The Prince's Chambermaid

Slanting him a demure smile, she rose to her feet—smoothing down the silk chiffon of her wedding dress and imagining him peeling it from her body very soon.

He walked over to her side and offered her his arm as he took her over to the window, for he had not been oblivious to her pale fidgeting throughout the meal. ‘You seem a little distracted, Catherine,’ he murmured.

Unseeingly, she gazed out at the perfectly manicured palace gardens and told herself not to react. If Catherine he wanted her to be—then Catherine she would be. Hadn’t she learnt her lesson over that particular quibble?

‘Do I? Well, it’s been a pretty overwhelming experience,’ she answered truthfully, and then lowered her voice so that only he could hear her next remark—because surely a new bride was allowed a little coquetry with her husband, no matter how exalted his position. ‘And I just can’t wait to be alone with you.’

‘Neither can I.’ He didn’t miss a beat as he saw her lips part. ‘But you must be patient for a little longer.’

‘P-patient?’ She turned her eyes up to him in bewilderment. ‘You mean there is some other sort of c-celebration we must attend?’

‘Hardly a celebration,’ said Xaviero, his voice hardening. ‘Now that you are my wife, protocol demands that you must meet my brother, the King. When the meal is ended, we will be driven to the hospital.’

‘Y-your brother? But…’

He raised his dark brows. ‘But what?’

‘Your brother’s in a coma, Xaviero.’ Tiredly, she shrugged her shoulders—aware of the weight of the pearlencrusted bodice and the tiara still in her hair. ‘Does it…does it have to be today?’

‘You mean, he won’t know or won’t care when I introduce him to my new bride—that we could wait a year and he wouldn’t notice?’

Hearing the condemnation in his voice, she lowered her own. ‘I didn’t mean that at all. It’s just that you look exhausted—it’s obvious you’ve been under a lot of strain since you came back and took over. Would it be so very wrong if we spent a little time on our own tonight—and went to see Casimiro tomorrow?’

Didn’t the guilt which was churning inside him make him want to lash out? ‘Is it too much to ask,’ he questioned, in a voice of silken danger, ‘that you wait a little longer to satisfy your sexual appetite?’

She wanted to gasp out her outrage, to vehemently deny his softly uttered accusation—but, of course, she could not. Not when there were the island’s most important dignitaries on the other side of the room, no doubt trying to ignore the fact that the newlyweds seemed to be having some kind of disagreement.

‘I wouldn’t have put it quite like that,’ she said, her calm voice belying the painful scudding of her heart. ‘And you know I’m longing to meet your brother.’

‘Then why make all this fuss?’ he questioned softly.

Somehow he had managed to twist her words and leave her feeling inadequate—as if she had failed him on every level. The first test of royal life, and she had somehow flunked it.

Pausing only to change from her wedding gown into something more suitable for hospital visiting, Cathy joined Xaviero in the back of the limousine for a tense journey across the city as she nervously twisted the new gold wedding band round and round on her finger.

But all her own insecurities were banished when they were ushered into the intensive-care room at the top of the high-tech building, to a room dominated by a white bed which for one awful moment almost resembled a bier. Her fingers flew to her lips and she bit back a little cry of distress.

For there lay the King. His eyes were closed and his muscles wasted through inactivity—but he was still recognisably a formidable figure with the same high slash of autocratic cheekbones as his brother. At well over six feet, he seemed to dwarf the narrow bed on which he lay and the deep, hoarse sound of his breathing echoed heartbreakingly through the room. Cathy looked at all the medical paraphernalia of tubes and resuscitation equipment which surrounded him and had never felt so helpless in her life. That a fine, fit young man could be struck down like this…

And then she glanced over at Xaviero, and as his tortured features burnt themselves into her vision her heart clenched. He looked haunted, she thought guiltily. No wonder he had been so tetchy and so ill at ease with her. How must it feel for him to see his brother lying there like that and to be unable to do anything to help him, for all his power and his position? And there she had been—petulant about a name-change and because she’d barely had any time alone with him. A shudder racked her slender frame and for a moment their eyes met in a shared moment of silent pain.