Royal Christmas: Royal Love-Child, Forbidden Marriage

Leo’s eyes met hers and he held her gaze with unrelenting hardness. ‘Then he will never become king.’

She would not let this man make her feel guilty. ‘He doesn’t even want to be king—’

Leo let out a bark of disbelieving laughter. ‘Doesn’t want to be king? When it’s all he’s ever known?’

‘He told me—’

He shrugged in derisive dismissal. ‘Anders,’ he said, cutting her off, ‘rarely knows what he wants.’

‘Well, he does now,’ Phoebe returned with more determination than she felt at the moment. Somehow, as the target of Leo’s incredulous scorn, she found her determination—her faith—trickling away. ‘He wants me,’ she said, and it came out sounding childish.

Leo stared at her for a moment, his expression turning thoughtful, then blank, ominously, dangerously neutral. He could be thinking anything. Planning anything. He cocked his head. ‘And you … want … him?’

‘Of course I do.’ Phoebe fidgeted again; the reception room with its heavy drapes and furniture felt oppressive. A gilded prison. Would she be allowed to walk out of here? She was conscious of her uncertain status as a foreigner in a small and fiercely independent country, and she was even more conscious of the man in front of her, a man with power and authority and clearly no compunction in using both for his own ends.

And where, oh, where was Anders? Did he know she’d been sent for? Why wasn’t he looking for her? Since he’d announced their relationship to the royal family he’d been absent, and she now felt a treacherous flicker of doubt.

‘You know him?’ Leo pressed. ‘Enough to live a life of exile?’

‘Exile from a family that doesn’t accept or love him,’ Phoebe returned. ‘Anders has never wanted this, Mr—Your Grace.’ She swept an arm to encompass the room and the entire palace with its endless expectations.

‘Oh, hasn’t he?’ Leo laughed once, a sharp, unpleasant sound. He moved back to the window, his back to her, seeming lost in thought. Phoebe waited, impatience and worse—fear—starting to fray her hope. Her faith.

‘Would ten thousand dollars, American, do it?’ Leo asked, his back to her, his voice musing. ‘Or more like fifty?’

Phoebe straightened, glad for the renewed wave of outrage that poured through her, replacing the fear and doubt. ‘I told you, no amount—’

‘Phoebe.’ Leo turned around, and the way he said her name sounded strangely gentle, although his eyes were hard, his expression remote. ‘Do you honestly think a man like Anders can make you happy?’

‘And how could a man like you possibly know?’ Phoebe flung back, annoyed and angry that he was making her feel this way. Making her wonder.

Leo stiffened, his face blanking once more. ‘A man like me?’ he enquired with stiff politeness.

‘Anders has told me about you,’ Phoebe said, both the fear and the anger spiking her words, making them hurt, making her want to hurt him—although how could you hurt a man like Leo Christensen? A man who had seen it all, done it all and cared about nothing? Or so the newspapers said, Anders said, and the man in front of her with his sardonic smile and cold voice seemed to confirm every awful thing she’d ever heard. ‘You know nothing about love or loyalty,’ she continued. ‘You care only about your own pleasure—and I suppose I’m a little inconvenience to that—’

‘That you are,’ Leo cut her off. For a second Phoebe wondered if she’d hurt him with her words. No, impossible. He was actually smiling, his mouth curving in a way that was really most unpleasant. Frightening. ‘Quite an inconvenience, Miss Wells. You have no idea just how much.’ As if drawing a mask over the first one, Leo’s expression changed. It became sleepy, speculative, his smile turning seductive. He took a step closer to her. ‘What would have happened, do you suppose,’ he asked in that soft, bedroom voice, ‘if you’d met me first?’

‘Nothing,’ Phoebe snapped, but even so her heart rate kicked up a notch as Leo kept walking towards her with languorous, knowing ease, stopping only a hairsbreadth away. She could feel his heat, smell the faint woodsy tang of his aftershave. She stared determinedly at his shirt, refusing to be intimidated, to show how afraid—how affected—she was. Yet even so, her gaze helplessly moved upwards from the buttons of his fine silk shirt to where they were undone, to that brown column of his throat where a pulse leaped and jerked, and Phoebe felt an answering response deep inside, a tug in her belly that could only be called yearning. Desire.

She flushed in shame.

Leo gave a low chuckle. He raised one hand to brush a wayward curl from her forehead, and Phoebe jerked instinctively in response, felt the heat of his fingers against her skin.

‘Are you so sure about that?’ he queried softly.

‘Yes …’

Yet at that moment she wasn’t, and they both knew it. Heard it in her ragged breathing, saw it in how she almost swayed towards him. Horrible man, Phoebe thought savagely, yet she condemned herself as well. She shouldn’t let him affect her like this, not if she loved Anders, which she did.

Didn’t she?

‘So sure,’ Leo whispered, his voice a soft sneer, and his hand dropped from her forehead to her throat, where her pulse beat as frantically as a trapped bird’s. With one finger he gently touched that sensitive hollow, causing Phoebe to gasp aloud in what—? Shock? Outrage?

Pleasure?

She could still feel the reverberation of his touch, as if a string had been plucked in her soul, and the single note of seduction played throughout her body.

‘Phoebe!’

Gasping again, this time in relief, Phoebe stumbled away from Leo, from his knowing smile and hands. She turned towards the doorway and saw Anders, appearing like the golden god Baldur from the Norse myth, smiling at Phoebe with a radiant certainty that dispelled all her own fears like the dawn mist over the mountains. ‘I’ve been looking for you. No one would tell me where you were—’

‘I’ve been here—’ tears of relief stung Phoebe’s eyes as she hurried towards him ‘—with your cousin.’

Anders glanced at Leo, and his expression darkened with a deeper emotion. Phoebe couldn’t tell if it was disapproval or fear or perhaps even jealousy. She swallowed and glanced at Leo. She saw with a sharp jolt of shock that he was staring at his cousin with a bland expression that somehow still managed to convey a deep and unwavering coldness. Hatred. And Phoebe was reminded of the ending of the Norse myth she’d read about during her travels through Scandinavia: that Baldur had been murdered by his twin brother, Hod, the god of darkness and winter.

‘What do you want with Phoebe, Leo?’ Anders demanded, and his voice sounded strained, even petulant.

‘Nothing.’ Leo smiled, shrugged, spreading his hands wide in a universal gesture of innocence. ‘She obviously loves you, Anders.’ His mouth twisted in a smile that didn’t look quite right.

‘She does,’ Anders agreed, putting an arm around Phoebe’s shoulder. She leaned against him, grateful for his strength, yet still conscious of Leo’s dark, unwavering gaze. ‘I don’t know why you were talking to her, Leo, but we’re both determined to be together—’

‘And such determination is so very admirable,’ Leo cut across him softly. ‘I will tell the king so.’

Anders’s expression hardened, his lower lip jutting out in an expression more appropriate to a six-year-old before he shrugged and nodded. ‘You may do so. If he wanted you to convince me otherwise …’

Leo smiled and that simple gesture made Phoebe want to shiver. There was nothing kind or good or loving about it. ‘Obviously, I cannot.’ He lifted one shoulder. ‘What more is there to say?’

‘Nothing,’ Anders finished. He turned to Phoebe. ‘It’s time for us to leave, Phoebe. There’s nothing for us here. We can take the ferry to Oslo and then catch the afternoon train to Paris.’

Phoebe nodded, relieved, knowing she should be excited. Ecstatic.

Yet as she walked from the room, Anders’s arm still around her shoulders, she was conscious only of Leo’s unrelenting gaze, and that dark emotion emanating from him which seemed strangely—impossibly—like sorrow.

CHAPTER TWO

Six years later

IT WAS raining in Paris, a needling grey drizzle that blanketed the royal mourners in grey, and made the images on the television screen blurry and virtually unrecognisable.

Not, Phoebe acknowledged, that she’d met any of Anders’s family besides his cousin. Leo. Even now his name made her skin prickle, made her recall that terrible, cold look he’d given Anders as they’d left the Amarnesian palace. That was the last time either she or Anders had seen any of his family, or even stepped foot in his native country.

Six years ago … a lifetime, or two. Certainly more than one life had been affected—formed, changed—in the last half-decade.

‘Mommy?’ Christian stood behind the sofa where Phoebe had curled up, watching the funeral on one of those obscure cable channels. Now she turned to smile at her five-year-old son, who was gazing at the television with a faint frown. ‘What are you watching?’

‘Just …’ Phoebe shrugged, reaching to turn off the television. How to explain to Christian that his father—the father he hadn’t ever even seen—had died? It would be meaningless to Christian, who had long ago accepted the fact that he didn’t have a daddy. He didn’t need one, had been happy with the life Phoebe had provided, with friends and relatives and school here in New York.

‘Just what?’ Christian put his hands on his hips, his expression halfway between a pout and a mischievous grin. He was all boy, curious about everything, always asking what, why, who.