The Prince's Pleasure

Sure enough, Dion with the mile-long name was waiting. Although he greeted her cordially enough she sensed his reservation as he opened another elevator with a key and ushered her inside. Kites jostling in her stomach, she stared at the wall until the lift stopped at the penthouse, where a security guard opened the door and ushered them both into a foyer.

‘In here, madam,’ her guide said, opening another door for her.

He stood back as Alexa walked through. Stopping when the door closed behind her, she ignored the huge, opulently furnished room to fix her eyes on the man who turned from contemplation of a crimson sunset to look at her with dangerous metallic eyes.

From somewhere Alexa remembered that when confronted by royalty you waited until you were spoken to. So, although she had to bite back the words that trembled on her tongue as he surveyed her with comprehensive and intimidating thoroughness, she stood silently.

But her eyes sparkled at his unsparing scrutiny, and her mouth tightened as she jutted her chin at him.

‘Have you seen today’s newspaper?’ he asked in a deep, cold voice.

Frowning, she abandoned any attempt at formality and protocol. ‘No. Why?’

He gestured at one spread out on a coffee table. ‘Perhaps you should read it now. In the last section, page three.’

After a baffled glance she walked across to the table and picked up the paper. The conference had made the front page, but the part he referred to was a lifestyle pullout. And there, in the gossip column, someone had ringed an item with a slashing black pen—the same pen that had written the letter ‘L’ on the paper accompanying her flowers.

Incredulously Alexa read the item.

The Prince of Dacia, heaven’s gift to romantic royalists now that the Prince of Illyria is married, is clearly a connoisseur of more in New Zealand than our scenery and wine. Last night, a small but dedicated bird told me, he was seen driving one of Auckland’s busiest young photographers home after the opening banquet of the banking conference. And she was wearing his jacket. What, we wonder, can this mean?

With scornful precision he asked, ‘Did you leak this?’

Alexa’s head jerked upwards. Bitterly—foolishly—hurt, she transfixed him with a furious glare. ‘Of course I didn’t!’

‘Then how did it get into the newspaper?’

She didn’t know what intimidated her more—his anger, frozen and harsh as a blizzard at the South Pole, or his flinty control.

‘I don’t know,’ she told him, clinging to her composure. ‘Someone saw us at the police station, I’d imagine. Fortunately she hasn’t linked you with any specific person.’

‘Perhaps your name will be in the next sly little morsel,’ he said with a cutting edge to his voice.

Her head jerked around and she met the full shock of his gaze. Dry-mouthed, she asked, ‘Why should there be a next one?’

‘Because whoever fed this to the columnist will make sure of it.’

‘Look,’ she said, trying to be reasonable, ‘it’s irritating and naff, but it isn’t the end of the world. People will forget it.’

‘I won’t forget it,’ he said, watching with hooded eyes the way the light smouldered across her hair, loose now around her face. With silky precision he said, ‘I don’t like being used, Ms Mytton.’

In the face of his scornful arrogance she felt hot and foolish and furious. Covering a stab of pain with seething denial, she asked indignantly, ‘Why would I want to use you?’

‘Usually it’s for money,’ he returned caustically, killing Alexa’s jab of sympathy by adding, ‘But often for notoriety—and I imagine that a link to me, however tenuous, would help you advance in your profession. I hope you took no photographs of me last night.’

Pale eyes glittering, Alexa almost ground her teeth. Her quip to Carole about hiding a camera came back to taunt her, bringing colour to her skin—which he noticed. ‘Not a single one,’ she retorted crisply. ‘And I don’t leak titbits to the press. This rubbish—’ she gestured contemptuously at the newspaper ‘—is your area, not mine. And it’s totally without any foundation.’

‘Do you really believe that?’ He crossed the room in two strides, stopping her instinctive retreat by grasping her shoulders.

The previous night Alexa had noticed the strength and support of his hands; now, knocked off-balance by hurt and anger, she felt nothing but the promise of their power.

‘I wish I could believe that there is no foundation for the sly innuendo in that rubbish,’ he said, mockery gleaming in the frozen fire of his eyes, ‘but I am a realist above all else.’

And he bent his head and kissed her.

Afterwards Alexa tried hard to convince herself that it was the sheer unexpectedness that kept her locked un-protesting in his embrace.

But she lied. The second she’d seen Luka she’d been acutely, forcefully aware of him—and in spite of his steely control, she’d recognised a like response. Each time their eyes had met they’d exchanged hidden messages that bypassed logic to kick-start a flagrant hunger.

Fed by clamouring instincts, that secret communication—primitive and involuntary—had grown in quantum leaps, burning away common sense and caution.

Without realising it, she’d been waiting for this moment, all that was female in her knowing it would come. In mute surrender, she relaxed against his taut body.

At the first touch of his mouth something buried inside Alexa split and broke, as though she’d emerged from a chrysalis.

And then, after a kiss as short, brutal and impersonal as a slap, Luka lifted his head to survey her with chilling detachment, the hunger that prowled his eyes disappearing behind their opaque, enamelled surface.

It took every ounce of self-command she could summon to ask sweetly, ‘Had enough?’ letting contempt sharpen each word.

With a bleak, twisted smile he said harshly, ‘Unfortunately, no.’

This time the kiss was neither brief nor brutal. He kissed her with fire and purposefulness, as though he’d longed for her down the years, as though they were lovers who had only this kiss to exchange before bitter fate tore them apart for ever.

Alexa struggled to remain passive, but a terrifyingly raw, untamed force sprang up to meet his open hunger, and—to the shocked astonishment of the last rational part of her mind—match it. Flames rocketed through her, eating away everything but the sheer physical magic of the Prince’s flavour and subtle scent, and the heat and power of his warrior’s body against hers.

It was the increasing hardness of that body rather than the sharp knock on the door that broke into her sensual enslavement. In some dim recess of her brain she remembered that this man might have spent the night with another woman.

When she pushed against his chest he lifted his head and released her, stepping back. Alexa forced her lashes up and looked into eyes as polished and impersonal as the gold they resembled. Oh, he wanted her—he couldn’t hide that—but with nothing more complex than simple lust.

It shouldn’t have hurt.

Yet it was pain as much as fury that drove her to ask, ‘And what did that prove, except that you’re stronger than I am?’

Caustic amusement gleamed in his gaze, curved the mouth that now knew hers intimately. ‘It proved that you want me as much as I do you,’ he returned on a note of courtesy that lacerated her composure.

‘That means nothing,’ she retorted, trying to convince herself. Beneath the surface control, she realised, he was blackly furious.

‘An admirably liberated view,’ he said, not hiding the flick of contempt in his tone.

The skin over her high cheekbones heated and she forgot tact and discretion and plain common sense to flare, ‘Perhaps, but I’m not so liberated that I sleep with every good-looking man who wants a bit of publicity.’

‘No,’ he said lethally, ‘you merely pander to the avid eagerness of people who want to read that sort of trash.’

Hot with chagrin at her humiliating rudeness, she said between her teeth, ‘I shouldn’t have said that. I’m sorry. But, for the last time, I did not notify the newspaper.’

He surveyed her with aggression bordering on menace. ‘If news of those kisses makes it into the media I’ll know how much your word is worth.’

‘As much as yours,’ she said tersely. ‘I’d hate to be as mistrustful as you are.’