‘No! It’s the fact that you didn’t tell me! I don’t like dishonesty in a man.’
‘There is rarely total truth between new lovers,’ he bit out frustratedly.
Maybe he was right. But it was suddenly about more than that. He’s never failed before, Ella realised. This is possibly the first time in his life he hasn’t got what he wanted—at least with a woman.
For a moment she felt filled with a heady sense of power, but that soon fled and was replaced by something much more satisfactory. Because right then, despite everything, Ella felt his equal.
She gave him a thin smile. ‘And now, if you don’t mind, I really do want to go back to the hotel and make some notes.’
He could see that he was going to make no further headway. At least, not right now. But there would be plenty more opportunities. ‘Okay,’ he agreed easily. ‘Let’s go. We can continue this fascinating discussion later, over dinner.’
‘No, we can not,’ she refuted, revelling even more in his look of surprise. But she needed to safeguard herself—not just against his sexual charisma but against her own helpless reaction to it—and to do that she needed to put distance between them. ‘I am going to spend the evening in my beautiful and lavish suite, and I shall order something up from Room Service.’
She saw his lips part in amazement as she walked past him, her head held high, and flung the door open—though more as a protective device than anything else. The room was now on view to the whole corridor, and with servants and brothers potentially lingering in the background surely he wouldn’t dare try anything else?
By now he was laughing softly at her extravagant behaviour. ‘Oh, but your surrender will be sweetness itself, cara.’
‘It isn’t going to happen, Nico,’ she replied tartly, and hoped that her words carried more conviction than she felt.
CHAPTER TEN
AFTER a long and luxurious bath, and a delicious supper that she ate on her terrace overlooking the harbour, Ella began to pore over the map Nico had given her. By the time she fell into bed she was exhausted.
But fatigue did nothing to block out the images of his black mocking eyes, and when eventually she fell asleep it was to dream of Nico.
A car picked her up the following morning, and drove her to the palace, and a servant took her to the office that Nico had shown her the day before. There was a small cut-glass bowl of scented white roses sitting on the desk, with an envelope beside it, which she ripped open.
Inside was a note from Nico. It was the first time she had seen his handwriting and it was rather like the man himself—uncompromising and bold.
It said: Today I have taken my bike up into the mountains. Will you have dinner with me tonight? And it was signed simply, Nico.
She sat back in her chair and looked out of the window onto the palace courtyard. Should she?
Well, what else was she going to do? Sit in her suite night after night, ordering up Room Service? She picked up her pen and began to make notes.
It didn’t take her long to discover that an office was an office wherever it was—palace or not. The only real difference about this one was that it was so quiet. She hadn’t always worked from home, she had done her share in other places, where there had always been a buzz, with people stopping by for coffee, or the sound of telephones ringing and fax machines disgorging their pages. But here the silence was uncanny. Did the servants move around on noiseless feet? Probably. It hit her in a sudden rush of understanding just how lonely it would be, to be a Royal.
She worked hard, marking out places she wanted to visit, and she was just wond
ering what to do about lunch—she didn’t imagine that there was a vending machine sitting outside the throne room!—when there was a rap at the door.
‘Come in,’ she called, and the door opened to reveal the tall, imposing figure of Prince Gianferro.
Somehow she wasn’t a bit surprised.
She rose to her feet. ‘I honestly don’t know whether or not I’m supposed to curtsey,’ she admitted.
He nodded. ‘I think you can be excused,’ he observed drily. ‘This is, after all, a rather informal meeting. I wondered—since I believe you have been working all morning—whether you would care to see the palace gardens? After that, I could arrange to have some lunch sent here.’
So he wasn’t actually inviting her for lunch! He wants to suss me out, she thought suddenly. She nodded. ‘I should like that very much.’
‘Come.’
It was a quiet and silky command, but she thought it came to him as naturally as breathing—which, when she came to think about it, it probably did. He would have been obeyed without question since he was barely out of the cradle—how must that affect a man’s character development? she wondered. How had it affected Nico’s?
As they emerged from the cool marble corridor into the bright sunlit gardens, she felt a ripple of sensation whispering over her skin at the thought of Gianferro’s youngest brother. She wished he were with her. He would protect her from his brother, she realised, from the searching questions she was certain would follow. Or maybe Gianferro was too subtle to interrogate her outright? Would not a man of his birthright establish and direct matters in a far more understated way?
He paused beside a circular bed of the most heavenly roses Ella had ever seen—great rumpled globes of saffron, the petal-tips edged in apricot-pink—and the sweet scent of the massed flowers wafted up to her. She breathed it in.