Passion And The Prince

How could this woman, this Dr Lillian Wrightington, be the same woman he had caught trying to bribe his nephew into modelling for her?

It seemed impossible…but it wasn’t. Quite plainly Dr Wrightington was a woman who lived two very separate lives. What could possibly motivate a woman highly qualified and presumably able to command a respectable salary to involve herself in such sleaze? The anger and pain he had felt over Olivia’s death surged through him. He could taste it in his mouth, feel it burning his emotions.

They had been childhood friends, expected by their families to marry one day. Theirs would have been a platonic union, a business arrangement, and Olivia had assured him that she wanted the same thing, too. Only she’d been leading a secret life, duped into chasing fame as a model, and it cut deep to think that the girl he’d thought he knew had been deceiving him all that time.

Olivia had never found that fame. Drugs and ultimately prostitution had dragged her into the gutter and from there to her death, and her journey there had been facilitated by a woman like the one standing in front of him now. A woman who bought beautiful young flesh for those with a taste for it, and who deceived those who possessed that beautiful young flesh with promises of fame and fortune.

He had trusted both Olivia herself and that woman, but they had both lied to him about their intentions. That knowledge had left a raw wound within him that his pride could not allow to heal. They’d given him their word, their promise, they’d taken his trust and destroyed it. He’d have to be a complete fool—a weak, easily manipulated fool—to trust another woman now. His cynicism burned inside him like vitriol.

‘Why do you do it?’ he asked grimly.

Lily could feel the icy-cold blast of his contempt like a burn against her skin. It made her want to shrink into herself in anguished pain. What had she ever done to warrant his harshness towards her? Nothing. And yet the knowledge that he felt contempt for her pierced her. What was it about him that made her own emotions react so deeply to him? As though somehow she was hyper-sensitive to him—as though some kind of magnetic link existed between them, enclosing her and making her acutely vulnerable to the force-field of his personality, no matter how hard she struggled to resist the effect he was having on her.

‘Why do I do what?’

‘Don’t pretend not to understand me. You know perfectly well what I mean—that seedy studio, the manner in which you approached my nephew.’

His words brought a guilty flush of colour to her skin, even though she had nothing to feel guilty about.

‘I’ve already told you I was simply doing someone else a favour.’

Far from placating him, her explanation served only to add to his biting contempt.

‘I can imagine the kind of favour you were attempting to do,’ he told her brutally, the fury inside him spilling over. ‘Tell me something,’ he demanded. ‘Does what you’re doing never worry you? Do you ever give any thought to the damage and destruction you and your kind cause?’

Lily’s heart had started to thump heavily and uncomfortably. She was beginning to feel panicked by his attack. He was advancing into private territory within her that was filled with thinly healed sores. It was incredibly ironic that he should make the assumptions about her that he had. Incredibly ironic and almost unbearable. Only her keenly honed instinct to protect herself stopped her from protesting and from justifying her involvement. Instead, as calmly as she could, she said unsteadily, ‘As I’ve already told you—not that I need to explain or excuse my actions to you—I was asked by my…by someone to take over a photographic shoot for a clothes catalogue. Nothing more than that.’

‘So what about the young man who was approached in a student bar and offered the opportunity of doing some modelling work in this shoot? Didn’t that worry you? Didn’t you question your…friend about why he had found a model in such a way? There are, after all, model agencies who I am sure have books filled with the names of young men who already know at least some of the pitfalls of the business in which they are involved.’

Lily could feel the sting of his words against her emotions, lacerating and flaying them as effectively as though he had laid a whip to her flesh. The only difference was that the wounds he was inflicting on her she could and must keep hidden from him. In the life she had so carefully created for herself there was no place for the girl she had once been and there never would be. She had cut herself off from her past to protect herself from her own ghosts. She would never look back at them.

Because she was still afraid of them?

Why was this happening to her? She had been so happy, so safe, had felt a real pride in herself and what she had achieved, and now because of one man—this man—who was determined to misjudge her, everything she had was in jeopardy. The desire to give in to her emotions had never been stronger, but Lily knew that she had to overcome that desire. Calmness, logic and knowing the truth must be her weapons in this fight, and she must wield them well if she was to protect herself.

Lily took a deep breath,

‘Clothing catalogues don’t exactly pay top dollar. My…the person I was helping wanted to keep his costs down. That was why he approached your nephew. No other reason.’

‘Do you really expect me to believe that? It’s illogical. After all, in addition to paying my nephew your friend also suggested he accompany him to a post-shoot party with some of fashion’s big names.’

This was too much. Lily could feel her defences crumbling. She had really had enough. She wasn’t at all happy about being put in the position of having to defend her half-brother’s behaviour, but neither did she think Marco di Lucchesi’s behaviour towards her was in any way acceptable.

He had virtually accused her of acting on behalf of a pervert bent on corrupting the innocence of his nephew. Rick had his faults, but he would only have been trying to impress his potential models—nothing more.

‘You’re mistaken about Rick,’ she insisted fiercely, ‘and about me.’ When he didn’t respond she added impulsively, ‘If you want the truth, I feel exactly the same way about the sleazy side of modelling as you do.’

Wasn’t that more or less exactly what the owner of the model agency Olivia had worked for had told him when he had gone to her for help in his quest to bring Olivia safely home? When Olivia herself had refused to listen to him? Hadn’t the woman told him that she shared his opinion of Olivia’s vulnerability and that he could trust her to protect and keep her safe? Eighteen-year-old Marco had foolishly believed her, but she had been lying, and so too was the woman confronting him now. Past experience and the facts told him that.

Why, then, when it should have been the simplest of matters to continue to denounce her, without any compunction and without any kind of emotional reaction himself, was he now discovering that it wasn’t? What was stopping him? For some inexplicable reason, and completely illogically, he was actually experiencing an unwanted but undeniable emotional reaction to her deceit. Why? Why should he care that she was a liar who couldn’t be trusted? He didn’t, Marco assured himself, and told her curtly, ‘What you’re saying does not add up, therefore it cannot possibly be true.’

Lily stared at him in stunned disbelief. Everything about his body language and the look on his face told her that nothing she could say would change his mind. He was calling her a liar, and he was making it plain that he wasn’t going to change his mind—no matter what she tried to say. It was as though he wanted to dislike and distrust her. Very well, she would defend herself by using the same ‘logic’ on him that he had used against her.

‘No one forced your nephew to accept the photo shoot, the money, or the party invitation,’ she pointed out, somehow managing to adopt a cool, clear, emotionless voice. ‘Instead of harassing me you might do better using your bullying questioning tactics on him. After all, a young man so well connected and coming from such a wealthy family shouldn’t need to accept work that pays so little—unless, of course, he had other reasons for accepting it.’

She had hit a nerve now, Lily recognised. He might not have betrayed it in any visible way, but she knew as surely as if the reaction had been hers that inwardly he had recoiled from her challenge.

‘What reasons?

His voice was harsh, almost raw with an emotion that was more than anger—as though something had been dredged up from deep within him against his will. Lily could feel herself weakening. Only he was not a man for whom she should feel compassion, she warned herself. In his way he was every bit as dangerous as those he was castigating, if not more so.

Taking a deep breath, she challenged him silkily. ‘An uncle who keeps him on too short a rope, perhaps?’

He didn’t like it. He didn’t like it one little bit. And yet to her surprise, instead of retreating into an angry and arrogant princely silence, no doubt meant to indicate to her that he did not have to explain himself or his actions to someone as plebeian as she, he told her, ‘Pietro is a young man with a tendency to behave impulsively and the belief that he is immortal. Traits which in my opinion are the result of a little too much maternal indulgence. If I believe he should be able to manage within his not ungenerous allowance then I do so in the knowledge that one day he will be responsible for managing a far greater sum of money. You may think that to be keeping him on a short rope. I consider it to be encouraging him to respect the benefits of living within his means.’

‘Perhaps that is something you should be telling him, not me?’ Lily suggested. ‘I accept that your nephew is important to you, but what is important to me right now is doing what the Trust sent me here to do.’ She looked pointedly at the closed doors he had barred.

‘And you can be trusted to carry out that duty, can you? Without disappearing to undertake some very different work on the side for a “friend”?’

‘You have neither the right nor any reason to question my commitment to my work.’

‘On the contrary, I have both the right—since I am responsible for persuading people to admit you into their homes—and the reason you have already supplied to me.’

‘We are keeping people waiting,’ Lily reminded him, anxious to bring their conversation to a close and to escape from him. She looked at the door, but he was standing closer to it than she was and he was watching her.

CHAPTER THREE

THE way Marco was looking at her was making Lily’s heart thump raggedly with tension. If only someone would come and interrupt them, bring her torment to an end. But no one did, and she was left with no alternative other than to listen to him.

‘I don’t accept for one minute that the motives of you or your friend were as altruistic as you would have me believe,’ he told her.

‘I’m telling you the truth. If you can’t accept that then that’s your problem.’

‘No,’ he told her harshly. ‘You are not telling me the truth.’

His presence encircled her now. She could neither step forward nor back. He had bent his head to speak quietly into her ear, and now a thousand delicate nerve-endings were being tortured by the warmth of his breath. She felt hot and dizzy, with a torrent of sensations cascading through her caused by the fact that he had breached the polite barrier of personal space that should have existed between them.

She had to say something. She had to stand her ground. But she could hardly breathe, never mind that her flesh was almost screaming out a feral cry of panicked fear. She tried to step past him, but he moved even more swiftly, causing her to cannon into him.

Her small gasp grazed the bare skin of Marco’s neck, causing an explosion of sensual pleasure to bomb his nerve-endings and race from them along his veins like liquid fire. His response to it was so instinctive and automatic that he was reaching for her before his brain knew what was happening. Frantically it searched for an explanation for what he was feeling. How could he, a man who could quite easily remain impervious to the most blatant of erotic sensual persuasion from the women who had shared his bed, have succumbed so easily to the mere touch of her breath against his skin? What was it about this woman that ripped aside his self-control and induced in him such a primitive male response?

Of course he would release her; there was, after all no purpose in him holding her. No purpose and certainly no desire, he assured himself—and he would have released her too, if she hadn’t started to struggle against him, igniting a feeling inside him that came like a thunderbolt out of nowhere to challenge his male pride.

‘No!’ Panic had filled Lily at the way her body was reacting to the proximity of his body, as though it actually wanted that proximity, and she desperately needed to bring it to an end before he realised the effect he was having on her. But now, as she saw the look in his eyes, Lily realised that he had misinterpreted her anxiety as defiance—and she could see too that he intended to punish her for it.

That punishment was swift and shocking. His mouth taking hers in a kiss of blistering male revenge that seared her senses. It had been years since she had last been kissed—and never, ever like this. Never, ever in a way that imprinted everything about the male lips possessing hers on her senses and her psyche, from the texture of his skin to its taste. In a thousand rapid-fire shutter actions his maleness was being matched by her femaleness. Why? What was happening to her?

Lily lifted her free hand in protest, her eyes opening and widening when her fingertips grazed the flesh of his face. She could feel the contrast between the skin of his jaw where he’d shaved and the skin above it. The photographer in her, the artist, wanted to explore the lines of his face, so dramatically perfect. She wanted to. Her lips softened and parted. So that she could protest. It had to be for that. It couldn’t be for anything else. And that small mewing sound locked in the back of her throat? That was a complaint, she assured herself.