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

He smiled, but it was nothing more than a distant and sexy smile.

‘Eat something,’ he murmured. ‘You’ll feel better.’

Better?

He put the tray down to plant a long and lingering kiss on her lips, and it had the desired effect of making her skin shiver with longing. But his next words killed it stone-dead.

‘Just because we have a marriage which was born out of practicality,’ he said softly, ‘doesn’t mean to say we can’t make it work—does it, Lucy?’

Her blood ran cold, for it was such an analytical and businesslike assessment, and at that precise moment Lucy realised nothing had changed. He could have been a million miles away from her instead of in the same bedroom. They might have become close in the physical sense, but that was all.

Emotionally, the stalemate remained exactly the same—with her wanting more than her cool Prince of a husband was prepared to give.

CHAPTER TWELVE

THEY stayed put in New York.

‘Don’t you want to be away from my family for a while?’ Guido whispered beguilingly. ‘Just the two of us?’

‘Y-yes,’ she said uncertainly—but how could she even think straight with him dipping his head to run his lips with a butterfly brush down her neck like that?

‘We can fix you up with an obstetrician here, if that’s what you’re worried about.’

Well, actually, it wasn’t—but in a way it was easier to hide behind the natural anxieties of a mother-to-be than the concerns which still lay like a steel barrier between them.

What had happened to walking proud and strong? She had come up against a rock, that was what. The stony and unchangeable knowledge that you couldn’t control someone. You couldn’t make someone love you.

Lucy nodded her head, as if her doctor’s appointment had been what was troubling her all along.

He introduced her to his life in the city. His friends. His business colleagues. They went to England for Christmas to visit her parents in their rambling cottage, where they had spent a Christmas which had not proved to be the endurance test she had been dreading. But then Guido

had been charming and diplomatic—skills which had been drummed into him from the cradle—and her mother and father had not even begun to guess at the great emotional distance which lay between them like a canyon.

Back in New York, there were trips to the opera and weekends out of town. And he took her shopping—he liked taking her shopping—even though she tried to curb the amount of clothes and jewels he lavished on her.

‘Guido, I don’t need all this stuff!’ she protested.

‘Well, no one ever said you needed diamonds,’ he remarked drily. ‘But I thought they were what every woman wanted.’

Were they? Her fingers touched the icy splendour of the huge diamond pendant which dangled between her swollen breasts. A glittering trophy whose cost she didn’t even dare to think about. Would it sound ungrateful to say that sometimes she felt like a little girl who was being given free access to the dressing-up box?

The maternity clothes she wore were cut to cleverly flatter the bump and were shockingly expensive. But as a princess she knew that she needed to look the part. She couldn’t attend all the functions Guido took her to making do with a couple of well-worn and practical maternity outfits, as most of her school-friends seemed to have to.

She could have coped with Guido’s extravagance—with almost anything—if only his behaviour towards her had evolved into something deeper, closer—but it hadn’t. Oh, on one level, things were vastly improved—they did the things that most married couples did now, and regular sex seemed to have made some of his tension disappear. And hers too, if she was being honest. She had made a vow that first night that she was no longer going to use sex as a bartering tool. Apart from anything else, it was counterproductive in Guido’s case.

Resolutely, she put aside her doubts and her fears, and the nagging insecurity that one day he might fall truly in love with another woman and then—contract of marriage or not—it would all be over.

It didn’t matter how tenderly she held him during the night—the true closeness she yearned for somehow evaded them. She felt as though she was playing a part again—only this time the part of young, pregnant bride.

When they were out together she could see people looking at them, sighing wistfully—and part of her could see why. They made a textbook couple, and she was the textbook working woman who had ended up with a fairytale marriage. If only they knew that her husband had never once told her he loved her and that she did not dare to tell him how much—despite all the odds—she loved him.

For love was blind to reason. It wasn’t a balance sheet on which you weighed up all the pros and cons of why you should or should not love someone. Either you did or you didn’t, and Lucy did.

Sometimes she wanted to burrow deep into that cold, clever mind of his and ask him what he really felt about her—except that such a question would sound like the mark of a desperate woman. And what if he told her the truth? Could she face the rest of her life living with it?

She stared at him one morning when they were finishing breakfast. Guido was scanning the financial pages of the newspapers, though she sometimes wondered why he bothered. He had all the wealth a man could want and more—and yet it was never enough. He always seemed to have the burning need to prove himself. To keep climbing the slippery slope of success, even though he had already conquered it.

‘Guido?’