The Royal House of Niroli: Scandalous Seductions: The Future King's Pregnant Mistress / Surgeon Prince, Ordinary Wife

He and his grandfather had made their peace, his father was gone, he himself was a man and not a boy any more. It was only in his dreams now that he sometimes revisited the pain of his past. When he did, that pain could be quickly extinguished in the raw passion of satisfying his physical desire for Emily.

But what about the time when Emily would no longer be there? Why was he wasting his time asking himself such foolish questions? Ultimately he would find himself another mistress, no doubt via a discreet liaison with the right kind of woman, perhaps a young wife married to an older husband, though not so young that she didn’t understand the rules, of course. He might even, if Emily had been sensible enough, have thought about providing her with the respectability of marriage to some willing courtier in order that they carry on their affair, once he became King of Niroli. But, Marco acknowledged, the very passion that made her such a responsive lover also meant she was not the type who would adapt to the traditional role of royal mistress.

Emily would love Niroli, an island so beautiful and fruitful that ancient lore had said Prometheus himself caused it to rise up from the sea bed so that he could bestow it on mankind.

When Marco thought of the place of his birth, his mental image was one of an island bathed in sunlight, an island so richly gifted by the gods that it was little wonder some legends had referred to it as an earthly paradise.

But where there was great beauty there was also terrible cruelty, as was true of so many legends. The gods had often exacted a terrible price from Niroli for their gifts.

He pushed back the duvet, knowing that he wouldn’t be able to sleep now. His body was lean and powerful, magnificently drawn, as though etched by one of the great masters, in the charcoal shadows of the moonlight as he left the bed and padded silently toward the window.

The wind had picked up and was lashing rain against the windows, bending the bare branches of the trees on the street outside. Marco was again transported back to Niroli, where violent storms often swept over the island, whipping up its surrounding seas. The people of Niroli knew not to venture out during the high tides that battered the volcanic rock cliffs of a mountain range so high and so inaccessible in parts that even today it still protected and concealed the bandit descendants of Barbary pirates who long ago had invaded the island. In fact, the fierce seas sucking deep beneath the cliffs had honeycombed them into underwater caves and weakened the rock so that whole sections of it had fallen away. The gales that stirred the seas also tore and ripped at the ancient olive trees and the grapevines on the island, as though to punish them because their harvest had already been plucked to safety.

As a boy Marco had loved to watch the wind savage the land far below the high turrets of the royal castle. He would kneel on the soft padded seating beneath an ancient stone window embrasure, excited by the danger of the storm, wanting to go out and accept the challenge it threw at him. But he had never been allowed to go outside and play as other children did. Instead, at his grandfather’s insistence, he’d had to remain within the castle walls, learning about his family’s past and his own future role as the island’s ultimate ruler.

Inside Marco’s head, images he couldn’t control were starting to form, curling wraithlike from his childhood memories. It had always been his grandfather and not his parents who had dictated the rules of his childhood, and who’d seen that they were imposed on him…

‘Marco, come back to bed. It’s cold without you.’ Emily’s voice was soft and slow, warm, full and sweet with promise, like the fruit of Niroli’s vines at the time of harvest, when the grapes lay heavily beneath the sun swollen with ripe readiness and with implicit invitation.

He turned round. He had woken her after all. Emily ran her small interior design business from a small shop-cum-office just off London’s Sloane Street. Marco had known from the moment he first saw her at a PR cocktail party that he’d wanted her, and that he’d intended to have her. And he’d made sure that she’d known it too. Marco was used to getting his own way, to claiming his right to direct the course of his own life, even if that meant imposing his will on those who would oppose him. This was an imperative for him, one he refused to be swayed from. He had quickly elucidated that Emily was a divorced woman with no children, and that had made her pattern-card perfect for the role of his mistress. If he had known then her real emotional and sexual history, he knew that he would not have pursued her. But, by the time he had discovered the truth, his physical desire for her had been such that it had been impossible for him to reject her.

He looked towards her now, feeling that desire gripping him again and fighting against it as he had fought all his life against anything or anyone who threatened to control him.

‘Marco, something’s wrong. What is it?’

Where had it come from, this unwanted ability she seemed to possess of sensing what she could not possibly be able to know? The year his parents died, the storms had come early to Niroli. Marco could remember how when he had first received the news, even before he had said anything, she had somehow guessed that something was wrong. However,whilst she might be intuitive where his feelings were concerned, Emily hadn’t yet been shrewd or suspicious enough to make the connection between the announcement of his parents’ deaths and the news in the media about the demise of the next in line to the Niroli throne. He remembered how hurt she had looked when he’d informed her that he would be attending his mother and father’s funeral without her, but she hadn’t said a word. Maybe because she hadn’t wanted to provoke a row that might have led to him ending their affair, the reason she didn’t want it to end being that, for all her apparent lack of interest in his money, she had to be well aware of what she would lose financially if their relationship came to a close. It was, in Marco’s opinion, impossible for any woman to be as unconcerned about the financial benefits of being his mistress as Emily affected to be. It was as his grandfather had warned him: the women who thronged around him expected to be lavishly rewarded with expensive gifts and had no compunction about making that plain.

Under cover of the room’s darkness, Emily grimaced to hear the note of pleading in her own voice. Why, when she despised herself so much for what she was becoming, couldn’t she stop herself? Was she destined always to have relationships that resulted in her feeling insecure?

‘Nothing’s wrong,’ Marco told her. There was a note in his voice that made her body tense and her emotions flinch despite everything she was trying to do not to let that happen. The trouble was that once you started lying to yourself on an almost hourly, never mind daily, basis about the reality of your relationship, once you started pretending not to notice or care about being the ‘lesser’ partner, about not being valued or respected enough, you entered a place where the strongest incentive was not to seek out the truth but rather to hide from it. But she had no one but herself to blame for her current situation, she reminded herself.

She had known right from the start what kind of man Marco was, and the type of relationship he wanted with her. The problem was that she had obviously known Marco’s agenda rather better than she had understood her own. Although she tried not to do so, sometimes when she was feeling at her lowest—times like now—she couldn’t stop herself from giving in to the temptation of fantasising about how Marco could be different: he would not be so fabulously wealthy or arrogantly sexy that he could have any woman he wanted, but instead he’d be just an ordinary man with ordinary goals—a happy marriage, a wife… Her heart kicked heavily, turning over in a slow grind of pain. She thought of children—theirs—and it turned over again, the pain growing more intense.

Why, why, why had she been such a fool and fallen in love with Marco? He had made it plain from the start what he wanted from her and what he would give her back in return, and love had never been part of the deal. But then, way back when, she had never imagined that she would fall for him. At the beginning, she had wanted Marco so much, she had been happy to go along with a purely sexual relationship, for as long as he wanted her.

No, she had no one but herself to blame for the constant pain she was now having to endure, the deceit she was having to practise and the fear that haunted her: one day soon Marco would sense that deceit and leave her. She loathed herself so much for her own weakness and for not having the guts to acknowledge her love or take the consequences of walking away from him, through the inevitable fiery consuming pain. But, who knew? Maybe walking away from Marco would have a phoenix-like effect on her and allow her to find freedom as a new person. She was such a coward, though, that she couldn’t take that step. Hadn’t someone once said that a brave man died only once but a coward died a thousand times? So it was for her. She knew that she ought to leave and deal with her feelings, but instead she stayed and suffered a thousand hurtful recognitions every day of Marco’s lack of love for her.

But he desired her, and she couldn’t bring herself to give up the fragile hope that maybe, just maybe, things would change, and one day he would look at her and know that he loved her, that one day he would allow her to access that part of himself he guarded with such ferocity and tell her that he wanted them to be together for ever.

CHAPTER TWO

THAT was Emily’s dream. But the reality was, recently, she’d felt as if they were growing further apart rather than closer. She’d told herself yesterday morning she would face her fear. She took a deep breath.

‘Marco, I’ve always been open and…and honest with you.’ It was no good, she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t make herself ask him that all-important question: ‘Do you want to end our relationship?’ And, besides, she hadn’t always been honest with him, had she? She hadn’t told him, for instance, that she had fallen in love with him. Her heart gave another painful lurch.

Marco was watching her, his head inclined towards her. He wore his thick dark hair cut short, but not so short that she couldn’t run her fingers through it, shaping the hard bone beneath it as she held him to her when they made love. There was just enough light for her to see the gleam in his eyes, as though he’d guessed the direction her thoughts had taken and knew how much she wanted him. Marco had the most piercingly direct look she’d ever known. He’d focused it on her the night they’d met, when she had tried to cling to reason and rationality, instead of letting herself be blatantly seduced by a pair of tawny-brown predator’s eyes…

Emily knew she should make her stand now and demand an explanation for the change she could sense in Marco, but her childhood made it difficult for her to talk openly about her emotions. Instead she hid them away behind locked doors of calm control and self-possession. Was it because she was afraid of what might happen if she allowed her real feelings to get out of control? Because she was afraid of bringing the truth out into the open? Something was wrong. Marco had changed: he had become withdrawn and preoccupied. There was no way she could pretend otherwise. Had he grown tired of her? Did he want to end their relationship? Wouldn’t it be better, wiser, more self-respecting, if she challenged him to tell her the truth? Did she really think that if she ignored her fears they would simply disappear?

‘You say that you’ve always been open and honest with me, Emily, but that isn’t the truth, is it?’

Emily’s heart somersaulted with slow, sickening despair. He knew? Somehow he had guessed what she was thinking and—almost as bad—she could see he was spoiling for an argument… because that would give him an excuse to end things.

‘Remember the night I took you to dinner and you told me about your marriage? Remember how “open” you were with me then—and what you didn’t tell me?’ Marco recalled sarcastically.

Emily couldn’t speak. A mixture of relief and anguish filled her. Her marriage! All this time she had thought—believed—that Marco had understood the scars her past had inflicted on her, but now she realised that she had been wrong. ‘It wasn’t deliberate, you know that,’ she told him, fighting not to let her voice tremble. ‘I didn’t deliberately hold back anything.’ Why was he bringing that up now? she wondered. Surely he wasn’t planning to use it as an excuse to get rid of her? He wasn’t the kind of man who needed an excuse to do anything, she told herself. He was too arrogant to feel he needed to soften any blows he had to deliver.

Marco looked away from Emily, irritated with himself for saying what he had. Why had he brought up her marriage now, when the last thing he wanted was the danger involved in the sentimentality of looking back to the beginning of their relationship? But it was too late, he was already remembering…

He had taken Emily to dinner, setting the scene for how he had hoped the evening would end by telling her coolly how much he wanted to make love to her and how pleased he was that she was a woman of the world, with a marriage behind her and no children to worry about.

‘Just out of interest,’ he’d quizzed her, ‘what was the reason for your divorce?’ If there was anything in her past, he wanted to know about it before things went any further.

For a moment he thought that she was going to refuse to answer him. But then her eyes widened slightly and he knew that she had correctly interpreted his question, without him having to spell it out to her. She clearly knew that if she did refuse, their relationship would be over before it had properly begun.

When she finally began to speak, she surprised him with the halting, almost stammering way in which she hesitated and then fiddled nervously with her cutlery, suddenly looking far less calm and in control than he had previously seen her. Her face was shadowed with anxiety and he assumed that the cause of the breakdown in her marriage must have been related to something she had done—such as being unfaithful to her husband. The last thing he expected to hear was what she actually told him. So much so, in fact, that he was tempted to accuse her of lying, but something he saw in her eyes stopped him.

Now Marco shifted his weight from one foot to the other, remembering how shocked he’d been by the unexpected and unwilling compassion he had felt for her as she’d struggled to overcome her reluctance to talk about what was obviously a painful subject…

‘I lost my parents in a car accident when I was seven and I was brought up by my widowed paternal grandfather,’ she told him.

‘He wasn’t unkind to me, but he wasn’t a man who was comfortable around young children, especially not emotional young girls. He was a retired Cambridge University academic, very gentle and very unworldly. He read the classics to me as bedtime stories. He knew so much about literature but, although I didn’t realise it at the time, very little about life. My upbringing with him was very sheltered and protected, very restricted in some ways, especially when I reached my early teens and his health started to deteriorate.

‘Gramps’ circle of friends was very small, a handful of elderly fellow academics, and…and Victor.’

‘Victor?’ Marco probed, hearing the hesitation in her voice.

‘Yes. Victor Lewisham, my ex-husband. He had been one of Gramps’ students, before becoming a university lecturer himself.’

‘He must have been considerably older than you?’ Marco guessed.

‘Twenty years older,’ Emily agreed, nodding her head. ‘When it became obvious that my grandfather’s health was deteriorating, he told me that Victor had agreed to look after me after…in his place. Gramps died a few weeks after that. I was in my first year at university then, and, even though I’d known how frail he was, somehow I hadn’t…I wasn’t prepared. Losing him was such a shock. He was all I had, you see, and so when Victor proposed to me and told me that it was what Gramps would have wanted, I…’ She ducked her head and looked away from Marco and then said in a low voice, ‘I should have refused, but somehow I just couldn’t imagine how I would manage on my own. I was so afraid…such a coward.’

‘So it was a marriage of necessity?’ Marco shrugged dismissively. ‘Was he good in bed?’

It continued to irk Marco to have to admit that his direct and unsubtle challenge to Emily had sprung from a sudden surge of physical jealousy that the thought of her with another man had aroused. But then sexual jealousy wasn’t an emotion he’d ever previously had to deal with. Sex was sex, a physical appetite satisfied by a physical act. Emotions didn’t come into it and he had never seen why they should. He still didn’t. And he still had no idea what had made him confront her like that, or what had driven such an out-of-character fury at the thought of her with another man, even though she had had yet to become his. It had caught him totally off guard when he had seen the sudden shimmer of suppressed tears in her eyes. At first he’d wanted to believe they were caused by her grief at the breakdown of her marriage, but to his shock, she had told him quietly:

‘Our marriage…our relationship, in fact, was never physically consummated.’

Marco remembered how he had struggled not to show his astonishment, perhaps for the first time in his life recognising that what he had needed to show wasn’t the arrogant disbelief so often evinced by his grandfather, but instead restraint and patience, to give her time to explain. Which was exactly what she had done, once she had silently checked that he wasn’t going to refuse to believe her.

‘I was too naïve to realise at first that Victor making no attempt to approach me sexually might not be a. because of gentlemanly consideration for my inexperience,’ she continued. ‘And then even after we were married—I didn’t want him, you see, so it was easy for me not to question why he didn’t want to make love to me. If I hadn’t lived such a sheltered life, and I’d spent more time with people my own age, things would probably have been different, and I’d certainly have been more aware that something wasn’t right. But as it was, it wasn’t until I…I found him in bed with someone else that I realised—’

‘He had a mistress,’ Marco interrupted her, his normal instinct to question and probe reasserting itself.

There was just the merest pause before she told him quietly, ‘He had a lover, yes. A male lover,’ she emphasised shakily.

‘I should have guessed, of course, and I suspect poor Victor thought that I had. He treated me very much as a junior partner in our relationship, like a child whom he expected to revere him and accept his superiority. For me to find him in bed with one of his young students was a terrible blow to his pride. He couldn’t forgive me for blundering in on them, and the only way I could forgive myself for being so foolish was to insist that we divorce. At first he was reluctant to agree. He belonged more to my grandfather’s generation than to his own, I suspect. He couldn’t come to terms with his sexuality, which was why he had tried to conceal it within a fake marriage. He refused to say why he couldn’t be open about his sexual nature. He got very angry when I tried to talk to him about it and suggested that, for his own sake, he should accept himself. The truth was, as I quickly learned, that to others his sexuality was not the secret he liked to think. There was no valid reason why he should have hidden it, but he was just that kind of man.