A Ring To Secure His Crown

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!’

‘I am not blushing.’ A sudden possibility had occurred to her, one that would explain his outrageous attitude and the reckless gleam in his eyes. ‘Have you been drinking?’

‘Not for at least two hours.’ He raised his voice to reach the man in the driver’s seat. ‘Charlie, what time did we leave?’

‘I believe it was four a.m., sir,’ the man with the tattoo responded in a cultured voice.

‘Really? Oh, well, I’m totally sober...well, maybe not totally,’ he conceded. ‘Oh, here we are.’ The car drew up outside the embassy. ‘Oh, and I almost forgot, Luis sent his love, and this.’

He leaned across and the sudden shock that had held her immobile as his lips covered hers faded into something else as the slow, sensuous exploration deepened. Sabrina was not sure how her arms came to be around Sebastian’s neck but they were, and she was kissing him back as if he were water and she’d spent the last week in the desert. She had never before felt, never imagined anything like the sudden explosion of hot need inside her.

A need that intensified as she felt a shudder move through his lean body and felt the touch of his tongue between her parted lips. She moaned into his mouth and pushed her body into his as he kneaded his fingers into her hair. She felt on fire, filled with an aching need to...what?

Luckily, before she found the answer, as suddenly as it had started the kiss stopped.

She sat there, shivering, eyes wide, sucking in air in tiny laboured gasps as he leaned back in the seat staring at her, his hypnotic blue stare searing. Hot, dark streaks of colour emphasising the contours of his sharp cheekbones.

‘How dare you?’ The sound of her open palm making contact with his cheek was shocking.

He lifted a hand to his cheek and drawled, ‘Don’t slap the messenger, cara.’

‘You are vile!’ She choked, almost falling out of the car when the door was opened by someone wearing a military uniform.

She could hear his laughter as she walked stiffly up the shallow flight of embassy steps.

CHAPTER TWO

SEBASTIAN SET HIS shoulder to the stiff door that opened out onto a small Juliet balcony. It gave suddenly, filling the warm room with a welcome breeze. The view was as dramatic as the plumbing was idiosyncratic. His shower had run cold and then it had almost scalded him. Oh, well, maybe it was time he learnt how the other half lived, even if that half could claim a heritage as illustrious as his own, such as it was.

For a moment his lip curled into a cynical smile. For reasons obvious when you considered his nickname at school had been the royal bastard, Sebastian had never been able to take the whole heritage thing seriously.

A tap on the door made him turn, but before he could respond Luis walked into the room, his normal smile absent.

‘Reading your body language I’d guess you were just told you’ve got weeks to live, or you’ve just had a heart to heart with our father. How is His Royal Highness?’

Luis’s heavy sigh and despondent attitude would normally have evoked a sympathetic reaction from Sebastian, but today the only thing he felt was a surge of irritation. Didn’t Luis realise that until he showed a bit of backbone the King was never going to stop trying to micromanage his life? Maybe not even then, Sebastian, a realist, conceded. If he were in his brother’s shoes...

But you’re not, are you, Seb?

Luis gets the crown and the girl.

‘I didn’t think you’d come, neither did...anyone.’

‘You asked.’

Actually his father had ordered, which under normal circumstances would have guaranteed Sebastian’s nonappearance, and yet he was here. So why? He rubbed the towel across his dripping hair and veered away from the question in his head before it formed.

‘I asked the last three times I came to visit the Summervilles.’

‘You know I have an allergy to duty.’

‘So you keep telling everyone. Seriously—’

‘It is a very serious allergy.’

‘I wanted you to get to know Sabrina.’

‘It’s you she’s marrying.’ And me she’s kissing, he thought, the sharp twinge of guilt he felt drowned out by the stronger slug of lusty heat that accompanied the memory of those soft, sweet-tasting lips. If Luis had kissed her more often maybe she wouldn’t have melted in his arms.

That’s right, Seb, because it’s never your fault, is it?

He waited for the familiar hit of mingled frustration, sympathy and affection as he watched Luis walk, shoulders hunched in defeat, across the room. Instead, Sebastian found himself feeling anger and something that, had the circumstances been different, he would have called envy.

But of course it wasn’t.

Envy would mean that his brother had something that he wanted, and Luis didn’t.

Luis was welcome to the crown.

There had been a time when they were growing up that being pushed into the background and being referred to as the spare had got to Sebastian, but that had been before he had recognised that it was a lot worse for Luis, carrying the expectations of a country on his young shoulders. Luis had no choices—even his wife was picked out for him.

Luis was welcome to his bride; Sebastian had his freedom. His father had told both of his sons that privilege came with a price; well, so far he’d been proving his father wrong. Sebastian enjoyed the privileges that came with his title without any of the responsibilities.

And Sebastian didn’t want to marry Sabrina—he didn’t want to marry anyone—he just wanted to take her to bed. Even thinking about her now, and that miracle of a mouth of hers, made smoky desire slither hotly through him.

He ignored it. He’d kissed Sabrina and he wasn’t going to do it again, even if the primal attraction that drew him to this woman was stronger than anything he could ever remember feeling. He knew himself well enough to know that it would pass—it always did.

And in the meantime there were plenty of women to kiss who were not about to marry his brother, who were not about to throw away their lives. Her business, he reminded himself, her choice.

Luckily he had recognised, before the entire kiss incident in the car had got out of perspective, the real danger of building it up into something it was not. She had an incredible mouth, beautiful lips and they made him hungry. The need to taste had swept away every other consideration in his head, but it had been what it was: a ‘perfect storm’ moment. Or maybe a perfect moment of madness, fuelled by the alcohol he’d imbibed much earlier in the morning at the nightclub, where he had been even more bored than usual.

The chances were, seeing Sabrina here, in her natural environment, as a woman who represented everything he had been rebelling against and rejecting all his life, that he would regain his normal objectivity.

‘I didn’t expect you to come, but I’m glad you did. I do appreciate the support.’

‘Support?’ Sebastian queried with a frown.

‘I can’t say I’m exactly looking forward to tonight.’

‘Performance anxiety or...don’t tell me you’re having second thoughts?’

Luis turned away but not quickly enough to hide his flush of annoyance at the joke that presumably offended his highly developed sense of duty. If it was annoyance?

Guilt? Could he have hit a nerve? Was his brother having second thoughts? Sebastian dismissed the possibility almost straight away, no matter what his personal feelings. For Luis, duty, no matter what form it took, came first.

‘So how is the blushing bride?’

‘Fine... I guess.’

‘You guess? You mean you didn’t spend the night saying hello?’ Sebastian said, immediately imagining himself saying a very long hello.

‘I only just arrived and she...we... She doesn’t blush.’

Sebastian’s brows lifted. ‘Oh?’ he said, remembering the delicious rosy tinge that had washed over Sabrina’s pale skin.

‘Not that that is a bad thing.’

Sebastian’s eyes narrowed in his brother’s face. ‘Which means that you think it is.’

Luis looked guilty. ‘She just isn’t always what you’d call very spontaneous.’

Sebastian cloaked his expression as he heard the echo of that soft little mewling cry as she’d opened her mouth to him. His body hardened helplessly at the memory of her soft breasts pushing into his ribcage.

The effort of fighting his way free of those intrusive memories delayed his response. ‘Spontaneity can be overrated.’ It could also be great...she would be great in bed.

Never going to find out, Seb.

He was a bastard but not that much of a bastard.

‘Exactly, especially when your every move is being scrutinised. She has all the qualities to make the perfect Queen.’

The speculative furrow between Sebastian’s dark brows deepened as he listened to his brother, sounding very much like a man who was trying desperately to convince himself that he believed in what he was saying.

‘I’m sold,’ he murmured drily. ‘How about you?’

Luis dodged the soft question and his brother’s speculative stare. ‘Marriage is all about teamwork.’

‘So I hear.’ He had never given marriage much thought aside from concluding fairly early on that it was not for him, about the same time that he had nearly made a fatal error. ‘I nearly proposed once,’ he remembered, a rueful smile tugging the corners of his mouth upwards as he tried and failed to visualise the face of the woman who he had decided, at nineteen, was the love of his life.

‘You!’ His brother’s jaw hit his chest before he recovered. ‘You’ve been in love?’ Luis shook his head. ‘Who? When? What happened?’

‘What always happens—the glitter rubs off. I found out she snored and her laugh grated, but for a while I believed that she was perfect. Actually, I’ve believed quite a few were perfect since, the difference being I no longer expect it to last.’

In Sebastian’s opinion, if you were looking for a formula for unhappiness it would be hard to come up with a more sure-fire method than tying yourself to one person for life based on a short-lived chemical high.

‘Perfect? Like you, you mean?’

Sebastian winced and grinned, watching as Luis, his expression growing distracted, moved to one of the two chairs arranged at the foot of the bed. Sebastian held up a warning hand.

‘I wouldn’t do that. I made the same mistake. The leg dropped off. I’ve propped it.’

Luis made a detour to the other chair.

Sebastian’s gaze moved around the room of faded grandeur. ‘It’s not what I was expecting. They really are strapped for cash. No wonder,’ he observed cynically, ‘they are so willing to sell their daughter off to the highest bidder.’

‘They’re not selling her!’ Luis protested. ‘Sabrina understands. She respects—’

‘Our mother understood,’ Sebastian interrupted, wondering if the anger he felt would ever go away. Anger at the system that had trapped his mother in a marriage that had, in the end, destroyed her. ‘And that didn’t turn out so well.’

‘It’s not the same!’ his brother protested, flushing as he surged to his feet.

Sebastian arched a brow. ‘From where I’m standing it looks like a classic case of history repeating itself.’

Luis’s horrified rebuttal was immediate. ‘I’m not like...him.’

Then break the blasted cycle!

Sebastian didn’t voice his thought. What would be the point? He knew his brother would never challenge their father, and, if the positions were reversed, was he so damned sure that he would? Easy to criticise from where he stood.

‘I wonder, Seb. What do you think he’d do if he knew...?’

Sebastian’s irritation slipped away as he walked across to where his brother stood and laid a hand on Luis’s shoulder. ‘He won’t,’ he said firmly. ‘We burnt the letters. No one knows they ever existed.’

The young brothers had not known at the time they discovered the love letters hidden under a floorboard that despite breaking off the affair after she discovered she was carrying her lover’s child she had continued to see him after the child she had conceived with him had been born.

The irony was that they were right, there was a royal bastard, only it wasn’t the son that the scandal-mongers had identified.

‘As far as the world is concerned, the affair only started the year I was born.’ Sebastian could see no reason anyone should ever know. ‘We are the only two people who know, unless you plan on telling him?’

Luis shuddered. ‘I stood by and watched you being bullied at school and then at home when we both know that you should be King. I have no legitimate claim to the throne. I’m not even his son.’

Sebastian shook his head. ‘Be glad of that every day. Be glad of it, Luis!’ he said, his voice gruff with ferocious sincerity. ‘You’ve escaped the taint that I carry. I’m the son the bastard deserves. You will make a better King than I ever could be. You’re the one who has made all the sacrifices...and you are still making them.’ Sebastian straightened up, relaxing the grip on his brother’s shoulders. ‘You don’t have to marry her, you know. You could say no.’

Luis shook his head and dodged his brother’s gaze. ‘Easy for you to say. I’m not—’

‘Selfish as hell?’ Sebastian thought of where being unselfish had got his mother. He’d choose selfish every time.

Luis’s gaze lifted, just as his brother vanished into the bathroom. ‘I’m not a rebel like you. I need to... I care about what people think about me.’

Sebastian re-emerged with a fresh towel, which he rubbed vigorously over his damp hair.

‘And this marriage isn’t about me, it’s about bigger things. I’m realistic about it.’

‘So how does she feel about it?’

Luis gave an uncomprehending shrug. ‘How do you mean?’

‘I mean what does Sabrina expect from this marriage? Is she realistic too?’ He gave a sudden shrug, annoyed with himself for wasting time on a subject that was none of his business. ‘Is the warm glow of doing the right thing enough for her too?’ He began to vigorously rub his already towel-dried hair, asking himself where this swell of outrage was coming from. She’d made her bed and she seemed happy to lie in it...with his brother. ‘Hell, Luis, do you two even talk?’

‘We have a lifetime to talk,’ Luis responded, not sounding as though the life he saw stretching ahead filled him with joy. ‘But you mean sex, don’t you? It’s not like you to be so squeamish. Actually no, I haven’t slept with her.’

‘That’s not what I meant, but as you’ve shared aren’t you taking this untouched virgin bride stuff a bit too far, Luis?’

Luis laughed. ‘Even father doesn’t expect that.’

‘How incredibly liberal-minded of him.’ Sebastian was still struggling with the implication of some of Sabrina’s unguarded comments. Was it really possible that Sabrina had not had a lover, out of fear of falling in love?

‘What if you’re not compatible? Have you thought of that?’

Luis for once looked annoyed. ‘For God’s sake, Seb, this isn’t about how good she is in bed!’

As the comment unlocked a stream of graphic images that flowed relentlessly through his head, Sebastian lowered his eyelids to half-mast. His jaw clenched as he struggled to stem the flow and pretended an amusement he was a long way from feeling. ‘But it would help.’

It would help him even more, Sebastian mused darkly, if he could stop thinking of unfastening glossy honey hair and watching it fall over bare shoulders, pushing it back to reveal small firm breasts...

Oblivious to the tension underpinning his brother’s taut delivery, Luis laughed. ‘I really like her.’

‘Like?’

Luis tipped his head in acknowledgment. ‘She’s sweet,’ he began with the attitude of a man who was clutching at straws.

‘And,’ he ploughed on with determination, ‘she has a lot of common sense.’

Were they even talking about the same woman? Sebastian wondered, thinking about the woman who had attempted to punch her way out of his locked car just to avoid being shut in there with him.

He recognised she’d been driven to this drastic move by desperation and fear and he had fully intended saying something to soothe her, but the expression on her face when she’d recognised him, the fact that she’d looked as though she had just discovered she had jumped into a car beside the Devil himself...he simply hadn’t been able to resist playing up to her prejudices a little.

But then she had challenged his own firmly embedded prejudices. In the abstract he had been able to despise Sabrina Summerville, or at least the idea of her, a woman who, despite coming from a different generation, was just as willing as his own mother had been to be a compliant, political pawn.

The first surprise had been the desire that had twisted inside him when he’d found himself sitting just inches away from her, which shouldn’t have happened. He had seen the photos. He already knew that she was good-looking, admittedly more classy than classically beautiful. But what those photos had not prepared him for was the crystal clarity of her skin, the sprinkling of freckles across the bridge of her small straight nose, the deep liquid darkness of her eyes that seemed to reflect her every mood like a mirror. And last, but definitely not least, the pink lushness of her amazing lips.

The blood-roaring primal intensity of his reaction had effectively blocked everything else from his mind for what might only have been seconds, but could have been an hour.

And the hits had just kept coming!

He’d expected a passive victim; he had got a feisty fighter, who clearly thought he was a total waste of space. What had got to him the most had been the conflict in her eyes, her vulnerability.

He’d just wanted to tell her not to do it. Not to marry Luis. Instead he’d kissed her...a greedy response to a need that had been visceral in its intensity.