Playboy's Lesson

However, the same could not be said of Princess Charlotte. There were scores of unflattering comments about her lack of fashion sense, and some rather nasty and unfair, he thought, comparisons made between her and her sister. As if to back up their criticisms the press had sourced several candid shots that made Charlotte look severe and much older than her years. There was nothing about her private life other than one small snippet about a fling with a diplomat’s son while she was at finishing school in Switzerland when she was eighteen. But if she had an active social life since it certainly wasn’t wild enough to attract the paparazzi’s attention, which, quite frankly, was a little intriguing.

There was nothing he liked better than to ride a dark horse.

‘This way, Mr Chatsfield.’ A palace official bowed as he opened a door leading into a morning room. ‘Her Royal Highness Princess Charlotte will receive you now.’

The first thing Lucca noticed when he stepped into the room was a pair of startlingly green eyes glaring at him from behind a pair of tortoiseshell-rimmed spectacles. The princess was standing with her back ramrod straight, reminding him of a small tin soldier facing an imaginary battle. Nary a muscle on her slim framed body moved. It was as if she had been snap frozen … all except for a betraying little movement of her left index finger against her thumbnail, an agitated flicking movement that he suspected might have been an unconscious habit, like picking at a hangnail.

However, he could see why the press made such sport of her clothes. If what she was currently wearing was any indication, she either didn’t have a clue what suited her or deliberately dressed in the most unflattering way possible. The below-the-knee plaid skirt teamed with a brown cotton blouse and covered by a cardigan that swamped her small frame made her look like a bag lady rather than a princess second in line to the throne. Her hair was neither blonde nor brown, but a tawny shade, and tied back severely from her face, giving her a prim, schoolmarmish look.

‘Welcome to the royal palace of Preitalle, Mr Chatsfield.’ She spoke in a coolly polite tone that had a hint of a French accent to it. She held out her right hand to him but he sensed it was out of a grim commitment to duty rather than any desire to make physical contact.

He took her hand and watched as her rainforest-green eyes widened fractionally as his fingers wrapped firmly around hers, almost swallowing her tiny hand whole. Her skin was rose-petal soft and cool like silk. She tilted her head right back to keep eye contact with him, making him feel every millimetre of his six-foot-two height.

Her hand fluttered like a little bird inside the cage of his, sending a shock wave of heat through his pelvis like the backdraft of a fire. He released her hand and had to physically stop himself from wriggling his fingers to rid himself of the electric tingling her touch had evoked.

‘Thank you, Your Royal Highness,’ he said with exaggerated politeness. He might be an irascible rake but he knew how to behave when the occasion called for it, even if he privately thought it was all complete and utter nonsense. In his opinion people were people. Rich or poor. Royal or common.

She pressed her lips together so tightly as if she were trying to hold an invisible piece of paper between them steady. He wasn’t sure if it was out of annoyance or a gesture of nervousness or shyness, but it drew his gaze like starving eyes to a feast. She had a bee-stung mouth, full lipped and rosy pink without the adornment of lipstick or even a layer of clear lip gloss. It was a mouth that looked capable of intense passion but it seemed somewhat at odds with the rest of her downplayed and rather starchily set features.

A feather of intrigue tickled Lucca’s interest. Did she have a wild side behind those frumpy clothes and that frosty facade?

Maybe his exile here wouldn’t be a complete waste of time, after all….

She stepped back from him like someone does in front of a suddenly too-hot fire. She squared her slim shoulders and crossed her hands over the front of her body, cupping her elbows with the opposite hands. ‘I believe you have been appointed as my assistant.’

Lucca was seriously getting off on her priggish hauteur. It was so different from the way women usually responded to him. There was no simpering and batting of eyelashes. No breathy coos and whispers. No coy come-hither looks or pouting lips and delectable cleavages on show.

No, sirree.

She was buttoned up to the neck and spoke to him in clipped formal sentences and looked at him down the length of her retroussé nose as if he was something unpleasant stuck to her sole of her sensible shoe.

‘That’s correct.’ He gave her a mocking at-your-service bow.

Her chin came up a little higher and those striking eyes flashed like green-tinged lightning behind those conservative spectacle frames. ‘I think you should know that your appointment is both unnecessary and expressly against my wishes.’

Wow. Now that was some attitude.

He’d had every intention of leaving her to it but something about her stiff unfriendliness irked him. He wasn’t used to being dismissed as if he was nothing more than a lowly ranked servant who had failed to come up to scratch. He was an heir of one of the richest families in England. He decided to dig his heels in. He wasn’t going to let some hoity-toity little princess rob him of his allowance by dismissing him before he put in a day’s ‘work.’ He would play the game for the sake of appearances and keep everybody at home happy.

‘Your sister’s wedding cannot go ahead without my family’s cooperation,’ he said. ‘The Chatsfield Hotel is the only venue large and modern enough in Preitalle to accommodate a royal wedding reception.’

She gave him a defiant stare. ‘We can have it here at the palace ballroom. It’s what I proposed to my sister in the first place.’

‘But that’s not what your sister wants,’ he countered neatly. It felt like a verbal fencing match and just as stimulating. He could feel the stirring of his blood, like a tapping beat picking up its tempo, taking heat to his groin like a spreading fire. ‘The hotel is closer to the cathedral and she wants the neutral ground of Chatsfield to show how forward-thinking the royal house of Preitalle is becoming, does she not?’

Her lips compressed again. He could almost hear the cogs of her smart little brain ticking over. She was planning a counterattack. He could see the flickering behind her eyes as if she was mentally shuffling through her storehouse of comments to choose the most waspish one to send his way. ‘I fail to see how a man who spends his life frittering away his time and his family’s money on a profligate lifestyle such as yours could have anything to offer me in terms of services.’

Lucca smiled a satirical smile. ‘Au contraire, little princess. I think I have just the services you need to get this place rocking into the twenty-first century.’

Her cheeks blushed a fiery red but her mouth was still flattened chalk-white in disapproval. ‘You do not have permission to address me informally. Please refrain from doing so. I am Your Royal Highness at first greeting and then Ma’am henceforth.’

‘Would that be Ma’am as in schoolmarm?’

She drew in a sharp little breath and stalked to the other side of the room, still with her arms crossed over her body, her head at that proud height as she looked out of the windows to the formal palace gardens outside. Her whole body seemed to be vibrating with anger like a battery-operated toy set on an uneven surface. He could see her trying to control it, he assumed out of years of royal training. Presumably royals had tempers just like everybody else but they weren’t allowed to use them, or at least not in public. But he had a feeling Her Royal High and Mightiness would give her best tiara right now for an opportunity to slap one of her dainty little fingernail-chewed hands across his face.

‘I do not wish to have anything further to do with you,’ she said in clearly enunciated tones. ‘Please leave.’

‘Listen, sweetheart,’ Lucca said with a cavalier disregard for protocol. ‘Way I see it, we’re stuck with each other, at least for the sake of appearances. Your big sister seems pretty keen on us working together and I get the feeling that what she says around here goes. Quite frankly, I’d rather be working on my tan on one of your beaches, preferably with a couple of blonde beach bunnies peeling grapes for me. So kick me out if you dare. I’m cool with it, but you can say goodbye to using the Chatsfield.’

She turned and gave him a look one would do when a cockroach appears on the table in the middle of a formal dining setting. ‘You are the most disreputable man I have ever met.’

‘Looks like you need to get out more.’ He gave her his fallen angel’s smile. ‘I can assure you there’s plenty more out there like me.’

Her eyes slitted like a cat facing a feral dog, her hands balling into fists at her sides. ‘Get out before I have you thrown out by my security team.’

He gave an indolent shrug as he ambled over to the door. ‘I’ll be staying in the penthouse at the Chatsfield if you want me.’ He turned and blew her a kiss across his open palm. ‘Ciao.’

CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_4b4419c7-c663-5771-ad5d-0fb1ccd43fc6)

LOTTIE STORMED INTO her sister’s suite of rooms a few minutes later. ‘You cannot be serious. That man is insufferable! He’s quite possibly the rudest, most uncouth man I’ve ever met. What can you be thinking to bring him here? I won’t work with him. I won’t! I won’t! I won’t!’

Madeleine slowly turned on the velvet-covered stool in front of the antique dressing table where she had been experimenting with a new eye shadow. ‘You will. You will. You will. I want my reception at the Chatsfield Hotel. We’ve talked about it since we were children. I am not going to let a little personality clash ruin my fairytale wedding.’

Lottie loved her sister but she hated the streak of bossiness in Madeleine’s nature. There were only three years’ difference in their ages but once her older sister’s mind was made up it was virtually impossible to change it.

But she was going to have a damn good try.

‘Personality clash, you call it? I’d call it a personality collision! That man is nothing but trouble. He came swaggering in as if I was a housemaid instead of a princess. He called me sweetheart!’

Madeleine giggled. ‘Did he?’

Lottie glowered. ‘Not only that, he held my hand far too long.’ She didn’t mention the blown kiss. She was still too furious about that to put the words together. The audacity of the man was unbelievable. The effrontery of him made her blood boil. How dare he treat her like one of his shallow little strumpets?

‘He’s rather gorgeous, isn’t he?’ Madeleine swivelled back to apply dove-grey eye shadow to her left eyelid with a slim-handled sable brush. ‘If I wasn’t already taken I’d make a play for him myself. He’s got that wild, bad-boy thing going on. That element of totally unapologetic outrageous wickedness that makes a girl go weak at the knees.’

Lottie locked her knees together just in case they took it upon themselves to be influenced by her sister’s comments. Not that they hadn’t already been influenced, not by comments about the man, but by the man himself. As soon as Lucca Chatsfield had taken her proffered hand something had ignited inside her body like a match struck against dried-up tinder. It had raced like a runaway flame right to the centre of her being and had sizzled there in secret ever since. His glinting dark brown eyes had roved over her like a minesweeper, taking in every nuance of her appearance. The mockery in his gaze had infuriated her. She knew she wasn’t the beauty of the family, but did he have to rub her nose in it?

Schoolmarm indeed!

He was here to make trouble for her and she had to get rid of him as quickly as she possibly could. Her plans for a perfect wedding for her sister would be sabotaged if he got any say in it. He was an outright playboy. He didn’t date women. He slept with them and then left them before they had time to put his number in their phone. The press was full of his wild-partying, hooking-up lifestyle. He hadn’t had a single relationship that lasted more than twenty-four hours. He was a one-night-stand man. It was practically his brand, for God’s sake. What possible interest would he have in planning a wedding? She would be made a fool of and the whole world would be watching to see it. Argh!

‘You know he’s not going to do a minute’s work while he’s here,’ Lottie said, jutting her chin as she looked at her sister. ‘He’s only here for show. He’s using it as some sort of layabout holiday. He was disgustingly blatant about it. That shows how unprincipled he is.’

Madeleine picked up her bronzing brush and swept it artfully across each of her regal cheekbones in turn. ‘Then perhaps you should take him on as a project. Put him to work. Get his nose to the grindstone and his shoulder to the wheel or whatever the saying is.’

I’d like to get his back to the wall, Lottie thought with venom. I’d like to scratch his eyes out. I’d like to slap his arrogant face. I’d like to—

Madeleine smiled at her in the mirror. ‘Well, look at you, Lottie, love. I’ve never seen you so fired up. He really has got under your skin, hasn’t he?’