A Ring To Secure His Crown

Hard to imagine that the endless succession of tall, leggy blondes whose names had been linked with his were universally dumb, but Sabrina had always imagined, with an uncharacteristic lack of charity, that they probably pretended to be dim! There was a type of man who just couldn’t cope with a woman who could challenge them intellectually, and in her opinion the black sheep of the Zorzi family ticked all the boxes for that type!

He was the sort of royal prince who made republicans say smugly, I told you so...or they should do, she reflected grimly. It was just that somehow Sebastian made the unacceptable seem charming and no matter what his indiscretions everyone seemed to forgive him; and not only that, they liked him despite the fact he’d been sticking a finger up to authority all of his adult life.

It had always mystified Sabrina. Yet sitting a few feet away from him in an enclosed space, she began to understand it better. He didn’t have to deliver a charm offensive, he just had to breathe!

The sensual shock wave of his presence had to be experienced to be believed! She had, and Sabrina no longer believed that any of the stories that circulated about him were exaggerated.

In the past it would not have been strange that they had never met. For many years relations between the two Velatian royal families had been, if not frigid, definitely cool.

Times had changed. No longer enemies, the two royal families had become the best of friends and co-conspirators, united in a common cause.

But at every social occasion where both families had been present, somehow Sebastian had always been absent. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise her if Sebastian had been banned from such occasions. The only time Sabrina had even been in the same room as Sebastian Zorzi previously, it had been a very large room and he had vanished very early in the evening through a back exit, along with the much younger wife of an elderly diplomat, before they’d had the chance to be formally introduced.

Later that same evening she remembered the awe-inspiring and rather cold, or so it had always seemed to her, King Ricard coming to find his younger son. Luis, she recalled, had covered for his brother. It seemed to be the pattern of the siblings’ relationship, his brother breaking the rules and Luis covering up for him.

If that meeting had ever happened she might have been prepared for the aura of raw masculinity Sebastian projected like a force field. It was primitive, raw sex appeal in its most concentrated form.

It made her skin prickle, her heart race and her limbs grow heavy and shakily weak. She didn’t like it, but she accepted that she might well be in the minority there. A lot, if not most, might not exactly disapprove of the blatant sexuality of his wide, mobile mouth and the hard sculpted lines of his face. She took comfort in the knowledge that any second-year medical student, or, for that matter, sensible person, would have known her symptoms were caused by the after-effects of shock.

‘Did anyone see us leave...?’ He repeated the mystery caller’s question. ‘A few, I’d say.’ His eyes, glittering with malicious amusement, found her own and she stopped the frenzied smoothing of her hair while he responded to the person on the other end of the line. ‘I wasn’t actually counting, but, no, she didn’t give them any quotes, barring the curses. I learnt a few new ones!’ He winced and lifted the phone away from his ear, waiting a moment, a smile playing across his lips until eventually he pressed it back into the angle of his jaw. ‘Of course I’m not being serious. She was the epitome of inbred princess cool,’ he soothed, before sliding the phone back into the breast pocket of his jacket.

Sabrina still didn’t really know what was happening, but in that moment her desire to find out came second to her desire to react to his comments. ‘The next time you accuse someone of being inbred I think maybe you should consult your own family tree.’

He gave a low throaty chuckle that alarmingly raised goosebumps over the surface of her skin. ‘Point taken, though, as I’m sure you are aware, there was for some time a question mark over my genetic inheritance.’

Her eyes fell even though he displayed none of the awkwardness she immediately felt. Of course she knew. News of the late Queen’s affair had found its way onto every front page after the love letters she had written to her lover had found their way into the public domain after the man’s death.

Then soon after, in case anyone had missed the lurid headlines, there was the book written by the man’s ex-wife and the nanny, who had been the first to connect the dates with the birth of the Queen’s second son and shared her suspicions with a tabloid.

There had been a show of solidarity by the Zorzi royal family at the time too. The Queen had appeared looking beautiful and frail at the side of her husband, the two Princes with their hair slicked back and faces shiny.

‘But nobody believes that now,’ Sabrina said uncomfortably.

He threw her a sardonic look. ‘Oh, plenty believe it, cara, and a lot more wish it was true...’ One slanted brow arched as he shrugged his shoulders. ‘Myself included.’

Distracted from her own situation by this statement, she could not hide her astonishment. ‘You wish you were a bastard? I’m sorry, I...’ She broke off, blushing furiously, but Sebastian Zorzi did not appear even slightly put out by being referred to as a bastard.

‘Let’s just say I don’t wake up feeling lucky that Zorzi blood is running through my veins.’

‘Well, Luis is proud of his heritage,’ she countered defensively.

‘My brother is more forgiving than I am.’

‘Forgiving of who?’

The mockery left his eyes as he stared at her for a long moment. The expression on his face was hard to read. ‘While I’m enjoying this deep and meaningful discussion, aren’t there other questions you should be asking at this moment?’

She shook her head in confusion.

‘Like, what just happened?’

She immediately felt stupid. ‘So what did just happen?’

He gave a throaty chuckle that sounded cruel to Sabrina. ‘Welcome to the rest of your life, cara.’

‘I’m not spending the rest of my life with you.’ Or even another second, if she had her way.

‘My loss, I’m sure,’ he drawled sarcastically.

She clenched her teeth. ‘But why the cameras? The journalists? I don’t understand.’

His dark brows lifted. ‘Really? I’d heard you were bright. Ah, well, bright doesn’t always equate with quick on the uptake, I suppose,’ he conceded as she flushed angrily. ‘There has been a leak.’

Crazily, all she could think about with those blue eyes mocking her was the leak in her bathroom that had occurred last winter, the one that had taken the landlord a month to fix.

He sighed, the sound the auditory equivalent of an eye roll. It was the last straw for Sabrina.

‘Look, I’m sure having cameras and microphones thrust in your face is all part of a normal day in your life but it’s not in mine, so shall we pretend just for a moment that you have an ounce of sensitivity? I’m badly traumatised and, like you said, not so quick on the uptake!’

A tense silence followed her outburst. She never yelled!

‘Ever heard of volume control?’

She said nothing, afraid if she opened her mouth again she’d do something even more embarrassing like cry.

As he stared at her the humorous glint in his eyes completely faded, though there was certainly no softening in his blunt delivery as he spelt out the situation. ‘Someone in the inner circle sold the story: wedding, reunification, the whole master plan.’

She shook her head and swallowed past the lump the size of a tennis ball that was lodged in her throat ‘Why would anyone do that?’

‘Oh, I don’t know, maybe for money?’

She gnawed on her full lower lip, resenting the ease with which he made her feel gauche and naive.

‘But don’t worry, we know it wasn’t you.’

Her eyes flew wide, the pallor that emphasised the sprinkling of freckles across the bridge of her small straight nose deepening. ‘What?’

‘Well, first thought was that you might have got tired of waiting for Luis to pop the question and decided to nudge things along.’

‘Why the hell would I want to do that?’ In the hothouse emotional atmosphere her knee-jerk reaction emerged uncensored. ‘I mean...’ Her eyes fell from his searing stare. No, he couldn’t see what was in her head; how the hell could he? At that moment she didn’t even know what was in her head.

‘I touched a nerve...interesting.’

‘I am not a science experiment!’

One side of his mouth lifted in an incredibly attractive half-smile that made her fight to catch her breath while her skin prickled with antagonism.

‘I am sensing that this is bad timing?’