Passion and the Prince

‘Anton liked photographing her, then, did he?’ the rebellion in him asked conversationally, mercilessly silencing what he thought of as his real self when it tried to protest that it didn’t want to get involved.

‘Oh, yes,’ Melanie agreed. ‘He always said she had real model potential …’

Lily struggled to subdue the sound of protest and anguish rising in her throat. She looked ill, Marco recognised. Bruised and defeated and agonised.

‘I was so sorry when I heard about your mother’s death, Lily,’ Melanie added in a much more sombre voice. ‘Such a dreadfully sad thing to happen.’

‘She was never able to come to terms with her divorce from my father,’ Lily responded in a strained voice, somehow managing to drag herself back from the edge of the dark, greedy chasm of fear that had opened up at her feet.

The other woman patted her arm and then excused herself, explaining, ‘I must go—my husband will be looking for me. Stay in touch, Lily darling.’

The Duchess too had moved away to talk to another guest, leaving Lily alone with Marco in their own little pool of silence.

Marco was still looking at her, even though he had now released her arm, and Lily could imagine what he was thinking. Draining her glass, she turned to him and spoke in an empty voice.

‘My mother committed suicide—drink and prescription drugs. Oh, yes,’ she added fiercely when he didn’t speak, ‘I do know what the modelling business can do to those who are too vulnerable for its cruelty. I’ve experienced it at first hand. That’s why …’

Without waiting to see what his response was she stepped past him and walked away, her head held high and half blinded by the tears she knew she dared not shed. She didn’t stop in her headlong flight until she realised that she’d lost her way and was in a small ante-room, thankfully all on her own. She wanted fresh air—fresh air and privacy—and the self-indulgence of crying for a mother and a childhood that were long gone. But she wasn’t here to indulge herself, she reminded herself sharply. She was here to work. But the floodgates had been opened and there was no holding back the memories now.

CHAPTER EIGHT

SHE knew who the hands on her shoulders belonged to without needing to turn round.

Marco. It couldn’t be anyone else.

And the reason she knew was because … because she would know him anywhere. Because with her emotions exposed to the painful air of recognition by Melanie’s revelations she had committed the worst self-injury of all. Because there were no other hands she wanted to hold her, only his.

When had her emotions become entangled with her desire for him? When had they melded together to create the most eternally binding human cord of all? Love. Ah, how the mere thought of it threatened pain. She couldn’t love Marco. He was turning her round and wrapping his arms around her, holding her as carefully as though she might break. Out of pity, she told herself fiercely. Out of pity—nothing else. And pity wasn’t what she wanted from him. She knew that now. She tried to break free but he wouldn’t let her go ‘You’re right,’ she told him, as though he had made the statement. ‘I’m here to work, not to behave like a silly fool who can’t control her emotions.’

The rebellion that had begun as a small protest he could easily control had become a raging force for change within him, directing him into responses that should have felt awkward and unwelcome but which instead seemed to come fatally easily. It seemed the most natural thing in the world for him to demand, in a voice that was low and rough with something that could have been self-condemnation, ‘Why didn’t you tell me any of this before.’

‘Tell you what? Tell you that my father was a photographer? Tell you that my mother was a model? Tell you that between them the world of modelling and my father destroyed her, and that because of that I’ve …?’ Lily’s voice thinned out to become brittle and self-derisory. ‘Why should you want to know? Why should you or anyone else care?’

Marco could hear the pain she was trying to control. It seared through him, burning through the restraints he had wrapped around his own emotions. An answering pain mixed with yearning and an entirely male desire to hold and protect her spilled over. To say what he had felt listening to Melanie’s revelations had been shock didn’t come anywhere near describing the effect those revelations had had on him. They had pierced the seal he had placed on his own emotions, exposing them to the raw reality of another person’s pain. Lily’s pain.