‘Well, I’m going to tell you anyway,’ he continued, as if she weren’t smoothing sheer black silk over one creamy thigh and making his heart pound painfully in his chest. But more than the physical distraction of her beauty was the realisation that hewantedto tell her—and wasn’t that dangerous? Because things always went deeper with her than with anyone else, didn’t they? Somehow she had the ability to touch into a place which had always been out of bounds to anyone else. ‘When my mother was about eighteen, she was brought over to the US from Greece and introduced to Corso’s father, the late King, as a potential lover. They began a short affair in New York, for which she was paid—handsomely, I understand. Believe me, this was never a fairy-tale romance,’ he added grimly. ‘Apparently she had no idea he was married and certainly not that he was a royal, with the power to ghost her when she became pregnant with his child. Which is exactly what happened.’
‘Don’t you understand? I don’tcare!’ she said, hunting around for the other stocking.
But Xanthos carried on regardless, making sentences out of the bizarre facts which had been torturing him ever since he’d discovered them. Saying out loud the words he’d kept hidden away in a place of shame ever since Corso had blurted out the whole incredible story. ‘The money my mother had been paid quickly ran out,’ he continued roughly. ‘And her family back in Greece would have disowned her if she’d turned up pregnant out of wedlock, without even being able to name the father. So she met another man very rapidly and married him, convincing him that I washischild. I only discovered this when Corso came to New York to find me. It still feels pretty new and raw.’
She was shaking her head. ‘But you’re completely missing the point!’ she raged. ‘All the time you were having sex with me and supposedly being intimate with me—you were holding this back. Don’t you see how it makes me feel?’ she exploded, wriggling her soft cream dress over her curvy body. ‘As if the rest of you are all part of some exclusive, privileged circle and I’m on the outside and don’t count. It seems everybody knew about it except me.’
‘Not everybody,’ he contradicted. ‘Corso knows. Your sister knows. Why would I tell you about something when I still hadn’t come to terms with it myself?’
‘I don’t give a damn whether or not you’ve decided to embrace your precious royal roots. I can’t believe my sister kept your identity secret from me!’
‘But she didn’t know we were involved, did she?’ he pointed out.
‘Werebeing the operative word,’ she gritted out, before storming from the room.
He lay in that sex-rumpled bed, waiting to hear the slam of the door. But his assumption was wide of the mark because she returned almost immediately, wearing her coat, her face even more furious than before. Her eyes were two green splinters in her pinched face, her lips a tight line.
‘I can’t believe I’ve fallen into your arms again, or why I’ve just accepted whatever crumbs you were prepared to offer me. You couldn’t wait to try to turn me into a convenient mistress, could you, Xanthos? Waiting until I was in the shower before buying me expensive lingerie.’ Her mouth flattened in disgust. ‘It’s such a cliché!’
‘I wanted to buy you something pretty.’
‘I don’t need you to do that—I can buy my own lingerie!’ she protested fiercely, before sucking in an angry breath as if she’d suddenly thought of something else. ‘Is that the real reason why you seduced me, despite your obvious reservations about me? So you could ask me all those questions about Corso, and find out what life was really like in Monterosso? Maybe you needed a few insider facts about the place where some of your ancestors came from, before you decided whether or not to make your association with them public. Was I just a convenient provider of information, Xanthos—who you decided to soften up by being physical?’
‘You think I’d do something as underhand as that?’ he demanded dangerously. ‘That I would have sex with you in order to obtain information?’
‘Oh, please. Spare me the righteous indignation. It’s a little late to take the moral high ground. The bottom line is that you’ve misled me.’
But her fury couldn’t disguise her hurt nor the clouding of disappointment in her beautiful green eyes and Xanthos felt the hard thud of guilt deep in his gut. ‘Not deliberately,’ he argued.
‘You’re splitting hairs. Again. Whichever way you want to look at it, I’d still call it a falsehood—’
‘Bianca—’
But Bianca silenced him by lifting her hand, knowing his deception was only half the story. Because hadn’t she been guilty of deceivingherself? Wouldn’t that account for her disproportionate sense of hurt and disappointment, rather than the fact she’d been unaware her lover was a half-blood prince? Xanthos had made it perfectly clear this was never intended to be anything other than a casual fling.Shehad been the one to complicate it by reading too much into it—by wanting and dreaming and hoping. She had projected her wishes and her desires onto him, falsely imagining him to be the man she had been looking for. Was she going to imagine herself in love with every man she had sex with?
‘I shouldn’t be here,’ she said quietly. ‘I should never have agreed to have dinner with you. We’re not right for each other. We never have been. Nothing has changed, Xanthos.Nothing has changed.’
And although the temptation to slam the door was powerful, she maintained her dignity by walking from that luxury suite with her head held high.
CHAPTER TEN
BIANCASATSTRAIGHT-BACKEDin the hard chair and faced the man on the other side of the desk who had caused something of a stir among the staff when he had arrived at her workplace a few minutes ago. Her heart gave another heavy beat of dread and there was nothing she could do about it. She thought about the last time she’d seen him, when she’d walked out of his suite at the Granchester, thinking they would never have to lay eyes on each other again. If only. She cleared her throat but didn’t smile, because that would send out conflicting messages. Instead, her body grew tense as she picked her words with care.
‘It was good of you to come and see me, Xanthos.’
‘I was intrigued.’ His black eyes were narrowed in question, his New York drawl a tantalising mixture of silk and gravel. ‘How could I resist such a summons? I don’t think an ex-lover has ever asked to see me in herofficebefore. You aren’t about to sue me, are you, Bianca?’
Bianca didn’t react to the taunt, or the undeniable flirtation which flickered beneath it like a candle flame. Because she hadn’t invited him here to flirt with him. She had asked him to come to her office because she wanted to be in total control of her environment—and herself—in light of what she was about to tell him.
She didn’t know what his reaction was going to be, but at least she had her assistant sitting next door in case all hell broke loose. She didn’t want the neutral space of a restaurant or a park, where their interaction could be observed by strangers. She wanted to be here inherspace, surrounded by some of the things she’d worked so hard for, as if they would remind her of who she really was. Not the casual sexual partner of a deceitful billionaire, but an independent woman in her own right. Her legal qualification was hanging on the wall, alongside the wall calendar featuring the pinky-mauve sweet-peas which always bloomed in July. On the desk was a paperweight of a rare Monterossian shell, which her father had given her such a long time ago.
And in front of her sat Xanthos, hard and cool and utterly delicious. It was over three months since she’d seen him but not a day had passed when she hadn’t thought about him—usually with a mixture of longing and regret. His black hair was shorter than she remembered but the virile shadowing of his jaw was the same. He wore an immaculate dark suit because he’d been in London on business, which was fortunate—if any aspect of this whole business could be described asfortunate. But she was grateful he hadn’t been forced to travel thousands of miles just to hear what she was about to tell him.
The situation was bad enough—made worse by the fact that she had lost none of her susceptibility to him. The hot summer day meant she was wearing a new cotton shirt, which was already a little tight across her breasts. But now her nipples had started stinging uncomfortably, as if the only thing which could bring them relief would be to feel his tongue or his fingers working their way over them. And she didn’t want to feel that way. She didn’t want to be vulnerable to him in any way emotionallyorphysically.
She could see curiosity glinting from his black eyes as if this scenario was something he had expected all along—a change of heart from her perhaps, with the possibility of sex at the end of it. But there was wariness in his gaze, too—as if something was warning him not to take anything for granted. For one brief moment her heart went out to him, knowing that in a few seconds’ time, his worst nightmare was going to come true.
‘No, Xanthos,’ she said. ‘I’m not about to sue you.’