Kitabı oku: «A Ring To Secure His Crown»

CHAPTER ONE

SABRINA CLOSED HER bedroom door with care, conscious of her two flatmates who were both doing a night rotation in Casualty. She had reached the front door, a piece of toast in one hand, her oversized bag in the other, when her phone rang.

She swore softly, and then again as her efforts at juggling caused her toast to land butter-side down on the carpet. Why did it always do that?

She dumped her bag, picked up the toast with a grimace and glanced at the caller ID before lifting the phone to her ear. The low-voiced conversation lasted a few moments as the junior lab assistant gave her the results she and the entire research team had been waiting for.

Consigning the toast to the waste-bin, Sabrina was smiling when she opened the door; the results were not what they had expected, they were better! Embracing the buzz of excitement, she hitched her bag over her shoulder, grabbed an apple from the fruit bowl to soothe her rumbling stomach and released the loose, heavy honey strands of hair that had got stuck down the collar of her jacket before backing out of the front door.

It was the noise that hit her first, like a solid wall of sound; the voices calling her name seemed to come from everywhere.

Dropping the apple, she turned and was immediately blinded by flashing lights. She lifted a hand to shade her eyes and turned her head to avoid the microphones being thrust in her face.

Heart thudding like a piston, she tried to turn back but it was already too late. In seconds the weight of bodies pushing against her had already carried her several feet away and into the street and now she was surrounded.

‘Lady Sabrina... Lady Sabrina... Lady Sabrina...! When is the wedding?’

‘Will it happen before or after the island is reunified?’

‘When did Prince Luis propose?’

‘Is this a marriage of convenience?’

‘What sort of message do you think you are sending to young women, Dr Summerville?’

The sound of her own name and the stream of questions coming from all directions felt like a physical assault. The conviction she had just walked into her own personal nightmare, the sense of galloping claustrophobia intensified along with the gut-freezing horror that literally paralyzed Sabrina. She couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t even think past the static buzz of panic in her head. She just closed her eyes, put her head down and waited for the ground to open up.

It didn’t.

And then something did, though in amidst the confusion she didn’t immediately register anything about what was happening until the grip on her wrist tightened and another hand slid around her waist. She was no longer being carried along by the media crush, she was being pulled in the opposite direction by someone who was strong enough to make it seem easy and to make her wild attempt to hit out at her abductor a joke.

It happened in a blur, one minute she was in the street trying to fight for her freedom and the next she was being unceremoniously dumped like a sack of potatoes into the back seat of a big sleek car that had been hidden from her view by the mass of bodies.

People didn’t get kidnapped in front of the press and hundreds of cameras, she told herself while struggling to sit up. She managed it in time to see a camera being thrown at the crowd before the man who had climbed in beside her slammed the door on the noise outside. The mob were now pretty much hysterical.

‘Drive, Charlie, if you would!’ he drawled in an almost bored tone of voice.

The man in the driving seat reacted by doing just that. He pulled away from the kerb with a squeal of brakes and with scant regard for the lives of the bodies blocking their way.

Sabrina found her eyes connecting with the small, mean-looking eyes of the man in charge of the getaway in the rear-view mirror before she looked away. The tattoo in the shape of a dragon on the back of his thick neck was even less comforting.

Although she knew all about the physical and chemical processes that led the body to over-produce adrenaline, could answer, and actually had answered, an exam question on them, she had never, up to that point, personally experienced how compelling the flight-or-fight reflex was.

As the primitive survival response kicked in she literally threw herself at the door, pressing every button in a frantic effort to open it and sobbing with frustration when it didn’t budge. She began to batter on the window, more in desperation than with any real hope of attracting attention—they were travelling at speed and the windows were blacked out.

‘If you’re trying to break it I should tell you that it’s bulletproof, though that is quite a right hook you have, cara, and I consider myself lucky that you are not wearing heels.’

Her clenched fists slid down the glass and for a moment she rested her forehead against the coolness of the glass before she took a deep breath and turned to face her captor. She might have lost the fight to open the door but she’d won the fight to hide her fear behind a mask of cool disdain—well, as disdainful as you could look when your face was wet with tears and your mascara had most likely run.

‘I am not your cara, I am not your anything, but if you don’t let me go I will be your worst nightmare,’ she promised. ‘You will stop this car and let me out this instant or I will...’ Her voice dried and her jaw hit her chest as she identified the man who was sitting in the corner, one arm resting along the padded backrest, the other holding a phone.

He smiled, looking like a fallen angel on performance-enhancing drugs. It had always made total sense to her that the devil would be good-looking or else where was the temptation?

Not that she was tempted in any way!

* * *

His electric-blue eyes glittering with amusement, Prince Sebastian Zorzi tipped his head and touched a gentle finger to her chin.

Shock zigzagged along her nerve endings as Sabrina pulled her head away breathing hard. The initial relief she’d felt upon realising she was not actually being abducted, but in fact rescued, was swallowed up by a wave of antipathy as she met the mockery in the eyes of her future brother-in-law. His suit was beautifully cut and a dark charcoal, the jacket stretched across broad shoulders, unbuttoned to reveal the white T-shirt he wore instead of a shirt and tie. The T-shirt clung just enough to suggest the strong, well-developed contours of his broad chest. It wasn’t his tailoring that made her scalp tingle though—under the laconic surface there was an explosive quality about him. In the toughness stakes Sebastian Zorzi could have given the bulletproof glass a run for its money.

Obviously she had been aware that the brothers were physically dissimilar. Nothing surprising about that; siblings often were. She and Chloe looked nothing alike, after all.

But the Zorzi Princes were not just different, they were total opposites in everything. It went beyond their colouring or build, or even their smiles, actually especially their smiles! One’s made you feel safe, the other? She gave a little shudder. Safe was not a word she could imagine many people using when it came to Sebastian Zorzi!

‘That’s right, Lady Sabrina, I’m the rescue party.’ He lifted his hand and spoke into the phone cradled in his palm. Sabrina noticed his fingers were very long, the ends square-tipped and capable. They were definitely strong hands.

‘Yes, I’ve got her. She’s...’ The dark lashes lifted from the angular jut of his high carved cheekbones, his blue eyes seemed to consider her for a moment—the bone-stripping intensity making her shift in her seat before he responded to the question she couldn’t hear. ‘In one piece, just about. She looks like she’s been dragged through a hedge backwards, but she retains the ability to look down her well-bred little nose... So, yes, all right—if you like that sort of thing.’

His tone suggested that personally he didn’t like, but then, having seen the sort of women Sebastian thought of as fine, Sabrina was actually quite glad.

He had a type.

And it had nothing to do with IQ points.

Hard to imagine that the endless succession of tall, leggy blondes whose names had been linked with his were universally dumb, but Sabrina had always imagined, with an uncharacteristic lack of charity, that they probably pretended to be dim! There was a type of man who just couldn’t cope with a woman who could challenge them intellectually, and in her opinion the black sheep of the Zorzi family ticked all the boxes for that type!

He was the sort of royal prince who made republicans say smugly, I told you so...or they should do, she reflected grimly. It was just that somehow Sebastian made the unacceptable seem charming and no matter what his indiscretions everyone seemed to forgive him; and not only that, they liked him despite the fact he’d been sticking a finger up to authority all of his adult life.

It had always mystified Sabrina. Yet sitting a few feet away from him in an enclosed space, she began to understand it better. He didn’t have to deliver a charm offensive, he just had to breathe!

The sensual shock wave of his presence had to be experienced to be believed! She had, and Sabrina no longer believed that any of the stories that circulated about him were exaggerated.

In the past it would not have been strange that they had never met. For many years relations between the two Velatian royal families had been, if not frigid, definitely cool.

Times had changed. No longer enemies, the two royal families had become the best of friends and co-conspirators, united in a common cause.

But at every social occasion where both families had been present, somehow Sebastian had always been absent. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise her if Sebastian had been banned from such occasions. The only time Sabrina had even been in the same room as Sebastian Zorzi previously, it had been a very large room and he had vanished very early in the evening through a back exit, along with the much younger wife of an elderly diplomat, before they’d had the chance to be formally introduced.

Later that same evening she remembered the awe-inspiring and rather cold, or so it had always seemed to her, King Ricard coming to find his younger son. Luis, she recalled, had covered for his brother. It seemed to be the pattern of the siblings’ relationship, his brother breaking the rules and Luis covering up for him.

If that meeting had ever happened she might have been prepared for the aura of raw masculinity Sebastian projected like a force field. It was primitive, raw sex appeal in its most concentrated form.

It made her skin prickle, her heart race and her limbs grow heavy and shakily weak. She didn’t like it, but she accepted that she might well be in the minority there. A lot, if not most, might not exactly disapprove of the blatant sexuality of his wide, mobile mouth and the hard sculpted lines of his face. She took comfort in the knowledge that any second-year medical student, or, for that matter, sensible person, would have known her symptoms were caused by the after-effects of shock.

‘Did anyone see us leave...?’ He repeated the mystery caller’s question. ‘A few, I’d say.’ His eyes, glittering with malicious amusement, found her own and she stopped the frenzied smoothing of her hair while he responded to the person on the other end of the line. ‘I wasn’t actually counting, but, no, she didn’t give them any quotes, barring the curses. I learnt a few new ones!’ He winced and lifted the phone away from his ear, waiting a moment, a smile playing across his lips until eventually he pressed it back into the angle of his jaw. ‘Of course I’m not being serious. She was the epitome of inbred princess cool,’ he soothed, before sliding the phone back into the breast pocket of his jacket.

Sabrina still didn’t really know what was happening, but in that moment her desire to find out came second to her desire to react to his comments. ‘The next time you accuse someone of being inbred I think maybe you should consult your own family tree.’

He gave a low throaty chuckle that alarmingly raised goosebumps over the surface of her skin. ‘Point taken, though, as I’m sure you are aware, there was for some time a question mark over my genetic inheritance.’

Her eyes fell even though he displayed none of the awkwardness she immediately felt. Of course she knew. News of the late Queen’s affair had found its way onto every front page after the love letters she had written to her lover had found their way into the public domain after the man’s death.

Then soon after, in case anyone had missed the lurid headlines, there was the book written by the man’s ex-wife and the nanny, who had been the first to connect the dates with the birth of the Queen’s second son and shared her suspicions with a tabloid.

There had been a show of solidarity by the Zorzi royal family at the time too. The Queen had appeared looking beautiful and frail at the side of her husband, the two Princes with their hair slicked back and faces shiny.

‘But nobody believes that now,’ Sabrina said uncomfortably.

He threw her a sardonic look. ‘Oh, plenty believe it, cara, and a lot more wish it was true...’ One slanted brow arched as he shrugged his shoulders. ‘Myself included.’

Distracted from her own situation by this statement, she could not hide her astonishment. ‘You wish you were a bastard? I’m sorry, I...’ She broke off, blushing furiously, but Sebastian Zorzi did not appear even slightly put out by being referred to as a bastard.

‘Let’s just say I don’t wake up feeling lucky that Zorzi blood is running through my veins.’

‘Well, Luis is proud of his heritage,’ she countered defensively.

‘My brother is more forgiving than I am.’

‘Forgiving of who?’

The mockery left his eyes as he stared at her for a long moment. The expression on his face was hard to read. ‘While I’m enjoying this deep and meaningful discussion, aren’t there other questions you should be asking at this moment?’

She shook her head in confusion.

‘Like, what just happened?’

She immediately felt stupid. ‘So what did just happen?’

He gave a throaty chuckle that sounded cruel to Sabrina. ‘Welcome to the rest of your life, cara.’

‘I’m not spending the rest of my life with you.’ Or even another second, if she had her way.

‘My loss, I’m sure,’ he drawled sarcastically.

She clenched her teeth. ‘But why the cameras? The journalists? I don’t understand.’

His dark brows lifted. ‘Really? I’d heard you were bright. Ah, well, bright doesn’t always equate with quick on the uptake, I suppose,’ he conceded as she flushed angrily. ‘There has been a leak.’

Crazily, all she could think about with those blue eyes mocking her was the leak in her bathroom that had occurred last winter, the one that had taken the landlord a month to fix.

He sighed, the sound the auditory equivalent of an eye roll. It was the last straw for Sabrina.

‘Look, I’m sure having cameras and microphones thrust in your face is all part of a normal day in your life but it’s not in mine, so shall we pretend just for a moment that you have an ounce of sensitivity? I’m badly traumatised and, like you said, not so quick on the uptake!’

A tense silence followed her outburst. She never yelled!

‘Ever heard of volume control?’

She said nothing, afraid if she opened her mouth again she’d do something even more embarrassing like cry.

As he stared at her the humorous glint in his eyes completely faded, though there was certainly no softening in his blunt delivery as he spelt out the situation. ‘Someone in the inner circle sold the story: wedding, reunification, the whole master plan.’

She shook her head and swallowed past the lump the size of a tennis ball that was lodged in her throat ‘Why would anyone do that?’

‘Oh, I don’t know, maybe for money?’

She gnawed on her full lower lip, resenting the ease with which he made her feel gauche and naive.

‘But don’t worry, we know it wasn’t you.’

Her eyes flew wide, the pallor that emphasised the sprinkling of freckles across the bridge of her small straight nose deepening. ‘What?’

‘Well, first thought was that you might have got tired of waiting for Luis to pop the question and decided to nudge things along.’

‘Why the hell would I want to do that?’ In the hothouse emotional atmosphere her knee-jerk reaction emerged uncensored. ‘I mean...’ Her eyes fell from his searing stare. No, he couldn’t see what was in her head; how the hell could he? At that moment she didn’t even know what was in her head.

‘I touched a nerve...interesting.’

‘I am not a science experiment!’

One side of his mouth lifted in an incredibly attractive half-smile that made her fight to catch her breath while her skin prickled with antagonism.

‘I am sensing that this is bad timing?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ The bad timing was the twisting sensation in her stomach.

‘No need to be coy. I’m assuming that there is a boyfriend in the wings you want to break the news to? Does this guy know that you’ve been tagged as a sacrifice to the great cause of reunification for years?’

‘I am not a sacrifice!’

‘Sorry, a willing victim, then. How many barrels of oil do you reckon marrying my brother is worth, just an estimate?’

She clenched her teeth. ‘I am not a victim—’

‘And the oil deposits in your rocky little kingdom have nothing whatsoever to do with the sudden enthusiasm to reunify our lovely island state? Sorry, not actually sudden. How old were you when they told you the plan? That the feel-good factor of a royal wedding would silence the traditionalists on both sides of the border who cling to the good old days when we hated each other’s guts.’ He pushed his broad, muscular shoulders a little deeper into the leather backrest and let his head fall back. ‘It must make you feel very special to know that you make up an entire chapter in a legal document that took two countries ten years to agree on.’

‘You forgot one important factor...my family ran out of male heirs and, for the record, some guts,’ she told him with grim sincerity, ‘are easier to hate than others.’

His head lifted; he was grinning his insanely attractive smile. ‘Go ahead,’ he invited, tossing her his phone, which she caught on instinct. ‘I’ll pretend to be deaf.’

Lips clamped tight, she tossed it back. ‘Thanks but I have my own phone and I don’t have a boyfriend.’ At university she’d dated a bit, but nothing serious, and then her best friend had met, fallen for and got engaged to a fellow student all in the space of a month. And though Sabrina could not imagine finding herself similarly smitten she had asked herself, what if?

Did she really want to find her soul mate only to be forced to walk away from him? The anger she hadn’t even acknowledged to herself at the time suddenly found its voice—its loud voice.

‘I don’t date. You go on dates to hopefully get butterflies wondering if he is the one, right? So what would be the point?’ She stopped, bringing her lashes down in a concealing curtain across her eyes, appalled as much by the bitter outburst as the person she had chosen to open up to. ‘Besides, I’ve been far too busy with work for much else.’

‘And now you’re going to give that up too like a good little girl, anxious to please. I can see now why it never actually crossed anyone’s mind that you were the leak. The general consensus being that you have never broken a rule in your life.’

His scorn stung, even if what he claimed was depressingly true. She had always been the good girl; she was not about to apologise for it. ‘You make that sound like a vice.’

‘As opposed to what...a virtue?’ On the point of answering his own blighting question, he seemed to change his mind when after a short static pause he added, in an oddly flat voice, ‘The culprit—and, mea culpa, he is one of ours—has been found, and he is, as we speak, being dealt with severely.’

‘Dealt with?’ It sounded sinister, especially when Sebastian said it.

His grin reappeared but it didn’t reach his blue eyes. ‘Don’t worry, despite the bad press we get we haven’t actually executed anyone for a century or so, as for thumbscrews we have found them not really that effective, so we just sacked him.’

‘He lost his job?’

The air escaped through his clenched teeth in an irritated hiss. ‘You’re worried about the fate of a man who was responsible for throwing you to the wolves back there? Wow, you really are going to have to toughen up if you’re joining our family, sweetheart!’ he ground out. ‘But if it makes you feel better the guy won’t be penniless. His insider story of what goes on behind closed doors is pretty much guaranteed to make the bestseller list after it has been serialised in the Sunday papers.’

The colour that had been seeping back into her face retreated. ‘That’s terrible!’

‘But hardly news,’ he responded, sounding very relaxed about the situation. ‘The fact my stepmother has a plastic surgeon on speed dial is not exactly the best-kept secret, neither is my father’s tendency to throw the first thing that comes to hand when thwarted.’

It crossed Sabrina’s mind that an outsider’s view of the place could not be any more jaundiced than this cynical insider’s.

‘So what actually happens now?’

‘Now you go get measured for your wedding dress.’ His gaze slid down her body.

Smiling through clenched teeth, Sabrina struggled not to react to the calculated insolence in his scrutiny, sweat breaking out across her upper lip as she fought the impulse to lift a hand to shield her shamefully hardened nipples.

‘Size eight, am I right? Or maybe a ten up top and an eight in the hips?’ His eyes dropped to her legs where her ankles were neatly crossed one over the other, making her aware that she was rhythmically rubbing one calf against the other.

The abrupt cessation of movement brought his heavy-lidded gaze back to her face. ‘I’m curious—did it ever occur to you to say no?’

‘No?’ she echoed, wondering if any woman ever had to say no to him. It seemed very unlikely.

Her sense of disorientation increased as his eyes narrowed on her face. ‘Or are you actually content to be a pawn?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Really? Next you’ll be telling me that you love Luis, that he is the one.’

Her full lips thinned as she framed a carefully expressionless response to his contemptuous question. ‘I’m not going to tell you anything...’ Then spoilt the effect by instantly exploding resentfully, ‘I wouldn’t expect someone like you to understand.’

Sebastian levered his shoulders from the leather padded backrest and seat as he leaned forward, angling his body towards her. ‘And what exactly wouldn’t someone like me understand?’

She clamped her lips and shook her head, not that the action lessened the feeling of being cornered or the nerve-rattling impact of the aura of testosterone he exuded. If the option to crawl out of her skin had been offered at that moment she would have taken it.

‘Duty,’ she choked through clenched teeth.

His throaty laugh was mockingly ironic. ‘Of course, duty.’ His slow hand clap raised the levels of her animosity.

‘What is funny about that?’

He widened his eyes. ‘Sorry,’ he said, sounding anything but. ‘Was I meant to look impressed by your sacrifice? Oh, I don’t think it’s funny, cara, I think it’s tragic that you are embracing martyrdom so enthusiastically. I’d blame the brainwashing but I think perhaps you were always the good little girl.’

The air left her lungs in a wrathful hiss. ‘I have grown up, unlike some people, and I do not consider myself a martyr!’ Her voice wavered; she was trembling inside and out with the violent rush of emotions his words had shaken loose.

It was a fact of life—or at least her life—that she had little control over a lot of things, but this was one occasion when she didn’t have to take it—or him!

‘You can mock the concept of duty and service, but I’d prefer to be a good girl, as you put it, than a selfish, thrill-seeking, hedonistic waste of space. Has there ever been a moment in your life when you haven’t put yourself and your pleasure above anything else?’

She probably imagined the flash of something that had looked like admiration before his head tilted to one side as he gave the appearance of considering her question. ‘Probably not,’ he conceded.

‘Well, being a selfish waster is not a luxury we can all have even if we wanted it.’

‘You enjoy your occupation of the moral high ground and in a few years’ time, when you are wearing the crown, I just hope you will still think it was worth the things you gave up.’

‘I haven’t given anything up.’

‘How about your work? Why did you waste time, effort and money to qualify as a doctor when you had no intention of ever using that skill?’

Her eyes fell. ‘Research is important.’

‘Granted, but it will have to survive without you, because my instructions are to deliver you to the embassy. Ours.’

‘I’m not a parcel, I’m a person!’

‘With feelings, of course—where are my manners? The shoulder to cry on...’ He leaned towards her and her nostrils flared as the male, warm scent of his body, mingled with a faint fragrance, filled them. ‘Feel free.’

‘I do not require a shoulder and if I did—’

‘I’m only the spare,’ he cut in with an exaggerated sigh as she leaned heavily back. ‘I get that totally. You’re saving yourself for the man with the crown.’

Her hands clenched into fists as she looked at him with burning eyes. ‘You are a really horrible man, you know that?’

‘And you are a very beautiful woman.’ A look of incredulity flickered across his face. ‘Wait, are you...?’ He put a finger to her chin and lifted her face towards him. ‘Yes, you’re blushing!’