The Prince's Love-Child (The Royal House of Cacciatore 2)

Lucy flushed and moved away, suddenly feeling cheap as she imagined how it would look to an outsider. Woman gets off plane and lets man ravish her in car. A man, moreover, who had never made any promises of commitment to her and never would. Was she valuing herself too low—and, if so, for just how long was she going to let it continue?

‘Cara?’

His voice was soft, and in anyone else you might almost be fooled into thinking that it was tender—but tenderness was an alien concept to Guido.

He saw the way that her eyes clouded and some stubborn inner resistance suddenly melted away. He leaned forward so that their foreheads were touching and began to stroke her hair.

‘Forgive me, Lucy,’ he said softly.

Lucy closed her eyes. For what? For taking her to heaven in an indecently short space of time? Or for drumming home the fact that where sex was concerned he was very definitely the master and she the puppet?

She opened her eyes again. ‘You make me feel helpless,’ she admitted.

He shrugged. ‘Sometimes a woman should be helpless.’

‘But not a man?’ she questioned provocatively.

‘Of course not.’ His eyes sparked back in answering challenge. ‘It is why we were born the stronger sex—did you not know that? We’re conditioned to fight wars and to hunt—not to roll over on our backs like tame little pussycats.’

‘Like I’ve just done, you mean?’

He brushed his lips against hers. ‘Mmm. You were quite perfect. I like to see you like that.’

‘Oh, you’re just a power-freak,’ she said, half crossly.

A smile curved his mouth. ‘But you like that, too.’

‘Sometimes.’ Not always. Sometimes she would give a hundred erotic highs just to see him show even the briefest flicker of vulnerability—but that would be like wishing for the sky to suddenly start raining diamonds instead of hailstones. ‘Sometimes I wish you’d just relax a bit more.’

‘I’ll relax later,’ he promised silkily, and pulled her into the cradle of his arms. ‘I promise you.’

‘I don’t just mean in bed,’ said Lucy primly. ‘It may be an alien concept to you, Guido, but you are allowed to let your hair down at other times.’

‘Shh. Enough. That is enough, cara.’

Lucy rested her head against his shoulder and lapsed into a silence that was just the wrong side of contentment as she registered his unspoken reprimand. Was she nagging him? She stared out of the window just as the expensive car purred its way up Park Avenue and came to a halt in front of a rather beautiful old building.

She turned back to find his eyes watching her intently. ‘Why are we stopping here?’

‘Because we’ve arrived.’

Behind the Titian swing of her fringe, Lucy knitted her eyebrows together. ‘This doesn’t look like a hotel!’

‘That’s because it isn’t.’ He smiled, as if nothing was at stake. But something was, and they both knew it. ‘I thought you might like to see my apartment.’

CHAPTER TWO

LUCY could read nothing in the ebony glitter of Guido’s eyes, and somehow she kept her own expression casual—even though, deep down, she felt slightly shell-shocked. Guido wanted to take her home! Well, to one of his homes, that would be more accurate. At last. Now, why would that be?

‘Your apartment?’ she questioned slowly.

Not the kind of rapturous excitement he might have expected—which just went to show that in life you should expect nothing. ‘Wouldn’t you like to see it?’

She smiled at him. ‘Of course I would.’

Up until now they’d always stayed in hotels—a city-central room was one of the perks of her flying job and, as a fabulously successful property developer, Guido rented luxury suites all over the world. In New York and in Paris he did actually own an apartment, but Lucy had seen neither.

To be allowed to set foot inside her boyfriend’s home shouldn’t have felt like a major achievement, but somehow it did. Was that what happened when you went out with a man like Guido? she wondered. You began to normalise abnormal behaviour?