The Blackmail Marriage

Happy for him, but Maria’s mentioning of her grandmother had awoken some far from happy memories for herself!

Oh, yes, Maria’s grandmother! Carrie’s eyes suddenly glinted with a certain steeliness.

‘Carrie, please,’ Maria pleaded, ‘There is no one else I can ask to do this for me. No one else I could trust…who understands just how things are at home in S’Antander…just how things are with Luc! If you would just go there for me and tell my grandmother. So that she can tell Luc.’

The very mention of Maria’s grandmother was enough to raise the most ignoble and tempting thoughts in Carrie’s mind!

She wasn’t a naïve eighteen-year-old any more, she reminded herself sternly. She was now a mature, confident and successful woman! A highly acclaimed economist, working freelance as a financial journalist.

Determinedly she tried to refuse, but Maria remained stubbornly insistent that Luc, His Serene Highness, ruler of the small but perfectly formed principality of S’Antander, had to be told that his prospective bride had instead chosen to marry the man who had been her childhood playmate—Carrie’s younger brother.

‘Please, Carrie,’ Harry begged her, and Carrie could feel her resistance weakening.

A little ruefully she admitted that there was a part of her that could not help feeling a certain degree of valedictory triumph in being the one to carry the news to the Countess that her granddaughter was not after all going to meekly accept her grandmother’s plans for her and fulfil her ambitions to make her Luc’s wife.

After the misery of a cold, wet British spring, the warmth that met Carrie as she stepped out of the airport at Nice and set off to collect her hire car was indeed a welcome relief.

Despite her fair English skin and straight silky shoulder-length naturally blonde hair, Carrie had never enjoyed the discomfort of her home country’s grey winter climate. Perhaps it was the fault of all those school holidays spent in S’Antander with her father—they had given her a taste for the warmth of its sunshine!

Her father was retired now, and lived in Australia with his second wife who, like him, had been widowed when they met.

Carrie liked her stepmother who, having no children of her own, had expressed herself delighted to be gaining two adult stepchildren. Carrie’s own mother had been killed in a car accident when Carrie had been seven and Harry only two. It had been one of the reasons why her father had accepted the post in S’Antander, which had included the benefit of proper domestic care for his young children—although that had not stopped Carrie from adopting her almost motherly attitude towards her younger brother.

Although Nice was its closest airport, S’Antander, which occupied a small strip of land between France and Italy, had been influenced by the Italian way of life as much as the French. Its people spoke Italian with a smattering of French names and vocabulary, and privately Carrie had always thought that there was a certain macho, Italian latinness about Luc himself.

The principality boasted a small seaport and harbour town, and its walled capital city was the site of an imposing castle which was both Luc’s principal home—he also had a hunting lodge high up in the Alps, which he used as a winter skiing retreat—and seat of the country’s government offices. It was set back from the coast, commanding a strategic position which overlooked both the main roads that gave access to the country.

Since the only way to get there was either to drive or to hire a private helicopter, Carrie had elected to drive. She might earn a very good living for herself, but it was not good enough to run to such extravagances as private helicopters! Unlike the new breed of entrepreneurs who were flocking to S’Antander to take advantage of its tax laws—just one of the innovative schemes and incentives that Luc was putting in place to attract income to the small principality!

‘You’re going where?’ her agent and close friend Fliss Barnes had demanded in excitement when Carrie had told her what she was doing. ‘You’ve got to do an article on the place whilst you’re there, Carrie,’ she had insisted. ‘I’ve heard that it’s awash with rich sports personalities and the like, and that you can’t so much as buy a one-bedroomed apartment there for under a million!’

The young Frenchman who had handed the hire car over to Carrie watched appreciatively as she walked over to it to check it over, admiring the length of her slender legs encased in a pair of low-slung jeans. A soft white tee shirt discreetly covered rather than hugged the rounded swell of her breasts, and the sunglasses she had put on to shade the cool jade-green of her eyes, whilst designer-logoed, were subtly discreet rather than flaunting their origins.

Quickly checking the time on the businesslike watch strapped to her narrow wrist, she unlocked the car. It was just ten a.m. That gave her time to drive to S’Antander and back again to the hotel she had booked herself in to for a brief self-indulgent stay before returning home.

Spring on the Côte d’Azur was a wonderful season, Carrie reflected, as she headed towards Menton, leaving the A8 behind to take the coast road.

After all, she was in no hurry to get to S’Antander—and revenge, so they said, was a dish best eaten cold!

She had never forgotten the cruelty of the way the Countess had spoken to her, and she had never forgiven the man who had given that woman authority to do so!

The naïve eighteen-year-old so desperately in love with Luc that he had filled her emotions and her thoughts to the exclusion of everything and everyone else had had to grow up very quickly since then.

A brief sadness darkened her eyes before she pushed her unwanted memories away as the once familiar countryside claimed her attention. Three years at university, followed by her father’s retirement and remarriage, had ensured that there had been no need for her to return to S’Antander since the Countess had delivered Luc’s dismissal to her.

A discreet signpost indicted the road to S’Antander’s border. Unlike Monaco, S’Antander had never touted itself as a tourist attraction. Olive groves flanked the road, and in the distance she spied the turquoise brilliance of the sea. Winding down her window as she approached the border post, Carrie breathed in the warm fragrant air of the South, with its intoxicating blend of perfume and sunshine.

A guard stepped forward as she stopped her car, dressed not in the pageantry of the country’s historic military uniform but instead in a much more serviceable police uniform. Handing him her passport, Carrie waited as he inspected it, and her, before handing it back to her.

It was only as she put the car in gear that she realised that she had been holding her breath.

Why? After all, Luc wasn’t even in the country—never mind likely to have placed her name on a ‘not to be admitted’ list! That was if he could even remember it!

As she drove further into the country Carrie was again entranced by its beautiful scenery. Centuries ago, before the country had been gifted to Luc’s forebears, it had been owned by a reclusive order of monks. The monastery high up in the Alps was now an exclusive skiing centre owned by Luc, but the monks’ careful husbandry of the land had been passed on to the people of the area, and as Carrie drove towards the capital she couldn’t help but admire the neat, orderly rows of vines and the small olive groves.

It had been her own father who had encouraged Luc to make his people as self-supporting as possible. Every acre of agricultural land was used as productively as it could be, and Carrie could see the sun glinting on the plastic coverings that housed the country’s much sought-after organic fruit and vegetable crops

The road had started to climb now. Below her was the sea and the small port, whilst up ahead of her…

Her heart did a slow somersault as she spied the rich terracotta walls of the city towering over the landscape. Built on a rocky outcrop and surrounded by a fertile plain, the castle commanded an excellent defensive position. Carrie remembered how shocked her twelve-year-old self had been when Luc had shown her the castle’s dungeons.

The steep incline of the road momentarily cut off the warmth of the sunlight, making her shiver in the coldness of the castle’s imposing shadow. Even if she had not known the history of this place it would still have been easy to imagine how daunting it would have appeared to any invading force.

Grimly Carrie drove under the narrow, tunnel-like entrance into the city, blinking as she emerged into the brilliant sunlight.

Maria had told her that her grandmother would be in residence at her grace and favour apartment in the castle, rather than staying in her country villa, and so Carrie parked her car in the small town square and got out, squaring her shoulders before making her way through the market stalls towards the castle.

High up above the city, in the eyrie he had made his private office, Luc D’Urbino, His Serene Highness, Prince of S’Antander, frowned. He had just returned from Brussels, where he had been involved in protracted and complex negotiations with regard to his country’s tax-free status, to discover that the political unrest which had been simmering between the traditionalist old guard of his grandfather’s generation and their younger, far more politically radical opponents had reached boiling point.

Still frowning, he listened as his elderly cousin and Prime Minister told him tersely, ‘The people want to see you married, Luc. The fact that you don’t as yet have a son, an heir, makes them feel insecure! And besides, your wedding would help to take people’s minds off all this fuss that’s going on with these foolish young hotheads who are claiming that we are guilty of allowing criminals and murderers to make use of our country to hide their blood money, as they insist on calling it.’

Luc suppressed a sigh as he listened. From a personal point of view he completely sympathised with the opinions expressed by the so-called ‘foolish young hotheads’, but his position meant that he could not publicly take sides—and besides, he naturally felt honour-bound to protect not just his late grandfather’s reputation but also the now sadly out of date and, because of that, vulnerable remaining members of the government who had been his grandfather’s peers.

‘I have already made it clear that as ruler of this state there is no way I intend to allow anyone guilty of profiting from the death of other human beings, or indeed any other illegal activities, to take advantage of our tax laws here,’ Luc began quietly, and then stopped as he looked down from his window into the market square below.

There was a woman standing there with her back to him, the sun shimmering on the tousled silky fall of her blonde hair. Lifting a hand, she raked her fingers through it, as though impatient with its waywardness. Immediately he stiffened, his stance unconsciously that of a hunter, silent but awesomely effective, as if he instinctively scented a prey. There was something about her bearing, about the fiercely eloquent independence of it, that he instantly recognised.

‘I am sorry, Giovanni, but I will have to discuss this with you later.’

Whilst his cousin watched in confusion, Luc thrust open the door and strode swiftly through it.

Carrie had no need to ask for directions to the Countess’s quarters. She knew exactly where the suite of rooms she occupied was, just as she knew how to evade having to go through the formality of entering the main doors to the castle and making herself known to the impressively uniformed major-domo stranding guard there, behind the equally impressive-looking pair of traditionally uniformed, helmeted and musket-carrying sentries.

They were there more for show than anything else, their muskets unloaded, but that did not mean that either the palace or its occupants were not very efficiently and discreetly protected by the ex-military un-uniformed men who formed the bulk of Luc’s security guards.

As she slipped through the small side door a hundred memories flooded back over her: the smell of the palace—a mixture of precious old furniture, works of art and ancient stone—and even more the smell of Luc, both before he had made love to her and after—a heady, dangerous mixture of male testosterone and those other indefinable scents that were his alone…

Or was she just allowing her imagination and her dangerous memories to play even more dangerous tricks on her?

Angrily Carrie closed her eyes, trying to blot out her unexpectedly sharply focused memories. Better that she remembered the icy hauteur of the Countess’s voice, the contempt and the cruelty with which she had been treated—at Luc’s behest after all—as well as the pain she herself had felt when…

‘So it is you! I thought so!’

‘Luc!’

Shocked, Carrie stepped back against the protection of the wall, her eyes widening betrayingly.

What was he doing here? Maria had insisted that he would be in Brussels.