‘I suppose I did,’ she said carefully, resolutely ignoring the trace of mockery in his voice. ‘Doesn’t every child put their faith in the adults who form their view of the world?’
His laugh was unexpectedly bitter and the lines around his mouth became deep and tense. ‘Not necessarily. Not if they’ve discovered such an exercise to be futile.’
‘Is that what happened to you?’
‘I don’t dwell on the past, Zabrina. It’s pointless.’
She wanted to argue that the past informed the present and to tell him that she needed to get to know him better, but something told her now was not the time and her immediate concerns were of a far more practical nature. Soon they would arrive at the palace and, if her own father’s exalted position was anything to go by, the King would quickly be surrounded and swept away by a cohort of aides and equerries. And she would be on her own. Alone in a place where she knew absolutely no one.
Except him.
She moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue. ‘So what happens when we reach the palace? What’s the set-up there?’
He shrugged. ‘The set-up will be exactly as was always planned. You will have your own staff. A private secretary with their own office, plus various ladies-in-waiting who will provide you with anything you need. You will obviously wish to explore as much of Petrogoria as is possible in the run-up to the marriage and to acquaint yourself with your new country and its people. Some of these visits we will do together, some you will perform solo and, once we are married, we will tour nearby Greece.’
She touched one of the waxy blooms of the lily-of-the-valley bouquet she had been presented with on embarkation and fixed her gaze on his. ‘I was told that it would be possible for my horse to be brought here. And before you start telling me that you have the finest stable of horses in the world—it’s not the same as having a mount you’ve owned ever since he was a young foal.’
‘Of course you can have your horse here. I will set the process in motion,’ he said, his eyes narrowing, as if he had picked up some of her apprehension. ‘The aim is to make you feel at home, Zabrina, not alienate you, and all efforts have been made to do this. Your suite of rooms is in the southern end of the palace, where the outlook is particularly fine. I am sure you’ve heard about the fabled gardens here, which have inspired some of the nation’s finest poets and—’
‘Of course I have,’ she interjected quickly, because he was the last person she could imagine enjoying poetry and just the thought of that was more than a little distracting. ‘But what about you?’
‘Perhaps you could be a little more specific, Princess.’ His grey eyes gleamed with yet more mockery. ‘What about me?’
‘Is your...?’ A lump seemed to have inconveniently lodged itself in her throat, making her next words come out as a thready whisper. ‘Is your own section of the palace nearby?’
‘Why, is that what you were hoping for?’
‘Of course not,’ she said crossly, but her burning cheeks ran the risk of making her words seem like a sham.
‘I have decided that there will be no resumption of intimacy until we take our vows, as tradition demands. So I’m afraid you will just have to survive on the memory of how good it can be, Princess.’
‘Does anyone know?’ she questioned, in a low voice.
‘You mean, are my staff aware that we’ve already had sex?’
‘Keep your voice down!’ she hissed. ‘How...how are you going to explain the fact that you were even on my train when it arrived this morning, when I was supposed to meet you for the first time at the station? I could tell the crowds were surprised when they saw you jumping off in front of me and then lifting me down.’ She raised her hand to wave to the crowds, her serene smile belying the rapid thunder of her heart. ‘A completely over-the-top response, in my opinion.’
Roman expelled a reluctant sigh as the sunlight splashed pale gold streaks over her dark hair, because the reworking of the original plan had given him cause for concern. He had considered having the train make an unscheduled stop just outside the capital, and for one of his grooms to have a horse saddled and ready for him to ride to ‘meet’ the Princess for the first time. But the thought of any more subterfuge had been wearisome and he couldn’t guarantee how Zabrina would react to such a suggestion—negatively, he suspected. And besides, he was the King. If he occasionally broke the rules, so what?
‘I’ve already spoken to my aides and given them a story.’
‘A story?’
‘Don’t look so shocked, Princess. Isn’t that what everyone does?’ He saw an old woman lay her hand across her heart as he passed by and he gave a courteous nod of acknowledgement. ‘Reality is just an interpretation of facts,’ he continued smoothly. ‘And no two people ever see things the same way. I told them I was determined to protect my future bride and the most effective way of ensuring that was to guard her myself.’
‘Right. Because the real facts—the true facts—that you were secretly doing a character assassination of me, wouldn’t play out very sympathetically for you, would they, Roman?’
‘Possibly not,’ he mused. A flurry of rose petals drifted into the car and as one of them lodged itself beneath a pearl clip which gleamed in her hair, Roman had the strongest desire to smooth it away with his finger. But he didn’t. He didn’t trust himself to touch her again. At least, not yet. And certainly not in public, where his every action would be forensically scrutinised. What if some clever camera lens managed to capture his gnawing frustration at the way control seemed to be slipping away from him whenever he was around her?
Because none of this was turning out as he’d expected. He had thought, afte
r deciding to go ahead with the marriage, that they might spend the remainder of the night on the train, blissfully exploring each other’s bodies. There had certainly been plenty of sexual tension fizzing between them, after she’d given him all the reasons why they shouldn’t call off the union. In a way, he had almost admired her dogged determination to get her own way. It had certainly turned him on. And while he was aware that sexual propriety would have to be observed once they reached the palace and they wouldn’t be intimate again until their wedding night—surely that was even more reason to have capitalised on the strange circumstances which had led to that first delicious encounter. Silviana the servant could have been dismissed for the night and he could have locked the carriage door and let bliss take over.
But it had seemed that Zabrina had other ideas.
In fact, he had conducted the remainder of the journey standing to attention in the rattling corridor of the train, right outside her salon.
‘If you’re so determined to pretend to be a bodyguard, then maybe you’d better start acting like one!’ she had hissed, before slamming the door in his face—something which had never happened to him, not in all his thirty-three years.