The Mediterranean Prince's Passion

He was standing by the small table, dishing out two plates of something she didn’t recognise, the scent of which made her empty stomach ache. He had left the door open and Ella discovered why the sound of the waves was so loud. It looked directly out onto the most glorious sea view she had ever seen in her life.

Pale, powdered sand dotted with shells gave way to white-topped sapphire waves that glittered and sparkled and danced and filled the room with light. But the room seemed suddenly to have kaleidoscoped in on itself, for all Ella could see was the dark power of the man who was silhouetted against the brilliant backdrop outside.

Now that she was on her feet she didn’t need the T-shirt as an indicator of just how tall he was. She could see that instantly from the way he towered, dominating the small room, making everything else shrink into insignificance. His hair was dark and ruffled, tiny tendrils of it curling onto the back of his neck. She felt an odd, powerful kick to her heart as he looked up and slowly drifted his eyes over her.

‘My T-shirt suits you,’ he mused softly.

It was an innocent enough remark, but something in the way he said it, and the accompanying look of approbation in his eyes, made her feel all woman. She could feel her breasts tingling, and the soft, moist ache of longing. It was a powerful and primitive response, and it had never happened to her quite like that before.

Filled with a sudden feeling of claustrophobia, and unsure of how to deal with the situation, she walked to the open door and breathed in the fresh, salty tang of the air, staring at the moving water in silence for a moment.

‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’ came his voice from behind her.

Composing her face into an expression of innocent appreciation, Ella turned round. ‘Unbelievable.’ And so was he. Oh, he was just gorgeous. ‘That…that smells good,’ she managed, in an effort to distract herself.

‘Mmm.’ He had seen the perking breasts and the brief darkening of her eyes and he felt himself harden. ‘Come and eat,’ he said evenly. ‘We could take our food outside, but I think you need a break from the sun. So we’ll just look at the view from here.’

But Ella didn’t move. ‘You said you would give me some answers, and I’d like some. Now. Please.’

Nico gave a slow smile. The novel always stirred his blood, and it was rare for him to be spoken to with anything other than deference. ‘Questions can wait, cara, but your hunger cannot.’

His words were soft, but a steely purposefulness underpinned them. As if he were used to issuing orders; as if he would not tolerate those orders being disobeyed. The scent of the food wafted towards her and Ella felt her mouth begin to water. Maybe he was right. Again.

She went back inside and sat down at the table.

‘Eat,’ he said, pushing a plate of food towards her, but it seemed the command was unnecessary. She had begun to devour the dish, falling on it with the fervour of the truly hungry.

He watched her in fascinated silence, for this, too, was a new sensation. In his company people always picked uninterestedly at their food. There were unspoken rules that were always followed. They waited for him to begin and they finished when he finished. It was all part of the protocol that surrounded him—and yet for all the notice she took of him he might as well not have been there!

She ate without speaking, unable to remember ever having enjoyed a meal as much. Eventually she put her fork down and sighed.

‘It’s good?’

‘It’s delicious.’

‘Hunger makes the best sauce,’ he observed slowly.

There was red wine in front of her, and he gestured towards it, but she shook her head and drank some water instead, then sat back in her chair and fixed him with a steady look. His eyes were as black as a moonless night and they lanced through her with their ebony light.

‘Now are you going to start explaining?’

Nico found that he was enjoying himself. He had played the rescuer—so let him have a little amusement in return. ‘Tell me what you wish to know.’

‘Well, for a start—who are you? I don’t even know your name, Mr…?’

There was a pause while he considered the question. It seemed sincere enough, although the Mr tacked onto the end could have been disingenuous, of course. Was it?

‘It is Nico,’ he said eventually. From behind the thick dark lashes that shielded his eyes he watched her reaction carefully, but there was no sign of recognition in her emerald eyes. ‘And you?’

‘I’m Ella.’

Ella. Yes. ‘It’s a pretty name.’

‘It’s short for Gabriella.’

‘Like the angel,’ he murmured, letting his eyes drift carelessly over the pale flames of her hair.

It was that thing in his voice again—that murmured caress that made her conscious of herself as a woman. And him as a man. A man who had seen her sick and half-naked. But he was the angel—a guardian angel.

‘Where am I?’ she asked slowly.

Now his expression became sceptical. ‘You really don’t know?’

She sighed. ‘How long are we going to continue with these guessing games? Of course I don’t know. One minute I was on a boat—and the next I’m in some kind of beach hut, eating…’ She stared down at her empty plate. Even the food had been unfamiliar, just as he was, with his strange accent and his exotic looks. Disorientated, she found herself asking, ‘What have I just eaten?’

‘Rabbit.’

‘Rabbit,’ she repeated dully. She had never eaten rabbit in her life!

‘They run wild in the hillsides,’ he elaborated, and then, still watching her very closely, he said, ‘Of Mardivino.’

‘Mardivino?’ She stared at him as it began to sink in. ‘Is that where we are?’

‘Indeed it is.’ He sipped from a tumbler of dark wine and surveyed her from eyes equally dark. ‘You have heard of it?’

It was one of the less-famous principalities. A sun-drenched Mediterranean island—tax haven and home to many of the world’s millionaires. Exclusive and remote and very, very beautiful.

‘I’m not a complete slouch at geography,’ she said. ‘Of course I’ve heard of it.’

Authority reasserted itself. ‘You were in forbidden waters. You should never have ventured onto this side of the island!’

She remembered Mark and one of the others blustering about navigation, and then they had started hitting the bottle, big-time. She remembered how frightened she had been, how she had stood on deck for what seemed like hours and hours, the blistering sun beating down on her quite mercilessly. She shivered. ‘But we were lost,’ she protested. ‘Genuinely lost!’

‘Yes.’ He didn’t disbelieve her. Off Mardivino’s rugged northern coast there were rocks and rip tides that would challenge all but the most experienced sailor. No one would have been foolish enough to deliberately put themselves in the danger in which he had found them. So why had they?

His eyes bored into her. ‘Those people with you…’

‘What about them?’

There was a long pause. ‘One of them is a journalist, perhaps?’ he questioned casually.

‘A journalist?’ She screwed up her nose. ‘Well, I don’t know any of them that well, but none of them said they were journalists.’ She met his eyes, which were hard and glittering with suspicion. ‘Why would they be?’

‘No reason,’ he said swiftly.

But Ella heard the evasion in his voice and stared at him. Nothing added up. She stared at him as if seeing him properly for the first time. His clothes were simple, but his bearing was aristocratic, and there was something about his appearance that she had never seen in a man before. Something in the way he carried himself—an arrogant kind of self-assurance that seemed innate rather than learned. Yet he wore faded jeans and a worn T-shirt…

He had brought her to this beach hut, where the shower dripped in a single trickle and yet the soap and shampoo were the finest French brands. She frowned. And he had called her cara, hadn’t he?

‘Are you Italian?’

He shook his head.

‘Spanish?’

‘No.’

‘French, then?’

He smiled. ‘Still no.’

Words he had spoken came back to her. ‘Yet you speak all three languages?’

He shrugged. How much to tell her? How long to continue this delicious game of anonymity? How long could he? ‘Indeed I do.’

‘And your English is perfect.’

‘I know it is,’ he agreed mockingly.

This time she would not be deterred by the soft, seductive voice. Ella leaned across the table, challenging him with her eyes. ‘Just who exactly are you, Nico?’

CHAPTER THREE

THE strangest thing was that Nico was really enjoying himself. It was like a game, or a story—the one where a prince disguised himself as a beggar and no one recognised him.

For a man whose life had been composed of both light and dark fairy tale aspects, it was a new and entertaining twist. And if he told her…then what? Nothing would be the same, not ever again. Her attitude towards him would change irrevocably. No longer would she speak to him as if were just a man—an ordinary man.

When he was a little boy, had he not sometimes wished to be made ‘normal’, just for the day? And even when he had been at college in America, doing his best to blend in, people had still known of his identity. It had been inevitable—security had arrived before he had, to make the place fit for a prince.

And since when had he been asked to make an account of himself? To explain who he was and his place in the world?

Never.

He leaned back in the wooden chair. ‘How does a man define himself?’ He asked the question as much of himself as of her. ‘Through his possessions? His achievements, perhaps?’

Ella gave him a bemused look. ‘Are you incapable of giving a direct answer to a direct question?’

Probably. In the world he inhabited he was never asked a direct question. Conversation was left for him to lead, at whim. It was forbidden by ancient decrees for others to initiate it. When he spoke people listened. He had never known anything else, had accepted it as the norm, but now—with a tug of unfamiliar awareness—he recognised that total deference could be limiting.

‘I am Nico,’ he said slowly. ‘You know my name. I’m twenty-eight and I was born on Mardivino—a true native of the principality.’ His eyes glittered. ‘So now you know everything.’

‘Everything and yet nothing,’ she challenged. ‘What do you do?’

‘Do?’ His eyes glittered. How could he have forgotten that in her world people were defined by what they did for a living?

‘For a living?’

‘Oh, this and that,’ he said evasively. ‘I work for a very rich man.’

That might go some of the way towards explaining things. Maybe that was why he seemed so impressively self-assured. Perhaps he had picked up and now mirrored some of his rich employer’s characteristics, as sometimes happened. That might also explain the extravagant soaps in the bathroom—he might be the recipient of a rich man’s generosity.

Ella gestured towards the humble interior. ‘And is this your home?’

There was a pause. ‘No. No, I don’t live here. It’s just a place that belongs to my…employer.’

‘And the jet-ski?’

‘You remember that?’ he questioned.

The food and the shower had worked a recuperative kind of magic, and more fragments of memory now began to filter back. She recalled being clasped against a firm, hard body and the comforting, safe warmth of him. Then fast bobbing across the water, with spray being thrown against her fevered skin.

‘Kind of.’

‘What about it?’ he asked carelessly.

‘Is it yours?’

Inexplicably, he felt a flicker of disappointment. Would that matter, then? A top-of-the-range jet-ski was a rich man’s toy. His habitual cynicism kicked in. Of course it would matter—things like that always did. You were never seen for who you were but what you owned and what you possessed. Take away the trappings and what was left?

‘No,’ he said flatly. ‘It’s just something I use when I want to.’

‘Well, I hope I’m not going to get you into trouble,’ she ventured.

His cynical thoughts began to crumble when she looked at him like that. So…so sweet, he thought. So scrubbed and so innocent. So utterly relaxed in his company and now worrying about his welfare! And when had anyone ever done that before?

Now that it was dry, the tawny hair was spilling in profusion over her shoulders and face, but not quite managing to disguise the lush swell of her breasts. The aching in his body intensified as he imagined himself running the tips of his fingers over their heavy curves. ‘No, you won’t get me into trouble,’ he murmured. ‘I suspect he wouldn’t have minded rescuing you himself.’

The words were flirty, and almost imperceptibly something in the atmosphere changed and then intensified. A blurry sexual awareness that had been there all the time was now brought into sharp focus. Ella felt the warm tongue of desire licking its way over her skin and the heated clamour of her response. She found that she didn’t dare look at him—and yet where else was there to look? The room was so small, and he was so…so…

She swallowed, her mouth as dry as the sun-baked sand outside. ‘Maybe I should think about getting home,’ she said quietly.

Nico had watched her body tense, and then seen the wary look that crept into her eyes. He forced himself to steel against the demands of his hungry body, aware that he could frighten her away. Because sex was easy. He could get sex any time he wanted. But not a unique situation like this. And what would sex be like with a woman who didn’t know?

‘Not yet.’ His dark eyes on her face, he took a mouthful of wine. ‘You still haven’t told me anything about you.’

‘Well, you know my name. And I’m twenty-six and I was born in Somerset.’ Her eyes mocked him. ‘So now you know everything about me, too.’

‘Everything and nothing.’ He echoed her sardonic words. ‘And what of the men on board—one of them is your lover, perhaps?’

Ella found her cheeks colouring. ‘You can’t just come out and ask me something like that!’ she protested.

‘Why not?’

‘Because I thought we were sitting here having a polite conversation, and that sort of question breaks all the rules!’

‘A polite conversation?’ he murmured. ‘Oh, I think not, cara mia. When a man and a woman talk together there is always an internal dialogue taking place. What you say is never what you’re really thinking, deep down.’ Or else I would be telling you that I want to feel your naked body against me, to taste your tongue as it licks against my lips and hear your cry of startled pleasure as I thrust into you that sweet first time.

His murmured words increased her wariness, but heightened the sensation of tense expectation, too. Surely by now she should be itching to get away? Not finding her eyes drawn to the luscious curve of his lips, to the hard, clean lines of his body, and thinking how magnificent he must look when he was naked.

His voice interrupted her thoughts. ‘So?’ he persisted silkily. ‘You wish to rush away to the jail-house to greet one of them?’

‘Ugh—no, thanks!’ Ella shuddered. ‘None of them is my lover, nor ever would be. Mark is just someone I met through work.’ She bit her lip, remembering how trusting she had been. ‘He invited me along to join some friends of his for the weekend, only I arrived to discover that his idea about how we were going to spend our time together differed somewhat from mine.’

‘So what happened?’

‘I made it clear I wasn’t interested in him, and that’s when he decided to make love to a bottle of whisky instead.’ She pulled a face. ‘They all did.’

‘And did he hurt you?’ he demanded, his expression darkening.

Ella shook her head, taken aback by the sudden hardening of his voice. ‘No. I stayed as far away from them as possible. Then they started to drink more and more, and no one seemed capable of taking charge of the boat.’ Her voice trembled a little. ‘That’s when I started to get frightened.’

He remembered the way she had clung to him on deck, and the gut-wrenching effect of the little whimper of protest she had made when he had left her. The way she had weakly gripped onto his hand as if he were her lifeline. Playing rescuer to a woman could evoke some very powerful and primitive feelings, he recognised—feelings he was unfamiliar with, which were given extra potency by her ignorance of who he really was. And that, too, was a rare sensation.

He knew he wanted to make love to her, but he couldn’t do it now. Not here. Making love to a woman on his own territory was always fraught with difficulty. And he had no wish to shatter her trust in him, nor to abuse his position. When he took her to bed it must be on equal terms. And in order for that to happen he must get her back to England with as little fuss as possible.

‘You want to go home?’ he asked suddenly.

His question took Ella off-guard, and she hoped her expression managed to mask her disappointment. What had she been expecting? To stay here indefinitely, in this beautiful place, with this strong, handsome man who had saved her? Alone like Adam and Eve—with the inevitable outcome of sexual discovery?

She fixed her mouth into a wobbly kind of smile. ‘Well, I suppose I’d better.’

He heard her reluctance, and that only heightened his appetite. But, as he had already told her, hunger made the best sauce…

He slid a high tech-looking mobile phone from the back pocket of his jeans. ‘I’ll arrange it.’

He went outside to get a signal and she could hear him talking in a low, rapid voice in Spanish. Then he came back inside.

‘We can be airborne within the hour.’

She was unable to hide her bewilderment. ‘That soon? But my ticket is from Nice, and that’s miles away.’

‘We’ll be travelling by private jet.’

Her frown deepened. ‘How come?’

Again, his eyes pierced her with their brilliant light, but he was enjoying this sensation of anonymity far too much to break it. And besides, he wasn’t telling a lie. He was merely presenting the truth in a slightly different form.

‘My…employer,’ he elaborated casually, ‘is an exceedingly rich and generous man. And I’m a qualified pilot,’ he added. ‘So I can fly you home.’ There was a pause and his dark eyes captured hers in their ebony crossfire. ‘That is, of course, if you trust me to fly you home safely, cara?’

He had rescued her from the boat and ensured that she did not spend a night in the cells. He had cared for her while she thrashed around with fever—what was there not to trust?

And when he called her cara like that…

‘But can you just get up and go like that? Won’t your employer mind?’

‘Not at all. I have to do some business myself in England, and I can do it this week just as easily as next.’

She saw the gleam of anticipation that had lightened the night-dark eyes, the slow smile that had irresistibly curved his lips, and she could feel the erratic beat of her heart.

‘It’s very…sweet of you,’ she said.

The question why hung unspoken on the air.

He shook his head very slightly. It was a very English description, and one that had never been applied to him in his life. ‘Sweet? No, cara—it is something much more fundamental than that.’ He suddenly became aware of the irony of his words. ‘You see, I find that I’m just as susceptible to the lure of a pair of dazzling green eyes and a pair of petal-soft lips as the next man.’

Ella felt the heat rise in her cheeks. It was most definitely an overture. And what was she going to do about it? After all, what did she have in common with this all-action foreigner—with his jet-ski and his pilot’s licence and his ability to rustle up a delicious one-pot meal in the most basic surroundings? Who lived on a remote island far away from her world…

A shadow of a smile had flitted across the hard contours of his face. ‘Maybe you’d like to have dinner with me back in England?’ Breakfast would have been his meal of choice, but that would inevitably follow.

From the crashing of her heart against her ribcage someone might think that she’d never been asked out for dinner before—but quite honestly that was the way it felt. As though every invitation up until that moment had been a rehearsal for the real thing. And Ella found herself smiling at him with lips that she had never considered to be petal-soft before, but that now parted like a flower.

‘Why, thank you,’ she murmured. ‘I’d like that.’

CHAPTER FOUR

IT’S ONLY a dinner date, Ella told herself.

So why did she feel so jumpy? Why were the hands that smoothed the dress down over her hips so clammy and her lips so cool and pale? She rubbed a slick of lipgloss on them and stared at herself critically in the mirror.

The silky black dress gleamed against the curve of bottom and breast, contrasting provocatively with the tiny covered buttons that ran in a demure line from neck to knee.

The spiky black sandals made the best of her legs, and her only adornment was a matching velvet choker at her neck, inlaid with jet as dark and glittering as Nico’s eyes.

For the umpteenth time she glanced at the clock, nervously tugging at the hem of her dress, her mind skipping back over the extraordinary events of the last couple of days, which had culminated in Nico flying her home on a private jet.

Ella had spent the flight sipping on a fruit cocktail and looking around her with a sense of disbelief. Whatever Nico’s boss did for a living, he must be enormously successful at it to own a plane like that.

She had glanced yet again to the cockpit, to see Nico sitting in front of a radar screen lit up like a Christmas tree, his fingers caressing the joy stick as if it was a woman’s body, and she had shivered, unable to prevent herself. There was something decidedly sexy about a man who could fly a plane—but there again, she’d never met one before!

‘Here you are. Home,’ Nico murmured as he came through into the cabin after a successful touch-down, his eyes shining.

When he flew a plane he always felt filled with a wild kind of exhilaration—it was the same when he sailed, or climbed, or dived deep to explore the beautiful coral reefs off Mardivino. Some people called it living dangerously—he just called it living.

‘Thanks,’ Ella said steadily, praying that he’d meant his offer of dinner. ‘It was a brilliant flight.’

‘So when am I going to see you?’ he drawled. ‘Tonight?’

It nearly killed her, but Ella shook her head. A woman should never be too available—everyone in the world knew that! ‘No, not tonight, I’m afraid. I have masses to catch up on.’

He raised his eyebrows. ‘Cancel it,’ he said arrogantly.

Their eyes clashed. That was what he was used to, she recognised. Easy come, easy go. Well, if he wasn’t prepared to wait even a day, then he was wasting his time.

‘Sorry,’ she said coolly. ‘I can’t. I’ve been away and I need to catch up on work. See what’s been happening in my absence. You know.’

With an effort he hid the little flicker of irritation and shrugged. ‘Sure. So…when? Tomorrow night—or will you be busy then, too?’

She heard the sarcasm in his voice. ‘Tomorrow will be fine,’ she said steadily, but the small victory of holding out only increased her sense of apprehension.