The Prince Brothers: Satisfaction Guaranteed!: Prince's Passion / Prince's Pleasure / Prince's Love-Child

Not very gallant of him, he accepted, but, for some reason he couldn’t completely explain, Jane Morrow’s hand on his chest just now had given him a distinct feeling of distaste.

It couldn’t be because he was falling for Jinx, could it? a little voice mocked inside his head. A little voice that sounded decidedly like Zak’s voice teasing him!

And the answer was…no, he wasn’t falling for Jinx. She seemed extremely vulnerable to him, very much alone, which probably brought out the same protective instinct in him that he felt towards his sister Stazy, but he certainly wasn’t falling for her.

Protesting too much, BB?

Zak’s voice again, damn it. And he had told both Zak and Rik repeatedly not to call him Big Brother.

But then, if he wasn’t falling for Jinx, exactly what was he doing chasing all over London after her in cabs?

Securing the movie rights to a book, that was what!

Lame, Nik, extremely lame. He might as well admit it, to himself if to no one else: the movie had become secondary in his pursuit of Jinx. She was what he wanted right now, every satiny inch of her naked beneath him, her legs wrapped about his hips as they took each other to the heights and back.

He was so lost in thoughts of that image as he came out of the building onto the pavement that he almost missed Jinx’s cab pulling away from the kerb. Mentally cursing himself for his daydreaming, he rushed forward to hail another cab, climbing inside to tell the driver to follow the cab ahead.

The sideways glance he received from the cabbie in the overhead driving mirror, even as he turned the vehicle out into the flow of traffic, was enough to make Nik feel like a character in a second-rate movie. And he had never made a second-rate movie in his life, let alone starred in one.

‘The lady left her purse behind,’ he leant forward to mutter.

He received another sideways glance for his trouble. ‘Course she did, mate!’ the cabbie said skeptically.

Nik decided to ignore the driver and instead concentrate on the cab ahead. He could just see Jinx’s head above the back seat, that fiery red hair unmistakable. She wasn’t going to like the fact that he was following her, so he would have to make sure—

‘I ’ate to say this, guv’ner,’ the cabbie cut in on his thoughts a few minutes later, ‘but I ’ave a feeling that someone’s following you too. The taxi be’ind is sticking pretty close, if ya know what I mean?’

Nik did know what he meant, having glanced back to see another black cab almost driving on the bumper of this one, two passengers visible in the back of the vehicle, even if their features were indistinguishable. But every turn that this cab took as it followed behind Jinx, the one behind followed.

Reporters again? Nik couldn’t think of anyone else it could be. And if it was the same two from earlier this morning, they were obviously ticked off with him enough to be dogged in their pursuit.

‘Can you lose them?’ he asked his driver.

‘I can try,’ the man came back with a cheeky grin, obviously relishing the thought. ‘But I might lose sight of the cab in front if I do that.’

Continue to follow Jinx? Or lose the cab behind?

After this morning’s fiasco, Jinx certainly wasn’t going to thank him if he should lead a reporter directly to her door. But if he had the driver divert from following her, in an effort to divert the cab following his, Nik had a feeling he might never find Jinx again.

Something that didn’t please him at all.

Neither choice was a good one as far as he was concerned.

‘Okay,’ he sighed heavily. ‘Turn off at the end of the next block and let’s lose these guys.’ And he would lose Jinx…

He gazed regretfully after her cab as his driver took the next left turn, her own cab continuing straight on.

‘Uh oh,’ his driver murmured a few seconds later.

‘What is it?’ Nik demanded sharply.

The man shrugged. ‘Guess they weren’t following you, after all.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Take a look.’ The man grimaced.

Nik turned to look out the back window, the other cab no longer in sight. ‘Where did they go?’

Surely they couldn’t both have been wrong, after all? If they had, and the cab just happened to have been going the same way that they were, that meant he had lost Jinx for absolutely no reason.

‘They continued to follow the other cab, I’m afraid, guv,’ the man told him apologetically.

Nik frowned at the empty road behind them. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Positive.’

Nik didn’t hesitate. ‘Turn back onto the other road, will you, and see if you can catch them up again?’

While he tried to work out exactly what was going on!

He had assumed, both he and Jinx—after a little persuasion on his part—that the reporter from this morning was following him in the hopes of getting a story, that Jinx’s presence there just happened to be coincidental. But what if they had both been wrong…?

Now that he thought about it, he remembered that the woman who had turned out to be a reporter had already been in the hotel when he’d met Jinx in Reception this morning, sitting in one of the chairs there apparently reading a newspaper.

She had then followed them through to the lounge, again seemingly reading a newspaper as she drank a cup of coffee.

But what if following Nik was only a means to an end, in the hopes that he’d lead the reporter and her photographer to the mysterious author J. I. Watson…?

Something he had undoubtedly done!

CHAPTER EIGHT

JINX heaved a sigh of relief as the taxi pulled in next to the kerb beside her home, so weary now that she didn’t even want to think about—

‘Get out of the cab and go into the house, Jinx! Quickly!’ Nik Prince instructed grimly as he wrenched open the door beside her.

She stared up at him dazedly. Where on earth had he come from? More to the point, how had he got here? If he had been following her again—

‘I don’t have time to explain now, Jinx,’ he muttered impatiently, starting to pull her out of the taxi. ‘Just go inside and lock the door!’

She blinked up at him incredulously as she suddenly found herself out on the pavement beside him. ‘Now just listen here, Nik—’

‘Now, Jinx!’ he rasped, taking her firmly by the shoulders and turning her in the direction of the house.

One glance at the reporter from this morning, the photographer at her side—obviously with a replacement film if the fact that he was focusing the machine on her was any indication—as the two of them hurried across the pavement towards her was enough to send Jinx hurtling in the direction of the house as if the devil were at her heels.

She almost dropped her door key in her hurry to unlock the door, shooting one last frantic glance in Nik’s direction as he stood arguing with the reporter and photographer, before she escaped into the house and closed the door firmly behind her.