Royals: Wed To The Prince

An odd, aching foreboding clutched her with a cold grip. Ignoring it, she got to her feet and said, ‘Dinner’s ready. I’ll go and get it.’

Over the meal Lauren set herself to switch Guy’s mind away from the horrors of the past few days. She filled him in on the latest headlines, culled from the newspaper stand outside the immigration office, then skimmed over a couple of juicy financial scandals and the spectacularly spicy meltdown of a singer’s marriage.

He knew what she was doing, but he went along with her and by the end of the meal he was laughing and the lines of tension scoring his lean face were slightly less deep.

Whereas she was now racked by taut expectancy.

‘Coffee?’ she asked, shielding herself with the banal little rituals of everyday life. ‘It’s only instant, I’m afraid.’

‘It’ll be fine.’ He yawned and rubbed the back of his neck, the easy flexion of his big body sending a shivering little ripple of anticipation through her. ‘But before you make it, I’ll go and collect the other parcel I have for you.’

‘What—’

‘You’ll see,’ he said coolly.

It took him about twenty minutes, the longest twenty minutes of Lauren’s life. When he came back she was sitting out on the terrace waiting for him, the friendly darkness pressing against her.

‘Here,’ he said, tossing a parcel onto the table.

‘Oh.’ Another plastic bag. ‘What is it?’

‘Clothes.’

Her clothes from Sant’Rosa. She said, ‘Thank you. I thought they’d have been looted.’

‘They’re new.’ He paused, then said, ‘I should go.’ He spoke abruptly, the words falling stark and curt in the heavy air.

Lauren got up and walked across to the tiny kitchen. With her back to him she filled the battered electric kettle and plugged it in, then set two cups on a tray with sugar and milk. Only when she’d made the coffee and picked up the tray did she ask coolly, ‘Why?’

Guy watched her carry the tray across to the table. She walked as he’d dreamed of her in the hot, foetid jungle nights—with the lithe, easy grace that set off her long, lovely legs and the sensuous little sway of her hips that had dragged him temporarily out of hell.

He waited until she’d sat down and picked up the milk jug before saying in a deliberately prosaic voice, ‘Because if I stay it will be in your bed, and I doubt if either of us will sleep much.’

Guy regretted the words as soon as they left his mouth. Pragmatism was doing its best to convince him that making love to a woman he’d forced into a temporary marriage was a stupid thing to do.

For once, pragmatism could go bury itself.

Her hand shook so much she had to set the milk jug down. She kept her head down too so that all he could see was the lovely curve of her cheekbone. After a moment she poured the milk in, then got up and turned off the lights.

In the soft half-darkness, illuminated only by the stars, she said quietly, ‘I wouldn’t have asked you to stay if I hadn’t wanted that.’

Damn it, he could taste the need, hot as sin, dangerously heady as any drug; wanting Lauren was an ache in his guts, a reckless loss of control that both excited and infuriated him.

And for the first time in his life he was being propositioned by a woman who had no idea who he was. Here in Valanu they knew him only as Guy Bagaton. Combined with the heated sexual appetite raging through him, Lauren’s offer was damned near irresistible.

‘Neither reward nor gratitude,’ Lauren said.

Was there a hint of nervousness beneath the polished surface? When she stopped a step away, Guy refused to reach out, although the muscles in his shoulders and arms bunched with the effort to keep them still. Leaping on her with famished savagery was not the way to endear yourself to a woman, he thought derisively.

He asked, ‘So what is it?’

The taut seconds that followed his question didn’t give him enough time to impose control on his more primitive instincts. He could die wanting her, he thought, grimly fighting the physical longing that undermined his will-power, but he hadn’t come here for this.

Then she bent and fitted her mouth to his. Against his lips she said, ‘This.’

And kissed him.

She tasted of mystery and delight, of sex and truth, of daring and intensity and grace. An exultant, desperate need roared through him, and he said too harshly, ‘Good, because that’s what I want too.’

When Lauren began to straighten, he came up with her in a silent, purposeful movement that sent shudders through her.

‘Like this,’ he said.

He caught her against him, his mouth taking hers in a kiss that gave no quarter. Dimly, Lauren realised that it was a signal of dominant masculinity, and she gloried in it, demanding as much from him as he asked from her, her eager body thrumming with need.

He kissed her as though she was the only woman he’d ever wanted, as though they shared infinitely more than this transitory passion, this time out of time in the empty blue reaches of the Pacific.

Shuddering, she opened her mouth to his, and relished the wild kick of passion inside her—and the fierce hardness of his body against hers.

‘When I first saw you,’ he said, reluctantly giving her air, ‘I wanted you.’ That faint trace of accent flavoured each word, intriguing and different.

‘Mmm,’ she murmured. ‘You looked like a pirate. A very sexy pirate.’

His heavy eyelids almost covered his eyes, but she could see a gleam of laughter in their golden depths. ‘You have a thing for pirates?’

‘Stubble suits some people,’ she said demurely, nipping her way along his jawbone.

He laughed again, deep and low and triumphant, and kissed the spot where her neck joined her shoulders, and then the warm swell of her breasts above her sarong. Pleasure raced through her in a dizzying flood; as he deftly untied the knot she knew that nothing in her previous life had prepared her for the ardent, honeyed recklessness of making love with Guy.

When the sarong fell away, he froze. Lauren gazed into his stunned face, and her heart tumbled into free-fall. She hadn’t known a man could look like that—a mixture of conqueror and supplicant, eyes glittering in a darkly drawn face while he gazed at the slender white curves and lines of her body.

And then he lifted his head, and there was no supplication in his expression now—he was all conqueror. Her breath locked deliciously in her chest when he cupped a small, high breast, tanned fingers shaping the pale curves with erotic confidence as his thumb brushed the tight pink bud at the centre, slowly, back and forth, back and forth, until she moaned deep in her throat.

Needles of pure desire ran along her nerves; she couldn’t speak, couldn’t tell him that he was killing her with sensation. Even her breath died when he bent his head and kissed the nipple his thumb had tantalised. Carnal sensation sparked an inferno inside her when the tight little nub peaked in a silent, evocative plea for more.

He gave it to her, his dark head drawing close. Lauren swallowed, and when he drew the nipple into his mouth her knees buckled.

Guy caught her before she fell, lifting her into his arms and stepping over the fallen sarong to carry her across to the bed. As her feet touched the floor, his free hand jerked aside the bright quilted coverlet and he put her down gently on her back.

‘Are you sure?’ he asked deeply, his gaze caressing her body, exposed now for his delight with only a scrap of cotton hiding her most secret parts.

They had so little time, Lauren thought desperately. Soon she’d be leaving for New Zealand.

And Guy? He’d go back to Sant’Rosa, and she had no right to ask him to stay away.

A smile trembled along her lips. ‘Utterly sure,’ she said like a vow.

Guy stood very still, then said, ‘So am I,’ and without haste he shrugged out of his shirt.

Her pulses drummed faster as she feasted her eyes on the clean, perfect symmetry of his body. But when he stood naked before her, her breath locked in her throat. He was, she realised on a note of primitive panic, big all over, and it had been a long time since she’d done this…

‘Relax,’ he said softly, and ran a deliberate forefinger from the centre of her breast to the soft, warm nest between her thighs. ‘I won’t hurt you.’

The path of that finger burned like a streak of fire, and her confidence returned in a rush. Her first glance had told her that he was an experienced lover. ‘I know.’

Solemnly she watched the play of powerful muscles beneath his sleek bronze skin as he untied the mosquito netting so that it fell around the bed in a billow of white, shutting them off from the rest of the world.

Then he came down beside her, dark to her light, sun to her moon, strength to her grace.

CHAPTER FIVE

LAUREN had expected a slow, sophisticated wooing. Perhaps Guy had planned that, but when she smoothed her hand over his shoulder and down the flexible line of his spine, her fingers tracing out the vertebrae beneath the hot skin, he muttered a word she couldn’t discern. And followed it with another devouring kiss that set her afire with heady, primal intoxication.

A ferocious intensity wiped away the last pathetic shreds of her self-control. When she gasped and arched beneath him, her hips grinding into his, he took an importunate, demanding nipple into his mouth and suckled strongly.

Delicious arrows blazed through her body; groaning, she tightened her fingers around his head, holding him close to her breast while the craving intensified, burning hotter and hotter until she thought she might die of need.

‘Now,’ she muttered. ‘Now, for heaven’s sake… Guy, please—’

He kissed her again, and a second later he was buried to the hilt in her, his big body so rigid she thought he might not be able to control himself any longer.

But he dragged a quick, impeded breath into his lungs, and slowly, deliciously eased out of the slick passage until she gasped his name again, and once more her hips jerked in involuntary provocation.

On a harsh, feral sound, he thrust even deeper inside her, and she met the powerful rhythm and matched it until every thought fled her brain, lost in the sensual tidal wave of Guy’s mastery.

It was like drowning in rapture, and for a sudden moment she fought it, wondering where it would lead, what it would take from her.

‘Relax,’ he said, the words purring roughly into her ear. ‘Let go, Lauren—it won’t hurt. It can’t hurt.’

Yes, it can, she thought wildly, her head tossing back and forth on the pillow, but it was too late. She could no more resist this blatant bewitchment of her senses than she could push him off; she had never before felt so much a woman, so much herself, as she did when Guy made love to her.

Anyway, she couldn’t speak. The pleasure that had been threatening her since her first sight of him boosted her into some stratosphere of sensation. Her lashes flew up and she stared into his face. Lean and dark, every arrogant bone prominent, eyes glittering like the heart of the sun, he looked like a corsair intent on plunder.

And she was it, and she wanted it as much as he did. Lauren abandoned every last inhibition and surrendered to passion, rocking herself against him and tightening her inner muscles in an ancient, provocative rhythm every time he pushed into her.

She saw the moment his control cracked and shattered, registered the split-second of understanding in his aristocratic face, and then the torrent of ecstasy rolled over and through her in waves from the centre of her body.

Savage, merciless, exquisitely arousing, they hurled her into an alternate universe where all she saw was the golden gleam of Guy’s eyes and all she felt was an ineffable rapture that lasted too long and not long enough, where its slow fading was at once a tragedy and a glory.

And then Guy followed her into that secret, bewildering place, a low, hoarse sound torn from his throat as he fought for that peak, his beautiful body like steel against her and in her.

As the savage physical longing ebbed into sweet sorrow, Lauren linked her arms around his neck and pulled his head down to kiss him. Yielding to her conviction that he needed her had brought her wild ecstasy, but she’d chosen to break through an invisible barrier into another world where invisible chains linked her to him.

How would she ever forget him?

Mouth still holding hers captive, Guy rolled onto his back, scooping her with him so that she was lying on him.

When they could both breathe again, both speak, he asked, ‘When are you leaving Valanu?’

Her heart wept, but she answered steadily, ‘When funds come through for a plane ticket.’

‘I’m returning to Sant’Rosa three days from now,’ he said. ‘Would you like to spend those days with me?’

Lauren lifted her head to stare into his eyes; she saw the pupils dilate, and the fracture in her heart widened as she pulled back. Although the residual heat of passion still smouldered in the golden depths, she realised that once she left Valanu she’d never see Guy again. At least, she thought painfully, he made no promises, offered no inducements. ‘Here?’

‘A little further along the coast.’

‘On a desert island?’ she asked, putting off the moment of decision.

His smile was a sensual challenge. ‘Deserted,’ he said. ‘Not exactly an island.’

Although she hesitated, she knew what answer she’d give him. ‘Yes. But I’ll have to ring my parents and tell them what’s happening.’

He kissed her collar-bone. ‘Everything?’ he asked wickedly.

And although it hurt, she smiled. ‘Not everything,’ she admitted, and yawned.

‘You can tell them when we get there.’

‘You’ve got a telephone on your deserted not-island?’

He tucked her against his shoulder. ‘Yes. Now, go to sleep. We’ll leave at dawn tomorrow morning.’

But he woke her once more, and towards dawn she woke him, and both times they made love with slow, sweet passion that culminated in white-hot savagery, leaving them sensually replete.

Sputtering across the lagoon in a banana boat, Lauren turned to look at Guy. Something about his stance, his expression as he frowned into the sun and steered, sent a shiver across her nerve ends. Dismissing the momentary unease, she said lightly, ‘Where did you learn to run a departure like a military exercise?’

The canoe met the oncoming wave a little clumsily, splashing a sparkling cascade of water over the bow. ‘I did army training for a couple of years,’ he said. ‘It’s a tradition in my family. Look, can you see the frigate birds?’ He pointed to a pair of long-tailed birds that swooped above the lagoon.

In other words, she thought bleakly, do not go there, Lauren.

That morning she’d woken in his arms, and for a few seconds she’d allowed herself to feel at home there—until common sense took over, reminding her that Guy belonged in some way to Sant’Rosa, and she was a rising executive in her half-brother’s large organisation. Apart from the passion that blazed between them, they just didn’t connect—something Guy clearly understood, and something she had to accept.

Although the house he took her to sprawled alone beneath the coconut palms lining another white beach, there was nothing primitive about it. ‘Does this lovely place belong to you?’ she asked after she’d rung her parents using the latest in communications technology.

‘No. The resort,’ Guy told her. ‘The owner wanted to build a dozen or so along the lagoon, but his plans fell through. Do you like it?’

She gazed around the open, airy room, decorated in the blue of the lagoon, the soft green of the palm leaves and the white of the sand, and smiled a little ironically. Of course a buccaneer wouldn’t have a home.

‘It’s beautiful,’ she said, her voice dying as he kissed her.

During the next few days Lauren learned how lost in desire she could become; this new capacity for sensation both overwhelmed and scared her. But because these precious days were all that she’d have of Guy, she surrendered to erotic fantasy—and the arms and body of a man who set himself to satisfy appetites she hadn’t known existed.

Time enough to consider the implications when she returned to the workaday world.

He was the perfect lover—intelligent, intriguing, and he could cook. He made her laugh and he talked about anything she wanted to discuss, although by mutual consent neither spoke of their ordinary lives.

And he seemed to know by instinct when she wanted tenderness, when she wanted to walk on the wild side, and when she wanted to sleep. She soon lost any inhibitions about swimming naked in water as warm as her blood, walking back to the house over sand like powdered sugar to shower with him in the huge bathroom.

Sun-warmed, star-silvered, threaded with passion, the days and nights slid through her fingers like pearls on a silken cord, perfect, irretrievable, until at last it was the morning they were due back in Valanu. Just before they left Lauren spoke to her parents again.

Guy left her to check that everything was ready, coming back in the brightening light to hear her say, ‘I thought I might come straight back home instead of going on to New Zealand.’

He’d heard her voice in so many moods—sultry, playful, sophisticated, determined, and the way he liked best, shaken by craving—but never the warmly affectionate tone she used for her parents.

So? he thought restlessly.

She listened, then said, ‘Well—are you sure?’

A long silence followed, during which her soft mouth tilted at the corners in a smile she’d never bestowed on him. He watched a graceful hand trace a pattern on the table and responded to the familiar heaviness in his loins with tight anger. He didn’t want to feel like this. They had made love so many times he’d lost count; with Lauren he was insatiable and her response was equally reckless, but she had been careful to avoid any reference to the future.

Perhaps she was that rare thing, a woman who treated her lovers with affection, then let them go without any emotional strings.

Until that moment he’d deliberately pushed the shadow of Marc Corbett to the furthest reaches of his mind, but now a jagged pang of jealousy, barbaric in its intensity, thrust through his iron control. Guy had always considered himself a sophisticated man, one who didn’t expect anything more from his lovers than he was prepared to give them—affection, respect and good sex.

Yet the thought of Lauren going from his bed to another man’s summoned a primitive possessiveness that infuriated him.

‘Well, all right,’ she said cheerfully into the telephone. ‘I’m leaving today, but I have a few hours’ stopover in Fiji so I won’t get to New Zealand until late. I’ll spend the night at an airport hotel in Auckland and fly up to the Bay of Islands tomorrow morning.’

She listened again, then laughed. ‘Fusspot. Yes, I’ll ring you as soon as I get to Marc’s house. Goodbye.’ She put the telephone down.

A fierce, elemental anger almost consumed Guy; unlike his normal coldly disciplined response to provocation, this hot outrage seethed under such pressure that it took his entire stock of will-power to restrain it.

‘Everything under control?’ It was all he could trust himself to say, and even then his voice sounded guttural and aggressive.

Grey eyes wary, she looked up. Clearly, she hadn’t heard him come in. ‘Yes, thank you. I wondered if I should go home to reassure them that their darling daughter is safe and healthy, but my father wouldn’t hear of it.’

Guy wrestled his simmering rage into enough of a strait-jacket to say curtly, ‘A thoughtful father.’

So she was going to Marc Corbett’s house. It could mean nothing more than that they were on good terms even though their relationship had ended. It wasn’t so unusual; he prided himself on staying good friends with his previous lovers. He’d have offered a holiday house to any of them.

But it might also mean that the time they’d spent together meant nothing more to her than an exotic interlude.

He tried for a mental shrug, wondering coldly why his usual practical logic had abandoned him. So what? They’d made no commitment; Lauren might be every man’s dream lover, but their idyll was over. She could go wherever she wanted, sleep with whomever she wanted. And so could he.

Her tone deepened. ‘My father’s a darling.’ She joined him on the tiled terrace outside the airy sitting room and said carefully, ‘Guy, it’s been magic. Thank you so much.’

‘You sound like a small child at the end of a party,’ he said, exasperated by the rasping undertone in his voice.

Her face went still. Without moving she met his eyes, her own now as opaque as burnished silver, but her withdrawal hit him, palpable as a blow.

Steadily she said, ‘Probably because that’s what I feel like. It’s been a lovely, lovely party, but like all good times, it’s come to an end.’

Hiding his astonishing anger with the disciplined control he’d fought to acquire, Guy relaxed hands that were curling into fists by his sides. ‘You’d better give me an address so I can contact you if I need to.’

At first he thought she was going to refuse, but she nodded and reached into her bag for a small notebook. He watched her write down the address, tear the page out and hand it over. ‘I’ll be there for three weeks,’ she told him, that seamless poise firmly in place.

Guy wanted to smash it into splinters. Get a grip, he told himself roughly. A few days making love to a woman gave you no claims to her.

‘Right, we’d better go,’ he said, and picked up the bags.

They got back to Valanu not too long before her plane was due to leave. As the banana boat sputtered across the brilliant blues of the lagoon, Lauren gazed around, pretending that nothing had changed, that Guy wasn’t steering with an expression of such concentrated authority it shut her out as effectively as a barred door.

A car was waiting at the docks; Guy must have organised it. He walked her towards it, and as the driver slung her bag into the boot she held out her hand in farewell and said steadily, ‘Goodbye. Thank you for everything.’

Equally formal, his golden eyes dark and unreadable in his handsome face, he bowed over her hand. But there was nothing formal about the way he lifted it to his mouth; his kiss burned against her skin like a brand, quickening her heart and tightening inner muscles accustomed now to enclosing him in their subtle grip.

‘It was,’ he said with silken distinctness, ‘my complete and utter pleasure.’

Colour scorched along her cheekbones; she looked away, blinking at the figure of a man in the distance. ‘Mine too,’ she said uncertainly.

He held open the door and she slid into the back of the car. It drew away and she didn’t look back; she didn’t even notice the man who stared into the vehicle as it passed him, then straightened to examine Guy, a big figure striding into the distance.

During the flight to Sant’Rosa’s capital and then on to Fiji, she fought a savage, unrelenting emptiness, refusing food and anything to drink except water and fruit juice. Once aboard the big jet for New Zealand, she watched the jewel that was Fiji’s main island drop away from beneath the plane’s wings and forced herself to eat something that tasted like a mixture of plastic and sawdust in her mouth.

Afterwards she saw the sun go down in a splendour of blood-red and scarlet, and blamed the sight for eyes that felt heavy and dry, as though if she relaxed they might sting with tears.

Stop that right now, she told herself roundly. You knew right from the start that once you left you’d never see Guy again. You knew, and you accepted it—you can’t renege on the deal now.

She was not in love with Guy Bagaton.

But halfway to New Zealand she finally accepted something she’d been refusing to acknowledge. She had done the exact same thing as her mother—without considering anything other than her own desires, she’d embarked on a wild, defiant, unrestrained affair with a man she didn’t know.