Castiglione's Pregnant Princess: Castiglione's Pregnant Princess

From that point he wasn’t the only individual valiantly gritting teeth. Her flushed face frozen as he had never seen it before, Jazz emerged from the bathroom, noting that he had put on a black shirt. ‘I didn’t know you were waiting,’ she said dulcetly, leaning heavily on her one and only elocution lesson.

‘Look, don’t go all girlie on me. I don’t expect that from you,’ Vitale countered crushingly. ‘I only want the answer to one question.’

Jazz tried to unfreeze a little and look normal, or as normal as she could feel being confronted by Vitale when she was wearing only a towel. ‘OK.’

‘Why is a virgin on birth control?’ he asked gravely.

‘I don’t really think that’s any of your business. It was for...well, medical reasons,’ she told him obliquely, unwilling to discuss her menstrual cycle with him, her colour heightening until she felt like a beetroot being roasted and wanted to slap him for it.

‘It will be very much my business if you get pregnant,’ Vitale breathed witheringly.

‘It’s so like you to look on the dark side and expect the very worst,’ Jazz replied equally witheringly. ‘It’s not going to happen, Vitale. Relax and go back to bed and please forget this ever happened for both our sakes.’

‘Is that what you want?’ Vitale wanted to rip off the towel and continue even though he knew she was in no condition to satisfy him again. It had nothing whatsoever to do with his brain. It was pretty much as if his body had developed an agenda all of its own and he couldn’t control it.

‘We just had a sleazy encounter on a kitchen table in the middle of the night. What do you think?’ Jazz enquired saccharine sweet.

Vitale was receiving a strong impression that anything he said would be taken down and held against him. Sleazy? That single descriptive word outraged him. He swung on his heel, his lean, powerful body taut, and left the room and just as quickly Jazz wanted to kick him for giving up on her so easily. Her thoughts were a turbulent sea of conflict and confusion and self-loathing, sending her seesawing from one extreme to the other. No sooner was he gone than she wanted him back and she flung off the towel and climbed into bed, hating herself. It was so typical of Vitale to worry about the fact that he hadn’t used contraception. Now he would be waiting on that axe to fall and that was a humiliating prospect, even though it also reminded her that she hadn’t yet taken her daily pill. She dug into her bag and took it before switching off the light.

What was done was done and it had been amazing, she thought ruefully, but it was better not to think about that imprudent sudden intimacy that had changed everything between them. Now she was no longer thinking about Vitale as the boy he had once been, but Vitale, very much a man in the present and that switch in outlook disturbed her, made her fear that somewhere deep down inside her there was still a tiny kernel of the fourteen-year-old who had believed the sun rose and set on Prince Vitale Castiglione...

CHAPTER FIVE (#u783dd2eb-f521-5494-9a0d-f012ebaab217)

‘WOMEN MY AGE don’t wear clothes like this,’ Jazz was saying by late morning the next day, appalled by the vast collection of garments, all distinguished solely by their lack of personality. ‘I’m not your future wife or one of your relatives. I’m supposed to be only a girlfriend. Why would I be dressed like an older woman?’

‘I want you to be elegant,’ Vitale responded, unimpressed by her reasoning. He wanted every bit of her covered up. He didn’t want her showing off her shapely legs or her fabulous figure for other men to drool over. Recognising Angel’s appreciation of the beauty Jazz had become had been quite sufficient warning on that score. ‘I imagine you would prefer to show more flesh.’

That was the last straw for Jazz after a trying few hours of striving to behave normally when she did see Vitale between coaching sessions. Temper pushed up through her like lava seeking a crack to escape. ‘Where do you get all these prejudices about me from?’ she demanded hotly. ‘I don’t wear revealing clothes. I never have. And as you know I haven’t got much to reveal!’

‘You have more than enough for me, bellezza mia,’ Vitale breathed half under his breath, heat stirring at his groin as he thought about the delectable little swells he had explored the night before.

Jazz flinched and acted studiously deaf in receipt of that tactless reminder. He was no good at pretending, she recognised ruefully. ‘This stuff is all so bland,’ she complained instead, fingering a pair of tailored beige trousers with a curled lip. There was a lot of beige, a lot of navy and a lot of brown. He was even biased against bright colour. ‘If this is your taste, you certainly didn’t miss out on a chance of fame in the fashion industry.’

Vitale reached a decision and signalled the stylist waiting at the far end of the very large room. ‘Miss Dickens is in charge of the selections. By the sound of it, she will be ordering a more adventurous wardrobe,’ he declared, watching the slow smile that lit up Jazz’s piquant little face while smoothly congratulating himself on knowing when to ease up on exerting control. ‘But pick out something here to wear tonight.’

Jazz chose a fitted navy dress and shoes and lingerie as well as a bag.

‘Thanks!’ she called in Vitale’s wake as he left her alone with the stylist to share her own likes and dislikes.

His arrogant dark head turned in acknowledgement, brilliant dark-fringed eyes a fiery gold enticement, and desire punched her so hard in the chest that she paled, stricken that she could have made herself so vulnerable. Putting such pointless thoughts from her mind, she concentrated on choosing clothes and particularly on the necessary selection of a spectacular gown for the royal ball.

After asking for lunch to be served in her room she was free to go home and visit her family for a few hours, and it was a welcome break from the hothouse atmosphere of Vitale’s imposing London home. Her mother and her aunt were baking and Jazz sat down with a cup of tea and tried to feel normal again.

But she didn’t feel normal after she had put on the navy dress over the silk lingerie, her feet shod in hand-stitched leather sandals with smart heels. Although she had never bothered much with make-up she made a special effort with mascara and lipstick, knowing that that was one thing she did need that Vitale probably hadn’t thought about: make-up lessons.

‘No, I like you the way you are,’ Vitale asserted, startling her in the limo on the way out to dinner. ‘Natural, healthy. You have beautiful skin... Why cover it?’

Jazz shifted an uncertain shoulder. ‘Because it’s what women do... They make the most of themselves.’

Vitale studied her from his corner of the limo. She looked stunning, the dark dress throwing her amazing hair into prominence and emphasising her delicate figure and long slender legs. He willed his arousal to subside because he had made decisions earlier that day. He was going to step back, play safe, ensure that there was no more sex, no more blurring of the lines between them, but he only had to look at her to find his resolution wavering.

That had never happened to Vitale before with a woman. He had never succumbed to an infatuation, had always assumed that he simply wasn’t the emotional type. His affairs were always cool and sexual, nothing extra required or needed on either side. Naturally he had been warned since he was a teenager that he would, in all likelihood, have to marry for dynastic reasons rather than love and he had always guarded himself on the emotional front. What he felt for Jazz was desire, irresistible burning desire, and there was no great mystery about that when it was simply hormones, he told himself soothingly.

A current of discreetly turned heads and a low buzz of comment surrounded their passage to their table in the wildly exclusive restaurant where they were to dine. Vitale’s gaze glittered like black diamonds when he saw other men directing lustful looks at Jazz. For the moment, Jazz was his, absolutely his, whether he was having sex with her or otherwise, he reasoned stubbornly.

Jazz sat down, surveying the table to become belatedly grateful for Jenkins’s lesson in cutlery clarification. ‘So, tell me what you’ve been doing since you left school?’ she invited him cheerfully. ‘Apart from being a prince and all that.’

They talked about being students. Vitale admitted that banking had been the only viable option for him. He also told her that he had a house in Italy where he planned to take her before the ball.

‘For how long?’ she asked, her lovely face pensive in the candlelight, which picked up every fiery hue in her multi-shaded red mane of hair for his appreciation. ‘I like to see my mother regularly.’

‘A couple of weeks, no more. When this is over, after the ball—’ Vitale shifted a fluid, lean brown hand in emphasis ‘—I will pay for you to finish your degree so that you can work in your chosen field.’

‘That’s a very generous offer but you’re already covering quite enough in the financial line,’ she began in surprise and some embarrassment.

‘No. I tricked you,’ Vitale divulged, disconcerting her even more with that abrupt confession of wrongdoing. ‘My father is settling your mother’s loans. He wanted to. It makes him feel that he has helped her.’

‘You...tricked...me?’ Jazz gasped in disbelief that he could quietly admit that.

‘Being a bastard comes naturally. I needed you to accept the bet and I used your need for money to win your agreement,’ Vitale pointed out levelly. ‘I feel that I owe you that amount of honesty because you have been honest with me.’

‘So, you’re saying your father would always have helped?’ Jazz prodded in even greater surprise because she wasn’t, once she thought about it, that shocked to discover that Vitale could be extremely calculating and shrewd. She didn’t, however, feel that she was in a position to complain or protest because if he had used her to suit his own purposes, she was also most assuredly using him. Having already received a discreet cheque in payment for her supposed salary, she had given it in its entirety to her mother. No, she wasn’t proud that she had accepted money from a man she had also slept with, but she really could not bear to watch her mother scrimp and struggle. Being seriously poor had taught Jazz a lot of tough life lessons.

‘Papa feels very guilty about your mother. He was concerned that there was a possibility of domestic abuse in your parents’ marriage...’ Vitale volunteered very quietly after their plates had been cleared away.

Jazz turned sheet white and her fingers curled into the tablecloth, scrunching it. ‘There was,’ she conceded, thrown back in time to a period she rarely revisited. ‘My father was violent when life didn’t go his way and he took it out on us.’

Vitale was appalled and then shocked that he was appalled because he had heard of such situations, but then he had never personally known anyone who confessed to being a victim of domestic abuse. ‘You...as well as your mother?’

‘On several occasions when I tried to protect Mum. Poor Mum got the worst of it,’ Jazz conceded heavily. ‘Dad was hooked on online gambling and when he lost money he took it out on his family with his fists.’

A very real stab of anger coursed through Vitale at that news. He was remembering Jazz as a tiny child and a skinny teen and realising that she knew what it was to live in fear within a violent home where she should have been safe. His strong jawline was rigid. ‘I’m sorry you had to go through that experience.’

Jazz pursed her lips and sighed. ‘I think that was why Mum ran off with her second husband, Jeff. He was supposed to be her escape but he was more of a dead end. He wasn’t violent, just dishonest. But you know, the older I get, the more I realise that many people have had bad experiences when they were young,’ she told him in an upbeat tone. ‘It doesn’t have to define you and it doesn’t have to hold you back and make you distrust everyone you meet. You can move beyond it. I know I have.’

Vitale stretched out a hand and squeezed hers to make her release the tablecloth and she laughed and let go of it when she appreciated what she had been doing, her lack of self-pity and her strength delighting him.

‘I have the mother from hell,’ he confessed unexpectedly. ‘Controlling, domineering, very nasty. If she has a heart, I’ve never seen it. All she cares about is the Lerovian throne and all the pomp and ceremony that go with it.’

Jazz smiled, pleased that he trusted her enough to admit that. ‘You’re very lucky to have such a pleasant father, then,’ she pointed out.

‘Sì...’ Vitale confirmed, startled that he had spoken ill of his mother for the first time ever and quite unable to explain where those disloyal words had come from. There was something odd about Jazz that provoked him into acting against his own nature, he decided darkly. Maybe it was simply the fact that she was so relaxed in his company that she broke through his reserve. Was that why he was acting out of character?

As for the problem that was his mother, he had only told the truth, he reasoned ruefully. Sofia Castiglione was feared even by the royal household. It was not disloyalty to tell the truth, he acknowledged then, while marvelling that in admitting that salient fact to Jazz he felt some of his tension drop away.

Outside the restaurant, the limousine awaited them, two security guards forcing a man with a camera to back off. The flash of a photo being taken momentarily blinded her as Vitale guided her at speed back into the limo.

‘Who is she?’ another voice shouted.