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.’
How had he missed such an important event? The people he had employed to watch what was happening in Mecjoria should have been aware of it. They should have investigated and reported back to him.
‘It’s been kept very quiet—at the moment my father is officially “resting” to recover from illness.’
‘When the reality is?’
‘That he’s under arrest.’
Her voice caught on the word, a soft little hiccup that did disturbing things to the tension at his groin, tightening it a notch or two uncomfortably.
‘And is now in the state prison.’
That was the last thing he’d expected and it shocked some of the desire from him, making his head swim slightly at the rush of blood from one part of his body to his head.
‘On what charge?’ he demanded sharply.
‘No charge.’ She shook her head, sending her dark hair flying. ‘Not as yet—that—that all depends on how things work out.’
‘So what the hell did he do wrong?’ Gregor had always seemed such a canny player. Someone who knew how best to feather his own nest. So had he got too greedy, made some mistake?
‘He—chose the wrong side in the recent inheritance battle. For the throne.’
So that was what was behind this. Alexei might never want to set foot in Mecjoria ever again, but he couldn’t be unaware—no one could be unaware—of the struggle that had gone on over the inheritance of the throne once old King Leopold had died. First Leopold’s son Marcus had inherited, but only briefly. A savage heart attack had killed him barely months into his reign. Because he had died childless, his nephew Felix should have inherited the crown, but his wild way of life had been his undoing, so that he had died in a high-speed car crash before he had even ascended to the throne. Now there were several factions warring over just who was the legal heir to follow Felix.
‘And then when Felix died... My father is currently seen as an enemy—as a threat to the throne.’
She wasn’t telling the full truth, Alexei realised. There was something she was holding back, he was sure of it. Something that clouded those amazing eyes, tightened the muscles around her delicate jawline, pulling the pretty mouth tight, though there was no mistaking the quiver of those softly sensual lips.
Lips that he wished to hell he could taste, feel that trembling softness under his own mouth, plunder the moist interior...
‘It will all work out in the end.’
Once again his own burning inner feelings made the words sound abrupt, dismissive, and he saw her blink slowly, withdrawing from him. Her head came up, that smooth chin lifting in defiance as she met his stare face-on.
‘You can promise that, can you?’ Ria asked, her tone appallingly cynical.
And where her unexpected weakness hadn’t beaten him now, shockingly, her boldness did. There was a new spark in her eyes, fresh colour in her cheeks. She was once more the proud Grand Duchess Honoria and not the strangely defeated girl who had reached out to something he had thought was long dead inside him. This Ria was a challenge; a challenge he welcomed. The sound of his blood was like a roar inside his head, the heated race of his pulse burning along every vein. He had never wanted a woman so much as he wanted her now, and the need was like an ache in every nerve.
‘How would you know? You were the one who turned your back on Mecjoria—haven’t even been back once in ten years.’
‘Not turned my back,’ Alexei growled. ‘We weren’t given a chance to stay. In fact it was made plain that we were not wanted.’
And who had been behind that? Her father—the very same man who was now, according to her story, locked in a prison cell. Did she expect him to feel sorry for him? To give a damn what might happen to the monster who hadn’t even waited to allow him and his mother time to mourn their loss, or even to attend the state funeral, before he had had them escorted to the airport and put on the first plane out of the country?
First making sure that every penny of his father’s fortune, every jewel, every tiny personal inheritance, had been taken from them, leaving them with little but the clothes they stood up in, not even the most basic allowance to see them into their new life in exile. Worst of all, Gregor had taken their name from them. The name his mother had been entitled to, and with it her honour, the legality of her marriage into the royal house of Mecjoria. He must have done it deliberately, hiding away the document that showed the old king’s permission. The document that Ria had been commissioned to bring here so unexpectedly—because it now suited her father. Was it any wonder that he loathed the man—that he would do anything to bring him down?
But it seemed that Gregor had managed that all on his own.
‘And I don’t have to be in the country to know what is going on.’
‘The papers don’t report everything. And certainly not always accurately.’
Something new had clouded those clear eyes and turned her expression into an intriguing mixture of defiance and uncertainty. There was just the tiniest sheen of moisture under one eye, where a trace of an unexpected tear had escaped the determined control she had been trying to impose on it and slipped out on to her lashes.
Unable to resist the impulse, he reached out and touched her face, letting his fingers rest lightly on the fine skin along the high, slanting cheekbone, wiping away that touch of moisture. The warmth and softness of the contact made his nerves burn, sending stinging arrows of response down into his body. He wanted so much more and yet he wanted to keep things just as they were—for now. It was a struggle not to do more, not to curve his hand around her cheek, cup that defiant little chin against his palm, lift her face towards his so that he could capture her mouth...