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The Prodigal Prince's Seduction / The Heir's Scandalous Affair: The Prodigal Prince's Seduction
Jennifer Lewis
Olivia Gates
The Prodigal Prince’s Seduction Olivia GatesAs a rich man, Prince Durante D’Agostino often received incredible offers. Yet the woman attached to this one had come to bring the prince back to Castaldini to become its king. After one fiery night, Durante believed Gabrielle was meant to rule by his side. Until he discovered her real identity…The Heir’s Scandalous Affair Jennifer Lewis Young widow Samantha Hardcastle is looking for her late husband’s heir. All alone in New Orleans, Samantha succumbs to the sensual refuge offered by a gorgeous stranger. Who turns out to be the man she was seeking. He’ll take a DNA test – if Samantha agrees to spend another evening with him…
The Prodigal Prince’s Seduction by Olivia Gates
He shouldn’t have been so smug.
He should have known that she’d had more cards to play. And she’d played them. Played him. And how.
She was the woman he’d spent the most revitalising, enthralling time of his life with. The woman who’d made him forget exhaustion and every preconception about himself and what he could feel.
She whimpered at his sudden withdrawal. It had only been moments since their lips had met, before he’d learned her real name and plunged from the heights of delight to the depths of disillusion.
So what if she wasn’t the woman he’d thought her to be? It should change nothing. His body was reaching critical mass. And she was offering…everything. He should drag her inside, throw her to the ground and take it all. Then walk away.
The Heir’s Scandalous Affair by Jennifer Lewis
“I came to New Orleans to find my late husband’s son, his heir” Samantha explained. “His name is Louis Dulac.”
“I’m Louis DuLac,” said the handsome mystery man with whom she’d just shared a night of incredible passion. His features grew hard and he gazed at her through narrowed eyes.
Sam’s knees almost gave out. If he hadn’t been holding her wrist she might have plunged backwards down the stairs.
“But you can’t be.” The words fell from her lips, dazed and barely coherent. “It’s impossible.”
“Come in,” he said. This time, it was a command rather than an invitation. He still held a firm grip on her wrist.
She felt herself struggling for breath. He tugged her towards him. “You’re my late husband’s…oh no.” She tried to free herself.
He pulled her closer. “You’re not going anywhere.”
Available in May 2010
from Mills & Boon® Desire™
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The Prodigal Prince’s Seduction by Olivia Gates
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The Heir’s Scandalous Affair by Jennifer Lewis
The Prodigal Prince’s Seduction
by
Olivia Gates
The Heir’s Scandalous Affair
by
Jennifer Lewis
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
The Prodigal Prince’s Seduction
by
Olivia Gates
Dear Reader,
Being a romance author has got to be one of the best jobs there is. For in what other job can one experience the rush of falling in love over and over again?
And it happened again in the second instalment of THE CASTALDINI CROWN trilogy, where I fell in love with my hero, Prince Durante D’Agostino. Each hero I write is another fantastic specimen of manhood and humanity, but Prince Durante has characteristics that surprised even me as I wrote his story. Contrary to all the über alpha males I’ve written about, he was so open to the notion of falling in love, so wholehearted about it. He was like that massive source of romanticism and sensuality that had gone unplumbed until he laid eyes on Gabrielle Williamson and it all came pouring out.
I mean, who could resist a hero who wants to savour the torment of not touching the woman who has him on fire until he gets to know more of the “real” her, who serenades her, who actually offers the other cheek, and who eventually gives up everything to atone for the sin of not trusting her, for hurting her?
I was certainly not immune, and I hope no reader will be, either.
I hope Durante and Gabrielle’s story gives you as much pleasure as it gave me while writing it.
I would love to hear your thoughts at oliviagates@ oliviagates.com.
Also please visit me at www.oliviagates.com.
Thank you for reading.
Olivia Gates
Olivia Gates has always pursued creative passions—painting, singing and many handicrafts. She still does, but only one of her passions grew gratifying enough, consuming enough, to become an ongoing career: writing.
She is most fulfilled when she is creating worlds and conflicts for her characters, then exploring and untangling them bit by bit, sharing her protagonists’ every heart-wrenching heartache and hope, their every heart-pounding doubt and trial, until she leads them to an indisputably earned and gloriously satisfying happy ending.
When she’s not writing, she is a doctor, a wife to her own alpha male and a mother to one brilliant girl and one demanding angora cat. Visit Olivia at www.oliviagates.com.
To my husband. To my daughter.
Both of you, my one and only. More and more, I wouldn’t be doing all this without you. Thank you for being who you are.
One
“I want one hour with you.”
Prince Durante D’Agostino froze at the foyer’s threshold.
That voice. Coming out of nowhere. So low he shouldn’t have heard it over the live jazz music blaring its infectious energy from the ballroom where the charity function was in full swing.
He heard nothing but its softness. As if faders had been hit, boosting it, dousing every other sound. More. As if it had been generated inside his head, a caress of a thought, making all else recede from his awareness. An awareness that bristled with responses so tactile that every hair on his body rose as if he were caught in a field of static electricity.
He frowned. What was all this, over hearing a woman’s voice? Over yet another blatant invitation?
A scowl seized his face as he swung around to the offending entity. And everything receded farther. Disappeared. He felt as if his blood stopped in his arteries even as everything else hurtled through him. Heat, sensations. Urges.
Eyes. From the shadows behind the foyer’s door, they trans-fixed him. Pieces of heaven. Staring up at him from a face that was what the offspring of an angel and a siren must look like.
Then the impossible creature spoke again. “One hour. I’ll pay one hundred grand for it.”
His eyes dragged away from the clear skies of hers to the lips spilling that offer. Dimpled, dewy and flushed as if she’d been sucking on bloodred cherries. They were still again, slightly parted. But he could see them as they’d wrapped around each syllable of her spell, could imagine them nibbling and suckling their way down his body…
He shifted, stunned to feel himself hardening, zero to one hundred in two seconds.
Aroused? Here? From just a look and a few words?
He expanded his chest in an effort to draw in more oxygen, to drive blood to his head instead of his loins. He managed only to suck in her scent—clean, with a tinge of jasmine and a deluge of pheromones. Every cell in his body twitched, revved.
Then she stepped out of the shadows and he forgot any intentions or delusions of subduing his body.
This might not be happening anyway. He might still be in the back of his limo, dreaming this apparition as he dozed off on the way to the charity event he was sponsoring. Thirty-six sleepless hours must have taken their toll on his nervous system. It would explain her, the epitome of his every far-fetched fantasy. From hair the shade of fire he’d once seen in a painting and wondered if it truly existed in nature, a waterfall of silk his fingers itched to twist through, to a complexion of such clear olive that it offset the vividness of her hair and the lightness of her eyes, to features sculpted and aligned in such an unusual way that they screamed character and whispered sensuality, to curves and swells in the abundance and the distribution to answer his every specification.
But she was no figment of his overworked mind. She was real.
What was unreal was her effect on him. Women had been throwing themselves at him since he’d turned seventeen, and even then he hadn’t operated on hormones. Then had come this woman.
She’d aroused everything in him just by breathing those words, by being near. Now, by just looking at him, she had his imagination flooding with images and sounds and sensations and scents, of drenched silk sheets and hot velvet limbs, of cries rising in the dark along with the aromas of arousal and satisfaction.
Was this it? The overtures of the breakdown Eduardo and Jade claimed he was teetering on? Was this surreal reaction the first crack before a chasm tore his psyche wide open? Not that he cared. If this was a breakdown, maybe it was exactly what he needed.
“I have a check right here.” She fumbled inside her evening purse. “Make it out to the charity or cause of your choice.”
He watched her supple hands, with those neat, short, unadorned fingernails, found himself imagining grabbing them, sucking each finger until she was begging for his lips and teeth and tongue elsewhere…everywhere.
He took a step toward her, maybe not to translate fantasy into action, but to feel her—any part of her—against him, to confirm that she—and what she evoked in him—was real.
She stumbled back. He surged forward to stop her, only to become trapped in the swarm of people who’d materialized between them.
Maledizione. He hadn’t even heard them approach. Now there was nothing but the cacophony of their intrusion, the encroachment of their self-interest.
“Prince Durante! You’re finally here!”
“Prince Durante, this way.”
“You must come this way first, Prince Durante.”
“I have someone who’s dying to meet you.”
“Me, too, and you’ll definitely want to meet him first.”
He was suddenly sorry that he’d left his bodyguards outside. He fought the urge to signal them to disperse the throng who’d so rudely fractured the pristine intensity that had cocooned him with her. But they might rush to deal with the situation with inappropriate force. They’d been jumpy ever since Jeremiah Langley had stabbed him a month ago.
Apart from bellowing for everyone to get the hell away from him, he had no recourse but to let them sweep him along, watch her recede as she remained standing where she’d first intercepted him in that evening gown that could have been spun from the hues and radiance of her eyes. The last thing he saw of her before the ballroom doors closed was her arm falling to her side, the check held limply in her hand.
He buzzed his head bodyguard, muttered an order to keep track of her if she left. He couldn’t risk losing her.
Only then did he start playing the evening’s sponsor, burning to wrap everything up so he could do what he really wanted to do. The first thing in years that he couldn’t wait to do. Seek her out, give her whatever she wanted and experience that eagerness and exhilaration she’d inspired in him, something he hadn’t felt in…ever.
Gabrielle Williamson’s eyes clung to one thing among the ebbing wave of people. The man they’d swept along, the one who towered above them all.
So that was Prince Durante D’Agostino.
She’d thought she knew what he looked like from endless photos in newspapers and magazines, including her own publications. She’d known nothing. Every photo had downgraded him to the man who deserved every letter of his reputation as the world’s most notorious, eligible and panted-after royalty.
In reality he was a…a god.
And she’d approached him—okay, ambushed him more like—with her pathetic offer. A hundred grand felt ridiculous now. But what would an hour with a god rate?
The ballroom door closed, severing the mesmerism of those azure twin stars he had for eyes.
A tremor hit her. A second hit harder. Then a deluge broke out, until she was shaking like a rag in a storm.
What was wrong with her? She was the one who was supposed to surprise him into agreeing to give her that hour. To make a solid pitch before he asked questions. Especially about who she was. She’d wanted to eliminate—or at least postpone—the prejudice her name had already elicited from him. She’d wanted a fair hearing.
But seeing him in the flesh, even from the back, had almost blanked her mind. Then he’d turned, and everything had vanished.
She’d forgotten where she was, what she was supposed to say, could only stare at him. She’d moved only when the tractor beam of his will had forced her forward for his inspection. And boy, had he inspected. She’d felt…inspected down to her cellular level.
Then, those people had charged him, saved her from doing that rag-in-the-storm impression in his presence. They’d also taken him away before he’d said yes. And he’d been about to. Or she could have been imagining that, along with his surreal impact on her.
Imagining shimagining. She was a thirty-year-old divorcée who hadn’t had fantasies even as a young girl. Being the only child of parents whose marriage had sunk daily into the dark realities of bankruptcy and depression hadn’t been conducive to flights of fancy.
That was part of the convoluted journey that had brought her here today, on a mission to save her own company from bankruptcy, while repaying the man who’d supported her family during those desperate years. King Benedetto of Castaldini—Prince Durante’s father.
