Wedding Party Collection: Marrying The Prince: The Prince She Never Knew / His Bride for the Taking / A Queen for the Taking?

LEO SAW THE emotions flash across Alyse’s face like changes in the weather, sunshine and shadows. Even more so he felt the change in her, the tensing, the slight withdrawal even though she hadn’t actually moved.

‘What is it?’ he asked quietly. ‘What’s wrong?’

She gave a little shake of her head. ‘Nothing.’

He didn’t believe that for a moment. Gently but firmly he took her chin in his hand, forced her to look at him. ‘It’s not nothing.’

Her clear grey eyes met his for a moment before she let her gaze slide away. ‘Nothing to talk about now,’ she said, with a not-quite-there smile.

If she was trying to sound light, she’d failed. Leo let go of her chin and sat back braced on his hands to survey her thoughtfully. She still wasn’t looking at him and a tendril of hair, curly from the sea air, fell against the soft paleness of her cheek.

‘Are you nervous about what will happen between us?’

She looked at him then, a small spark of humour lighting her eyes. ‘You sound like something out of a melodrama, Leo. You’re usually more blunt than that.’

He felt his mouth curving in an answering smile. ‘I’m happy to be blunt. I want you, Alyse.’ He gazed at her frankly, letting the desire that still coursed unsated through his body reveal itself in his face. ‘I want you very badly. I want to touch you, to kiss you, to be inside you. And I don’t want to wait very long.’

He saw an answering flare of heat in her eyes, turning them to molten silver, but her lips twisted and trembled and she looked away again. What was going on? ‘That’s admirably blunt.’

‘I’ll be even blunter—I think you want me just as much as I want you.’ Gently he tucked that curly tendril of hair behind her ear, unable to keep his fingers from lingering on the softness of her skin. He felt her tremble in response. ‘Do you deny it?’

‘No,’ she whispered, but she wouldn’t look at him.

Frustration bit into him. What was going on? Compelled to make her look at him, make her acknowledge the strength of the desire between them, he touched her chin and turned her to face him. She met his gaze reluctantly but unflinchingly, her eyes like two wide, grey pools Leo thought he could drown in. Lose himself completely.

‘I want to make love to you,’ he said quietly, each word brought up from a deep well of desire and even emotion inside him. ‘But not here, on a hard deck. We have a lovely big bed on a lovely private beach and I quite like the idea of making love to you there.’

Her eyes widened even more, surprise flickering in their depths, and with a jolt he realised what he’d said. Confessed.

Making love. It was a term he’d never used, didn’t even like. If love didn’t exist beyond a simple hormonal fluctuation, then you couldn’t make it. And sex, in his experience, had nothing to do with love. It wouldn’t, even with Alyse.

Yet the words had slipped out and he knew that Alyse had noticed. What did she think was happening between them? What was happening between them?

Panic, icy and overwhelming, swamped him. Why the hell had he said that? Felt it? This was what happened when you let someone in just a little bit. Friendship be damned.

He dropped his fingers from her chin and rose abruptly from the deck, thankfully shattering the moment that had stretched between them. There would be no putting it together again; he’d make sure of that. ‘We should head back,’ he said tersely. ‘In any case.’

He set sail, his back to her, and wondered just how he could get their relationship—he didn’t even like calling it that—back on the impersonal and unthreatening footing he craved. Whatever it took, he vowed grimly, he would do it. He’d had enough of this friendship.

* * *

Alyse sat on the bridge deck and watched as Leo set sail for their private cove. His shoulders were now rigid with tension, every muscle taut, and she didn’t know if it was because of her emotional withdrawal or his. She’d seen the flare of panic in his eyes when he’d said those two revealing words: making love.

But there would be no love in their physical union, just immense, intense attraction. So why had he said it? Had he meant it simply as a turn of phrase that had alarmed him when he’d heard it aloud? Or, for a moment, had he actually felt something more? That alarmed him more than any mere words ever could.

Was she ridiculous to think that little slip might signify something? She knew she had a tendency to read far too much into a smile or a look. She didn’t want to make the same mistake now, yet she couldn’t keep herself from wondering. From hoping.

And yet, she felt her own flare of panic. What would Leo think—and feel—when she told him, as she must do, that she wasn’t a virgin?

Alyse turned to face the sea, hugging her knees to her chest even though the wind was sultry. The coldness she felt came from inside, from the knowledge she’d been hiding from for too long already.

She’d blanked out that one fumbling evening that constituted all of her sexual experience, had consigned it to a terrible, heart-rending mistake and tried to pretend it hadn’t happened.

But princesses—future queens—were meant to be pure, unblemished, and she clearly was not. In this day and age, did it really matter?

It would matter, she supposed, to someone like Queen Sophia who, despite having been born into merely an upper-class family, held fast to the archaic bastions of the monarchy as if she were descended from a millennia’s worth of royalty. It probably mattered to King Alessandro as well, but she didn’t care about either of them. She cared about Leo.

Would it matter to him? Would he be disappointed that he wasn’t her first? She had no illusions that he was a virgin; he surely hadn’t been celibate for the six long years of their engagement, even if he’d been admirably discreet.

Anxiety danced in her belly. Worry gnawed at her mind. She didn’t want to give him any reason to withdraw emotionally from her, to feel disappointed or perhaps even angry, yet she knew she would have to tell him...before tonight.

They didn’t speak until the catamaran was pulled up on the beach and they were back in their private cove, and then only to talk about when they would have dinner. It was late afternoon, the sun already starting its mellow descent towards the horizon.

Alyse went to shower in the separate bathroom facilities, all sunken marble and gold taps kept in a rocky enclosure that was meant to look like a natural part of the cove.

She washed away the remnants of sea salt and sun cream and wondered what the next few hours would hold. Something had started to grow between her and Leo, perhaps even to blossom. Friendship—and perhaps something more, until he’d had that moment of panic.

Could they recapture both the camaraderie and passion they’d felt this afternoon?

What if her admission ruined it all?

It doesn’t matter, she told herself. It shouldn’t matter. He might be a prince, but Leo’s still a modern man...

Even so, she felt the pinpricks of uncertainty. Of fear.

The staff were setting up another romantic dinner on the beach when Leo came out of the shower, his hair damp and curling slightly by his neck, the sky-blue of his shirt bringing out the blue in his eyes. Alyse had chosen another dress from her stylist-selected wardrobe, this one made of lavender silk, the colour like the last vestiges of sunset. It dipped daringly low in the front and then nipped in at the waist before flaring out around her legs. She left her hair down and her feet bare and went without make-up. It seemed ridiculous to bother with eyeliner or lipstick when they were on a secluded beach and the sea wind and salt air would mess them both up anyway.

Leo seemed to agree, for he took in her appearance with no more than a slight nod, yet she still felt the strength of his response, the leashed desire.

And something else. Something she didn’t like—a coolness in his expression, a reserve in his manner. He didn’t speak as he took her hand and led her to the table set up on the sand.

Still she was achingly aware of him, more now than ever before: the subtle, spicy scent of his aftershave; the dry warmth of his palm as he took her hand; the latent strength of his stride as she fell into step next to him.

‘What shall we do tomorrow?’ she asked brightly when they’d sat down and begun their starters, slices of succulent melon fanned out with paper-thin carpaccio. She was determined not to lose any ground, not to let him retreat back into his usual silence, as much as he might seem to want to. ‘Go for a hike?’

Leo’s mouth tightened and he speared a slice of melon. ‘I need to work tomorrow.’

‘Work?’ Disappointment crashed over her but with effort she kept her smile in place, her voice light. ‘This is your honeymoon, Leo.’

He pinned her with a steely gaze. ‘I have duties, Alyse.’

‘And what will the staff think of you ignoring your bride on the second full day of our holiday?’ she asked, unable to keep herself from it even though she didn’t want to bring up the whole pretence of their relationship. She wanted to talk about how it was becoming more real. Or it had seemed to be, this afternoon.

‘I’m sure they’ll understand. Being in love doesn’t mean we live in each other’s pockets. The last six years have proved that. We spent most of the time apart and yet no one seemed to have any trouble believing we were wildly, passionately in love.’

That wasn’t quite true, Alyse knew. When the media hadn’t been celebrating their grand romance, it had been trying to create division: publishing incriminating-looking photos, composing pages and pages of speculation that she’d feared contained more than a grain of truth.

Leo looking for love with Duke’s daughter Liana?