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“You will call your friend Carla and tell her to bring Daniele to the airport tomorrow morning.”
“I won’t,” she said quietly, resenting the way he so easily Italianized her son’s name.
“Indeed you will,” Nico replied. “You can make this easy, or you can make it hard. Should you not cooperate, you might never see Daniele again. Because you will not leave Montebianco. He could grow up motherless, and alone.”
Numbness crept over her. “You would do that to your own son? You would deny him his mother?”
She didn’t miss the nearly imperceptible clenching of his jaw. “I will do what it takes to make you see reason, cara. If you cooperate, this will not have to happen, si?”
“How can you be so cruel?”
He shrugged an elegant shoulder, and Lily saw red. The spoiled bastard! The glass tumbled to the floor and shattered against the tile as she lunged for him. Nico was faster, however. He swept her high into his arms and carried her across the room as she kicked and struggled.
“Dio, woman, you are wearing sandals. Do you want to slice your feet to ribbons?”
Lily didn’t care. She simply didn’t care about anything any longer. This man, this cold evil man, was trying to take away the one person in the world who meant the most to her. It was her greatest fear come to life. She would not allow it.
She twisted in his iron grip, throwing him off balance so that he stumbled. Lily pressed her advantage and they fell to the thick Oriental carpet together, Nico taking the brunt of the impact. A moment later, he flipped her and she found herself on her back, Nico’s hard form pressing into her, breast to belly to hip.
“Stop fighting me, cara,” he said harshly. “It changes nothing.”
Lily wiggled beneath him, tried to shake him off. His solid form didn’t budge. The point of a star-shaped medal dug into her ribs. “Why are you doing this to me?” she cried. “You have dozens of children with your mistresses, so why do you care about mine?”
Rage, disbelief, frustration—they chased across his face in equal measure. “I have one child, Liliana. Only one. And you have kept him from me.”
“I don’t believe you,” she gasped out.
Nico shifted and the medal’s point thankfully stopped pricking her. He gripped her arms, forced them above her head. He seemed to hover on the edge of control. “Have you never thought that gossip magazines might lie?”
“They can’t all be lies.” There had to be a grain of truth, right? Perhaps they exaggerated, but there must be something to it. Not one of the reporters she knew at the Register would dare write something so patently false.
Nico’s laugh was short and bitter. “You have obviously never been the victim of these carrion. They feed on outrage and misdirection. There’s hardly a single thing they print about me that is true.”
“Now I know you’re lying. I’ve seen photos of you with lots of women—”
“I have had many mistresses,” he said, cutting her off. “This is to be expected—”
“Why? Because you’re some kind of God’s gift—”
“Basta! You seek to exasperate me, signorina, and you succeed. Nevertheless, I have one child.”
Lily’s chest heaved in frustration as she stared up at him. But her eyes closed as the truth of his words sank in. Gossip magazines thrived on scandal. She knew that. But she didn’t want to believe he spoke the truth. Because if he did, so much she’d thought about him would be wrong. The blood drained from her head as the implications sank in.
“But if Danny really is the only one, that would mean—”
She couldn’t finish the sentence, uncertain what to say next. Was Danny in line for a throne? Impossible.
Nico said it for her. “Yes, cara, our child is my heir and second in line to the throne of Montebianco.”
Her insides were jelly. “How is that possible?” she managed. “We aren’t even married.”
“It just is,” he said, his accent thickening suddenly as she moved.
Lily took advantage of his distraction to try and buck him off. She arched her back and flexed her body upward, shoving into the cradle of his hips. His arousal sent a jolt of sensation sizzling through her.
In spite of her anger and frustration, the feeling was delicious.
Dangerous.
Nico’s breath caught as she shoved against him. The sound was slight, but she heard it nonetheless.
And just like that she was on fire, absolutely aflame with longing. How could it be possible? How could she feel sexual desire for him when he wanted to ruin her life? He’d given her the most precious thing in her world, and now he wanted to take it away. And her body didn’t seem to care. She redoubled her efforts to throw him off.
“Maledizione,” he ground out between clenched teeth. “Stop moving—or would you like to take this into the bedroom and do it properly?”
Lily’s palms pushed against the crisp material of his uniform. A desperate, greedy part of her did indeed want to do it properly. But her common sense, her anger, her sheer dislike of the man won out. “Get off me.”
“As you wish,” he said, then bounded up and left her to climb to her feet alone.
Lily hugged herself, her body still tingling with the shock of desire. How could she want him? She closed her eyes, squeezed her arms tight around her middle. My God, she really was her mother’s daughter.
She could not afford the distraction of such thoughts. She had to focus. “What now?”
He whirled on her, his uniform as crisp and perfect as if he hadn’t just been rolling on the floor with her. His royal bearing was absolute. She wondered that she’d never noticed it in the three days she’d spent with him in New Orleans.
“You will call your friend and instruct her to turn over the child.”
Lily shook her head. “Why? So you can marry your princess and raise my child with her? Not just no, but hell no.”
Nico’s brows drew together. “We will need to work on that mouth of yours. It’s unfit for a royal.”
Lily snorted. “But not unfit enough for you two years ago when you seduced me, huh? Go to hell, Nico,” she said, stressing his name without the title.
“You most definitely require etiquette lessons, cara mia.” His gaze raked her from head to toe. “And a suitable wardrobe.”
Lily stiffened. Her clothes might not be the height of fashion, but they were usually clean and neat. Unlike now, when she’d spent the last twenty-four hours in a prison cell and just wrestled on the floor with a prince.
Nico retrieved a cell phone from a table. “You and your son will never want for anything again. You will no longer have to work. I will take care of you both.”
Lily stared at the gleaming phone held so casually in his hand, his words more seductive than she cared to admit. Never to have to struggle again? Never have to worry about keeping her apartment or her health insurance? Money and freedom from the fear of not having enough to take care of her baby?
But no. What was he offering her—the chance to be a kept woman while he married his princess and had babies with her? She’d work herself half to death before she accepted such treatment. She’d taken care of Danny this long; she could continue to do so just fine on her own.
“I can take care of my son without you,” she said.
His expression grew so chilly she had to suppress a shiver. “Apparently I have not expressed myself in a manner you understand. There is no choice, Liliana. You and the boy belong to me.”
Lily snorted. “Even you can’t own people, Nico.”
He merely smiled at her. A frisson of warning raced down her spine and pooled in her belly. A moment later, he lifted the phone to his ear and began speaking in Italian. This time, it was a conversation, not simply a set of orders. When he finished, he laid the phone on a nearby table.
“What did you do?”
His self-satisfied smile did nothing to ease her tension. “Five million dollars is a lot of money, no? Do you think your friend will turn this down for you?”
Black spots swam before her eyes, but Lily refused to buckle. “My God…”
“Si, it is not likely, is it?” He moved closer, shadowing her like the predator he was, impossibly male and utterly beautiful in spite of the hatred she felt for him in that moment. “She will not turn it down, Liliana. Shall I tell you why?”
When she didn’t reply, he continued, “Carla has a boyfriend with a little problem. He likes the game tables in New Orleans a bit too much, yes? He has taken much from her in the last three years. Her savings are gone, her house leveraged in excess of its current value. This money represents a new life, cara mia. She will not say no.”
Lily blinked up at him. She knew she was defeated. Carla hadn’t told her the extent of Alan’s problems, but Lily had known that it worried her. Carla was almost as bad as her own mother when it came to her slavish devotion to a man who cared more for himself than for her.
His fingers stroked down her cheek, impossibly tender when compared with his actions. She shuddered in spite of her vow not to react. “What do you plan to do with my baby?”
His eyes hardened, his hand dropping away. “Our baby, Liliana.”
Lily faced him squarely, ready to do battle, heartsick and heartbroken all at once. “You can’t buy me off, too, Nico. I will never leave Danny with you willingly.”
“Clearly not,” he said, his voice deepening with anger. “But you will not need to do so.”
Lily gaped at him. “My God, you are unbelievable—how do you think your wife-to-be is going to feel about me and Danny, huh?”
“Why don’t you ask her yourself?”
“What? Are you insane?”
Nico grabbed her by the arm and propelled her toward the opposite wall, her puny resistance not slowing him in the least. He approached a door, and for one crazy minute she thought it was a bedroom and there was a woman inside. He would throw open the door and there she would be, the Princess Antonella Romanelli of Monteverde, a black-haired gray-eyed beauty, sprawled across silk sheets and pouting prettily because her lover was taking too long to get the baby mama under control.
Abruptly, they slammed to a halt, Nico pivoting behind her, the full length of his body pressing into her. She tried to jerk away, but he gripped her chin—more gently than she expected—and forced her head forward.
Lily gasped. “Is this a joke?”
She stared at her reflection—their reflection—in the mirror. The darkness of his fingers against her skin, her hair wild and tumbling around her shoulders in a silky mess. Her pink cotton shirt was stained over her left shoulder, and her eyes, though tired, gleamed with fury. Nico, in contrast, was cool and unruffled. If not for his quickened heartbeat against her, she’d almost think him bored.
But no, there it was, that flash of something in his eyes, in the set of his jaw, that spoke volumes without a sound being uttered.
“No joke, Liliana. I have broken a long-sought-after treaty between my country and Monteverde, not to mention embarrassed my father and our allies, so that I can do what should have been done the instant you conceived my child.”
“I—I don’t understand,” she whispered, searching his face in the mirror, her heart slamming into her ribs.
“Of course you do,” he replied, dipping his head until his lips almost grazed the shell of her ear. Almost, but not quite.
“You, Miss Lily Morgan, are about to become the Crown Princess, my consort, and the mother of my children.”
Chapter Three
SHE LOOKED UTTERLY STUNNED. Not that he blamed her; he was still somewhat stunned himself. He had a son with this woman, a fact that had the power to punch him in the solar plexus and leave him gasping for breath every time he thought of it.
A son she’d kept secret from him. The electric current zapping through him as he pressed against her was most certainly rage, nothing more.
“You can’t be serious,” she finally squeaked out. Her green eyes were huge as she blinked at him in disbelief. The platinum color of her hair made her almost ethereal. Surely, this is what had attracted him to her in the first place. That and the fact she’d been blissfully unaware of his identity. The experience was so novel that he’d quite possibly been more attracted to her than he would have otherwise been. She’d treated him like an ordinary person and he’d found it refreshing.
“I am indeed serious, Liliana.” He’d gotten his answer in the moments before he’d left his quarters to attend the State dinner. His investigators worked remarkably fast, and what they’d turned up was evidence he could not ignore. She’d given birth almost nine months to the day from the night he’d made love to her. She could have found another lover right away, true, but the child’s resemblance to him was too strong to discount. He would of course take the official step of verifying the child’s parentage, but it was merely a formality at this point.
When he considered how he’d missed the first seventeen months of his boy’s life, how this woman had kept his son from him, he wanted to shake her and demand to know how she could do such a thing. He let her go before the urge overwhelmed him and took a step away.
He would marry her because his personal code of honor would permit nothing less. It was his duty. But he didn’t have to like it. Or her.
She spun around to face him. “B-but I’m not a princess, I don’t know how to be a prin—”
“You will learn,” he said harshly. She wasn’t the ideal bride for him, but she could be trained. She was attractive enough, and she’d already proven she had the moxie required to stand up beneath the pressure. When she was coiffed and dressed appropriately, she would no longer appear so common. She was not as beautiful as Antonella, but she was quite lovely in a natural way. Antonella didn’t affect him one way or the other. He could take or leave the Monteverdian princess.
But Lily—
Nico crossed to the bar and poured another cognac. This time he downed the liquid himself, welcomed the burn of fine Montebiancan brandy. Per Dio, it’d been a hell of a night thus far. And he wasn’t finished fighting with himself.
Part of him, a mad and primal part of him, was so completely aware of the woman across the room that he wanted to haul her to his bed and strip her slowly before burying himself inside her for the rest of the night.
Madness. Sheer madness. The urge filled him with both hunger and rage, and he worked to force it down deep and put a lid on it.
In the two months since Gaetano had died, he’d mostly ignored the sensual side of his nature as he’d worked to further Montebiancan interests and be the kind of heir to the throne that his people deserved. He was sorely regretting the lack at the moment. It made Lily Morgan seem far more irresistible to him than she should be.
“Surely we can work this out another way,” she said, her voice small and hesitant. “You can have visitation and—”
“Visitation,” he exclaimed, slicing her words off before she could finish. He shrugged out of the sash and tossed it aside, then worked the buttons of his uniform jacket with one hand, throwing it open with an angry gesture to let the air from the terrace door he’d left ajar cool his body. This night had thrown him so far out of balance that he half wondered if he would ever recover his equilibrium. “You are quite lucky this is no longer the Middle Ages, Liliana. As it is, you are getting far more from me than you deserve.”
If he thought she would be chastened by his words, he was in for a surprise. She lit up like a firecracker. Dio, she was lovely. And she’d just cost him five million dollars, a trade treaty with a neighboring kingdom, and every last shred of credibility he’d built since becoming the Crown Prince. Being illegitimate, and having the playboy reputation he’d had before his brother’s death, he’d had to work doubly hard to prove himself.
Now, all his effort lay in tatters around him. The thought fueled the anger roiling in his gut.
“More than I deserve?” she said, her voice not small any longer but large and strong. “How dare you! I’ve been on my own for these two years, enduring what you could not begin to imagine in your ivory tower, taking care of a baby and—”
“Silence!” There was no way on this earth he would listen to her berate him for what had been essentially her decision to keep him in the dark about their child. She would pay for what she’d done. He was far too angry, far too close to losing the last shred of his control. “If you are aware of what is good for you, cara, you will not speak of this any further tonight.”
She opened her mouth, and he slapped the crystal on the table and moved toward her. When she scurried backward, her eyes widening, he checked his progress. He was on the edge of emotions he’d never felt before, torn between wanting to protect and destroy, and it made him reckless.
He snatched up the phone and pressed the button that would summon his housekeeper. When he put it down, Lily was chewing her lip, arms folded beneath her breasts as if to protect herself. Or to keep warm. The night was probably cooler than she was accustomed to in her native Louisiana. A tremor passed over her, confirming his observation. Beneath her shirt, her nipples peaked, small and tight, and goose bumps rose on her skin.
Nico swallowed, remembering how perfect her breasts had been when he’d first bared them to his sight. How responsive she’d been as she’d moaned and clutched his shoulders when he kissed the tight little points.
Dio, this was insane.
Nico shook the memories away and peeled off his jacket. “You are cold,” he said as he closed the distance between them. “Take this, cara.”
He placed the jacket on her shoulders and she clutched the material around her, thanking him softly. He turned his back on her and moved away.
He heard the intake of her breath, braced himself for what she might say next—but there was only silence.
