’d attended with her mother and stepfather.

Much to Ellie’s relief, her father had agreed she could stay there, since the suite at the Viscari was already crowded, and it would have required taking yet another room, running up yet another hefty bill.

The pale blue evening gown was perfectly respectable, but it was not couture, and since her Karylyan jewellery had also not made it out of the duchy and into exile, she was wearing only a pearl necklace of her mother’s. She’d dressed her hair simply, applied her make-up likewise, and she knew perfectly well that no one would take her for a princess just by looking at her.

No more than that man did in the penthouse lobby.

She pushed the memory out of her head. Pointless to remember it—pointless to think about the man. Even more pointless to remember her inability to tear her eyes from him... No, it was far more important to focus on this evening.

Marika’s text had elaborated on her stepmother’s summons.

Lisi—you must come! Leon Dukaris will be there. Please, please, please try and keep him away from me!

Ellie’s expression grew grimmer as she gained the almost deserted lobby. The performance was about to begin. She would do her very best to keep Marika’s unwanted suitor from her, but her thoughts were troubled all the same as she was hurriedly shown up to the Dress Circle. For all that the man her sister had fallen in love with was someone utterly impossible for her to marry, Ellie had nothing but sympathy for Marika.

Of course Marika wanted only to marry for love!

Just as I do—and always have done!

In this day and age, after all, even a princess was allowed to believe in marrying for love...

Her face clouded. It was all very well believing that, and all very well trying to protect her sister from an unwanted suitor—but this unknown billionaire was all that stood between her father and penury. It was a sobering and unwelcome thought...

The house lights were already dimming as she was shown into the box reserved for them, and as they dimmed she made out the regal figures of her father and stepmother, already seated, another masculine figure silhouetted beside them, and beside him the slight figure of her sister.

Marika turned a grateful glance on Ellie as she hurriedly sketched a cursory curtsy to the Grand Duchess, who had thrown her an admonitory stare at her late arrival, before sitting down on the nearest chair, just behind her sister.

Busying herself with easing her skirts as she sat down, she dipped her head to smooth the fabric, missing the turning of the head of the masculine figure beside her sister until she raised her eyes, just as the conductor lifted his baton and the curtain rose on the opening scene of Turandot. But as she did so Ellie froze. The breath stilled in her lungs and her lips parted in shock.

The man who’d turned his head to see who was arriving so late was the same man who’d been crossing the penthouse suite lobby that afternoon. The man she had not been able to tear her eyes from.

She gave an audible gasp—she was sure of it—and for the slightest second it seemed she met that dark gaze again, head-on. Then, still in shock, she twisted her head so that her eyes were doggedly on the stage below. But she was sure that colour had run up into her cheeks and her heartbeat had grown ragged—and not just from the rush of getting here!

This was the unknown Greek—the nouveau riche billionaire bankrolling her father and setting his sights on her sister?

Her own words to Marika that morning replayed in her head now, as the opening scene of the opera got underway below her.

Old, fat and piggy-eyed...

She wanted to give a semi-hysterical choke—dear Lord, she couldn’t have been further from the truth!

What had Marika said? She racked her brain to recall her sister’s reply to her dismayed exclamation.

‘Not exactly...’

The hysterical flutter came again—no, definitely ‘not exactly’!

In fact, he was whatever was the total and absolute opposite of her scathing description.

She felt a rush go through her that was nothing to do with her hurried arrival and everything to do with the man sitting just in front of her. Her heart thumping in her chest, she thanked heaven she had the duration of the first act of the opera to recover her composure. Time, more importantly, to dwell on what Marika had told her.

It doesn’t matter that he’s like every woman’s fantasy male—he can’t seriously think he can marry Marika just like that! She must be imagining it—she must!

But then why was Leon Dukaris bothering to pick up the sky-high tab for her father’s hotel bill? What did he think was in it for him by doing so?

Cold chilled through her veins. Her eyes rested on him now—on the broad back, the well-shaped head silhouetted against the bright lights of the stage, where the main characters were singing their hearts out, completely ignored by her right now, for there was a drama going on right here in this box that outweighed anything going on down there on the stage...

She could see he’d crossed one long leg over the other, in a kind of negligent pose, and from her angle behind him she could make out half his profile. Apparently he was focused on the stage, but she fancied he was not particularly riveted by the scene or the singing.

She could see a square-palmed hand resting on one powerful thigh, the other laxly holding a programme. There was something about the way he was sitting that made her realise his body was very slightly inclined towards her sister, as if to indicate a nascent intimacy with her, making himself at ease in her body space.

An ease that was being entirely repudiated by her sister.

Marika was, Ellie could see, sitting ramrod-straight, tension in every line of her slight body. With a tightening of her mouth, she dragged her eyes away from her sister and the man beside her, back down on to the stage—where, she realised with a belated start of realisation, a princess was vowing never to marry and her unwanted suitor was determined she should do just that...

It mustn’t happen—it just mustn’t!

The words formed in Ellie’s head and it was not the drama on the stage that she meant.

Leon let his gaze rest on the stage below, but all he was aware of was the woman sitting behind him. He still could not believe it. She was the breathtaking female who’d stopped him in his tracks that afternoon.

Who is she?

The question burned for an answer, but the best he could come up with, having taken her in at a single brief glance, was that she was some kind of lady-in-waiting. She’d dropped a curtsy to the Grand Duchess, who’d frowned at her, and the gown she was wearing was no couture number, like the duchess’s and the princess’s. So, yes...lady-in-waiting would be the most likely role, wouldn’t it?

He could feel emotions conflicting within him—his overpowering visceral reaction to her clashing totally with his purpose to make Princess Marika his bride. This blonde might be a fatal distraction. He was feeling that distraction even now, fighting the urge to turn and look at her.

It seemed to take for ever before the curtain finally fell on the first act, to tumultuous applause, but suddenly the Grand Duchess was addressing him as the house lights came up.

‘Torelli is in perfect voice!’ she exclaimed approvingly.

‘Outstanding!’ Leon heard himself agree politely.

Then, forcing himself, he smiled at the princess beside him, who was still looking as stiff as she had all through the first act. Leon wished she would relax a little more.

‘What did you think?’ he asked in a kindly tone that he hoped was encouraging.

‘She was very good,’ Princess Marika said faintly.

Grand Duke Mikal was getting to his feet. ‘It was a damned long first act!’ he exclaimed.

Leon, who privately agreed, only gave a light laugh, getting to his feet as well. No sitting when royalty stood, he made himself remember. The Duchess was remaining seated, as was her daughter, but behind him Leon could hear the blonde lady-in-waiting standing up, with a slight rustle of her skirts.

Taking it as a signal, Leon finally allowed himself to turn, feeling it like the release of a bowstring drawn too tight to bear the tension much longer.

And there she was.

He felt his blood surge again as his eyes latched on to her. She was not looking at him, but he did not care. Was content just to drink her in.

She was as breathtakingly, stunningly beautiful as she’d been that first moment—even more so. She was wearing make-up now, enough to accentuate her eyes and mouth, to sculpt her cheekbones, and her hair was in a simple but elegant pleat. Her only jewellery was a single row of pearls, which added to the translucence of her fair skin. The style of the pale blue gown, albeit non-couture, complemented her slender beauty with its plissé bodice, cap sleeves and narrow skirt.

He felt desire, raw and insistent, spike through him. He tried to fight it back, knowing he should not indulge it—not if he was seriously considering marriage to Princess Marika.

But how can I think of such a thing when I’m reacting to another woman like this? Impossible! Just impossible!

As impossible, he recognised with a plunging realisation, as seeking to have anything to do with this unknown lady-in-waiting—even if he were to abandon the whole idea of marrying the Grand Duke’s daughter. Any such liaison would be out of the question for Their Highnesses...

Frustration bit at him from every side, but still he could not tear his eyes from her. Not yet—and not when, even though she was still not looking at him, he could tell with every masculine instinct that she was acutely aware of him, responding to him as strongly as he was to her, just as she had in their initial brief encounter in the penthouse lobby.

He wanted her to look at him, but behind him he heard the Grand Duke step forward, and the blonde dropped him a slight curtsy, murmuring something in Karylyan that Leon took to be an apology for her late arrival.

The Grand Duke said something admonitory, then turned to Leon. ‘You must allow me, Dukaris,’ the Grand Duke announced in English, in his heavy, formal manner, ‘to make another introduction to you.’

He paused, and Leon could not deny himself the veiled pleasure of letting his eyes go back to the blonde, because that was the only place he wanted his gaze to go. Back to feast on her pale, fine-sculpted beauty, her slender, full-breasted form. He wanted to breathe in the elusive, haunting scent of her perfume...even if she could never be his...

She was standing very stiffly, still not looking his way, but a tell-tale pulse was beating at her throat.

Then the Grand Duke was speaking again, the formality of his style even more pronounced. ‘My elder daughter,’ he was saying now, ‘the Princess Elizsaveta.’

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.

His expression altered slightly. Except, of course, the Princess Elizsaveta was not a wealthy young woman at all... She was, in fact, penniless. As penniless as the rest of her family.

Unless she marries me.

And she would—he was sure of it. After all, why else inform his PA that she wished to meet him for lunch today?

He got to his feet, murmuring a greeting, and she took her place opposite him. She had an air of calm composure about her, but Leon could sense that she was very far from being either calm or composed. Her every sense was on alert.

As the attentive waiter poured iced mineral water for her, then retreated, Leon sat back, his gaze openly appreciative of her blonde beauty, the soft grey-blue of her eyes, the curve of her mouth, the sculpted line of her high cheekbones, the glorious pale gold of her hair, caught now into a chignon with low-set combs.

He was enjoying the elegance of her poise, the sweet swell of her breasts... She really was so very, very beautiful... He felt his senses stir, warming in his veins. Confirming everything he’d made his decision on. She was, without a shadow of a doubt, the ideal royal bride for him.

She is everything I want—everything!

She was speaking, and he made himself pay attention. She had leant forward slightly, her pose straight-backed, her manner very different from the subdued restraint she adopted when she was with her father and stepmother, or her determinedly polite, impersonal demeanour that afternoon at Meredon. Now her tone of voice was brisk.

‘Thank you for agreeing to meet me, Mr Dukaris,’ she opened. ‘I have, as you may suppose, a particular reason for wanting you to do so.’

Leon veiled his gaze. He said nothing, merely gave a faint smile, waiting for her to continue.

For a moment she seemed unnerved, then she rallied, her tone still brisk. ‘I need to be clear,’ she went on, her voice deliberately cool, ‘about a very important matter.’

Ellie paused, resting her eyes on his. It was taking her considerable resolve to do so. From the moment she’d set eyes on him across the restaurant, his relaxed but powerful frame had drawn her gaze immediately, and the familiar rush to her blood had sent heat flushing through her. She had had to fight hard to subdue it as she took her place. This was no time for any such reaction to him. She was here for one reason, and one reason only.

‘Mr Dukaris, why are you paying for my father’s suite at the Viscari St James?’

Leon stilled. He had not anticipated quite so blunt a question. But then, after all, he recollected, she had been just as blunt that night at Turandot, when she had, out of nowhere, warned him off her sister.

He heard her continue.

‘Since my father now has neither power nor influence in Karylya, you have no obvious need for his favour. So...’ she took a breath ‘...there must be some other reason.’

He saw her lips press together, as if she were steeling herself to go on.

‘Tell me,’ she said, and her voice was cool, yet Leon could sense the tension in it all the same, ‘were you serious, at the opera, in your remark to me? Or was it some clumsy attempt at humour?’

There—she had said it—had finally put into words what had been preying on her mind all week and more. She had finally nerved herself to say what had to be said.

A faint smile flickered at his mouth, curving his sensuous lips, but Ellie refused to be distracted by it. She could not afford to be—not now. Far too much depended on his answer.

‘It would be humour in a very poor taste, would you not agree?’ A slight lift of one dark arched eyebrow accompanied his laconic reply.

‘Indeed,’ she said tightly. She took a breath, forced herself on. ‘And I have to allow that my sister may be quite mistaken in her...her interpretation of just why you are being so generous to my father at this difficult time for him.’

She watched him reach for his glass again, take another leisurely mouthful. He appeared to be infuriatingly relaxed, that long-lashed gaze from his night-dark eyes still veiled, his expression unreadable, yet she could sense there was a sudden tension in him. She held her breath, waiting for his reply on which so much would depend.

Enough to change my life for ever—

The enormity of the moment pressed upon her, and she could hear the slug of her own heartbeat in her chest.

After an age, his answer came. His eyes held hers, still veiled, but it was impossible not to be held by them.

‘No, she was not mistaken,’ he said. He started to lower his glass to the table. ‘Only,’ he went on, ‘mistaken as to my preference. As I told you, it is not your sister I have an interest in marrying...’

She heard him say it as clear as a bell, and not in any sardonic manner, or with any possible humorous twist, but with a sudden unveiling of his gaze upon her that stilled the breath in her lungs.

‘Why?’

The word burst from Ellie—she could not stop it. She realised she had leant forward, giving vehement emphasis to her blunt question.

He paused in the act of lowering his glass. His expression changed minutely.

‘Why...?’ he echoed.

Then his expression changed again. Ellie could see it—could see his eyes veiling again, a slight smile deliberately forming around that well-shaped mouth of his.

‘Why would any man not wish to marry a princess?’

The riposte was light, designed to deflect her, she knew. But this was no game, no joke, no humorous light-hearted situation. This was real—brutally, starkly real. Nothing to do with any fairy story...

‘Why do you want to marry a princess?’ Her question was like a scalpel. She wanted an answer and she would have one—a good one, a real one!—or she would walk away from the table right now.

She saw his expression change yet again. She gave a start as she realised that she recognised what she was now seeing in those incredible, long-lashed, gold-glinting night-dark eyes, whose gaze resting on her seemed able to turn her to liquid mush. But they were not doing so now—they were resting on her with something quite different in them. Something she had not seen before but was seeing now.

Honesty.

‘I have no idea how much you know about me, Princess,’ he said now, his voice as clear-sounding as hers had been, ‘but you will have been told, I am sure, that I am nothing more than a jumped-up, nouveau riche billionaire who has made a fortune speculating in the global markets. That is quite true, and a moment’s search on the Internet will confirm that. There is no secret about that. And nor, by the same token, do I make any secret of the fact that I have more money than I know what to do with.’

He gave the slightest shrug of his shoulder—as if, Ellie thought, all those billions were just toy money.

‘I want something else now,’ he said.

He set his glass back on the damask tablecloth with a click. Levelled his eyes straight at her.

‘I can buy anything I want—anything. But there are some things that are harder to buy. Without help.’ He gave a smile now—a tight, knowing smile. ‘The help of a princess. A princess as a glittering prize to crown my achievements in life.’

He sat back, his long, strong fingers still curved around his glass, eyes still resting on her with that same startling revelation that what he was doing now was telling her, bluntly and openly, just how it was.

Ellie kept her face still. ‘A princess?’ she echoed flatly. ‘Any princess?’ It was a taunt, a challenge.

That negligent shrug came again. ‘More or less,’ he admitted. ‘Of course the number of available princesses of marriageable age is highly limited, and even those who might be willing to marry someone like me would want to get something for themselves out of it.’

For my family, Ellie told herself. Only for them.

Yet even as she thought it she felt a flush go through her. And a thought that was utterly and totally irrelevant to the moment. Any woman who married Leon Dukaris would be getting him—all six-foot-plus of devastating male...

She dragged her thoughts away. They weren’t relevant to the brutal discussion she was having...had to have...with this man keeping her father from ignominious penury... Who was only doing so in the expectation of a royal bride.

That much was obvious now.

She sat back. She felt as if she was doing a workout with weights too heavy for her. Yet she had to continue. This had to play out to the end.

I have to know exactly what it is I’m letting myself in for. Marrying a man who only wants to marry me for my royal blood—no other reason.

She felt something twist inside her and suppressed it. There was no point in feeling it. No point lamenting that her life-long dream of marrying only for love had become impossible. No point in anything except doggedly continuing.

She took a breath, saying the thing she had to say. ‘Do you accept, Mr Dukaris, that my sister Marika is not “available”, as you so charmingly express it?’ Ellie could not stop a waspish note stinging her voice. ‘Because she is in love with someone else?’

A faintly bored look crossed his face. ‘I made that clear the other night, I believe,’ he answered. One arched eyebrow lifted. ‘With that established, shall we move on?’ he invited.

This time the taunt was his, not hers. He was taking control of the agenda, and making it clear to her that he was doing so.

‘So, having disposed of the subject of your sister,’ his tone of voice was bland now, ‘I assume you are about to set out the terms and conditions of our marriage.’

Leon saw her eyes flash, impartially observing how it lent a dramatic aspect to her pale beauty.

‘You take it for granted that I will accept your offer?’ she asked.

He gave a shake of his head. ‘No, I take it for granted that you do not wish to see your father destitute. And that as a loyal daughter you will do whatever is necessary to prevent that. And, of course...’ there was a sardonic note to his voice now ‘...to enable your sister to remain free to pine after another man.’ He frowned for a moment. ‘Who is she pining for, by the way?’

Ellie’s expression changed. ‘Someone she’ll never be allowed to marry. Antal Horvath.’

Leon’s frown deepened. ‘Antal Horvath? But isn’t that—?’

Ellie’s lips pressed together tightly. ‘Yes, precisely. Antal is the son of Matyas Horvath—the man who led the coup deposing my father and who aims to be voted President of Karylya in his place!’

Leon’s eyebrows rose. ‘Well, that unpalatable fact will certainly test her youthful ardour!’ he commented sardonically. ‘However...’ his voice changed ‘...the woes of your sister are irrelevant to ourselves,’ he said dismissively, reaching for the leather-bound menu.

He looked across at the princess he infinitely preferred to her hopelessly lovelorn sister. Satisfaction was rising through him—he was achieving exactly what he wanted, and that always felt good. Very good.

‘Shall we get on with ordering lunch?’ he invited. He was hungry and he wanted to eat.

He made to flick open the menu, but the princess’s voice stayed him.

‘Not yet.’

Her tone was commanding, as befitting a princess, and Leon paused, setting down the menu with an air of patience. He lifted an enquiring eyebrow.

Ellie felt her jaw tighten, felt turbid emotions, clashing and turbulent, sloshing inside her. If she really, truly were to do the unthinkable—agree to marry a man she barely knew—she had to be rock-solid sure she would get the protection for her family they needed.

‘There are, as you say, terms and conditions.’

She had got her brisk, businesslike tone back, and was relieved she could still adopt it. She took a breath, marshalling her strength to make things crystal-clear to him.

‘The first of which is that I want a time limit on this marriage. Two years—no more. That gives you ample time to take all the social advantages you want out of marrying a princess.’

His face was closed. For a second—just a second—Ellie felt a thrill of apprehension go through her. Then, abruptly, his expression changed and he gave a slight assenting shrug of his shoulder, as if the stipulation meant nothing to him.

That stipulation means nothing to me! Of course it doesn’t. Why should two years not give me everything I want from her? Why would I care if she leaves me then?

He felt his mind shift away, as if from a place it refused to go. Where it would always refuse to go.

‘Good,’ Ellie said decisively, relief filling her.

I have to know that I can eventually be free of this marriage—free to find the love I seek.

She forged on, knowing she had to put everything down on the table in one go.

A hefty capital sum settled on her father, yielding an income sufficient to maintain his dignity in exile, and a suitable property for him and his wife to live in gratis for their lifetime.

‘Oh, and you must guarantee the university fees for my brother Niki—and a dowry for my sister. So that she, at least, will have freedom of choice when it comes to her marriage. Sufficient, if necessary, to defy her parents—’ She broke off.

Was there a trace of bitterness in her voice? She hoped not—what was the point of bitterness in the face of brute reality?

Disbelief was possessing her—an air of absolute unreality that she was actually doing what she was doing...marrying a stranger in order to protect her father and his family. To ensure a future for them all.

At the price of mine.

She felt her stomach hollow. That was the truth of it, wasn’t it? Everyone got what they wanted except her. She was going to have to hand herself over to a complete stranger, have her own life hijacked by making a marriage to this man she barely knew.

A cry came from deep inside her.

This isn’t the marriage I wanted to make! I wanted to marry for love—only for love! Even princesses can marry for love.

But not this one. Like so many of her ancestors, she was going to marry for royal duty—because she was the only one in the family who could protect her father now, protect her stepmother, her siblings.

She felt a wash of misery flush through her and her eyes dropped away, her throat tightening.

She heard Leon Dukaris—the vastly rich billionaire who was going to ensure her family’s future at the price she had agreed to pay for it—agreeing to all she demanded. And for a second—just a second—panic flared in her eyes. This marriage was going to happen...it really was going to happen! She was going to marry this man—this complete stranger—whose disturbing gaze on her could quicken her pulse and confuse her utterly...

The rush of panic beat up inside her again. And then suddenly she felt her hand being taken. His strong fingers closed around hers. His eyes held her troubled gaze.

Something seemed to run between them. As if, she thought, for the very first time she was seeing the man and not the billionaire. Not the devastatingly masculine male that her feminine senses were continually so perpetually aware of but the person—the individual, with a character and personality of his own.

A quiver seemed to go through her she could make no sense of.

‘It will be all right, this marriage of ours,’ he said quietly, his eyes still holding hers. ‘I will make sure of it.’

Then, before she could realise his intent, he was lifting her hand to his lips. It was the briefest of hand-kisses, but as he lowered her hand back to the table and released it Ellie felt, for the very first time since her mother had given her the dreadful news about her father, the agitation inside her and the tumult of her emotions start to subside.

The man she had just agreed to marry smiled. An open, reassuring smile. And somehow—she did not know why or how—all her panic was gone...quite gone.

‘Good girl,’ she heard Leon Dukaris say approvingly, and he patted the back of her hand.

He looked about, summoning the maître d’.

‘Now, let’s toast our engagement in champagne! It deserves no less!’

CHAPTER FIVE

ELLIE WAS BUSY. Very busy. Not only was she assembling an extensive couture wardrobe suitable for her role as Leon Dukaris’s fiancée and thereafter as his bride, but the wedding itself was to be lavish in the extreme, staggeringly expensive, and, it seemed, with a vast amount for her to do—even with the help of the wedding team at the Viscari.

They were to be married at the hotel, where her family would continue to live until her father and her stepmother and sister moved into a château in the Loire that Leon had purchased for that purpose.

The tabloids and the glossy magazines were in raptures. Ellie might be grimly aware of the real reason for her marriage, but to the world it was a fairy-tale romance.

The Princess and the Greek Tycoon!

Love in Exile!

Royal Bride for Billionaire!

Any number of permutations blazed in the headlines, accompanied by pictures from the carefully staged photo shoots set up by the PR machine activated by Leon Dukaris to show the world he was marrying a princess.

She’d let her father believe the same as the press, for the look of relief in his eyes when she’d told him her news had been painful to behold. If he wanted to keep the comforting illusion that his financial benefactor had taken one look at Elizsaveta and experienced a coup de foudre Ellie would not disabuse him.

It was not something she had tried with her mother, however. She and Malcolm were back from Canada, and Ellie had gone down to Somerset to tell her.

It had not been an easy conversation so far. Her mother was protesting strongly, but Ellie defended her decision.

‘I can’t abandon my father after what’s happened to him—’

‘Darling—he has no right to demand this of you!’ her mother began.

But Ellie cut across her. ‘He isn’t demanding it!’ she’d said. ‘I’m doing this because I love him—and I want to protect him.’

She took a step back from her mother’s anxious embrace, and felt something change in her face. She was no longer Ellie Peters, but Princess Elizsaveta of the Royal House of Karpardy.

‘I am my father’s daughter,’ she said, ‘and I have obligations to my birth. It’s as simple as that.’

Her mother looked at her, her gaze troubled. ‘And what of love?’ she said.

Ellie’s expression was wry. ‘I must hope that I will be like you and Papa—each of you finding love in a second marriage.’

It was the thought she clung to as the wedding preparations swept her up. Of her fiancé himself she saw not a great deal, and mostly in public or in company. He seemed to be flying about the world a lot, and had told her that he was putting his business affairs in order so that they would not make demands on him after their wedding.

She knew that in a cowardly way she was relieved at his absence. It just seemed easier for her to cope with.

She was relieved, too—though she did not want to spell it out to herself—that when they were together he did not take advantage of their engagement to get up close and personal...

Her mind sheered away, blocking such thoughts—she would deal with them later, but not now, she thought hectically. Instead, whenever she was with him, she would take refuge in adopting the same brisk attitude she had at that fateful lunch, when she had committed herself to a man she barely knew.

This time, though, it was endless wedding details that needed agreement—anything and everything, from the music during the ceremony to who the huge guest list should include.

‘Both my mother and stepmother are summoning all the relatives they can round up,’ she told Leon frankly over dinner, during one of his intermittent stop-overs in London. ‘And they’re pressing for as many royals—British and European—as we can muster in the time available.’

She ran through a number of the names of people who had RSVP’d already.

‘Very impressive,’ acknowledged Leon dryly.

Had that been a sardonic note in his voice? Ellie lifted her chin.

‘Well, that’s what this is all about, isn’t it?’ she riposted, in the same openly frank manner. ‘Making as big a social splash with our wedding and our marriage as we can?’

Leon sat back in his chair—they were at the same restaurant they had been for lunch all those weeks ago, when she had sealed her fate. Perhaps that was why she was speaking so frankly now, making herself face the reason she was marrying Leon Dukaris. To give him a princess bride to crown his achievements and give her beleaguered father the financial security he so desperately needed.

And it’s for no other reason—none.

Leon had made that clear—he had spoken no soft, seductive words to the contrary, cast no lingering glances at her, made no pretence that he felt anything for her. So, however much she might find her heart rate starting to quicken when she was with him, however heavy-lidded that dark, gold-flecked gaze of his could be, resting on her with that veiled expression she could not make out, she had to set all that aside.

His expression now, though, was not veiled at all. His eyes had narrowed as she’d spoken.

‘Tell me,’ he said, and there was a silky note to his voice that she had not heard before, for usually he gave quick, good-humoured answers to her questions, ‘do you intend always to be this blunt about our marriage?’

Ellie felt colour flush her cheeks, but fought it back. Lifted her chin again. Met that narrowed gaze full-on. Th world might be cooing over them, lavishing them with a romantic gloss that sold magazines by the truckload, but she would not collude with it. She would not pretend there was anything between them but what there was.

There was a spark in her eyes as she answered him. ‘Leon, you’re marrying me because I’m a princess, and I’m marrying you because you’re rich enough to bankroll my father and his family. My title for your wealth. It’s a pretty blunt situation,’ she said unrepentantly.

She held his gaze, which all of a sudden was like coruscating black diamonds. She reeled from the impact of it—but she would not flinch. Then, abruptly, that coruscating gaze was gone—veiled by the long dark lashes sweeping down over those gold-flecked eyes. She saw him lift his wineglass and tilt it lazily towards her. The sudden tension in him relaxed. He smiled his familiar half-sardonic, half-open smile.

‘Well, then, let us drink to our marriage all the same,’ said Leon equably. ‘An honest marriage...’

As most marriages are not—with the couple deluding each other with the belief that eternal love will bind them, when the first misfortune to befall them will make a mockery of all their vows!

So why should he care if his beautiful royal bride was being so blunt about why they were marrying? It was only the truth.

Except that it is not the only truth... It is not simply because I want a princess bride to show off on my arm and she wants a dignified exile for her father.

There was another truth to their marriage. As potent a truth as those.

He veiled his expression as she touched her glass to his with a faint answering smile, concealing his thoughts, knowing that she was not yet ready for anything more from him.

But perhaps it’s time...

Perhaps it was time that Princess Elizsaveta realised that he was marrying her for a great deal more than her title...

As he took another ruminative sip of his wine, watching with pleasure the way her delicate features caught the soft light pooling over their table as she skimmed her gaze over the next item on the wedding list, he knew exactly the occasion for her to do so.

The glittering opulence of their betrothal ball.

It would be ideal...

Ellie took a steadying breath, gathering her skirts. There were a lot of them—a cloud of palest blush-pink organza and chiffon—and her boned bodice was encrusted with crystal, another billowing swathe of chiffon framing her bare shoulders and arms. At her throat an ornate pink diamond necklace matched the long drop earrings of the parure, as did the twin bracelets encircling her wrists and the combs holding her elaborate upswept hair.

The very image of a princess.

At least I’m not wearing a coronet! she thought wryly to herself.

She’d drawn the line at that, explaining to Leon that tiaras were only worn by married women—indeed, her mother, sitting beside her in the huge limo now drawing up at the Viscari, was so doing.

‘Heaven knows when I last wore this!’ her mother had exclaimed when her jewellery case had arrived from its safety deposit box at her bank.

Her voice had been light, but her expression troubled. And Ellie knew why—tonight would be the first time her mother would meet Leon, the man who was bailing out her ex-husband at the price of her daughter’s hand in marriage.

‘I won’t say a word, darling, I promise you—this is your choice and you have made it in good conscience. I will stand by you,’ her mother had said, and Ellie had been deeply grateful. Grateful, too, to have her mother and stepfather with her tonight.

The doorman was stepping forward, opening the limo door, and with a final intake of breath Ellie got out, taking the greatest care with her voluminous ball gown. As she did she heard a scatter of applause from the gathered onlookers, saw the flash of cameras, and realised that Leon’s PR machine was ensuring that a quiet entrance was going to be impossible.

Then her mother and stepfather were beside her and they were all walking into the hotel. And in the marble-floored, mahogany-furnished atrium Leon was crossing the space towards them.

As it always did, Ellie felt her breath catch. Of all the men in the world, in evening dress Leon Dukaris beat them hands-down. He just looked...superb! And in white tie—for this was a fully formal evening—the effect was tripled.

‘Princess...’

He was taking her hand, bowing over it but not kissing it. His eyes were fastened on her, and in them was an expression that was like a blaze.

‘You look incredible!’ he breathed.

His gaze washed over her, taking in every detail of her sumptuous attire. She wanted to say something—anything! To make some light-hearted remark—something about Cinderella arriving for the ball, maybe, or something about a fairy-tale—whatever she could think of to say with a smile.

But she couldn’t. She couldn’t say a word as his blazing eyes devoured her. The breath had gone from her lungs, her head had emptied of anything at all except his gaze feasting upon her.

And then, dimly, she became aware that her mother and stepfather were waiting to be introduced to the man she was going to marry.

She had to make a huge effort but she drew back her hand, wishing it weren’t quivering like a leaf in autumn. ‘Leon, may I present you to my mother?’ she murmured, trying to stop her voice quivering helplessly.

As if he were also coming to himself, Leon’s expression changed, becoming formal. He turned towards her mother. ‘Lady Constance,’ he said, ‘I’m delighted to meet you at last,’ he said.

‘And I you, Mr Dukaris,’ Ellie heard her mother reply, with an assessing note in her voice.

‘Leon, please...’ he replied immediately.

‘Then you had better call me Connie,’ she invited.

There seemed, Ellie thought, to be a warmer note in her mother’s voice now, and wondered at it, but was grateful, too.

‘Lady Connie,’ Leon compromised, his smile coming again as he turned to Ellie’s stepfather.

Ellie performed the requisite introduction, and was glad that Leon’s demeanour acknowledged that her stepfather was a man of some renown in his field.

As Leon made graceful reference to his work, and Malcolm made a jovial reply in his usual bluff and forthright manner, Ellie glanced around her. She frowned. The only people in the huge Edwardian-style atrium apart from some senior hotel staff were, she realised from their black-suited, discreetly tough-looking appearance, Security.

Leon had clearly seen her glance at them, and he took her arm and ushered them all towards the grand staircase sweeping up to the first-floor ballroom.

‘The hotel is in lockdown until we are in the ballroom,’ he said. ‘Just a precaution, given both your family and the people on the guest list.’

Ellie just nodded. It wasn’t just a precaution—she knew that. But she did not say so, for what would be the point? It was so the world could see and know that Leon Dukaris was marrying royalty, and that royalty were not like other mere mortals on this earth.

It was why, too, he went on addressing her mother as Lady Connie—highlighting that even on her mother’s side, there was ancient nobility—albeit not royal. Her uncle, the Earl of Holmsworth, would be at the wedding, and his two young daughters were to be her flower girls, his ten-year-old son her page boy.

But before the wedding there was tonight’s ball to get through.

Leaning on Leon’s arm slightly more heavily than she’d thought she would need to, because of the sudden weakness in her limbs caused by his presence at her side, she processed with him up the sweeping staircase, then entered the vast, ornate ballroom, festooned with flowers and ablaze with light from a dozen crystal chandeliers, to receive another smattering of applause from the assembled guests.

Ellie smiled about her, but Leon was heading towards the far end, where her father and stepmother were. Two large gilded chairs had been procured, and the Grand Duke and Duchess were presiding over the whole affair.

Dutifully, Ellie curtsied when she reached them, her skirts billowing out in a cloud of blush-pink. Her father, splendid in white tie and tails, stood up and came forward to kiss her, then shook Leon’s hand as he bowed. Behind him the Grand Duchess dipped her head in regal acknowledgement of their arrival, and beside her Marika—looking enchantingly pretty in pale blue—gave her a little wave.

The Grand Duke held up his hand, then announced to the assembled company that he was welcoming them all to the betrothal ball of his daughter and her chosen husband-to-be.

‘The first dance is theirs!’ he declared, and resumed his seat as the orchestra, placed on a raised platform to one side of the room, struck up.

It was a Strauss waltz, and with a strange little catch in her throat, finding it impossible to resist such familiar and lilting music, Ellie went into Leon’s arms. She raised her left hand to his shoulder, had her right clasped in his firm grip. For a moment, as his arm came about her waist and he drew her closer to him, she felt her legs weaken further, felt heady at his closeness, and then, as the music sounded, he whirled her across the polished floor.

She gave a little gasp, her eyes darting to his. She held his gaze, unable to break the hold of it—for it was the fulcrum around which she was turning, around which the whole world seemed to be turning. Everything was becoming a blur but not the deep, dark eyes holding hers. And in them—not in their depths, but at the blazing forefront of his gaze—was molten gold. Pure molten gold...

And she melted into it. Just melted...

Suddenly, out of nowhere, the significance of the evening became clear—here she was, in this utterly over-the-top concoction of a ball gown, bedecked with jewellery, her satin slippers twirling her body around, caught in the arms of this impossibly devastating man, whose dark looks and planed face and sable hair were so ludicrously flattered by the white tie and tails that moulded his powerful body like a glove.

It’s like a fairy-tale! A fairy-tale of mythical princesses and handsome heroes!

But it wasn’t a fairy-tale!

It was true—all of it!

She was waltzing to the music of Strauss, the Waltz King, and she was Princess Elizsaveta of Karylya, and Leon Dukaris was—Oh, he was the most handsome man who had ever walked the earth!

She was enchanted, beguiled and enthralled, spinning around and around to music that no soul on earth could resist, to the music that whirled in her blood, carrying her slippered feet across the ballroom...

And she could not take her eyes from Leon. Not for anything in heaven and earth. Not while the music played, and she danced and she danced in his arms...

With a crescendo of sound, the music stopped. The waltz was over and she was standing there, heart pounding, the blood singing in her veins, exhilaration, wonder and enchantment consuming her.

She was still gazing up at Leon, and he was still holding her in his dancer’s hold, his hand at her waist. Then she felt her hand released, and hers fell to her side, nerveless with exhaustion. She could feel her heart beating so strongly—with the exertion of the dance, and with so much more than that.

She drank him in—the chiselled planes of his face, the sculpted mouth, the dark, drowning gaze of his eyes holding hers. She felt his other hand slip from her waist and she swayed, as if he alone had been holding her steady. And then, with a catch in her throat, she felt him cup her face with his long, strong fingers, tilting it up towards him, the touch of his hands catching at her breath. Her lips parted...helpless, breathless...

‘My Princess...’

His voice was low, and warm, and for her and her alone. And his lips, when they touched hers, were warm and for her and her alone. And his kiss was warm and slow and for her and her alone.

She felt her eyes flutter shut, felt the soft, sensuous glide of his mouth on hers, felt a liquefying rush go through her as if every cell in her body was dissolving. It seemed to go on and on, that kiss...on and on and on...

When his mouth lifted from hers she could only stare, dazed, helpless, her lips still parted. She kept on gazing up at him as his hands slid from her face and he smiled down at her.

‘My Princess...’ he said again, his voice husky.

Then he was tucking her limp hand that suddenly seemed to weigh half a ton into the crook of his arm and he was leading her off the dance floor. And she had to lean into him because she had no strength left in her body...not the slightest bit of strength.

Her mind was a daze, her thoughts a whirl, and the orchestra was striking up again. She was aware that other couples were taking to the floor now, and that Leon was leading her back to where her family sat, her mother and stepfather beside the royal couple, though on less ornate chairs. Marika was being led out onto the dance floor by someone Ellie vaguely recognised as one of the junior members of the British royal family, and seemingly very happy.

But she had no thoughts to spare for her sister or her parents, or for the throng of glittering guests here tonight to see Leon Dukaris present his royal bride-to-be to the world. She had no thoughts at all for anyone at all who was not the man who had swept her onto the dance floor and kissed her like the Princess in a fairy-tale...

Who had taken her, with that waltz and that kiss, to an enchanted realm she never wanted to leave...

CHAPTER SIX

LEON STOOD UNDER the rose-decked silk canopy as the celebrant threw him an encouraging smile. Yet for all that he could feel tension netting him. This was the day, the moment, when he would marry. Would marry his princess bride.

From that original fancy over a year ago, when the idea of marrying a princess had first come to him, to this moment now, when it was actually about to happen, seemed a blur.

Was he mad to do this? To truly go ahead with it?

Marriage was not an affair—it was unknown territory...

Unease flickered in his consciousness. Even with all the safeguards he had placed around what he was doing, ensuring that no delusions of love could come anywhere near this marriage, and that he and the woman he was to wed were doing so for reasons that had nothing to do with any such illusory notions, still unease flickered within him.

Memories, toxic and cruel, plucked at his mind.

Almost he gave them admittance.

Then, with a sudden rustle of movement amongst the serried ranks of guests behind him, he heard the music, up to this moment low and forgettable, start to swell, switching into full volume to herald the arrival of his bride.

He turned.

He could not stop himself.

And as his eyes lit upon her all doubts fled...

Ellie took a breath, pressed her hand on her father’s arm. The music was swelling—the Royal Anthem of Karylya, insisted on by her father. And who was she to deny him this small comfort, when he did not even have his royal regalia any longer, and had to walk his daughter down the aisle in nothing more than commonplace morning dress.

The guests were getting to their feet with a scraping of chairs on the paved ground of the Viscari roof terrace. The unreliable English weather was blessedly clement, so that recourse to the glass conservatory along one side of the rooftop would be unnecessary—except for the serving of the wedding breakfast to follow.

An arbour of roses arched across the aisle and their scent caught at her, adding to the scent from the thousands more blooms arranged to beautify the already stunning landscape architecture of this green oasis high above the city, enclosed and private, far above the masses on the streets below, where the London traffic was quite inaudible.

She could see the celebrant, waiting for them at the far end of the aisle. A civil ceremony was what she had stipulated to Leon—yet even so she still felt a hypocrite as she stepped towards the man waiting to marry her.

The words she’d so bluntly put to Leon echoed in her head.

‘Leon, you’re marrying me for my title, and I’m marrying you because you’re rich enough to bankroll my father and his family.’

Everything—all this extravaganza of a wedding, the guest list crammed with aristocrats and royalty, leaked to the press and the media by Leon for maximum coverage—was for that reason alone.

Yet even though she knew it she felt again the magical brush of Leon’s lips on hers, the enchantment of his kiss whispering of reasons that had nothing to do with her father’s exile, her bridegroom’s ambitions...reasons that fluttered like a butterfly seeking the sweetest nectar...

She felt her hand tremble on her father’s arm, and he patted it reassuringly as they processed forward. Nerves plucked at her, but she knew she must not let them show. Must be as composed, as calm, as perfect a princess bride as she could be.

Do her family proud.

Do Leon proud by being the perfect princess bride for him.

Beneath her veil her eyes went to him, and she was glad of the veil to hide the sudden heating of her cheeks. An air of unreality pressed upon her, as if she could not believe this was truly happening. But all her training came to the fore—as it must.

They reached the celebrant, the anthem ended and the congregation resumed their seats. Leon stepped forward to stand beside her. Her father stepped back to join his wife. Her mother and stepfather flanked them. Behind her Marika, her bridesmaid, took her allotted place, ushering the little flower girls to theirs, their older brother bringing up the rear.

The celebrant began to speak...

She heard the words but did not hear them. Heard her own voice but did not hear it. Heard Leon’s but did not hear it. Let Leon take her hand, slide the wedding band on her nerveless finger, his touch cool. She said more words, and so did he, and then the celebrant was speaking again, to them both.

Joining them in matrimony.

And she was Leon’s princess bride.

‘Where are we going?’ Ellie asked her new husband with mild enquiry.

Leon moved into the London traffic, shifting gear in the million-pound, brand-new supercar delivered that very morning—an enjoyable present to himself for his wedding day.

‘Wait and see,’ he answered.

He had told her nothing about his plans for a honeymoon, and wanted it to be a surprise. A pleasing one, he hoped...

They had been waved off amidst laughter and an easily foiled attempt by his new bride’s brother—finished now with his schooldays—and some of the younger males among the wedding guests to attach rattling tin cans to the bumper. Instead they had contented themselves by spraying ‘Just married!’ in shaving foam on the gleaming rear end of the car.

His bride’s flower girls—Ellie’s cousins Lady Emily and Lady Rose—had excitedly festooned them, and the car bonnet, with flower blossoms, giggling madly as their brother, the young Viscount, had vigorously popped streamers into the car’s interior.

Leon had tolerated it all with smiling equanimity. These harmless aristocratic antics were, after all, what he was paying for. Just as he was paying for his bride’s father and his family to enjoy their exile in luxury at his expense.

And in exchange...

His eyes slid to his bride. No longer in her wedding finery, she had changed into an ivory silk couture number and five-inch heels—which, Leon noticed with wry amusement, she was now kicking off into the spacious footwell with a sigh of relief.

‘That bad?’ he said sympathetically, nodding at the discarded killer heels.

‘Not my thing,’ she answered feelingly.

‘You looked fabulous in them, though,’ Leon said, as he headed down Piccadilly towards Hyde Park Corner.

‘Well, that was the idea,’ Ellie answered easily.

The shoes were part of her brand-new couture wardrobe, wearing which she would grace the arm of her billionaire husband when he showed off his princess bride to the world. Already engagements had been set, and they had a crammed social diary that would take them to one upper-crust event after another across Europe and beyond. They would be doing the Season—all the Seasons—and being seen at the best places with the best people, a high-flying, jet-setting couple who combined royalty and riches in a dazzling display.

It wouldn’t be the life Ellie was used to. As Ellie Peters her only international travel was to jungle and tundra with Malcolm and her mother. Even as Princess Elizsaveta of Karylya she had usually stayed only in her homeland, accompanying her stepmother and sister to whatever royal functions they were involved with.

But if her husband wanted them to jet around the world in a glittering swirl of royalty and aristocracy, then that was what they would do. It was what she had signed up to.

Was that what he was intending for their honeymoon? Some ultra-fashionable luxury location half the world away? she wondered as they headed out of London.

But when Leon told her the drive would be a couple of hours, Ellie started to relax. The day had been long, with an early start for all the preparations needed to turn her into a royal bride in all her finery, and the lavish wedding breakfast had seemed to go on for ever. Now, in the late afternoon, she felt tiredness wash over her, and the smooth motion of the powerful car began to cradle her into drowsiness...

At her side, Leon watched her translucent eyelids flutter shut, her breathing slow.

He let her sleep.

Who knew how long the night ahead would be? And all the nights to come thereafter...

Pleasurable anticipation started to fill him. At last this most breathtakingly beautiful woman was his—and their honeymoon awaited...

Ellie stirred, blinking. ‘Where are we?’ she asked, looking around. Then, as she took in her surroundings, she gave a little gasp of pleasure.

Beyond the small gravelled parking area the reed-edged waters of a lake beckoned, girdled by broad-leaved forest all around. It was totally private, totally remote.

Leon cut the engine, turning to her. ‘Do you like it?’ He smiled.

‘Oh, yes!’

She was slipping her shoes on, opening her car door and stepping out, and Leon did likewise.

Satisfaction was filling him—her reaction was just what he wanted.

He led the way forward, through screening willows and alders, to gain the wooden boardwalk edging the lake that glittered darkly in the late sunshine. The only sign of habitation was a cottage set a little further on.

‘It’s like a gingerbread house!’ Ellie exclaimed pleasurably as she spotted it.

A manservant was emerging from the cottage, and Leon exchanged a few words with him. He would fetch their luggage and then leave them entirely in peace unless summoned.

Inside the cottage, tea had been set out in a comfortably appointed sitting room, whose wide bi-fold doors opened directly on to a broad deck flooded with sunshine.

Ellie turned to him. ‘Oh, Leon, this is absolutely lovely!’ She smiled warmly, her eyes lighting up. ‘Ah, tea!’ she exclaimed gratefully, sinking down on one of the two sofas, easing her feet out of her killer shoes again before reaching for the teapot and pouring for them both.

‘So, what do you think of it?’ Leon asked, taking the cup she held out for him.

‘It’s delightful!’ she said warmly. ‘And quite a surprise. I thought—’ She broke off, stirring milk into her tea.

‘Yes?’

Leon’s prompt was pointed. She made a slight face and looked up at him.

‘Well, I thought you would want somewhere more...public. Glitzy. You know, to—’ She broke off again.

An eyebrow rose quizzically. ‘To show you off? My royal bride?’

Was there an edge in his voice? He hadn’t intended it, but perhaps it was there all the same.

She was looking straight at him now. ‘Well, yes,’ she answered frankly. ‘After all, there’s no point marrying a princess and then hiding her away, is there?’ She spoke lightly, as if determined not to make too big a deal of it but not to shirk from it either.

He sat back, crossing one long over the other. ‘I’m not sure that I want to share you with anyone right now,’ he murmured, and he let his eyelids half close as his eyes rested on her. ‘I think I want you all to myself...’

He saw a gratifying flush of colour stain her cheeks—only a swift wash, but it was revealing, and that was what he wanted.

He gave a laugh, to lighten the moment. ‘And anyway, we’ve been on show the whole day—I think we deserve some relaxing time “offstage”, don’t you? And...’ his eyes went to the deck beyond the open bi-folds ‘...this certainly seems to fit the bill for that!’

‘Oh, it does!’ The warmth was back in her voice. ‘I’m so looking forward to exploring! Can we do that?’

‘We can do anything we want,’ Leon returned. ‘It’s our honeymoon, and we get to choose.’

He saw her eyes flicker again and knew why. It was the H word that had done it.

Because ours is not the kind of honeymoon an ordinary couple would be having...

But a honeymoon it was, for all that. And it would bring all the pleasures every honeymoon should bring...

He would ensure it.

Ellie sat at the old-fashioned, chintz-skirted, kidney-shaped dressing table in her bedroom and stared at her reflection. The gingerbread cottage was far too homely for a couture outfit, so she’d donned one of her own well-worn favourites—a mauve knee-length dress in fine jersey, with a boat neck and three-quarter sleeves. She fastened her hair with a simple barrette, then slipped her feet into comfortable low-heeled sandals and headed downstairs.

Her mood was strange—uncertain. Up to this point all her energies—mental and physical—had been focussed exclusively on making her wedding happen. And now it had. And she was here with Leon.

Alone with Leon—

She felt her heart rate start to skip, conscious of her quickening pulse and an air of nervousness as she headed down the narrow flight of stairs to the small sitting room. She thought there was something she ought to be thinking about—that she ought to have thought about for quite some time, but she had been too swept up in all the wedding preparations.

She felt it hovering at the back of her mind...knew it was time to bring it to the forefront. Face the implications of it...

But not right now. Her mind skittered away from it, not wanting to confront it.

I’ll think about it later.

For now she would simply deal with the evening immediately ahead.

Leon’s words to her over tea floated across her mind.

‘I think we deserve some relaxing time...’

It was a sentiment that appealed.

In the sitting room, Leon was already there. A table-lamp had been lit against the night gathering outside, giving it a cosy feel. He turned from the drinks trolley, and as his eyes fell on her Ellie felt again that quickening of her pulse, that consciousness of his looks and masculinity that she always felt.

‘An aperitif before dinner?’ he asked pleasantly.

‘Please,’ she answered, opting for a sweet martini.

As she took it from him she thought she saw his gaze flicker over her, and was suddenly conscious that perhaps the jersey dress was just a little too softly draped over her body. But then her eyes flickered to him in turn, and she was conscious of how comfortably informal Leon was looking, too, with an open-necked shirt, turned back cuffs and a cashmere sweater slung casually over his shoulders. He looked, as ever, effortlessly drop-dead gorgeous...

‘It’s a mild evening—shall we go out on the deck?’ Leon suggested.

She smiled and let him usher her out. Night was gathering over the lake, and there was the low sound of water lapping beneath the decking and an owl calling from nearby in the woods, then another from further away. She wandered across to the wooden balustrade at the edge of the deck, leaning on it to look over the lake.

‘A pair of tawnies,’ Ellie announced. Then, listening again, ‘And a barn owl, too!’

‘How can you tell?’ Leon asked, coming up beside her.

She was glad to tell him, for it was a safely innocuous subject, and would help to take her mind off the fact that Leon was standing right beside her, his sleeve brushing hers from time to time as he sipped at his own gin-based cocktail in a leisurely fashion.

She launched into a description of the different kinds of owl hooting, giving a good impression of each herself that made him laugh, and her as well. Their shared laughter made her feel more comfortable...companionable.

‘How do you know all that?’ he asked with a smile.

‘I grew up with a naturalist, remember?’ she replied. ‘Malcolm was a wonderful teacher.’

There was a fond note in her voice and Leon did not miss it.

‘You’ve been fortunate in your stepfather,’ he heard himself say.

‘And my father.’ Her rejoinder was adamant. ‘I may only have spent school holidays with him, but they were always happy times. He loves me dearly. And I him. It’s why I—’

She broke off, but Leon could hear the unspoken ending of her declaration.

It’s why I married you.

He shifted his stance, wanting to change the topic. Away from why she had married him. Away from fathers altogether.

His thoughts twisted inside him. His own father had thought of no one but himself, putting himself first, his own interests, and if that meant deserting the wife he’d professed to love, and their son, too, well, he’d done it without a second thought. Abandoned them to their fate. Thinking nothing of them.

And is her father any better? Happy to see his own daughter married off to a complete stranger just so he can have a luxurious exile?

He felt a flicker of contempt go through him, familiar to him from the contempt he’d always felt for his own father. He, too, had once believed his father loved him—loved the wife he’d kept telling how much he adored her. Until he’d walked out on her.

So much for love...

He would have none of it.

His eyes went to his bride. Well, love had nothing to do with their marriage, and he didn’t want it to. They’d gone into it clear-eyed, the pair of them, for mutual advantage, and each was getting something out of it that they wanted. That was enough.

He veiled his eyes suddenly. And, of course, for one other essential reason. The reason he’d brought his bride here to this remote, secluded spot...entirely private.

To claim her as my bride—in every way.

CHAPTER SEVEN

WITH A GESTURE of reluctant refusal Ellie pushed back the plate of exquisite hand-made liqueur chocolate truffles Leon was proffering.

‘I couldn’t eat even one more!’ She gave a mock groan.

‘We’ll save the rest for tomorrow.’ Leon smiled.

Dinner had been provided by staff who’d arrived at the cottage and then left again once the main course had been served. Ellie had made the kind of anodyne conversation with Leon that strangers could overhear, but once they’d gone she’d become conscious of a different kind of constraint—that of being with Leon on her own.

She was grateful, therefore, that he had continued with the same mild and genial air he’d adopted since they’d left their wedding, telling her about the cottage and its original Victorian owner, of his enthusiasm for wildfowl. That had led to wildlife in general, and then they had moved on to her stepfather’s work, with Leon drawing her out about her experiences travelling with him and her mother on filming expeditions.

Ellie had felt herself relaxing more, regaling him with anecdotes about her adventurous travels in remote locations, where physical comforts had been scarce, and that had taken them through the rest of the meal.

Now, after pushing away the plate of truffles, she finished a particularly hair-raising account of privation and Leon frowned.

‘Your mother couldn’t have a more different lifestyle now than the one she had with your father—a royal palace versus roughing it in the middle of nowhere!’

Ellie laughed. ‘She never could stand all the palace protocol and ceremony! It was bad enough being the Crown Princess, but being Grand Duchess never suited her—it was good that she found the courage to leave a marriage she felt she’d been pressured into by her parents’ ambitions for her. They were dazzled by her royal suitor. It never worked for either of them. She’s so much happier with Malcolm. And I know my father is so happier with my stepmother. My parents were right to part. No one should stay in an unhappy marriage.’

She saw Leon’s face tighten. Had it been tactless to talk about marriages ending when theirs had only just begun? However unlike a normal marriage theirs was?

But his words dispelled any noting that he’d been thinking about their own marriage.

‘But what if the wish to part isn’t mutual?’ he said. ‘If it suits only one of the parties?’

There was a harshness in his voice that made Ellie speak carefully. ‘That’s...difficult,’ she allowed.

‘Difficult...?’ he echoed, as if the word were a derisory understatement.

She looked at him, concern in her eyes. ‘That sounds personal,’ she said carefully.

Dark eyes flashed across the table at her. His words were stark when he spoke. ‘My father walked out on my mother at the height of the economic collapse in Greece. We’d gone from affluence to poverty. He was a well-paid civil servant, suddenly sacked when the government ran out of money to pay him. He didn’t like it—and so he took off with another woman who had money stashed abroad. Left my mother and me to fend for ourselves.’

‘Oh, Leon, I’m so sorry!’

Instinctively she reached her hand out to his, but he’d seized up his cognac glass and taken a heavy mouthful, as if he needed it. As he set it down she saw his features lighten again, as if he were making a deliberate effort. Blanking the past.

He pushed back his chair, getting to his feet. ‘Shall we get some fresh air?’ she heard him ask, and his tone of voice was deliberately lighter.

It was understandable that he wanted to change the subject, for who would want to dwell on such painful memories? So Ellie followed him out on to the deck, to lean, like him, against the wooden railing, gazing out over the dark surface of the lake.

The country air was fresh, and sweet, after so many weeks in London, and she gave a sigh of pleasure. She felt a wash of sympathy for him—for his blighted youth, his plunge into sudden poverty, his father’s desertion.

How little I know about him—about the man he is.

But then, how could she know more? Theirs was an artificial marriage—they were still strangers essentially.

Yet as he glanced down at her now there was a familiarity about the way he was smiling at her. A growing sense of ease between them.

‘It’s good, isn’t it, this place?’ Leon said, indicating with a nod the quiet, dim vista around them.

The night was cloudy, with a faint mild breeze ruffling the waters of the lake quietly lapping below the deck. Another owl hooted softly, adding to the peaceful atmosphere.

‘Yes,’ she said, nodding in slow agreement, ‘it’s good.’

She looked up at him. Returned his smile. But as she did so she saw, even in the low light, his expression change. Become...searching. And as it changed she felt something change within herself, felt a sudden consciousness of the two of them, standing out here, all on their own, far from anywhere and anyone else, with the whole world, or so it seemed, to themselves.

It seemed a very private moment. Very...intimate.

She felt her breath tighten in her lungs, wanted to look away, suddenly supremely conscious of his presence at her side. A tendril of hair fluttered at her cheek in the faint breeze, the air soft on her face. Her senses seemed heightened, the pulse at her throat tangible. Out of nowhere came the memory of that first waltz at their betrothal ball...of the kiss that had ended it. She felt the memory bring its sweetness again...

At the back of her mind she felt the thought she did not wish to think stir once more, seeking admittance. She held it back, held it at bay. Instead she gave herself to what she wanted to do, what she always wanted to do...what she had wanted to do from the very first.

She gazed up at his face, drinking him in, watching those dark, heavy-lidded eyes that were looking down at her in return, half veiled by those long, inky lashes.

Once before he had looked into her eyes like that... As the music of the waltz had ended and his hands had cupped her face, tilting it to his...

They did it again now.

His touch was cool as he cradled her cheeks, his fingertips drifting over the delicate lobes of her ears, teasing at the wafting tendrils of her hair. His face bent to hers, lips catching hers. She felt weakness drum through her...felt her eyelids flutter shut. Felt his mouth—his skilled, silken mouth—move on hers slowly, softly, sensuously.

She opened her mouth to his...

She felt her pulse surge, her lips part under his, her pliant body leaning into him as if her body were taking control of her, yielding to its own impulses, its own needs, its own demands. As his kiss deepened she felt the arousal of her quickened senses, her hands slipping to his chest, feeling the strong, hard wall of muscle beneath her splaying fingers.

Her body quickened, blood surging in her veins, and a flame caught fire within her that was not of her conscious being. It came from a place far, far deeper inside her—a hunger that had come from nowhere, possessing her...

Her mouth clung to his and a low moan broke from her throat. The sense of being possessed by more than she was seared within her. Her kiss deepened, feeding the hunger that had leapt within her. A hunger for him...for Leon...for his mouth, his body...

And it was a hunger he shared, for now his hands were sliding down to her shoulders, around her waist, fastening over her hips, moving lower still...

The hunger leapt inside her again, possessing her, and she felt her breasts engorge and flower. Another low moan broke from her throat and her body pressed itself against his, seeking more...so much more...

There was nothing else in all the world except this...now...and nothing mattered except this...now...as their mouths moved together, seeking, finding...

With a sudden rasping breath he hauled her close against him, his kisses devouring her. They were hip to hip, their bodies melding together, moulding together...

And his body was reacting to that closeness.

With a shocked gasp she pulled away, rearing back from him even though his hands still anchored her at her hips. She stared at him, eyes distended, lips still bee-stung from his. Her heart was pounding. Dear God, what had she done? To go from that soft, sensuous kiss to...to...

Her mind sheered away and her body did, too. Now she was pulling herself free from him, clutching at the wooden railings, head bowed, fighting for composure...

‘What is it? What’s wrong?’

Leon spoke behind her, concern in his voice—and alarm. She could hear his breathing, heavier than it had been during conversation, and knew hers was just as hectic. Her heart was still hammering as if she’d run a race. As if she’d been swept away on a flood tide that she had never before experienced. Had never before known the power of.

But she knew it now.

‘Tell me! Tell me what is wrong!’

Leon’s voice came again, still filled with concern and alarm.

‘Leon—I...’ She tried to speak, but could not. Tried to look at him, but could not.

Her head dropped again, shoulders hunched. Heat flushing through her. And dismay. Dismay that she had allowed what she should never have allowed to overwhelm her as it had!

Her grip on the railings spasmed.

I should have faced it sooner—not hidden it away, out of sight, while I was burying myself in all those wedding preparations, blanking it. And now...

She started. Leon’s large, square hand had lowered over hers, lifting her fingers free of the rail. Gently but inexorably. She felt his presence behind her. He was turning her now, towards him, leading her away from the balustrade, lowering her down upon a wide rattan settee on legs that were suddenly too weak to hold her. Sitting down beside her.

‘Tell me,’ he said quietly. He did not let go of her hand. ‘Tell me what’s wrong.’

Her eyes flew to his. Then dropped away again. And still she could not speak. Her skin was burning...her lungs were bereft of air.

‘Elizsaveta, look at me.’

Uncertainly, she lifted her eyes to him as he spoke again. His voice was quiet still, but filled with an intensity that accentuated his slight accent.

‘Have I confused you?’ he asked.

His gaze was searching hers in the dim light. Only the lamplight from the sitting room behind them spilled out onto the deck.

A faint smile tugged at his mouth, and there was a rueful tone in his voice as he spoke again. ‘I have been a very...inattentive fiancé, I know—but there was a purpose to it. Yes, I had to settle my business affairs—but there was another reason, too. I could not trust myself to be with you too much. Do you not know why that was?’

He paused, and now his gaze on her was not rueful, nor the tone of his voice.

‘Did you really think I was marrying you only for your royal blood?’ he was saying now, in that same quiet voice, with the warmth of his hand over hers, stilling the trembling of her limbs. ‘Did you really think there was no other reason?’ And now there was something else in his voice—an edge, and yet it was an edge softened by wryness.

He paused, and she could feel his thumb brush across the back of her hand with a slow, sensuous touch that seemed to be both calming her and soothing her jangled nerves.

His eyes held hers, their expression changing, and in the stricken veins of her body she felt her pulse quicken...like a ghost of what it had been before she’d torn herself away from him.

‘Did I not show you with every look I gave you?’ His voice was husky, his eyes fixed on hers. ‘Show you when I kissed you at our betrothal ball...?’

She felt colour flush into her cheeks and knew he could see it, even in this dim light.

He was speaking again, in the same husky voice, and the slow brush of his thumb on her hand was still soft and sensuous. ‘And when I kissed you then do you think I could not tell how you felt about me in return? And when I kissed you just now do you think I could not tell how the same flame you light in me every time you look at me, caught fire in you as well?’ The husk in his voice was yet more pronounced. ‘And do you think,’ he finished, ‘I would have married you if I did not desire you—if I did not know that same flame burned in both of us?’

He paused, giving a wry half-smile that tugged at his mouth. She gazed at him, wishing with all her being that she had not tried to shut out what had been in her head all along, what she had pushed down and back and out of sight and thought. Now it was here—standing foursquare between them.

Leon was speaking again, still with that quiet, reassuring warmth in his voice, yet there was an underlying timbre to it that plucked at her senses.

‘We are married, yes, and for reasons we have both been honest about. And that is good—never think otherwise.’ The slightest edge crept into his voice. ‘But we can be honest, too, about the flame that burns between us! That, too, is good and honest and true. And why should we not yield to that flame? We are consenting adults, my most beautiful and alluring bride...’ His voice had a wry humour in it now. ‘So why should we not consent to what we both clearly wish to do?’

She felt him turn her hand in his, lift it to his mouth. He moved his lips across it slowly, sensuously...arousingly...and she felt the flame that his kiss had fired in her flicker in her senses.

‘Why should we not consent?’ he said again, turning over her hand so that his mouth was moving on her open palm, her delicate, sensitive wrist...

Her blood started to beat up inside her again, her breathing quickening. But it was a breath she must use for a different purpose. To speak—to tell. Before his caresses turned her mind to mush and that urgent hunger leapt in her body again...that hunger she had never known before.

‘Because...’ Her voice was low, barely audible, and her eyes were barely able to meet his, even in the dim of the night. ‘Because I have never—’

His mouth lifted from her wrist and she drew her hand from his slackened grip. He stared at her, not understanding. She had to make him understand. Had to...

‘I never have, Leon,’ she said, her voice lower still, though she forced it to be steady.

She dropped her eyes again, unable to look at him. Her hands twisted in her lap. Her stomach clenched and her whole body was tense, suddenly. Awaiting his response.

It came after a silence that seemed to stretch for ever. ‘You are telling me,’ she heard him say, his voice expressionless, ‘that you are a virgin?’

The word seemed to toll like a bell in the night.

She could not speak. Could only nod.

The silence stretched again and she could bear it no longer. Her eyes lifted to him. His face was shadowed and she could not read it.

She swallowed. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. It seemed inadequate, but it was the best she could manage. ‘I should... I should have told you...made it clear before I—’

With a sudden movement she jerked to her feet, trying to rush past him, wanting only to get away from him.

But he caught at her hand, getting to his feet as well, taking her other hand, his clasp warm and strong.

He looked down into her face. There was something different in his eyes now—something that made her throat tighten and emotion well up in her. It was an emotion she could not name, but only feel.

Slowly, infinitely slowly, he lowered his head to drop a kiss upon her. Not on her mouth, but her forehead. There was a half-smile on his face that she could not understand.

‘It’s been a long, long day,’ he said. ‘And this has all been too much for you. Go to bed,’ he said quietly. ‘And sleep well. Sleep deeply—and alone.’

His light touch fell away, and he stepped aside to let her go indoors.

On stricken limbs, she did.

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