By Royal Demand

His wide shoulders moved in a slight negligent shrug. ‘Of course you’re safe from me—I’m not a barbarian.’

‘You threatened me about half a minute ago!’ He wasn’t going to get away with deliberately trying to intimidate her. She matched his hostile stare with one of her own, eyes glinting green as grass beneath her slim winged brows.

Another shrug underlined his Mediterranean heritage, from those warlike warriors whose blood had mingled with that of princesses from all over Europe to give him arrogantly handsome features and stunning colouring—hair like ebony, eyes as cold and blue as the sheen on a scimitar, and skin of warm bronze.

‘I knew you wouldn’t be intimidated,’ he said coolly. ‘But planning and executing a heist as successful as the Queen’s Blood is one thing—selling the thing is another. That involves criminals, and where this amount of money is involved the criminals are not loveable rogues. Stop hedging, Sara—it’s not getting you anywhere. Tell me where the Queen’s Blood is and I’ll let you go without fear of prosecution.’

The last tiny flicker of hope died. How could he be so intelligent in every other respect, yet so bone-headedly convinced that she’d stolen the necklace? Sara snatched another look at his face and saw beneath his amused contempt an unsparing determination.

Mindless panic roiled starkly beneath her ribs. She hid it by snapping, ‘You meant it when you said you could do whatever you liked with me.’

His black brows drew together in a forbidding frown that revved her heart-rate up into the stratosphere. ‘Oh, yes, I meant it. I could.’ His voice turned sarcastic. ‘But do try to restrain your vivid imagination. I don’t intend to hurt you.’

‘Why should I believe you?’ she demanded, realising too late that attacking his credibility was hardly the best way to get him to reconsider this crazy scheme and let her go.

Anyway, it wouldn’t work. Oh, Gabe definitely had a temper, but it was all the more intimidating for being so tightly controlled. More steadily she finished, ‘You didn’t believe me.’

‘Did I ever hurt you?’

‘I—no,’ she admitted reluctantly. Not physically, anyway. Indeed, he’d always been exquisitely tender with her.

Her heart-rate picked up as she remembered just how tender—and how she’d gloried in his strength and his potent male sexuality.

‘So stop pretending to be scared of me,’ he said crisply. ‘And don’t try to evade the subject. If you’re worried about your safety, be assured that no one can reach you here—no army has ever taken the castle by force.’

Sara remained stubbornly mute. Anything she had to say would only make things worse.

He waited, and when she didn’t fill the silence, went on relentlessly. ‘Give me the details of the theft and who else was involved. I promise you’ll be safe.’

As he’d once promised to love her?

‘I don’t know what happened to the wretched necklace,’ she told him, each word emerging with mechanical precision. ‘I gave it to the maid—to Marya—to put in the safe, and to the best of my knowledge she did just that.’

His response was unexpected. Instead of the chilling disbelief she’d had to endure when she’d tried to convince him of this a year before, he nodded. ‘And she swears that she did that, too. But about an hour afterwards she realised that she hadn’t put your engagement ring there, so she slipped down from her bedroom to do that. When she got there, the safe was empty. It had been opened by someone who knew the combination, which, as you set the combination when you arrived to stay with Hawke, means that you took it.’

A raw edge in his voice alerted her. She glanced up sharply, shock freezing her brain when she saw the dangerous glitter in his eyes. Stubbornly she retorted, ‘Or Marya.’

Holding her gaze, he said on a lethal note, ‘Marya is completely trustworthy.’

‘You’re so sure of that?’ she asked impetuously, knowing even as the words tumbled from her lips that she was on a hiding to nothing.

She hadn’t stolen the necklace, so the thief had to be Marya. Why, she didn’t understand, but there was no one else.

‘I’m sure,’ he said, his handsome, autocratic face hardening. ‘And, as the Queen’s Blood hasn’t yet appeared on the market—’

‘How do you know?’

Wide shoulders lifting in the slightest of shrugs, he kept his steel-blue gaze fixed on her face. She felt as though she had diamond lasers boring through the outer layer of skin and bone, right into her brain.

But if he could do that, he’d see her innocence.

He said, ‘The jewellery world is small, and it’s been under surveillance ever since the Queen’s Blood was taken. Apart from the value of the gold and the stones, the necklace is priceless as an artefact; an ancient, solid gold chain studded with perfectly matched cabochon rubies could only be sold to a collector. He’d have to be very rich and very unscrupulous, and have more money than sense.’

She frowned. ‘Why more money than sense?’

‘Because it could never be worn, never be shown—not for generations, if ever. It’s so well known that it would immediately be claimed by me, or my heirs. And if my line fails, Illyria would be entitled to the thing because it was originally found here.’ He stopped for a few measured seconds before adding deliberately, ‘But it hasn’t been bought by any collector, Sara.’

Eyes as cold and hard as ice searched her face. He thought she already knew all this; he was humouring what he considered to be her sly treachery.

Pain cramped her into rigidity. A year hadn’t been long enough to chisel him from her heart. She’d loved him so much….

Without emotion, he continued, ‘It could have been broken up and sold discreetly, stone by stone, on the black market. When the tyrant took over Illyria, my grandfather gave the necklace to someone to hide. After the usurper was assassinated, the only person who knew the hiding place brought it to me. I had each gem in the necklace measured and profiled, and its signature is stored. Burmese rubies the size of those in the Queen’s Blood and of the very best quality and colour—pure red with the faintest undertone of blue—haven’t been found for centuries. If even one such ruby turned up on the market I’d know within a few hours. It hasn’t happened.’

‘Because Marya doesn’t want to sell it.’

Without moving a muscle, he said, ‘Can you give me one good reason why Marya, who was my grandmother’s maid, would want to steal the Queen’s Blood?’

During the last year Sara had cudgelled her brain, trying to think of just such a reason, and the only one she could come up with was that the Illyrian woman had believed an upstart nobody to be completely unsuitable for her lord’s wife.

She was probably right.

The flames in the fireplace sprang high, then collapsed, and a faint, familiar scent reminded Sara of apples. Prunings from the orchards she’d seen beneath the helicopter, she thought, clinging to that simple sweetness in a room filled with fear and tension.

Oppressed by the weight of centuries of history, of death and war and disillusionment within the walls of the castle, she said flatly, ‘I’m sorry it was stolen, but I had nothing to do with it.’

Gabe drank some wine, then put his glass down with a sharp movement that set the golden liquid surging in the flute. ‘I don’t believe Marya took it because she was the one who hid the necklace when my grandparents abandoned the castle.’

Astonished, she stared at him. She knew the story. The general of the revolutionary army—a man whose violence had been legendary—had threatened to kill every person in the valley if the castle was defended. Gabe’s grandparents had slipped away in the night and joined the partisans, fighting in the mountains until they eventually died in an ambush.

In a thin voice she said, ‘Is that why you wanted her to be my maid?’

‘Partly. She asked if she could be when she heard that we were engaged. I suggested it to you because she was my grandmother’s maid, and I suppose it satisfied something in me to have her take care of you and your clothes.’

Sara bit her lip.

‘Yes,’ he said sardonically, answering her unspoken response. ‘You chose the wrong person to frame, Sara. Marya would never have stolen the necklace because she spent forty years protecting it at huge personal cost to herself and her family. She endured everything because she was loyal and because she understands the necklace’s enormous symbolic value.’

‘Is that why you’re so determined to find it?’ At least she could now understand why Gabe was so sure of Marya’s innocence. Not that it helped. ‘Does it confer some sort of divine right to rule on whoever holds it?’

‘No,’ Gabe said deliberately, surveying her with hooded, scornful eyes. ‘I’m trying to explain why I know Marya didn’t steal it. Whereas you lied to me and betrayed me. Give me one reason why I should believe you.’

Humiliation leached the colour from her skin. She stumbled over her next words, then caught her breath and forced herself to repeat stubbornly, ‘I didn’t lie or betray you.’

‘All I want is the Queen’s Blood,’ Gabe responded indifferently, making it more than obvious he didn’t believe her.

So what else was new?

He went on, ‘It’s an heirloom of my house, and I want it back again. Then you’ll be free to go.’