The Prince She Never Knew

Just his libido.

Leo lifted his head and gazed down at her, smiling slightly for the sake of their audience, and saw that Alyse was gazing at him with panic in her eyes. Her nerves clearly had not abated.

Suppressing his own annoyance, he gently wrapped his hands around hers—they were still icy—and pried them from his shoulders. ‘All right?’ he murmured.

She nodded, managed a rather sickly smile and turned towards the congregation for their recession down the aisle.

And now it begins, Leo thought. The rest of his life enacting this endless charade, started by a single moment six years ago.

Who could ever have known how a paparazzi photographer would catch that kiss? And not just his lips on her cheek but her hand clasped against his cheek, her face uplifted, eyes shining like silver stars.

That photo had been on the cover of every major publication in the western world. It had been named the third most influential photograph of the century, a fact which made Leo want to bark in cynical laughter. A single, stupid kiss influential? Important?

But it had become important, because the sight of the happiness shining from Alyse’s eyes had ignited a generation, fired their hearts with faith in love and hope for the future. Some economists credited the photograph with helping to kick-start Europe’s economy, a fact Leo thought entirely absurd.

Yet when the monarchy’s public relations department had realised the power of that photograph, they had harnessed it for themselves. For him, his father King Alessandro and all the future Diomedis that would reign over Maldinia.

Which had led, inevitably, to this engagement and now marriage, he all the while pretending to live up to what that photograph had promised—because for the public to realise it was nothing more than a fake would be a disaster.

Hand in hand with his bride, he walked down the aisle and into a lifetime of pretending.

She was breaking up, splitting apart, all the fragile, barely held parts of her shattering into pieces. She’d held herself together for so long and now…?

She wasn’t sure she could do it any more. And it was too late not to.

Somehow Alyse made it down the aisle, although everything around her—the people, the colours, the noise and light—was a blur. Everything but the look that had flashed in Leo’s eyes after he’d kissed her, something bordering on impatient annoyance at her obvious unease. Her panic.

She felt Leo’s arm like a band of iron beneath her hand. ‘Smile as we come out of the cathedral,’ he murmured, and then the crowds were upon them, their roar loud in their ears and, still feeling sick inside, she smiled for all she was worth.

The wordless roar turned into a rhythmic chant: bacialo! Bacialo!

The crowd wanted them to kiss. Wordlessly, Alyse turned to Leo, tilted her head up at him as he gazed down at her and stroked her cheek with a single fingertip and then, once again, brushed his lips against her in another emotionless kiss.

Even so that cool kiss touched Alyse’s soul, whispered its impossible hopes into her heart. She kept her lips mostly slack beneath his, knowing after six years of such kisses he didn’t want her to respond, never had. No hot, open-mouthed kisses of passion for them. Just these chaste displays of their mutual love and devotion.

He lifted his head and she smiled and waved to the crowd. It was done.

Still smiling, Leo led her to the waiting carriage, all gilt and scrollwork, like something out of a fairy tale. A Cinderella carriage for a Cinderella bride.

He helped her in and then sat next to her on the narrow leather seat, his thigh pressing against her hip, her dress billowing over his lap. The liveried coachman closed the door and they were off for a celebratory ride through the city, then back to the palace for the reception.

As soon as the door had closed, Leo’s smile, his mask, dropped. There was no need for it now; no one was watching. He turned to her, a frown appearing between his brows.

‘You’re too pale.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she murmured. ‘I’m tired.’

Leo’s frown deepened, and then it ironed out and he sighed and raked his hands through his hair. ‘It’s no wonder. The last few days have been exhausting. I expect it will be good to get away.’

They were leaving tomorrow for a ten-day honeymoon: first a week on a private Caribbean island and then a whistle-stop tour through London, Paris and Rome.

Alyse’s insides quaked as she thought of that first week. An entire week alone, without cameras or crowds, no one to perform for, no audience to entertain. A week completely by themselves.

She lived in both hope and fear of that week.

‘Yes,’ she said now, and thankfully her voice remained steady, strong. ‘I expect it will.’

Leo turned to the window and waved at the crowds lining the ancient cobbled streets of Averne, and Alyse turned to her own window and waved as well. Each flutter of her fingers drained her, as if she were lifting a huge weight. Her engagement ring, an enormous emerald surrounded by pearls and diamonds, sparkled in the sun.

She didn’t know why everything felt so much harder now. She’d been living this life for six years, after all. She’d come to enjoy her interactions with the public and had learned to live with the media’s attention.

Yet today, on her wedding day, with nearly the last words she’d spoken having been vows before the world, before God…

She felt the falseness of their masquerade more than ever. They’d only been married a few minutes and already she felt how difficult, how draining, this life of play-acting was going to be. She’d been moving towards that realisation for months as the weight had dropped off and her stomach had churned with nerves, as everything had steamrolled ahead with such frightening implacability that she had known she couldn’t call a halt to the proceedings even if she’d wanted to. The pretending.

And the terrible truth was, she still didn’t want to. She’d still rather hope.

‘Alyse?’

She turned from the window where she’d been blindly staring at the crowds, her hand rising and falling in a fluttering wave without even realising she was doing so. ‘Yes?’

‘You don’t look well,’ Leo said and he sounded concerned. ‘Do you need a few moments to rest before we go into the reception?’

Alyse knew what the reception would entail: hours of chatting, laughing and pretending to be in love. Of kissing Leo, squeezing his hand and laying her head on his shoulder. She’d done it all before, of course, but now it hurt more. It felt, absurdly perhaps, more fake.

‘I’m fine.’ She smiled and turned back to the window so he wouldn’t see how her smile trembled and almost slid right off her face. ‘I’m fine,’ she said again, this time for herself, because she needed to believe it. She was stronger than this. She had to be stronger, because she’d chosen this life, knowing how hard it would be.

At times it might have felt as if she had no choice, with the pressure of both the media and the monarchy urging her to agree, but if she’d really wanted to break off the engagement she surely could have. She would have found the strength to.

No, she’d chosen this life, and chosen Leo; she’d believed in the duty she was performing and she’d held out for love.

She still did. Today was a beginning, she reminded herself. Today was the start of her and Leo’s life together, days and nights spent with each other in a way neither of them had ever experienced before. Maybe, finally, Leo would fall in love with her.

Leo just wanted this day to be over. Although of course with its end would come a whole new, and rather interesting, complication: the night. Their wedding night.

He glanced again at Alyse; her face was turned away from him but he could still see how pale and wan she looked. And thin. The dress clung to her figure, which had already been slender but now looked rather waif-like. Clearly the strain of the heightened media attention had got to her over these last few months.

Just as it had got to him. He’d lived his life in the spotlight and he certainly should be used to it now. As a child, the play-acting for the media had confused him, but as he’d grown older he’d accepted it as the price he had to pay for the sake of his duty to the crown. At least this time, with Alyse, he’d chosen it. He’d entered this loveless marriage willingly, even happily.

Because wasn’t it better to know love was a sham from the beginning, than to live in desperate yearning for it—just as he had done for the whole of his confused and unhappy childhood?

At least he and Alyse agreed on that. She’d always known he didn’t love her, and he knew she didn’t love him. Really, it was the perfect foundation for a marriage: agreed and emotionless expectations.

Yet he’d found the last few months of intense media speculation and interest wearying. The charade of acting as if they were in love had started to wear thin. And he’d wondered, not for the first time, just why Alyse had agreed to this marriage.

He’d never asked her, had never wanted to know. It was enough that she’d agreed, and she’d gone along with it ever since. Just as he had.

Only, unlike him, she had no incentive to please the press, no duty to repair a badly damaged monarchy and increase the tourist revenue for a small and struggling country. No need to pretend to be wildly in love. So why had she agreed all those years ago? Why had she continued to agree?

He had to assume it was because, like him, she wanted this kind of marriage. Or maybe she just wanted this kind of life—the life of a princess and one day a queen. He didn’t fault her for it. She wouldn’t be the first person to have her head turned by wealth and fame. In any case, she’d approached their union with a practical acceptance he admired, and she’d embraced the public as much as they’d embraced her.

Really, she was perfect. So why did he wonder? Why did he now feel a new, creeping uncertainty? The questions—and the lack of answers—annoyed him. He liked certainty and precision; he prided himself on both.

He didn’t want to wonder about his bride on his wedding day. Didn’t want to worry about why she looked so pale and shaky, or why her smile seemed less assured. He wanted things to be simple, straightforward, as they had been for the last six years.

There was no reason for marriage to complicate matters, he told himself.

The carriage came to a stop in front of the palace and he turned to her with a faint smile, determined to banish his brooding thoughts and keep their relationship on the courteous yet impersonal footing they’d maintained for their entire engagement.

‘Shall we?’ he said, one eyebrow lifted, and Alyse managed just as faint a smile back as she took his hand and allowed him to help her out of the carriage.

CHAPTER TWO

THEY WERE ALONE. Every muscle in Alyse’s body ached with exhaustion, yet even so she could not keep a heart-stopping awareness of Leo from streaking through her as he closed the door behind them.

They’d retired to the tower suite, a sumptuous bedroom, bathroom and dressing-room all housed in one of the stone turrets of the ancient royal palace. A fire blazed in the hearth and a huge four-poster bed with silk coverings and sheets took up the main part of the room. Alyse stared at the white silk and lace negligee laid out on the bed and swallowed hard.

She and Leo had never talked about this.

They should have, she supposed, but then they had never really talked about anything. Their relationship—and she could only use that word loosely—had been little more than a long-term publicity stunt. Conversation had been limited to managing their appearances together.

And now they were married. It felt, at least to her, like a complete game-changer. Until now they’d only experienced manufactured moments lived in the public eye; but here, for the first time, they were alone with no need for pretence.

Would this moment be real?

‘Relax,’ Leo said, coming up behind her. Alyse felt his breath on the back of her neck and she suppressed a shiver of both anticipation and nervousness. ‘We’ve been waiting for six years; we don’t need to rush things.’

‘Right,’ she murmured, and then he moved past her to the window. The latticed shutters were thrown open to a starlit sky. Earlier in the evening there had been fireworks all over the city; the celebrations of their marriage had gone on all day.

It was only now that the city’s joy was finally subsiding, everyone heading back to his or her home—and Alyse and Leo to this honeymoon suite.

She watched as Leo loosened his black tie. He’d changed into a tuxedo for the evening party, and she into a designer gown chosen by the team of stylists hired to work on her. It was pale pink, strapless, with a frothy skirt. A Cinderella dress.

‘Do you want to change?’ Leo asked as he undid the top few studs of his shirt. Standing there, framed by the window, the ends of his bow-tie dangling against the crisp whiteness of his shirt, he looked unbearably handsome. His hair was a glossy midnight-black, and rumpled from where he’d carelessly driven his fingers through it.

His eyes were dark too—once Alyse had thought they were black but she’d learned long ago from having had to gaze adoringly up into them so many times they were actually a very dark blue.

And his body… She might not have seen it in all of its bare glory, but he certainly wore a suit well. Broad shoulders, trim hips, long and powerful legs, every part of him declared he was wonderfully, potently male.

Would she see that body tonight? Would she caress and kiss it, give in to the passion she knew she could feel for him if he let her?

And what about him? Would he feel it?

In the course of six years, he’d always been solicitous, considerate, unfailingly polite. She couldn’t fault him, and yet she’d yearned for more. For emotion, passion and, yes, always love. She’d always been drawn to the intensity she felt pulsing latent beneath his coolness, the passion she wanted to believe could be unleashed if he ever freed himself from the bonds of duty and decorum. If he ever revealed himself to her.

Would he tonight, if just a little? Or would this part of their marriage be a masquerade as well?

‘I suppose I’ll change,’ she said, her gaze sliding inexorably to the negligee laid out for both their perusals.

‘You don’t need to wear that,’ Leo said, and he let out an abrupt laugh, the sound without humour. ‘There’s no point, really, is there?’

Wasn’t there? Alyse felt a needle of hurt burrow under her skin, into her soul. What did he want her to wear, if not that?

‘Why don’t you take a bath?’ he suggested. ‘Relax. It’s been a very long day.’ He turned away from her, yanking off his tie, and after a moment Alyse headed to the bathroom, telling herself she was grateful for the temporary reprieve. They could both, perhaps, use a little time apart.

We’ve basically had six years apart.

Swallowing hard, she turned on the taps.

There were no clothes in the bathroom, something she should have realised before she got in the tub. Two sumptuous terry-cloth robes hung on the door, and after soaking in the bath for a good half-hour Alyse slipped one on, the sleeves coming past her hands and the hem nearly skimming her ankles. She tied it securely, wondering what on earth would happen now. What she wanted to happen.

For Leo to gasp at the sight of me and sweep me into his arms, admit the feelings he’s been hiding all along…

Fantasies, pathetic fantasies, and she knew that. She wasn’t expecting a lightning bolt of love to strike Leo; she just wanted to start building something, something real. And that took time.

Tonight was a beginning.

Taking a deep breath, stealing herself for whatever lay ahead, she opened the door.

Leo had changed out of his tuxedo and now wore a pair of navy-blue silk draw-string pyjama bottoms and nothing else. He sat sprawled in a chair by the fire, a tumbler of whisky cradled in his hands, the amber liquid glinting in the firelight.

Alyse barely noticed any of that; her gaze was ensnared by the sight of his bare chest. She’d never seen it before, not in the flesh, although there had been several paparazzi photographs of him in swimming trunks while on holiday—though not with her. They’d never actually had a holiday together in six years’ engagement.

Seeing his chest now, up close and in the glorious flesh, was another thing entirely. His skin was bronzed, the fire casting long shadows on the taut flesh and sculpted muscle. She could see dark whorls of hair on his chest, veeing down to the loose waistband of his trousers slung low on his lean hips, and her heart felt as if it had flipped right over in her chest. He was just so beautiful.

He glanced up as she approached, and his lips twitched in sardonic amusement as he took in her huge robe. ‘I think that one’s mine.’

‘Oh.’ She blushed, and then as she imagined Leo attempting to wear the smaller, woman’s-sized robe, a sudden bubble of nervous laughter escaped her. He arched an eyebrow and she came forward to explain. ‘I was picturing you in the other robe. Mine, apparently.’

‘An interesting image.’ His lips twitched again in a tiny smile and her heart lightened ridiculously. All she needed was a smile. A single smile on which to build a world of dreams.

She sat in the chair opposite his and stretched her bare feet towards the fire. Neither of them spoke for several minutes, the only sound the comforting crackle and spit of the flames.

‘This is strange,’ Alyse finally said softly, her gaze still on the fire. She heard Leo shift in his seat.

‘It’s bound to be, I suppose.’

She glanced upwards and saw his face was half in darkness, the firelight casting flickering shadows over the other half. She could see the hard plane of one cheek, the dark glint of stubble on his jaw, the pouty fullness of his sculpted lips. He had the lips of a screen siren, yet he was unabashedly, arrogantly male.

She’d felt those lips on her own so many times, cool brushes of mouths when what she wanted, what she craved, was hot, mindless passion—tongues tangling, plunging, hands moving and groping…

She forced the images, and the resulting heat, away from her mind and body.

‘Do you realise,’ she said, trying to keep her tone light, and even teasing, although they’d never actually teased each other, ‘we haven’t actually been alone together in about a year?’

He shrugged one bare, powerful shoulder. ‘That’s not all that surprising, considering.’

She glanced back at the fire, tucking her now-warmed feet underneath the hem of her robe. ‘Considering what?’

‘Considering we’ve been living separate lives ever since we announced this sham of an engagement.’

Alyse swallowed. ‘I know that.’ Neither of them had been in a rush to get married. Leo certainly hadn’t, and Alyse had already accepted a place at Durham University. Her parents hadn’t wanted her to give it up for marriage at eighteen, and neither had she, although she suspected Queen Sophia could have bullied her into it.

She’d been so young then, so naïve and overwhelmed. She liked to think she’d changed, that she’d grown up, at least a bit. She hoped she had, but right now she felt as gauche as ever.

At any rate, a long engagement had fed the media frenzy, accomplishing the monarchy’s purposes of keeping them in positive press for over half a decade. For the last six years she’d been living in England, completing her BA and then her MA in European history—a subject the monarchy had considered acceptable for its future queen, since it could be relevant to her rule. Alyse just loved history.

She’d wanted to have some kind of normalcy in her life, some kind of separation from Leo and the feelings he stirred up in her; from the bizarre intensity of life in the media spotlight and under the monarchy’s critical eye.

University had thankfully given her a degree of that normalcy she’d craved. Out of respect, and perhaps even love for her, the paparazzi hadn’t followed her too closely.

She’d had a somewhat usual university experience—or as usual as it could be, considering the jaunts to royal functions every few weeks, her carefully choreographed appearances with Leo and the constant curiosity and speculation of the other students and even some of the tutors and lecturers.

Remembering it all now brought a sudden lump to her throat. No matter how normal her life had seemed on the surface, she’d still felt the loneliness of being different from the other students. Of knowing the paltry truth of her relationship with Leo.

It was a knowledge that had sometimes led to despair, and that had once led to a foolish choice and a heartache and shame that even now could bring her to a cringing blush.

She pushed the memory away. It had no place here and now, on her wedding night.

‘But we’re not going to live separate lives now,’ she said and Leo inclined his head in brief acknowledgement.

‘I suppose we need to decide how we want to conduct our marriage, now that we’ll be under the same roof.’ He paused to take a long swallow of whisky, and Alyse watched the movement of the corded muscles of his throat, felt a spasm of helpless longing. ‘I don’t see any real reason to change things too much,’ he continued. Her longing left her in a rush.

She felt the way you did when you thought there was one more step in a staircase, the jolt going right through her bones to her soul. Had she actually thought things would change that much now they were married? That Leo would? It would mean more pretending, not less. Yet how could they pretend that much?

‘Things will have to change a bit, I imagine,’ she said, trying to speak lightly. ‘I mean…we’re married. It’s different.’

‘Assuredly, but it doesn’t mean we have to be different, does it?’ He glanced at her, eyebrows raised, cool smile in place. ‘The last six years have worked out quite well, don’t you think?’

No. No, no, no. Yet how could she disagree with him when she’d been acting like she’d agreed with him all along? Alyse swallowed. ‘I suppose, but now we have a chance to actually get to know each other…’ She trailed off uncertainly, wanting him to leap in and agree. When would she learn? He wasn’t going to do that. He wasn’t that kind of man.

Leo frowned, then turned back to the fire. ‘We’ve always had that chance,’ he answered after a moment. ‘We just chose not to take it.’

‘I suppose,’ Alyse managed. She tried not to let his words hurt her; he didn’t mean to be cruel; he simply had no idea of how she felt, never had. This wasn’t his fault, it was hers, for agreeing to pretend for so long. For never having been honest with him about how she really felt.

‘It might get a bit tedious,’ she ventured. ‘Pretending for so long. We’ll have to appear together more often, I mean.’

‘Oh, the media will get tired of us eventually,’ Leo said dismissively. He gave her a quick, cool smile, his eyes hard and glinting. ‘Especially once the next generation comes along.’

The next generation. Their children. Alyse felt her heart start to thud.

He put his glass down, raking both hands through his hair so Alyse’s gaze was drawn to the ripple of muscles in his arms and chest, the sculpted beauty of his body. Desire twisted and writhed inside her like some desperate, untamed creature seeking its freedom.

Leo dropped his hands and gave her a measured look. ‘I know tonight is bound to be awkward, at least at first.’ He nodded towards the huge bed looming behind them. ‘I think if we acknowledge that up front, it might be easier.’

Alyse’s mouth felt like sandpaper as she stared at him. ‘Yes, probably it will be.’ She tried for a light tone, or at least as matter-of-fact as his. She wasn’t sure she managed either. ‘Much better to be upfront and honest with each other from the start.’ She forced a smile, knowing her words for lies. ‘We pretend enough as it is.’