Princess in the Iron Mask

Why should she do anything for them? What had they ever done for her, apart from abandoning her in a foreign country? Twelve years old and so sick she could barely walk. So unsightly they’d secreted her away. The loss of everything and everyone she’d ever known had soaked her pillow at night. So frightened. So very alone.

Throat swelling with the sting of past hurts, she swerved back to the workbench and fumbled with the paper disarray for fear he’d see too much.

‘I would like you to leave, Mr Garcia,’ she said, the sheet in her hand quivering as violently as her voice. Please just go.

‘You ask me the impossible, Your Royal Highness,’ he replied in that delicious tone that licked at her senses like a hungry cat. Which only made her hate him even more.

She slapped the paper atop the stainless steel and braced her arms on the squared edge.

Trust her parents to send in the big guns. Lucas Garcia was proving to be as immovable as Big Ben, and she could hear the tick, tick of the clock. Don’t be ridiculous. They’ve sent for you before. You can get rid of this guy just as easily.

Their last threat had been the abolition of her living funds. ‘Go ahead,’ she’d told them, and promptly moved out of her swanky three-bedroom apartment on the banks of the River Thames. The bluff had backfired spectacularly, because the vast space lay empty to this day. But she loved her kitsch one-bed studio because it was hers alone, flying the flag of her hard-won independence.

Stiffening her spine, she turned in time to see Lucas finger his over-long hair back from his forehead and her insides liquefied. Must be a chemical reaction linked to irate frustration.

‘And please don’t call me, Your Royal whatever. I know perfectly well what you’re doing. Your tactics won’t work with me.’

‘Regardless of your preference, that is your title,’ he said, his voice toughened like steel, brow etched with exasperation. ‘When will you acknowledge the fact and behave accordingly?’

‘Behave? I’ve always been the upstanding daughter, Mr Garcia. I work hard and, more importantly, I make no ripples that will reach Arunthian shores to embarrass or disgrace.’ An implausible feat for Claudia, but he didn’t need to know that.

The dark glower he fired her way said he was far from impressed.

‘And I have two sisters,’ she said, suppressing any girlhood nostalgia and focusing instead on the little she’d gleaned of them by searching their names on the internet. Just to see if they were well…happy. If the thousands of glamorous photographs and articles were anything to go by they were more than well. They were true royalty in every way. ‘My parents don’t need me.’ Which was just as well because the mere notion of life at the palace, evermore in the public eye, made her skin crawl as if the venom of a scorpion pulsed through her veins.

‘Good grief, I’m as far away from being a princess as you are from being Prince Charming!’

Lucas coughed around a closed fist, then uncurled his long fingers to stroke his jaw. ‘I’ve noticed,’ he said, searching her face as if looking for an answer to the question hovering in the air.

Why? Let him come to his own conclusions, she mused. Claudia owed him nothing.

In thinking mode his face almost softened, and for the first time she noticed beautiful long thick lashes surrounded eyes so dark, so intense, they glittered like sapphires.

‘Then how would you like to be addressed?’ he asked.

Claudia frowned, blinking over and over, scrolling through the past few minutes of conversation, slightly disturbed by his silky intonation.

‘Just Claudia is fine,’ she said warily.

‘Very well, Just Claudia.’

Oh. My. Giddy. Aunt. Something hot and sultry splashed through her midsection. His accent thickened when he said her name. His full mouth formed a perfect O as if he’d kissed it past his lips: Cllowtia.

Kissed it past his lips?

She gave her head a quick shake. Twenty minutes in his company and she’d lost hundreds of brain cells, waxing poetical. This was what happened when a romance novel thrust itself into her hands during a spontaneous visit to the charity bookshop at St Andrews.

Claudia preferred to base her life on facts and scientific evidence.

And the fact was Lucas Garcia wouldn’t give her a second glance if he passed her in the street. The idea of mutual attraction was laughable. She wasn’t only socially inept but also the strangest-looking creature on earth. They were quite literally worlds apart. Or they would be as soon as she got rid of him.

From the way his long blunt fingers trailed down the lapel of his charcoal single-breasted jacket and deftly unpopped the button, it didn’t look as if he felt the need to go any time soon.

Mid-exasperated sigh, the air locked in her throat as he rolled his broad shoulders, revealing a wide panel of crisp white shirt stretched taut over his rock-solid physique, and strolled over to where her qualifications hung on the wall, filling the white expanse.

‘I understand you are a biochemist?’

Claudia’s eyes narrowed on his fluid gait, lithe for a man of his stature, and her traitorous mind imagined all kinds. ‘Mmm-hmm.’ Oh, lovely—she couldn’t even speak, her mouth was so dry.

‘What exactly does your work involve?’

Was he really that interested? She gave a little huff. Of course he was interested. It was his job to be interested.

‘At the moment I’m studying a childhood auto-immune disease and developing drugs to reduce the side-effects—along with a cure, of course.’ Claudia just had to think of a child suffering from the same condition and her life made a strange kind of sense. She was here for a purpose. One that didn’t include sitting around looking impossibly pretty, cutting ribbons at galas and chatting to foreign dignitaries.

Lucas paused before the largest frame. Her second Masters. ‘You feel strongly about your work.’ Reaching up, he straightened the gilt-framed plaque with tensile fingers and ran the tip of his index finger across the black lettering of her name.

The gesture was so unexpected, so intimate, it felt like a physical touch.

Without conscious thought she reached up and brushed her lips in a continuous circular motion, wondering what his too-large hands would feel like against her skin—rough and purposeful or seductively thrilling?

‘The strength of my dedication is unimaginable, Mr Garcia,’ she said softly, her hand plunging to her side.

Because suddenly, like the instant flare of a Bunsen, it occurred to her that he couldn’t possibly understand her avoidance of going home. Your selfishness is astounding. In his opinion she was being awkward and highly unreasonable. Having no idea why the notion weighed so heavy on her heart, she wanted to explain. Would she see pity in his beautifully fierce gaze or scorn because she’d yet to overcome the lingering effects?

‘That is quite understandable in the circumstances,’ he said, with a cool sincerity that snuffed out her burning desire to elucidate.

Was he saying he already knew?

‘This condition that you study?’ he went on. ‘JDMS?’

‘Juvenile Dermatomyosytis. I’m surprised you’ve heard of it. It’s not a particularly common affliction.’ Hence it was a constant fight to keep money rolling her way. Fingers of suspicion stroked her throat, curling like a noose around her neck. ‘Did my parents tell you?’

‘No.’

One word—sharp as a scalpel and just as ominous.

Claudia frowned. Was he deliberately being evasive?

Having reached the far corner, Lucas unclasped his hands and began to swivel on his heels. Before he made the full turn she braced her weight against the edge of the desk, clenched her fists, determined not to fidget and calling upon years of practice in the art of facial indifference.

Despite all her efforts her eyes still flared at the indomitable calculating expression on his face.

‘Like you, I take my position seriously, Claudia. I would not be doing my job correctly if I stumbled into a situation without all the relevant facts to hand.’

Meaning he’d pulled her files. Not full medical—he wouldn’t have had the authority—so his information would be brief. ‘So you understand my reasons?’

‘I understand perfectly,’ he said, his voice weighted with dark power.