Читать книгу: «The Royal House of Niroli Collection», страница 4

The taxi stopped abruptly, catching her off guard. She didn’t really want to go up to the apartment, not feeling the way she was right now, but another person was already hurrying purposefully towards the taxi, wanting to lay claim to it.

Emily got out and paid her fare to the driver, shivering as she waited for her change. Her stomach had already begun its familiar nauseous churning—this time, it had to be a result of Marco’s rejection of her appeal to him, though she had to admit she had also felt too nauseous to want any breakfast this morning. She was definitely beginning to feel slightly dizzy and faint as well as unwell now.

Psychosomatic, she told herself unsympathetically as she headed up to the apartment.

It had started to rain while Emily was getting out of the taxi. Yes, the miserable weather was adding to her feelings of lowness. Why couldn’t she talk to Marco? They were lovers, after all, sharing the closest of physical intimacy. Physical intimacy—but they did not share any emotional intimacy. Emily’s experiences as a child had made her wary of appearing needy. It was now second nature to her to hide the most vulnerable part of her true self. Only in Marco’s arms, at the height of their shared passion, did she feel safe enough to allow her body to show him what was in her heart, knowing that he wasn’t likely to be able to recognise it.

She let herself into the apartment, mutely aware of how empty and impersonal it felt, for all her attempts to turn it into a shared home.

‘Yes, Grandfather, I do understand, but I cannot work miracles. It is impossible for me to return to Niroli before the end of the month as we had already tentatively agreed.’ Marco managed to hold onto his temper as his grandfather’s complaints grew louder, before finally interrupting to say dryly, ‘Very well, then, I accept that whilst I had talked about the end of the month, you had not agreed to it. But that doesn’t alter the fact that I cannot return sooner.’

The sound of his grandfather slamming down the receiver reverberated in Marco’s eardrum. Replacing his own handset, he stood up and turned to look out of the window of his office. It was raining. In Niroli, the sun would be shining. Marco’s grandfather was obviously furious that he had refused to give in and alter the timing of his return and bring his arrival on Niroli forward. But his grandfather’s rage did not worry Marco. He was used to it and unaffected by it, apart from the fact that he too didn’t like having his plans challenged. He looked irritably at his watch. He was hungry and very much in need of the gentle calm of Emily’s company. That, plus the natural reserve that made her the kind of woman who was never going to court the attention of the paparazzi, or expose their relationship to the avid curiosity of others, were two other major plus-points about her. But not quite as major as the sensuality that spilled from her like sweetness from a honeycomb, even if she didn’t realise it.

The direction his thoughts were taking surprised him. It was nonsense for him to be thinking about Emily like this when he was about to end their relationship! Far better that he focused on the things he didn’t like about her, such as… Such as the way she insisted on keeping professional commitments even when he had made other plans. Is that the only criticism you can make of her? an increasingly voluble and irritating inner voice demanded sardonically. Marco sighed, mentally acknowledging the irony of his own thoughts. Yes, it was true that, in many ways, Emily was the perfect mistress for the man he had been whilst he’d lived in London. But he wasn’t going to be that man for much longer.

When the time came for him to take a royal mistress, she would have to have qualities that Emily did not possess. Chief amongst those would be an accepting, possibly older husband. This was an example of the kind of protocol at the royal court of Niroli which, in Marco’s opinion, kept it in the Edwardian era. He certainly planned to bring about changes that would benefit the people of Niroli rather than its king. But perhaps there were certain traditions that were better retained. No, Emily could not continue to be his lover, but even so he could have responded better to her arrival in his office earlier, Marco admitted. He could, for instance, have suggested that she go ahead to one of their favourite restaurants and wait there for him. It had, after all, been predictable that his grandfather would lose his temper and end their conversation so abruptly, once he realised that he wasn’t going to get everything that he wanted.

Marco toyed with the idea of calling Emily now and suggesting that she meet him for a late lunch, but then decided against it. She wasn’t the kind of woman who sulked or played silly games. But honesty compelled him to accept that some measure of compensatory behaviour on his part would be a good investment. Ridiculously in many ways, given the length of time they had been together, just thinking about her triggered that familiar sharp ache of his desire for her. He picked up the phone and rang the number of her shop.

Her assistant answered his call, telling him, ‘She isn’t here, Marco. She rang a couple of minutes ago to say that she’s going to spend the rest of the day working at the apartment. Poor Emily, she still isn’t properly over that wretched virus, is she?’

Marco made a noncommittal reply. He himself was never in anything other than the very best of health, but right now his mood was very much in need of the soothing touch that only Emily could give. She had an unexpectedly dry sense of humour, which, allied to her intelligence and acute perception, gave her the ability to make him laugh, sometimes when he least felt like doing so. Not that her sense of humour or his laughter had been very much in evidence these last few weeks, he recognised, frowning a little over this recognition. It surprised him how sharp the need he suddenly felt to be with her was. It was amazing what a bit of guilt could do, he decided as he told his PA that he, too, would be spending the afternoon working at home.

The best way to smooth over any upsets, so far as Marco was concerned, was in bed, where he knew he could quickly make Emily forget about everything other than his desire for her and hers for him…

* * *

Emily scowled as she worried over the message she had just picked up from one of her clients. The lady in question was a good customer, but Emily had still felt slightly wary when she’d been asked a while ago to take on the complete renovation of a property in Chelsea.

‘Darling, darling, Emily,’ Carla Mainwearing had trilled, ‘I am so in love with your perfect sense of style that I want you to choose everything and I am going to put the house totally in your hands.’

Knowing Carla as she did, Emily had taken this with a pinch of salt and had therefore insisted on having her work approved at every single stage. Now Carla had left her a message saying that she hated the colour Emily had chosen for the walls of the property’s pretty drawing room, and that she wanted it completely redone—at Emily’s expense. Emily recalled that Carla had previously sanctioned the colour of the paint. But discretion was called for in telling her this, so rather than phone Carla back she decided to e-mail instead. Her laptop was in the study she shared with Marco, as were her files, so she made her way there, firmly ignoring the leaden weight of her earlier disappointment at Marco’s refusal to join her for lunch.

Five minutes later, she was standing immobile in front of the study’s window, her laptop and original purpose of coming to the study forgotten, as she stared in shocked horror at the vellum envelope she was holding. Her hand, actually not just her hand but her whole body, was trembling violently, as she felt unable to move. Waves of heat followed by icy chill surged through her body and somewhere some part of her mind managed to register the fact that what she was suffering was a classic reaction to extreme shock. She could hardly see the address on the envelope now through her blurred vision, but the crest on its left-hand front corner stood out, its royal crest, followed by the address: HRH Prince Marco of Niroli…

She didn’t hear Marco’s key in the apartment door, she didn’t even hear him calling out her name. Her shock was so great that nothing could penetrate it. It encased her in a kind of bubble, which only concentrated the torment of what she was suffering and branded it on her brain so that it could never be forgotten. It was only finally pierced by the sudden opening of the study door as Marco walked in, but of course there was no way his arrival could ease her pain. Instead she gripped the envelope even tighter, her voice high and tight as she said thinly, ‘Welcome home, Your Highness. I suppose I ought to curtsey to you.’

She waited, praying that he would laugh and tell her that she had got it all wrong, that the envelope she was holding, addressing him as Prince Marco of Niroli, was some silly mistake.

CHAPTER FIVE

LIKE a tiny candle flame shivering vulnerably in the dark, her hope trembled fearfully. And then the look in Marco’s eyes extinguished it as cruelly as a hand placed callously over the face of a dying person to stem their last breath. It was over. Now, in this minute, this breath of time, they were finished. Emily knew that without the need for any words, the pain of that knowledge slamming a crippling body-blow into her. Her stomach felt as though she had plunged down a hundred floors in a high-speed lift.

‘Give that to me,’ Marco demanded, taking the envelope from her.

‘It’s too late to destroy the evidence, Marco.’ Emily told him brokenly. ‘I know the truth now. And I know how you’ve lied to me all this time, pretending to be something you aren’t, letting me think.’ She dug her teeth in her lower lip to try to force back her own pain. ‘Do you think I haven’t read the newspapers? Do you think the people of Niroli know that their prince is a liar? Or doesn’t lying matter when you’re a member of the Royal House?’ she challenged him wildly.

‘You had no right to go through my desk,’ Marco shot back at her furiously, his male loathing at being caught off guard and forced into a position in which he was in the wrong making him determined to find something he could accuse Emily of. ‘I thought we had an understanding that our private papers were our personal property and out of bounds,’ he told her savagely. ‘I trusted you…’

Emily could hardly believe what she was hearing.

‘Did you? Is that why you hid this envelope under everything else?’ she challenged him, shaking her head in answer to her own question. ‘No, you didn’t trust me, Marco, and you didn’t trust me because you knew that I couldn’t trust you. And you knew that because you are a liar, and liars don’t trust people because they know that they themselves cannot be trusted.’ She not only felt sick, she also felt as though she could hardly breathe. ‘Everything I thought I knew about you is based on lies, everything. You aren’t just Marco Fierezza, you are Prince Marco of Niroli. You yourself are a lie, Marco.…’

‘You are taking this far too personally. The reason I concealed my royal status had nothing whatsoever to do with you. It was a decision I made before I met you. My identity as plain Marco Fierezza is as real to me as though I were not a prince. It has nothing to do with you,’ he repeated.

‘How can you say that? It has everything to do with me, and if you had any shred of decency or morals you would know that. How could you lie about who you are and still live with me as intimately as we have lived together?’ she demanded brokenly. ‘How could you live with yourself, knowing that others, not just me, believed you, accepted and gave you their trust, when all the time—’

‘Stop being so ridiculously dramatic,’ Marco demanded fiercely. ‘You are making too much of the situation.’

‘Too much?’ Emily almost screamed the words at him. ‘Too much, when I have discovered that you have deceived me for the whole time we’ve been together? When did you plan to tell me, Marco? Perhaps you just planned to walk away without telling me anything? After all, what do my feelings matter to you?’

‘Of course they matter,’ Marco stopped her sharply. ‘And it was in part to protect them, and you, that I decided not to inform you of the change in my circumstances when my grandfather first announced that he intended to step down from the throne and hand it on to me.’

‘To protect me?’ Emily almost choked on her fury. ‘Hand on the throne? Don’t bother continuing, Marco. No wonder you told me when you first took me to bed that all you wanted was sex. You knew that was the only kind of relationship there could ever be between us! You knew that one day you would be Niroli’s king. No doubt you are expected to marry a princess. Is she picked out for you already, your royal bride?’

‘No.’

Emily shrugged disdainfully. ‘There’s no point in replying because, whatever you say, I can’t believe you, not now.’

‘Emily, listen to me. This has gone far enough. You are being ridiculous. I know you have had a bit of a shock, but…’

‘A bit of a shock? A bit of a shock?’

When she whirled round and headed for the door, Marco demanded, ‘Where are you going?’

‘To pack my things,’ Emily told him fiercely. ‘I’m leaving, Marco, right now. I can’t and won’t stay here with you. I feel I don’t know you any more, and right now I don’t really want to.’

‘Don’t be stupid. Where will you go? This is your home.’

‘No, this is your apartment, it has never been my home. As to where I will go, I have a home of my own—remember?’ she challenged him.

Marco frowned. ‘Your house in Chelsea? But your assistant is living there.’

‘She was living there, but she moved in with her new partner at the weekend, not that it or anything else in my life is any business of yours, Your Highness. Or should it be Your Majesty?’

‘Emily.’ He reached for her but she started to pull away from him, a look of angry contempt in her eyes that infuriated him. She had accused him of deceit and duplicity, but what about her actions? What about the fact that she had gone through his private papers behind his back? Her accusations had stung his pride, and now suddenly recognising that control of the situation had been taken from him and that she was about to walk out on him awakened all his most deeply held, atavistic male feelings about her. She was his—his until he chose to end their relationship.

Emily’s eyes widened in mute shock as his fingers closed round her wrist, imprisoning her, and she saw the familiar look of arousal darkening his eyes. ‘Let go of me,’ she snapped. ‘You can’t really expect…’

‘I can’t really expect what?’

He wasn’t going to let her go, Emily realised. She felt a quiver of sensation run down her spine—and it wasn’t fear.

‘What is it that I can’t expect, Emily?’ he repeated silkily. ‘Is it that I can’t expect to take you to bed any more—is that what you were going to say? That I can’t expect to touch you or hold you?’

She had edged towards the study door as he’d advanced, but before she could open it and escape Marco reached past her, kicking it shut. Then, he placed his hands on it either side of her so that she was caught between the door and him. A telltale spiral of excitement was sizzling through her, its presence within her reminding her of the early days of their affair, when just to know that Marco wanted her and intended to have her was enough to leave her quivering on the edges of erotic need and surrender. Just as she was doing now. She tried to vocalise her denial, not just of her own arousal but also of Marco’s intentions, but the words were locked in her throat. Beneath the soft wool of her sweater she could feel the growing hardening of her nipples and the desire-heavy weight of her breasts. How long had it been since she had felt like this? How long had it been since Marco had shown her this side of himself? So long that she couldn’t remember? So long that, because it was happening now, she couldn’t resist his allure?

Her heart jerked around inside her chest as though it were suspended on a piece of elastic. The ache in her breasts curled down through her belly to taunt her sex and tease from it a throbbing pulse of excitement and longing. She realised that she should be horrified by the way she was reacting to him, in view of what she had now discovered, horrified and determined not to let him touch her, sickened by the thought of him touching her. But she also knew that she wasn’t; instead she wanted him with a physical intensity that held her fast in an unfamiliar, almost violent grip.

‘Is that what you wanted to say to me, Emily—that I can’t make you want me any more, that I can’t arouse you, that I can’t do this…?’ He lifted his hand and stroked a fingertip down the side of her neck and along her collar-bone, making her shudder in violent erotic delight. He had moved closer to her, so close that she could smell the familiar scent of his cologne and the aroused heat of his body. Was it that, with its powerful but subtle message of male sexuality, that was turning her boneless with aching longing for him, even while her mind was telling her that she should resist him, and that this was no way for her to behave if she truly wanted him to believe what she had said?

She should say something, tell him to stop; tell him that there was no point in this for either of them. But she knew that she wouldn’t, just as she knew that some deep-rooted female part of her wanted this show of male dominance from him, wanted her own sense of fierce surging excitement, wanted and needed the pure, fierce searing heat of the mutual lust they had conjured up out of nowhere. She could quite easily have pushed past him, Emily knew, and she knew too that Marco would not try to stop her if she did. But the reality was that she didn’t want to… The reality was that her body was possessed by an incendiary mix of anger and desire that took fire from Marco’s determination to confront her with her own acceptance of his power to arouse her.

‘But that would be a lie, wouldn’t it?’ Marco challenged her softly as he continued his relentless sensual assault, his lips brushing the bare flesh of her throat in between each word, imprisoning her in her own wild arousal.

‘Wouldn’t it?’ he insisted as he slid his hand beneath her sweater and freed her breasts from the constriction of her bra. A low moan of unappeased longing bubbled in her throat as he fed her craving for his possession.

‘You want more?’ he demanded, his voice thickening and softening.

‘No!’ Emily lied. She could feel his hand cupping her breast and his fingertips stroking deliberately against her nipple again. She knew she couldn’t hold out much longer against the dammed-up force of her own need. With a low sound of surrender, she reached blindly for him, drawing his head down towards her own, her lips parting for his kiss and the swift, exultant victory of his tongue.

She could feel the thick hardness of his manhood pressing against her body. In her mind’s eye she visualised his naked body, familiar now after their years together, seeing behind her closed eyes the thick sheathing of smooth flesh over rigid muscle, where it rose from the dark silky thickness of hair. She could almost feel the smooth warmth of him, so enticingly supple to her touch, and so responsive to the caress of her fingers and her mouth. Fresh longing seized her. Impetuously she reached down between their bodies to touch him, spanning his length with the spread of her fingertips, and then stroking his thickness. A deep purr of satisfaction gathered in her throat as she felt him stiffen further and then pulse, becoming a moan of out-of-control urgency when she felt him tugging at the fastening of her skirt.

Not even in their early days together had she experienced this degree of intense need, she recognised. It was so much bolder than anything she remembered feeling before; bolder, and fiercer and hungrier—the sexual desire of a woman who must be satisfied.

The demoralising fear that had in recent weeks sucked from her any delight in their intimacy was as easily sloughed off by their shared passion as were their clothes, unwanted encumbrances that prevented her from taking all that she could. Marco was driving both of them to that place where they had no choice other than to plunge into the turbulent flood of the maelstrom together.

Emily’s fingers trembled over and tugged at his shirt buttons and trouser fastenings, her endeavours deliberately interrupted by him when he raked his teeth against the sensitive thrust of her nipple, causing her to gasp and then moan, unable to do anything other than give in to the intensity of the sensation he was inflicting on her. When pleasure was this intense, she thought frantically, it bordered on the almost unendurable. And yet she wouldn’t have wanted it any other way, wouldn’t have wanted any other man, wouldn’t have been able to reach this lack of inhibition with anyone else.

‘You want me to stop?’ Marco demanded. His breath cooled the aching flesh that had been tormented by his erotic caress, whilst the subtle touch of his fingertips continued to play on her nipple, increasing its dark, swollen call for the renewed heat of his mouth.

Emily couldn’t speak, she could barely stand up any more. But she knew Marco knew she wanted no such thing. She ran her hands along his sweat-dampened naked torso, deliberately bending her head so that she could graze her tongue-tip along his skin and taste the tangy maleness of his flesh, whilst she breathed in his aphrodisiacal Marco-drenched scent. At times like this, just the smell of him was enough to make her go weak with lust.

The ache deep inside her tightened and burned with a heat that could only be slaked by the possession of Marco’s hard flesh filling her and completing her. She could feel the small hungry ripples of sensation caused by her muscles as they tightened with the need to have him fill the empty, wanton place inside her.

‘Now, Marco,’ she urged him fiercely, ‘now!’

When he still waited, she looked up at him. She could see the dangerous look in his eyes, the darkness that said he was on the verge of wanting to punish her and that he was challenging her, needing to force her to acknowledge his supremacy, his ability to control her desire, arouse it and then satisfy it. It was too late for her to try to play him at his own game and deny him his triumph by pretending that she didn’t want him. Her own need was too great and too immediate. She would have to punish herself later for her weakness. Right now, no price was too high to pay for the satisfaction her body craved. She had tried to resist…

‘Now!’ she repeated.

For a second, she thought he was going to refuse, but then he was reaching for her, lifting her up so that she could wrap her legs tightly round him whilst he thrust firmly into her in one long, slow, deliberate movement that made her shudder violently. As he withdrew her muscles tightened, protesting around him, not wanting to let him go, and were then rewarded for their adoration by the almost mind-altering sensation of his second, stronger, deeper thrust. The sensitive nerve-endings in her flesh wept with joy at the intensity. Instinctively Emily drew in her muscles around him, savouring the sensation.

She could feel his hot breath in her ear, the tip of his tongue tracing the curls of flesh. She felt his teeth against the sensitive cord in her neck. Her whole body was being possessed by a pleasure so heightened she thought she might die from it.

‘Marco…’ She moaned his name as a plea, striking a solitary note of female praise as he thrust deeper, harder and faster now.

‘Mmm…more. Marco…more!’ she urged him, gasping out aloud in delight as he obeyed her and his movements became fast and rhythmic. Then he drove them to their climaxes, and she was left so boneless and weak that she collapsed helplessly against him, trembling in the aftermath.

The heat of the fury that had driven him was cooling on his sweat-slicked skin. Where he should have felt satisfaction and triumph at making Emily acknowledge that he could still arouse her, Marco could only feel a dark sense of stark awareness that he had crossed over a boundary he should not have breached. In forcing Emily to give in to the desire he had summoned in her, he’d also forced himself to acknowledge his need for her. A fleeting need, brought on by his justifiable anger, he assured himself, that was all! It meant nothing in the broader picture of his life.

‘I think we both needed that,’ he told her coolly, ‘and perhaps it was a fitting end to our relationship, a tribute to the mutual attraction that brought us together.’

Emily couldn’t believe what she had done—and what she might have betrayed. She couldn’t bear the thought of Marco thinking now how stupid she had been, maybe guessing she had dreamed that, one day, he might fall in love with her as she had done with him. A wave of irritation surged through her—not against him, but against herself. What a fool she had been, deliberately blinding herself to reality and fixating on something that her common sense could have warned her wouldn’t possibly happen. If Marco had really loved her he would have told her so. But he hadn’t, and he never would. She had deceived herself just as much as Marco had deceived her, and if anything her crime against herself was even greater than his. The fierce turbulent, almost torrid heat of their love-making had subsided now, and her anger had burned down into stark bleakness and grinding pain. Her dreams had been swept aside, shown to be pitifully worthless. Marco was a stranger to her, but no more so than she felt at this moment she was to herself.

‘Mutual attraction then, but perhaps mutual contempt now,’ she answered Marco pointedly. ‘I’m not the naïve girl that I was when we first became lovers, Marco.’

‘Meaning what?’ he challenged her, frowning.

‘Meaning that I’ve learned enough about sex from you to know that it isn’t always used as an expression of positive emotions. It’s common knowledge these days that couples on the verge of splitting up do sometimes use sex as a way of venting their negative feelings. Some couples say that they had the best sex of their relationship when the emotional side of it was dying. Of course, I know that we aren’t emotionally intimate with one another.’ What she meant of course, Emily admitted, was that Marco had never been emotionally close with her, because he didn’t want to be, whilst she had had to struggle not to be close when she’d wanted to be. ‘But I think both of us would accept that the break-up of any relationship—even one like ours—does bring things to the surface that aren’t easy to accept.’

Marco’s frown deepened. She was now being far more matter-of-fact about their relationship ending than he had expected—and he didn’t like that! But he was being ridiculous. He should feel very relieved that she was being so sensible, especially after her earlier, uncharacteristic outburst…