For some reason, her belly somersaulted, and her breath hitched. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
For the longest minute he simply stared at her, eyes slowly narrowing. Then he sharply veered from her doorway, granting her the freedom to shut it behind her.
‘You’re right. The matter of your security and extra-curricular activities can await another time. I don’t wish to keep my minister waiting.’
The fact that he’d simply evaded answering her question puzzled her before she assured herself she didn’t really want to know what he’d meant. After all, it had nothing to do with her work.
She told herself that with every step down the long flights of stairs. With every arrogant step that testified that the man who walked beside her was no ordinary man. That he was high born and could trace his ancestry back almost half a millennium.
He gestured her forward at the front door. She stepped through, then startled at his sharp exhalation. A furtive glance over her shoulder showed the briefest flare in the straight blade of his nose. The tiniest hungry flicker in his eyes as they dropped down to her bare back.
A second later he was back under control, prompting her to wonder if she’d imagined that reaction.
Because Zak Montegova didn’t betray superfluous emotion. In all things he held himself under supreme control. As if he were still in the military position he’d held in the Montegovan air force in his twenties.
But he had that night.
That hard-packed body had been alive with passion, impatiently aroused and breathlessly all-consuming with it. Even though he’d snapped into chilling rebuttal afterwards, she’d experienced that blistering moment when his guard had dropped. When he’d given her a glimpse beneath his armour-plated façade.
For years Violet hadn’t quite been able to dismiss that fraction of a moment from her thoughts. Not as easily as the Prince had dismissed her, anyway. Even when she’d imagined she’d seen a residual memory lurking in his eyes the handful of times fate, or her mother, had thrown them together.
But it wasn’t until her arrival in New York that she’d known she was mistaken. It’d all been in her imagination. And she needed to kill those thoughts once and for all if she hoped to get ahead in life.
And she had.
For the most part...
But that vital final step eluded her. The last memory of sizzling heat, masterful hands on her body that had ruined her for much longer than she cared to admit. It was why she’d rebuffed any advances from the opposite sex. Because after a few tentative tries she’d known she was wasting time better spent pursuing a fulfilling career. Because even if those advances hadn’t eventually been ruined by her mother’s meddling or male interest only piqued by the whiff of scandal that followed her name, the memory of Zak
ary Montegova had always been there, a formidable apparition, rendering every man who came close an unworthy imitation of the accomplished Prince.
The man lauded as a genius. While his brother had been tasked with preserving Montegovan interests, Zak had been tasked with interests abroad. Within a handful of years he’d had heads of states at his beck and call. And that acclaim had gained power and glory with each passing year.
The sights and sounds of New York blasted in the moment they stepped out of her apartment building.
And into the path of a bicycle courier. The cyclist swerved, just as Violet took a hurried step back. Into the hard, towering body of Zak Montegova.
Strong arms gripped her arms to steady her. Fierce eyes drilled into her with a mixture of concern and brusque irritation and that enigmatic gleam that immediately drove the breath from her lungs. Everything fell away.
The courier’s irritated shout despite his blatant contravention of cycling laws.
The blare of taxi horns and loud hiss of bus brakes.
The scent of stale hot dogs and hot pretzels.
Only the searing awareness of skin-on-skin contact remained, taking up ever-expanding room in her consciousness until it was the only thing that mattered. Until even breathing became redundant. Secondary to the rush of having her every fear confirmed.
That, regardless of her mother’s machinations and Zak’s blatant reservations about her presence in New York, she harboured terrible secrets of her own. Secrets she’d taken turns scoffing at and then fearing.
On a sordid little street corner in New York City, Violet accepted the truth that the fairy tale was very much alive.
That the man who’d taken her in his arms, kissed her with soul-stirring expertise while murmuring husky Montegovan words to her, was still very much present beneath that stoic facade. That the man who’d come within a heartbeat of taking her virginity on the night of her eighteenth birthday was still the man she secretly yearned for.
That Zakary Montegova was the reason Violet was, at the ripe old age of twenty-four, still a virgin.
Hard on the heels of the bracing indictment came the realisation that he knew. It was there in the blaze of his grey eyes, in the awareness that rippled through his body. In the thumbs brushing her bare skin...testing her weaknesses?
A shiver ran through her body, spreading goosebumps all over her skin.