‘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.