Of course, he didn’t want to keep her when she was so ill-qualified for the position of a royal wife. Obviously, he would want a bride with all the accomplishments that he himself took for granted. Like with like worked best even in nature. It didn’t mean that she was something lesser than the male she had married, she reasoned painfully, it only meant that they were too different.
‘Zac’s around here somewhere but I keep on missing him,’ Vitale breathed impatiently, a lean bronzed hand settling to her slender spine as he walked out to the grand foyer where guests stood in clusters served by another army of waiters bearing drinks trays.
An older man intercepted them and urged Vitale to introduce him to his fiancée. ‘Jazz.’
‘Short for?’
‘Jazmine,’ she slotted in with a smile, because it was the first time she had been asked. ‘My father registered my birth and he spelt it with a z rather than an s, which is how I became Jazz.’
‘And a very good friend in the media told me that you’ve known each other since you were children,’ the older man filled in with amusement. ‘That’s one in the eye for your mother,’ he pronounced with satisfaction before passing on.
‘Who was that?’
‘My mother’s younger half-brother, Prince Eduardo.’
‘Your uncle?’ Jazz repeated in surprise.
‘My mother wouldn’t even let him live here after she was crowned. She has always behaved as though she were an only child refusing to share the limelight...’
Jazz’s attention had strayed to the male exiting from a room further down the hall, smoothing down his jacket, running careless fingers through his long black hair, his light eyes bright beneath the lights. ‘Is that Zac?’ she asked abruptly, recognising the resemblance.
Two giggling women, one blonde, one brunette in rather creased ball gowns emerged from the same room only one telling step in the man’s wake.
‘Sì...that’s Zac,’ Vitale confirmed with audible distaste. ‘I wonder what he did with his partner while he was in there.’
A moment later, Zac answered that question for himself. ‘Well, obviously you win. Jazz is amazing and I came alone,’ he spelt out with a surprisingly charismatic grin of acknowledgement. ‘My car is already in transit.’
While the brothers chatted, Jazz wandered off. Her mother-in-law was talking to a bunch of people at the far end of the hall and Jazz tactfully avoided that area.
Vitale rejoined her by sliding his arm round her back and she smiled. ‘So, you won,’ she commented.
‘I set Zac up to fail. I feel a little guilty about doing that now,’ Vitale confided in an undertone. ‘But even so, this evening you have been a triumph of cool and control and I’m proud to be with you.’
Jazz gazed up at him in shock.
Vitale sighed. ‘It needed to be said and I’m sorry that it took my kid brother to say it first,’ he admitted.
‘Who were those women Zac was with?’
‘Willing ladies?’ Vitale suggested.
‘Don’t be so judgemental!’ Jazz urged. ‘Nothing may have happened between them and Zac.’
‘They’re both on my mother’s staff. I’m not in a charitable mood,’ he admitted wryly. ‘In any case, Zac is a player with the morals of an alley cat.’
Recognising that Vitale’s judgemental streak ran to both sexes, Jazz almost laughed. She wondered if he had ever resented his inability to behave the same way. Of course, he had, she decided, of course he must have envied his brothers’ freedom. Zac and Angel had freely chosen their lifestyles but birth had forced a rigid framework of dos and don’ts on Vitale and choice had had nothing to do with it.
‘Did you ever just want to walk away from being royal?’ Jazz asked him as he whirled her onto the dance floor for the opening dance beneath his mother’s freezing gimlet gaze. But the ballroom was so colourful that Jazz was entranced as more and more couples joined them on the floor, the ladies clad in every colour of the rainbow, their dresses swirling gracefully around them, the men elegant in black or white dinner jackets.
‘Frequently when I was a child, more often as an adult,’ Vitale confided, surprising her with that frankness. ‘But a sense of duty to our name must be stamped into my DNA. Although I consider the idea, I know I won’t actually do it.’
And it finally dawned on her that the unhappiness she had sensed in Vitale even as a child had been genuine and that acknowledgement saddened her. Shortly after midnight, soon after the Queen’s regal exit from the ball, Vitale accompanied her up to the door of their apartment and she knew he intended to go and tell the older woman that he was a married man.
‘If you’re going to confront your mother,’ she had argued all the way up the winding staircase. ‘I should come with you.’
‘There’s no reason for you to be subjected to hours of her ranting and raving. For a start, she will initially insist that my having married without her permission makes the ceremony illegal,’ Vitale retorted crisply. ‘I’m used to her hysterics and she won’t even listen until she calms down. Don’t wait up for me.’
Thinking about Vitale poised like a soldier, icily controlled in the face of his Queen’s wrath, made Jazz’s hands clench into angry fists of frustration. She had arrived in Lerovia with an open mind concerning Queen Sofia but that single scene in their bedroom had convinced her that Vitale’s mother was a despotic monster. And she cared, of course she cared, she reflected as she got ready for bed and finally climbed into that bed alone.
She loved Vitale. Oh, she hadn’t matched the word to the feelings before in an effort to protect herself from hurt, but the hurt would come whether she labelled her emotions or not. She loved the male who had lit her candles round her bath, who had held her close all night before they travelled to Lerovia. He was amazingly affectionate when he thought she was safely asleep, she conceded with tender amusement, but wary of demonstrating anything softer during the hours of daylight.
Angel had deemed his younger brother ‘emotionally stunted’, but he had been wrong in that assessment. Vitale bore all the hallmarks of someone damaged in childhood. He had taught himself to hide his emotions, had learned to suppress his pain and his anger to the extent that he barely knew what he felt any more. Yet he was working so hard at protecting her from his horrible mother, she thought fondly before she drifted off to sleep.
Breakfast was served to her in bed late the next morning and her phone already carried a text from Vitale, letting her know that he was attending a board meeting at the bank and would be out most of the day. She ate sparsely, awaiting the nausea that often took hold of her but evidently it was to be one of her good days and she could go for a shower and dress, feeling healthy and normal for once instead of simply pregnant.
Clad in an unpretentious white sundress, she went down the stone steps into the gardens to explore and enjoy the early summer sunshine. She was slightly unnerved to be closely followed by the housekeeper, Adelheid, and introduced to the very large plain-clothed man with her as her bodyguard. Striving to forget that she had company, Jazz went for a walk and then phoned her mum to catch up. She was sitting on a bench beside an ornamental stone fountain when a young woman approached her with a folded note on a silver salver.
‘It is an invitation to lunch from the Queen, Your Highness,’ the woman informed her with a bright smile.
Shock both at the form of address and the explanation of the note engulfed Jazz. Obviously, Vitale had spoken to his mother after the ball and the royal household were now aware that she was a wife rather than a fiancée. Even so, Jazz had expected the Queen to react with rage to the news that her son was married to his red-headed whore rather than a luncheon invite, and she was perplexed, lifting the note from the ludicrous salver and opening it while struggling to control her face.
Yes, she had also noted that the young woman delivering the note had been one of the women who had been in that room the night before with her brother-in-law, Zac. She concentrated, however, on the single s
heet of notepaper and its gracious copperplate written summons and gave her consent to lunching with Vitale’s mother even though she would much have preferred to say no. Vitale would probably want her to say no, but then Jazz was made of much tougher stuff than the man she had married seemed willing to appreciate. Sticks and stones would not break her bones, indeed they only made her stronger. In fact, if she could for once take a little heat off Vitale, Jazz was delighted to take the opportunity.
‘My dear,’ Queen Sofia purred, rising to greet Jazz as if she were a well-loved friend as soon as she entered the imposing dining room with a gleaming table that rejoiced in only two place settings set directly opposite each other. ‘Vitale shared your wonderful news with me.’