The Prince's Captive Wife

He moved then, like a big cat, lunging forward to grasp her shoulders. She wrenched back but he hauled her in against him and held, whether she wished it or not.

He simply held.

She was rigid in his grasp, but he could feel her shoulders heaving. ‘No…no.’

‘Let it go, Holly,’ he said, and held her tighter still and let his face rest on her lovely curls.

For a moment he thought she wouldn’t let herself succumb to his attempts at comfort. The stiffness in her body felt even more pronounced.

And then, so suddenly he almost let her go, he felt the tension release. She let her body slump against him. He tugged her into him. Her face buried into his shoulder and he felt her weep.

It lasted thirty seconds at the most. He held her close, the most primeval of emotions coursing through his veins, all to do with protection, desire, possession, and then he felt her stiffen and pull away. This woman would not give in to tears easily, he thought as she hauled herself back from him and swiped her face angrily on her towel. He remembered her refusal to weep when he’d left. He’d seen the glimmer of tears and had watched her simply shut them down, hold them back.

She did so now. Her eyes, when she finally raised them to meet his, were cold and defiant.

‘You have no right to make me feel like this,’ she whispered. ‘You have no rights at all.’

‘I had the right to know my son.’

The words shocked them both. They were said with such a harshness that both of them knew it for an inviolate truth. She stared at him for a long moment, and then simply turned her back on him. Again.

‘I know you did,’ she said, starting to trudge again toward the pavilion. ‘If he’d lived I’d have told you. I should have told you straight away. But I didn’t attempt to hide him. If you’d contacted me… But of course you didn’t. And you need to understand. The moment you left my world fell apart. The socializing we’d done had pushed us over the limit. The debt collectors pulled the place apart. They even took Merryweather.’ Her voice broke and she paused, trying to regroup. She kicked the sand out before her in anger and she trudged on.

Merryweather.

‘Your horse,’ he said, stunned, thinking back to the beautiful mare she’d loved almost as an extension of herself.

‘She was the least of it,’ she said, hauling herself back under control with an obvious effort. ‘She was a fantastic stock-horse and she was in foal to a brilliant sire. She and her foal were worth far too much to keep. My mother walked out, and my father went on a drinking binge that lasted for years. I kept my pregnancy from my father until I was six months gone, and by then you were married. By then my father knew that no amount of child support would save the farm, and I saw no point in destroying your marriage. I told my parents if they tried to blackmail you then I’d deny the baby was yours. I… I was just so tied up with putting one foot after another that I had no time to think of you.

‘Or not very much,’ she admitted. ‘I had to keep the cattle alive. I had to keep my father from self-destruction. And maybe there was also depression at play as well. I told myself I’d write to you after the birth, but I was barely over the birth when…when…’

She stopped walking but she didn’t turn. She took a deep breath, forcing the words out as if they still had the capacity to cut her to the heart. ‘When Adam died,’ she said, squaring her shoulders, every inch of her rigid with tension.

Andreas tried to imagine what that must have been like for her. He’d never had anything to do with babies. He thought of her holding a tiny child—the wild girl he’d fallen in love with, suddenly transformed into a woman. Holly breastfeeding. Holly sleeping with a baby beside her. Suddenly it was there, a mental image so strong it was as if he’d been there. Holly as a mother. The mother of his son.

‘I don’t know this…meningitis.’

‘Lucky you,’ she said drearily. ‘It happened so fast… He woke in the night with a fever. I rang the flying doctor service at six a.m. They arrived at eight and he died on the plane to the city. They said it was so appalling a case that it wouldn’t have mattered if we’d lived right by the hospital—there was simply no time for the antibiotics to work.’

‘Was your mother…?’

‘Nowhere. Back in Europe. If I wouldn’t acknowledge you as Adam’s father she washed her hands of me.’

‘But your father took care of you?’ The thought of her facing her baby’s death alone seemed insupportable.

‘Are you kidding? He’d gone on a bender the day my mother walked out and was still drunk. God knows where he was the day I buried my baby but he wasn’t with me.’ She shook her head. ‘Leave it. I’m on my own. I buried my little boy myself and I’ve taken care of myself since. Now is that all? I don’t know why you’ve brought me here, Andreas, but you might as well let me go. There’s nothing left between us but a dead baby, and that’s the truth. Let me go and be done with me.’

CHAPTER THREE

THEY walked back to the pavilion side by side. Holly said nothing and Andreas could think of nothing to say. He could barely remember the echoes of his fury that she’d borne his son and not told him. Her story had been flat and truthful and dreadful.

Her loneliness appalled him.

That he’d left her to face childbirth and the babe’s subsequent death alone seemed unthinkable. He’d been so young. He’d left her to come home to a magnificent royal wedding. Thinking of Holly had hurt so he’d tried not to think of her at all.

He’d been a boy.

That was no excuse. He should have…

‘There’s no reason to berate yourself for what happened ten years ago,’ Holly said with sudden asperity. ‘Adam’s death wasn’t your fault. For the rest… I knew I was being seduced by a prince and I liked it.’

‘You weren’t…’

‘Seduced?’ she demanded with a trace of the old Holly. ‘What do you call what happened between us? Hair like gold filigree, I believe you told me. Eyes like stars. Breasts like—’

‘There’s no need to—’

‘There’s not, is there?’ she agreed and fell silent again.

‘It was good,’ he said cautiously, glancing at her sideways. Maybe he did remember the overblown compliments. Maybe he even remembered his older brothers coaching him.

‘Being a prince has definite advantages where women are concerned.’ He remembered Alex telling him this. ‘There’s hardly a woman you can’t get into your bed. It’s just a matter of a few pretty words and they’re yours for the taking.’

It had been heady stuff for a young prince to hear. Heady advice for a young prince to live by.

Maybe, God help him, he’d even believed it.

‘It was fun,’ Holly conceded, interjecting over his thoughts. ‘But before you get all smug, if I hadn’t wanted to be seduced you wouldn’t have had a chance.’

‘As you don’t want to be seduced now?’ Hell, where had that come from? But the words were out before he could stop himself saying them.

Maybe it wasn’t the wisest come-on. And it certainly wasn’t the way to lead into Sebastian’s plan for them.

She gasped. She stopped walking—and then she started again, very fast.

‘We were children, Andreas. We’re not children now. If you think you have a snowball’s chance in a bushfire…’

He grinned, distracted as he’d been distracted years ago by her Aussie expressions. Flat out like a lizard drinking. Barmy as a bandicoot. Mad as a cut snake.

‘I remember the way you talk,’ he said and she glared back at him as if he were crazy.

‘Shut up,’ she snapped. ‘Just shut up. If I get one more compliment from you I’ll choke. How soon can I get off this place?’

‘There are things we need to sort.’

‘What things?’

‘We do need to talk,’ he said gravely, but she was hardly listening. She’d crested the last hill before the pavilion and was speeding up.