The Prodigal Prince's Seduction / The Heir's Scandalous Affair: The Prodigal Prince's Seduction

She suddenly shut her eyes. “Okay, let’s rewind and replay before I dig a hole to Malaysia. I made it all sound so pathetic and self-pitying, and that isn’t how I see my life. I’ve had it way better than most people. Despite my father’s problems, so many things, starting with my mother and our benefactor, provided me with a secure and reasonably happy childhood. I had a great time at boarding school and college, and my marriage, ugliness and all, lasted only four months and I own up to my role in it. I’ve established my own company and I loved every second of exploring and achieving so much on the way. My mother died, but I’m thankful she didn’t suffer long and that I had such an incredible friend and parent for so long. So…I hope I haven’t caused you to reach your whining tolerance level.”

She was making light of her ordeals, and, maledizione, meaning it. The expectedness of her last words awoke his humor, which he thought an insult to the suffering she’d related. But her come-on, laugh-with-me expression forced him to submit.

He coughed a distressed laugh. “You sent my sense of perspective levels through the roof, after they’d dwindled to trace elements. You forced me to revise how I perceive my own life. Seems I’ve been guilty of letting my…issues rule my mind-set.”

She shook her head, teasing radiating from her heavenly eyes. “I thought higher beings like you had global obstacles and dilemmas and crises, but nothing so petty as ‘issues.’”

He gave a grunt laden with self-disgust. “Leave it to you to underline how oblivious and tiny and self-indulgent it all is.”

She chuckled. “Anytime.”

He reached out across the table, took her hand. He needed to be connected to her as he made his own confessions. “My experience with my mother reflects yours with your father. She died five years ago, but I too was eleven when I started to realize I was losing her. It was then that I set out to detach myself, that I learned that no one is guaranteed to be there for me. I’ve become so comfortable being disconnected, so driven and distracted, that I no longer notice all the good that fills my life.”

Her other hand descended to his, imbuing him with a calm that was previously unknown to him, a restfulness to mirror the compassion that filled her eyes. “She suffered depression, too?”

He’d never discussed this, never given what his mother had suffered a name, not even with his siblings. He needed to talk about it now, with her, needed to name what had taken his mother away a piece every day, look it full in the face instead of evading it and having it invade far more of him instead.

“I think she was bipolar. Severely so.”

“So it’s true. No one is exempt. My father, a man who had everything, your mother, a queen with the world at her feet, both prisoners to something so dark and inescapable inside them.”

Pressure built behind his eyes as cold outrage at the injustice of it all gave way to the empathy flowing between them in sweeping currents. He surrendered to the release of sharing, of having another fully appreciate and understand.

Suddenly, urgency stained her gaze. Everything inside him became primed to defend, to contain. He had no tolerance for her distress, he was discovering. “What is it, bellissima? Tell me.”

She grimaced. “It’s nothing. It’s…” She stopped, closed her eyes, exhaled. “What the hell. I’ve put my foot in it too much already to get delicate at this late stage. I was just wondering if…if you’ve ever wondered if you have that seed of sourceless desperation and instability inside you?”

He stiffened with yet another jolt at how in tune she was with him, sensing fears that never came into focus, but cast their darkness over his existence nevertheless.

He let his counter-question acknowledge her insight just as it expressed his concern for her. “Do you?”

“Only since my mother died. I finally wondered if I’ve never been able to be close to others because I had something lurking inside me, because I subconsciously felt that emotional involvement would raise the chances that it would manifest.”

“And what’s your verdict?”

“I don’t know. What complicates matters and stops me from coming up with anything conclusive is the fact that it wasn’t a struggle not to be close. I wasn’t even tempted until…”

She stopped. He couldn’t anymore. He cupped her cheek as he’d been aching to. “Until tonight.”

Warmth surged from his gut when she acquiesced, to the truth of his statement, to his hold, letting her flesh mold to his palm.

And he had to ask. “Did you ever wonder if whatever consumed your father wasn’t sourceless, after all?”

She nuzzled into his caress. “I guess sourceless is the wrong word to use, what with all the physiological and social factors involved in the development of such a major disorder. I guess it’s the out-of-proportion, ever-compounding emotional response that becomes so far removed from whatever triggered it, making it seem as if there were no origin.” She sighed, singeing his flesh with the heat of her breath. “As I said, I’ll never know what started my father down that spiral.”

“I know what started my mother down hers. It was my father.”

Such shock, such pain flooded her eyes at his muttered bitterness that he groaned, cupped her head, needing to alleviate her distress.

She reached out to his face, her hand trembling in a caress that assuaged some of the darkness festering inside him.

She finally said, “I’m so sorry you believe that. I can’t imagine how painful it is to think one of your parents was responsible for the other’s deterioration. It’s the only thing that holds me together, that I believe that there was no one to blame.”

He rose, bent across the table. He gazed into her misty eyes for a heart-thudding moment, then descended, pressed his lips to hers in a brief, barely leashed kiss. “Grazie, bellissima.”

Her moan reverberated inside him. His fingers fisted in her tresses, spilling another moan from her lips, detonating charges of sensation across his skin. He withdrew before temptation overwhelmed him, sat down. His gaze pored over her, the image of her beauty burned onto his retinas.

Such beauty. Totally her own, following no one else’s ideas or rules, including his own before he’d set eyes on her. Beyond physical, with so many levels to it—levels he kept discovering with no end in sight. She was short-circuiting the civilized man he’d been certain he was, unleashing a primal male who wanted to possess, plunder. But it also made that same male want to protect, to pamper.

She inclined her head at him. “You can sing, can’t you?”

He blinked at the question—the statement, really. He didn’t even think to inquire about such a detour’s origin and intent. He just flowed with her along the wave of unpredictability, of freedom from rules and expectations.

“Can’t everyone,” he said. “to some degree or another?”

“Uh, no. Not according to my singing teacher, another suffering soul who told me she had nightmares of waking up in a world where everyone had my same singing ability, making her profession obsolete and putting her permanently out of a job.”

He frowned. “My teacher criticized my intentional truancy. He wouldn’t have disparaged my performance or made me feel responsible for it had it been a limitation on my part. That inconsiderate wretch who taught you had no business telling a child something like that, just because your talents didn’t meet her standards and your progress didn’t conform to her timetable.”

She beamed him such a look, full of mischief and embarrassment, that he wondered where he found the will to remain where he was. “Uh, I wasn’t exactly a child when the brilliant idea of taking singing lessons sprouted in my mind three years ago. And I did test her last tune-sensitive nerve by insisting on singing along with Whitney Houston and Maria Callas. The comparison was agonizing even to my own self-forgiving ears. But I have a feeling you can hold your own with the Elvises and Pavarottis of the world.”

He raised one eyebrow, goading her into telling him more. “Hmm, I wonder how you came by that conviction.”

Her grin grew impish and indulgent at once. “In your case, fishing will get you whales. You reaffirm that conviction every time you open your mouth and unleash that honed weapon you have for a voice. Uomo cattivo that you are, you unrepentantly use it to its full destructive effect. It’s very easy for me to imagine you taking your mastery over it to its highest conclusion.”

Stimulation revved higher. He let himself revel in the gratification of their repartee, challenged, fishing for even bigger whales. “I’ve heard many superlative singers who don’t sound special when they talk.”

“Sure, but I bet that’s not the case with you.”

“So what are you after? An admission? An audition?”

Her dimples flashed at him. “The first would be great, so I can gloat over my uncanny acumen. The second, alas, would be so much better even than having your ear for an hour—or a week—that I think it would warrant something larger than a ten-million-dollar bid.”

He reached for her hand and placed it on her fork. “I have a third option. Let’s finish this meal, and I’ll offer you something better than either at no cost but your willingness to accept it.” She sat forward, anticipation ablaze on her face. And he offered something he’d never imagined offering to anyone, ever. “A serenade.”

Darkness was melting under dawn’s advance, the horizon starting to simmer with colors, the rest of the sky’s blackness bleaching to indigo, the stars blinking out one by one.

Durante had taken his bellissima to the bow, initiating a match of quips around the Titanic movie parallel. Merriment had dissolved with the night into a silence filled with serenity and companionship. Soon it seemed as natural and needed as breathing for her to fill his embrace, just as she seemed to need to be contained there.

For the next hour, as the magic of the night segued into the new spell of dawn, he encompassed her, her back to his front, his arms crisscrossed around her midriff, his legs parted to accommodate her, imbuing her with his heat, protecting her from the chill of the breeze. She accepted him as her shield, surrendered to his cosseting and to that of the wind on her face as the yacht sailed toward the sun.

In this proximity, there was no disguising the extent of his arousal. Not that he tried to. He’d admitted his reaction to her minutes into their first conversation. His body had made its own admissions to her the moment he gathered her to him, his erection obvious through the confines of clothes and control.

Her own state must be as acute. The only movements she seemed capable of were the spasmodic pressing of her hands on the railing, and trembling. Was she trying not to press back into him as hard as he wanted to grind into her?

But he wouldn’t fracture this intensity, this purity of feeling for anything. This was too rare to rush, too precious to squander even for the ecstasy they were certain to find in each other. Not yet. They had to have this first.

It was magnificent, sharing this with her, experiencing each other without words after the liveliness of their verbal communication. Now the only sounds that permeated the whispers and whistles of the wind and the splash of the water were his groans as he pressed his lips into her neck, against her cheeks, the corner of her mouth, her moans as her tremors spiked with every press and glide. He felt as if every inch of her was made to click into every inch of him, that the eight or nine inches he had on her five foot six or seven had been bestowed on him so he’d envelop her like this.