To Claim His Heir by Christmas

The limo turned right onto the main road and picked up speed. But not nearly as fast as her temper.

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!

Look at 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.

As for his darkly intoned question—she’d lied through her teeth because all she cared about was making sure Augustus never put two and two together if he was ever faced with Natanael.

Natanael… Oh, Lord. She’d wanted to text him before he went to sleep. But it was far too risky to fish her phone from her handbag right now. The bag she clutched to her stomach like a lifeline. Thank goodness she’d carried it and not left it with her case.

More to the point, thank heavens she hadn’t brought Nate to the Alps with her. The thought of Thane discovering him…carting him off to Galancia… No, that could never happen. Never. Thane was descended from a long line of militia. Royal males trained in guerrilla warfare. The best fighter pilots in the world. Some said all the boys were taken to the barracks to learn how to become soldiers at eight years old. The mere thought of Nate holding a weapon in four years’ time made acid rise and coat her throat. Plus, she really had no idea what Thane was capable of. Considering abduction was his modus operandi for their reunion.

She shuddered where she sat, swelling until she felt she might burst with the need to protect Nate at all costs. She hadn’t kept his identity a secret all this time to lose him now. Her little boy was having a long, happy and healthy life even if it killed her.

At this rate, Luce, it just might.

When she realised Thane was speaking again, she turned to face him and watched the soft skin around his eyes crinkle as he narrowed those black sapphire peepers on her.

‘So you do not care? You do not care that your fiancé may no longer want you—?’

‘He is not my fiancé.’ Not yet anyway. And she’d rather bask in the fantasy of freedom a while longer, thank you very much.

‘Now, are you sure about that, Luciana?’ he jeered. ‘Because he seemed to think you are. Or is your word now as empty as it was five years ago?’

She made a tiny choked squeak of affront. ‘And what exactly do you mean by that?’

Brooding and fierce, he leaned forward, attacking her brain with another infusion of his darkly sensual scent. ‘You made a promise to me. That you’d stay another week. That we would talk.’

She could virtually feel how tightly reined in he was, and Luciana delved into his turbulent stormy eyes because…was that hurt in his voice? Surely not. How could she possibly hurt this man? No. If anything she’d bruised his male ego. A man who wielded his kind of power likely wasn’t accustomed to being deserted.

Though either way, to be fair, she had promised him she would stay. Hadn’t she?

Yes. She had. They’d become hot and heavy so fast she’d wanted to tell him who she really was. Not to have lies whispering between the damp, tangled sheets. Because in her mind there’d been something so beautiful and pure about what they’d had together the dishonesty had shredded her heart.

She swallowed around the great lump in her throat. It was torture to remember. Utter torture. ‘I did promise you—you’re right. But that was before I found out who you were.’

With his bent elbow resting on the lip of the window, he curled his index finger over his mouth pensively and stared at her. ‘So you didn’t know who I was all along?’

Mouth arid, she licked over her lips. ‘No, I didn’t know who you were. Of course I didn’t.’

‘Are you telling me the truth? You swear it?’

‘Yes.’ Did he think she’d duped him? ‘I couldn’t have set up the way we met even if I tried, Thane. Don’t you remem—?’

Slam! She locked the vault shut before all the memories it had taken her so long to ensnare were unleashed. Escaping to create havoc in her soul. Best to forget. For all their sakes.

‘Let’s just call it an ironic twist of fate,’ she said, hearing the melancholy in her voice. ‘We were young. Stupid. Reckless. I didn’t know you at all. I’d fallen into bed with a stranger…’ And I awoke to a nightmare. ‘I found your papers, Thane.’

She’d never forget that moment as long as she lived. Standing in the dim light of their bathroom, feeling naked and exposed, his nationality papers for travel that she’d stumbled across quivering in her hand. The realisation she was sleeping with the enemy.

‘And after three, almost four weeks,’ he said fiercely, ‘of our being inseparable, spending every waking and sleeping moment together, your first instinct was to run? With not one word? Do you have any idea…?’

Veering away from her, he clenched his jaw so tight she heard his molars groan in protest. And she swiftly reassessed the idea that she’d caused him pain by leaving the way she had.

Remorse gathered in the space behind her ribs and trickled down into her stomach to merge with the ever-present pool of guilt that swelled and churned with her secrets every minute of every day. The painful struggle between truth and darkness.

But, looking back, she remembered she’d been consumed with the need to flee.

First had come denial and bewilderment. She’d been unable to match the dark, dangerous, merciless Prince with the somewhat shy—at least around women—rock music lover who’d held her cherishingly tight through endless nights of bliss. Then terror had set in, leaving her panic-stricken, contemplating how he’d react when he discovered who she was. And heartache, knowing she had to leave before he found out. Knowing that while she toyed with the temptation of staying in touch, meeting up again, suddenly another hour was too much of a hazard, a risk, never mind some far-off midnight tryst.

So she’d run. Taken the good memories instead of tainting them with bitterness and regret. Run as fast as she could with her heart tearing apart.

Glancing out at the snow-capped peaks of the Tarentaise Valley, she took a deep breath and then exhaled, her warm breath painting a misty cloud upon the window. If he needed closure in order to forget and let her go, then so be it.

‘I’m sorry I didn’t let you know I was leaving. Write you a note or something. I didn’t mean to hurt you that way. But it was over. We had an affair—that’s all. There could never have been a future for us.’

Chills skittered over her skin and she crossed her arms over her chest, rubbing the gooseflesh from her shoulders. She was so lost in thought she didn’t notice his hand reaching across the back of the bench seat until it was in her periphery and she flinched. Hard. Unsure what to expect from him.

‘Are you afraid of me now?’ he asked, his voice gruff as if she’d sanded the edge off his volatility.

Was she afraid of him? Genuinely?

No. Though she couldn’t really understand why.

Because deep down you know he won’t hurt you. Deep down you know the man who took your innocence with such gentle passionate persuasion would never physically hurt you in a million years.

But that didn’t mean he couldn’t emotionally destroy her. And Nate. That he was capable of.

So maybe she did fear him. Just not in the way he meant.

Luciana gave her head a little shake and he picked up a lock of her hair and rubbed the strands between his fingertips. ‘I wouldn’t have recognised you. How different you look this way.’

She had the ludicrous desire to ask him if he liked the way she looked. The real her. Or if he’d fallen for a black-haired hippy who didn’t exist. But the reality was it was best she didn’t know.

‘It was a lifetime ago,’ she said, immensely proud of her strong voice when she felt so weak when he was close. ‘Forget the person I pretended to be in Zurich. I was just…’ She had to swallow hard to push the words out. ‘Acting out. Letting loose. Having a bit of fun.’

Such a lie. But maybe if he thought their wild, hedonistic fling meant nothing to her he’d hate her. Let her go…

Et voilà.

Easing back, he created a distance that felt as deep and wide as the Arunthian falls.

‘Fun,’ he repeated tonelessly. ‘Well, that makes both of us.’

Her stomach plunged to the leather seat with a disheartened thump. Because it was just as she’d always suspected.

Stiffening her spine, she brushed her hair back from her face. ‘There you go, then. There really is no point in dragging this out.’

He said nothing. Simply leaned back and glared at her with such intensity she felt transparent.

Jittery, she shifted in her seat and rammed her point home.

‘Thane, you have to let me go back to Arunthia. To my family. They need me. I’ve got to get married soon. I—’

‘No.’

‘No? But haven’t I given you an explanation? What more could you possibly want from me?’

‘That is a very good question, princesa.’

And Luciana had the feeling she wasn’t going to like the answer. Not one bit.

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