The Prince's Chambermaid

‘Tell me about Zaffirinthos,’ she said suddenly.

‘Not now, Cathy.’ He yawned.

‘Yes, now,’ she said stubbornly. ‘Why not?’

His lips curved into a reluctant smile as he watched her push a stray strand of thick blonde hair from her flushed cheek, recognising that she was a beguiling mixture of innocence and outspokenness. She was a complete natural, he realised—and it was still enough of a novelty not to irritate him. And yet wasn’t one of her most appealing qualities the fact that she was so biddable—so willing to be taught? Why, if he’d told her that it increased his sexual pleasure to have her dance naked around him beforehand, she would have gone about it in an instant!

His smile was one of rare indulgence. ‘And what—specifically—do you want to know about Zaffirinthos?’

‘Everything,’ she answered, wondering if she had imagined that faintly patronising tone.

‘But surely you must already know something? Some facts you picked up on the Internet. Because I can’t believe you didn’t look me up when you discovered who I was,’ he drawled. ‘People always do.’

Cathy found herself colouring, like a child who had been caught with her fingers in the cookie jar. Or some stupid little royal groupie. ‘Obviously I found out some things—’

‘Of course you did.’ His smile was faintly cynical. ‘What things?’

‘Not the kind of things I’d really like to know.’

‘And what might they be?’

‘Oh, I don’t know.’ She screwed the lid back on the mayonnaise. ‘Like what kind of childhood you had?’

If anyone else had dared quiz him about something so personal, he would have dismissed it as an outrageous imposition—but Cathy had a soft way of asking which was hard to resist. ‘It was a childhood in two halves,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘The first bit was idyllic—and then my mother died.’

Her heart went out to him—because didn’t she know only too well the pain of that? ‘And everything changed?’ she prompted quietly.

‘Totally. My father was utterly bereft.’ He stared at the ceiling. The depth of his father’s grief had taught him the dangers of emotional dependence as well as the temporary nature of happiness. ‘And then he turned all his attention into grooming my older brother to succeed him, as King. It meant a lot of freedom for me—so I was able to concentrate on my riding. That’s when I first started to learn about polo.’

Cathy experienced another wrench of sympathy—because too much freedom for a child could sometimes mean loneliness. She tried to imagine Xaviero as a little boy, doubly bereaved in a way—first by his mother’s death and then by his father’s withdrawal. And while she knew all about bereavement, at least she had enjoyed a close relationship with her great-aunt. ‘And your brother is now King,’ she said.

‘That’s right. My father died last year and big brother is now in charge,’ said Xaviero, a sudden edge to his voice. ‘Busy modernising Zaffirinthos with his sweeping reforms.’

But Cathy wasn’t interested in sweeping reforms—she wanted to see the island through her lover’s eyes. ‘And is it very beautiful?’ she asked. ‘Zaffirinthos?’

‘Very beautiful,’ he murmured. But somehow her questions made him realise how long he’d been away—and reinforced his sense of exile. He had not returned since his brother’s coronation, for reasons which were essentially primitive and guilt-inducing. Boyhood rivalries ran deep as blood itself, he thought grimly—and hadn’t there been a part of him which had always resented the accident of birth which had ensured that Casimiro would inherit the crown? Power was easy to come by, and Xaviero had built up his own power-base through his own hard work—but no one could deny the lure of ruling a country…

He realised that Cathy was still looking at him, her aquamarine eyes searching his face as she waited for him to paint the perfect, holiday-brochure picture of his paradise home.

He shrugged his shoulders. Well, he would give her the brochure version. Why not? He would be her fantasy prince in his fantasy land and that could be the memory she would keep of him. ‘It has forests so green that, like Ireland, it is known as the emerald isle. And the best beaches in the world, with sand as pale as sugar. And we have a bay with the bluest water—even bluer than your eyes, cara—where the rare caretta-caretta turtles come to lay their eggs on summer nights so still that you can almost hear the stars shooting across the sky.’

Cathy looked at him and couldn’t suppress a little sigh of longing. His lyrical words painted pictures, yes—but also helped create an image of the man she wanted him to be. One who was romantic, and caring. Would it be too much to hope that he cared a little bit about her? Hadn’t he just compared her eyes to the bluest sea and then called her ‘darling’ in Italian? How easy it would be to read too much into a simple remark like that—perhaps imagining that he wanted more from her than just being his willing bedpartner. ‘It sounds…it sounds like paradise,’ she said wistfully.