To Claim His Heir by Christmas

Anger sparked. Revving up to be free of its leash. And she let it take hold. Uncoil deep inside her. Unravel at a breakneck pace. It was wonderful. Glorious. Just what she’d hankered for all day. All day? No. Since she’d stepped off the plane from Hong Kong, thoroughly powerless, with her façade firmly in place.

‘Just who do you think you are? You can’t just take me like this.’

Cool as you like, he simply said, ‘Watch me.’

She sucked in air through her nose. ‘Are you playing with me? You’re taking me to the Altiport, right? I have a plane to catch.’

‘We are going to the Altiport, si.’

‘Good. That’s good.’

Though he hadn’t really said what was happening when they got there, had he?

Warily, she ventured, ‘And you’ll let me get on my own plane to Arunthia, yes?’

‘No.’

Mouth falling agape, she coughed out an incredulous laugh. ‘Are you serious?’

‘Deadly,’ he said, as sharp as a blade.

His eyes were as cold and hard as steel. Where once they’d been tender and warm. Had she known him at all? she wondered, fighting a miserable flare of anguish. Even a little bit? Or had the last few years killed any ounce of decency and compassion he’d possessed?

Icy fingers of dread curled around her throat. ‘So where are you taking me?’

‘Galancia.’

The world tilted as if the car had skidded down an embankment with a five-score gradient and she went woozy. Galancia? No, no, no!

Luciana scoured his expression, desperate to find even a flicker of his dry humour, and came up blank. Galancia… She shuddered in her own skin.

‘No way. You haven’t got a hope in hell of getting me to that place. I have to go home.’

He pursed his lips and cocked his head in faux contemplation. ‘Not today. Today you will go where I ordain.’

‘But…but that’s tantamount to abduction!’

‘I suppose technically it is. Yet during the several minutes we’ve been in this car I haven’t heard you call for assistance once.’

It didn’t bode well that he was right. But, honest to God, the man was so distracting. Still, why wasn’t she petrified out of her mind, screeching her head off?

‘Give me a second and I’ll scream blue murder. Though let’s face it,’ she said, gesturing to the luxurious car. ‘There’s no one to hear me, is there?’

‘Not now, no. You are seven minutes too late, princesa. Though Seve may help you.’

‘Who on earth is Seve?’

‘The driver.’

She almost shuffled to the edge of the bench seat and raised her fist to knock on the glass partition. Almost. Frankly, she knew better.

‘Friend?’

‘Cousin,’ he drawled, a flicker of a devilish smile playing about his mouth.

It was obscene how relieved she was to see that tiny flirtation with humour—that hint of the man she’d fallen for on a raucous, cluttered muddy field in Zurich. Particularly since it suggested he was enjoying her discomfort. What was all this? Payback for her walking away? Some kind of twisted revenge?

‘You can’t go about kidnapping people. It isn’t civilised behaviour.’

Lord, she sounded like her mother. And, honestly, only a dimwit would put ‘civilised’ and ‘Thane’ in the same sentence. It had been his untamed earthy savagery that had attracted her in the first place. Obviously she had a screw loose.

Blasé, he gave her an insouciant shrug that said, try and stop me, and it made her anger boil into lava-hot fury until she felt like a mini-volcano on the verge of eruption. What was it about men trying to govern her life? She’d just escaped one control freak and run headlong into another.

Smouldering with resentment, she decided she wanted him to erupt too. It was as if he’d switched off his emotions. He was far too cool and collected over there. While she was sitting here losing it!

Lookat him, she thought. Sitting at an angle, one leg bent and resting on the bench seat, he sprawled like a debauched lion, taking over half the enormous car—and all of the oxygen—in that outrageously expensive Italian suit. It should have oozed elegance and debonair refinement, but it made him look like pure wickedness and carnal sin.

And she detested him for making her hormones whisk themselves into a deranged frenzy over him. Wasn’t she in enough of a mess?

Which reminded her… Woman on a mission, here. She wanted the playing field levelled.

‘So the rumours are true, then?’ she said, with as much chilly, haughty daring as she could muster.

Thane arched one arrogant brow. ‘There are so many I’m at a loss as to which particular falsehood you refer to.’

‘That your men steal women. That your father took your mother from her bed—stole her from her intended.’ And by all accounts made her life a living hell in Galancia Castle. Rumour had it she’d thrown herself to her death to end the torment. Not that Luciana had ever believed that bit. No mother would do that to her son, surely?

Luciana waited him out. Expecting some kind of reaction. Something. Anything. What she got frustrated her even more. Nothing. Not even a flutter of his ridiculously gorgeous lashes.

‘Ah, that one. Perfectly true. Indeed, we take what is rightfully ours.’

She was going to slap him in a second. ‘And where, pray tell, do you get the idea that I am rightfully yours?’

Aha! As if she’d flipped a switch emotion stormed through his eyes. The dark variety. But right now she’d take what she could get.

‘What is rightfully mine, Luciana, is an explanation. Answers.’

‘That’s all you want from me. An explanation?’ It seemed a bit too easy to her, but she could answer fifty questions before they got anywhere near a plane. It was a thirty-minute drive at least. ‘Fine,’ she bit out. ‘Ask away, Prince Thane. What do you want to know? Why I bolted in the dead of night?’

‘Ah…’ he said, with an affable lilt that belied the fury now emanating from him. ‘So you do acknowledge that we have a history. Yet not thirty minutes ago you denied we’d ever met.’

Blast her runaway mouth. She should have known that would antagonise him.

‘Yes, well, I don’t want Augustus knowing about my personal life.’

‘Worried, Luciana? That the prissy Viscount will not wish to bed you or wed you any longer when he discovers you’ve been tarnished by our depraved association?’

She huffed. ‘Hardly.’ That would only be a good thing. And, absurd as it was, she suddenly had the strangest compulsion to thank her kidnapper for rescuing her from tonight’s unpalatable proposal. Clearly she’d lost the plot.