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‘No,’ he said, hard and rough. ‘No. I will not listen to a word you say. Why should I when you and yours turned your back on my mother—on me—and left us to exile and disgrace? My mother died in that disgrace. It’s not as if anything you have to say is a matter of life or death.’
‘Oh, but …’
It could be … The words died on her tongue, burned away in the flare of fury he turned on her, seeming to scorch her skin so painfully.
This was not how she had planned it, but it was obvious that he wasn’t prepared to let her lead up to things with a carefully prepared conversation. Hastily she grabbed at her handbag, snapping it open with hands made clumsy by nerves.
‘This is for you …’ she managed, holding out the sheet of paper she had folded so carefully at the start of her journey. The document she had checked was still there at least once every few minutes on her way here.
His eyes dropped to what she held, expression freezing into marble stillness as he took in the crest at the head of the sheet of paper, the seal that marked it out for the important document it was.
‘You know that your mother needed proof of the legality of her marriage,’ she tried and got the briefest, most curt nod possible as his only response, his gaze still fixed on the document she held out.
It was like talking to a statue, he was so stiff, so unmoving, and she found that her tongue was stumbling over itself as she tried to get the words out. If only someone else could have been given this vital duty to carry out. But she had volunteered herself in spite of the fact that the ministers had viewed her with suspicion. A suspicion that was natural, after the way her father had behaved. But they didn’t know the half of it. She had only just discovered the truth for herself and hadn’t dared to reveal any of it to anyone else. Luckily, the ministers had been convinced that she was the most likely to be successful. Alexei would listen to her, they had said. And besides, with success meaning so much to her personally, to her family, she would be the strongest advocate at this time.
It was a strong irony that all the discipline, the training her father had imposed on her for his own ends, was now to be put to use to try to thwart those ends if she possibly could.
‘And for that she needed evidence of the fact that the old king had given his permission for your father—as a member of the royal family—to marry all those years ago, when they first met.’
Why was she repeating all this? He knew every detail as much as she did. After all, it had been his life that had been blasted apart by the scandal that had resulted when it had seemed that his parents’ marriage had been declared illegal. Alexei’s father and mother had been separated, with him living with his mother in England until he was sixteen, and the fact that her husband was ill—dying of cancer—had brought his mother to Mecjoria in hope of a reconciliation. They hadn’t had long and, during what time they had had, Alexei had found the old-fashioned and snobbish aristocracy difficult to deal with, particularly when they had regarded him and his mother as nothing more than commoners who didn’t belong at court. His rebellious behaviour had created disapproval, brought him under the disapproving gaze of so many. And too soon, with his father dead, there had been no one to support his mother, or her son, when court conspiracy—a conspiracy Ria had just discovered to her horror of which her father had been an important part—had had her expelled, exiled from the country, taking her son with her.
Then there was her own part in all of it—her own guilty conscience, Ria acknowledged. That was an important part of why she had volunteered to come here today, to bring the news of the discovery of the document … and the rest.
‘This is the evidence.’
At last he moved, reached out a hand and took the paper from her. But to her shock he simply glanced swiftly over the text then tossed it aside, dropping it on to his desk without a second glance.
‘So?’
The single word seemed to strip all the moisture from her mouth, making her voice cracked and raw as she tried to answer him.
‘Don’t you see …?’ Silly question. Of course he saw, he just wasn’t reacting at all as she had expected, as she had been led to believe he would inevitably react. ‘This is what you needed back then, this changes everything. It means that your parents were legally married even in Mecjoria. It makes you legitimate.’
‘And that makes me fit to have you come and visit me? Speak to me after all these years?’
The bitterness in his tone made her flinch. Even more so because she knew she deserved it. She’d flung that illegitimacy—that supposed illegitimacy—at him when he had asked for her help. She hadn’t known the truth then, but she knew now that she’d done it partly out of hurt and anger too. Hurt and anger that he had turned away from her to become involved in a romantic entanglement with another girl.
A woman, Ria. She could hear his voice through the years. She’s a woman.
And the implication was that she was still a child. Hurt and feeling rejected, she had been the perfect target for her father’s story—what she knew now were her father’s lies.
‘It’s not that …’ Struggling with her memories, she had to force the words out. ‘It’s what’s right.’
She knew how much he’d loathed the label ‘bastard’. But more so how he’d hated the way that his mother had been treated because her marriage hadn’t been considered legal. So much so that Ria had believed—hoped—that the news she had brought would change everything. She couldn’t have been more wrong.
‘Right?’ he questioned cynically. ‘From where I stand it’s too little too late. The truth can’t help my mother now. And personally I couldn’t give a damn what they think of me in Mecjoria any more. But thank you for bringing it to me.’
His tone took the words to a meaning at the far opposite of genuine thankfulness.
There was much more to it than this. The proof of his legitimacy came with so many repercussions, but she had never expected this reaction. Or, rather, this lack of reaction.
‘I’m sorry for the way I behaved …’ she began, trying a different tack. One that earned her nothing but a cold stare.
‘It was ten years ago.’ He shrugged powerful shoulders in dismissal of her stumbling apology. ‘A lot of water has passed under a lot of bridges since then. And none of it matters any more. I have made my own life and I want nothing more to do with a country that thought my mother and I were not good enough to live there.’
‘But …’
There were so many details, so many facts, buzzing inside Ria’s head but she didn’t dare to let any of them out. Not yet. There was too much riding on them and this man was not prepared to listen to a word she said. If she put one foot wrong he would reject her—and her mission—completely. And she would never get a second chance.
‘So now I’d appreciate it if you’d leave. Or I will call security and have you thrown out, and to hell with the paparazzi or the gossip columnists. In fact, perhaps it would be better that way. They could have a field day with what I could tell them.’
Was it a real or an empty threat? And did she dare take the risk of finding out? Not with things the way they were back home, with the country in turmoil, hopes for security and peace depending on her. On a personal level, she feared her mother would break down completely if anything more happened, and she would be back under her father’s control herself if she failed. One whiff of scandal in the papers could be so terribly damaging that she shivered just to think of it. The only way she could achieve everything she’d set out to do was to get Alexei on her side—but that was beginning to look increasingly impossible.
‘Honoria,’ Alexei said dangerously and she didn’t need the warning in his tone to have her looking nervously towards the door he still held wide open. The simple fact that he had used her full name was enough on its own. ‘Duchess,’ he added with a coldly mocking bow.
But she couldn’t make her feet move. She couldn’t leave. Not with so much unsaid.
CHAPTER TWO
It’s not as if it’s a matter of life or death, Alexei had declared, the scorn in his voice lashing at her cruelly. But it would be if the situation in Mecjoria wasn’t resolved soon; if Ivan took over. The late King Felix might have been petty and mean but he was as nothing when compared to the tyrant who might inherit the throne from him. With a violent effort, Ria controlled the shiver of reaction that threatened her composure.
She hadn’t seen Alexei for ten years, but she had had close contact with his distant cousin Ivan in that time. And hadn’t enjoyed a moment of it. She’d watched Ivan grow from the sort of small boy who pulled wings off butterflies and kicked cats into a man whose volatile, mean-minded temper was usually only barely under control. He was aggressive, greedy, dangerous for the country—and now, she had learned to her horror, a danger to her personally as a result of her father’s machinations. And the only man between them and that possibility was Alexei.
But she knew how much she was asking of him. Especially now, when she knew how he still felt about Mecjoria.
‘Please listen!’
But his face was armoured against her, his eyes hooded, and she felt that every look she turned on him, every word she spoke, simply bounced off his thick skin like a pebble off an elephant’s hide.
‘Please?’ he echoed sardonically, his mouth twisting on the word as he turned it into a cruelly derisory echoing of her tone. ‘I didn’t even realise that you knew that word. Please what, Sweetheart?’
‘You don’t want to know.’
Bleak honesty made her admit it. She could read it in his face, in the cruel opacity of those coal-black eyes. There wasn’t the faintest sign of softening in his expression or any of the lines around his nose and mouth. How could he take a gentle word like ‘sweetheart’ and turn it into something hateful and vile with just his tone?
‘Oh, but I do,’ Alexei drawled, folding his arms across his broad chest and lounging back against the wall, one foot hooked round the base of the door so as to keep it open and so making it plain that he was still waiting—expecting her to leave. ‘I’d love to know just what you’ve come looking for.’
‘Really?’
Unexpected hope kicked hard in her heart. Had she got this all wrong, read him completely the wrong way round?
‘Really,’ he echoed sardonically. ‘It’s fascinating to see the tables turned. Remember how I once asked you for just one thing?’
He’d asked her to help him, and his mother. Asked her to talk to her father, plead with him to at least let them have something to live on, some part of his father’s vast fortune that the state had confiscated, leaving Alexei and his mother penniless as well as homeless. And not knowing the truth, not understanding the machinations of the plotters, or how sick his mother actually was, she had seen him as a threat and sided with her father.
‘I made a mistake …’ she managed. She’d known that her father was ruthless, ambitious, but she had never really believed that he would lie through his teeth, that he would manipulate an innocent woman and her son.
For the good of the country, Honoria, he had said. And, seeing the outrage Alexei’s wayward behaviour had created, she had believed him. Because she had trusted her father. Trusted him and believed in the values of upright behaviour, of loyalty to the crown that he’d insisted on. So she’d believed him when he’d told her how the scandal of Alexei’s mother’s ‘affair’ with one of the younger royal sons was creating problems of state. It was only now, years later, that she’d discovered how much further his deception had gone, and how it had involved her.
‘What is it, darling?’ Alexei taunted. ‘Not enjoying this?’
She saw the gleam of cruel amusement in his eyes, the fiendish smile curling the corners of the beautiful mouth. Each of them spoke of cold contempt, but together they spelled a callous triumph at the thought of getting her exactly where he wanted her. She knew now that this man would delight in rejecting anything she said, if only to have his revenge on the family that he saw as the ringleaders of his downfall. And who could blame him?
But would he do the same for his country?
‘It’s no fun having to beg, is it? No fun having to crawl to someone you’d much rather die than even talk to.’
Once more that searing gaze raked over her from the top of her uncharacteristically controlled hair down to the neat, highly polished black shoes. It was a look that took her back ten years, forced her to remember how coldly he had regarded her before he had walked away and out of her life. For good, she had thought then.
‘And I should know, angel—I’ve been there, remember? I’ve been exactly where you are now—begged, pleaded—and walked away with nothing.’
He might look indolently relaxed and at his ease as he lounged back against the wall, still with those strong arms crossed over the width of his chest, but in reality his position was the taut, expectant posture of a wily, knowing hunter, a predator that was poised, watching and waiting. He only needed his prey—her—to make one move and then he would pounce, hard and fast.
But still she had to try.
‘You are wanted back in Mecjoria,’ she blurted out in an uneven rush.
She could tell his response even before he opened his mouth. The way that long straight spine stiffened, the tightening of the beautiful lips, the way a muscle in his jaw jerked just once.
‘You couldn’t have said anything less likely to make me want to know more,’ he drawled, dark and slow. ‘But you could try to persuade me …’
She could try, but it would have no effect, his tone, his stony expression told her. And she didn’t like the thought of just what sort of ‘persuasion’ could be in his mind. She wasn’t prepared to give him that satisfaction.
Calling on every ounce of strength she possessed, stiffening her back, straightening her shoulders, she managed to lift her head high, force her green eyes to meet those icy black ones head-on.
‘No thank you,’ she managed, her tone pure ice.
Her father would have been proud of her for this at least. She was the Grand Duchess Honoria Maria at her very best. The only daughter of the Chancellor, faced by a troublesome member of the public. The trouble was that after all she had learned about her father’s schemes, the way that he had seen her as a way to further his own power, she didn’t want to be that woman any more. She had actually hoped that by coming here today she could free herself from the toxic inheritance that came with that title.
‘You might get off on that sort of thing, but it certainly does nothing for me.’
If she had hoped that he would look at least a little crestfallen, a touch deflated, then she was doomed to disappointment. There might have been a tiny acknowledgement of her response in his eyes, a gleam that could have been a touch of admiration—or a hint of dark satisfaction from a man who had known all along just how she would respond.
She’d dug herself a hole without him needing to push her into it. But, for now, was discretion the better part of valour? She could let Alexei think that he had won this round at least but it was only one battle, not the whole war. There was too much at stake for that.
‘Thank you for your time.’
She couldn’t so much as turn a glance in his direction, even though she caught another wave of that citrus scent as he came closer, with the undertones of clean male skin that almost destroyed her hard-won courage. But even as she fought with her reactions he fired another comment at her. One that tightened a slackening resolve, and reminded her just how much the boy she had once known had changed.
‘I wish that I could say it had been a pleasure,’ he drawled cynically. ‘But we both know that that would be a lie.’
‘We certainly do,’ Ria managed from between lips that felt as if they had turned to wood, they were so stiff and tight.
‘So now you’ll leave. Give my regards to your father,’ Alexei tossed after her.
He couldn’t have said anything that was more guaranteed to force her to stay. A battle, not the war, she reminded herself. She wasn’t going to let this be the last of it. She couldn’t.
He was going to let her go, Alexei told himself. In fact he would be glad to do so even if the thundering response that she had so unexpectedly woken in his body demanded otherwise. He wanted her to walk away, to take with her the remembrance of the family he had hoped to find, a life he had once tried to live, a girl he had once cared for.
‘Lexei … Please …’
The echo of her voice, soft and shaken—or so he would have sworn—swirled in his thoughts in spite of his determination to clamp down on the memory, to refuse to let it take root there. Violently he shook his head to try and drive away the sound but it seemed to cling like dark smoke around his thoughts, bringing with it too many memories that he had thought he’d driven far away.
At first she had knocked him mentally off-balance with the news she had brought. The news he had been waiting to hear for so long—half a lifetime, it seemed. The document she had held out to him now lay on his desk, giving him the legitimacy, the position in Mecjoria he had wanted—that he had thought he wanted—but he didn’t even spare it a second glance. It was too late. Far, far too late. His mother, to whom this had mattered so much, was dead, and he no longer gave a damn.
But something tugging at the back of his thoughts, an itch of something uncomfortable and unexpected, told him that that wasn’t the real truth. There was more to this than just the delivery of that document.
‘Not so much of Grand Duchess any more,’ Ria had said to him unexpectedly. ‘Not so much of a duchess of any sort.’
And that was when it struck him. There was something missing. Someone missing. Someone he should have noticed was not there from the first moment in the room but he had been so knocked off-balance that he hadn’t registered anything beyond the fact that Ria was there in his office, waiting for him.
Where was the dark-suited bodyguard? The man who had the knack of blending into the background when necessary but who was alert and ready to move forward at any moment if their patron appeared to be in any difficulty?
There was no one with her now. There had been no one when he had arrived in this room to find her waiting for him. And there should have been.
What the hell was going on?
He couldn’t be unaware of the present political situation in Mecjoria. There had been so many reports of marches on the streets, of protest meetings in the square of the capital. Ria’s father, the Grand Duke Escalona, High Chancellor of the country, had been seen making impassioned speeches, ardent broadcasts, calling for calm—ordering the people to stay indoors, keep off the streets. But that had been before first the King and then the new heir to the throne had died so unexpectedly. Before the whole question of the succession had come under scrutiny with meetings and conferences and legal debates to call into question just what would happen next. He had paid it as little attention as it deserved in his own mind, but it had been impossible to ignore some of the headlines—like the ones that declared the country was on the brink of revolution.
It was his father’s country after all. The place he should have called his home if he hadn’t been forced out before he came to settle in any way. Without ever having a chance to get to know the father who had been missing from his life.
‘Lexei … Please …’
He would have been all right if she hadn’t used that name. If she hadn’t—deliberately he was sure—turned on him the once warm, affectionate name she had used back in the gentler, more innocent days when he had thought that they were friends. And so whirled him back into memories of a past he’d wanted to forget.
‘All right, I’m intrigued.’ And that was nothing less than the truth. ‘You clearly have something more to say. So—you have ten minutes. Ten minutes in which to tell me the truth about why you’re here. What had you appearing in my office unannounced, declaring you were no longer a grand duchess. Is that the truth?’
It seemed it had to be—or at least that something in what he had said had really got to her. She had reacted to his words as if she had been stung violently. Her head had gone back, her green eyes widening in reaction at something. Her soft rose-tinted mouth had opened slightly on a gasp of shock.
A shock that ricocheted through his own frame as a hard kick of some totally primitive sexual hunger hit home low down in his body. Those widened eyes looked stunning and dark against the translucent delicacy of her skin, and that mouth was pure temptation in its half-open state.
His little friend Ria had grown up into a beautiful woman and that unthinkingly primitive reaction to the fact jolted him out of any hope of seeing her just as the girl she had once been. Suddenly he was unable to look at her in any way other than as a man looks at a woman he desires. His own mouth hungered to take those softly parted lips, to taste her, feel her yield to him, surrendering, opening … His heart thudded hard and deep in his chest, making him need to catch his breath as his body tightened in pagan hunger.
‘You don’t believe me?’ she questioned and the uncharacteristic hesitation on the word twisted something deep inside him, something he no longer thought existed. Something that it seemed that only this woman could drag up from deep inside him. A woman who had once been the only friend he thought he had and who now had been reincarnated as a woman who heated his blood and turned him on more than he could recall anyone doing in the past months—the past years.
It was like coming awake again after being dead to his senses for years—and it hurt.
‘It’s not that I don’t believe you.’
The fight he was having to control the sensual impulses of his body showed in his voice and he saw the worried, apprehensive look she shot him sideways from under the long, lush lashes. She clearly didn’t know which way to take him, a thought that sent a heated rush of satisfaction through his blood. He wanted her off-balance, on edge. That way she might let slip more than her carefully cultivated, court training would allow her.
‘Merely that I see no reason why you or any member of your family would renounce the royal title that has meant so much to you.’
‘We didn’t renounce it. It was renounced for us.’
A frown snapped Alexei’s black brows together sharply as he focussed even more intently on her face, trying to read what was there.
‘And just what does that mean? I’ve heard nothing of this.’
