by Trish Morey / Caitlin Crews / Nina Harrington / Raye Morgan
Four royal romances …
Four amazing love stories …
Mills & Boon is thrilled to present …
A
Royal
WEDDING
Four brand-new, irresistible romances
from beloved authors
TRISH MOREY, CAITLIN CREWS,
NINA HARRINGTON & RAYE MORGAN
Dear Readers,
At the end of 2009 when we were thinking about the books we wanted to publish in 2011, we had no idea that there would be a real royal wedding in April. But how exciting and how lovely!
We wish Prince William and his beautiful bride every happiness.
We hope that you will all be entertained by the four very different novellas in this perfectly timed super collection.
Also, to celebrate this historic event, Mills & Boon have created a special ebook collection: Royal Weddings … through the ages. Read about the future king’s ancestors and the people who helped bring their special days together. Seven couples, seven marriages, seven stories for you to enjoy! Visit www.millsandboon.co.uk.
Enjoy!
The Editors
A
Royal
WEDDING
The Strom Within
TRISH MOREY
The Reluctant Queen
CAITLIN CREWS
The Ordinary King
NINA HARRINGTON
The Prince’s Forbidden Love
RAYE MORGAN
www.millsandboon.co.uk
The Strom Within
TRISH MOREY
About the Author
TRISH MOREY is an Australian who’s also spent time living and working in New Zealand and England. Now she’s settled with her husband and four young daughters in a special part of South Australia, surrounded by orchards and bushland, and visited by the occasional koala and kangaroo. With a lifelong love of reading, she penned her first book at the age of eleven, after which life, career, and a growing family kept her busy until once again she could indulge her desire to create characters and stories—this time in romance. Having her work published is a dream come true. Visit Trish at her website, www.trishmorey.com.
Look for The Heir from Nowhere, Trish Morey’s most recent novel from Mills & Boon® Modern™.
Dear Reader,
There’s something about a craggy Mediterranean island topped with a looming castle that really appeals to me as a setting. The combination of remote with imposing might well be a mirror to the hero, who is as unapproachable and intimidating as the island setting itself.
Count Alessandro Volta is as unapproachable and intimidating as they come. Scarred both physically and mentally from a tragedy that left him the only survivor, Alessandro shuns society and the media and takes to self-imposed exile on his storm-ridden island home. Until a discovery is made in the secret tunnels beneath his castle, the lost pages from an ancient book of healing.
The woman who comes to evaluate the find is not the crusty academic he was expecting and suddenly Alessandro finds his escape from the world challenged by Dr Grace Hunter, a passionate scientist whose unwelcome presence threatens to break down the dark shields around him and thrust him once again into the light.
But can the fabled book of healing live up to its reputation and heal a heart so savagely broken? And will this unlikely couple ever earn their summer royal wedding?
I hope you enjoy finding out.
With very best wishes,
Trish
x
With grateful thanks to the real Archival Survival team, Angela Henrickson and Geoff McIntyre, and especially to Annie for all her help with a project that was so totally left field.
I’m not sure if this is what you envisioned Annie, when I first put the premise of this story to you, but thank you so much for your advice and assistance and for your sheer enthusiasm! Any mistakes or omissions are purely author error.
Thank you Annie!
CHAPTER ONE
SHE was coming. From his office overlooking the sea, Count Alessandro Alonso Leopold Volta watched the launch approach the island that was home to Castello di Volta and the seat of the Volta family for more than five hundred years.
The boat hadn’t even docked and already the bitter taste of bile hovered menacingly at the back of his throat.
He growled. He hated visitors, hated the way they brought the smell of the outside world with them, as if clinging to their very clothes. He hated their wide-eyed stares and their looks of horror when they first saw his scars, horror that bleached their faces white and sent their eyes skidding away to the floor or to the nearest work of art. Anywhere, it seemed, that wasn’t his face.
But most of all he hated their pity, for the horror always gave way to pity.
He preferred the horror.
His hands curled into fists at his side. He didn’t want anyone’s pity.
He didn’t want anyone. Period.
The launch slowed, rocking sideways on the bumpy water as it neared the dock and its wash caught up with it. He ground his teeth together and turned away, knowing that this time he had no choice. The package found tucked away in the caves deep beneath the castle had seen to that.
Why here? he asked himself again. Why, of all the places in the world, of all the places that would welcome the attention such a discovery would bring, why had what could be the lost pages from the fabled Salus Totus, the legendary Book of Wholeness, had to turn up here? When had fate taken to wearing a clown’s mask?
He grunted his displeasure and dropped into the chair behind his desk. One week Professor Rousseau had promised him the job would take. No longer than one week to examine and document the pages, to determine whether they were genuine, and if so to stabilise their condition until they could be taken away and prepared for display. One short yet no doubt interminable week, with a stranger clattering around the castle, asking questions and expecting answers, and probably expecting him to be civil in the process.
He looked down at the file he’d been reviewing before the onshore wind had carried with it the thumping beat of an approaching engine, but his skin pulled achingly tight over his jaw and the words before him danced and spun and could have been printed in a different language for all the sense they made.
It could be worse, he rationalised, clamping down on the rising black cloud of his resentment, forcing himself to focus on the résumé in his hands. He flipped the page, turning to the photograph of the woman he was expecting. Reputedly one of the best conservators in the business, Professor Rousseau boasted more than forty years’ experience in the industry. And with short grey hair cut helmet-style around features that looked as if they’d been sculpted from parchment rather than skin, she looked the kind of person who enjoyed books more than people. If he had to put up with a visitor to his island, he could do much worse than this shrivelled-up scientist.
Maybe. And yet still this heavy sense of foreboding persisted in his gut; still the jagged line of his scar burned and stung, as if someone had dragged their nails down his face and chest and sliced open his wound.
One week, he thought, touching fingers to his burning cheek, half surprised when they didn’t come away wet and sticky with blood. One week with a stranger poking around his castle, asking questions, getting under his feet. And whoever she was, and however she looked, it would be one week too long.
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CHAPTER THREE
ACROSS the room she saw the flare of his nostrils. She heard his intake of air. She was even convinced she saw the grind of his jaw as he stared seemingly fixedly through the window. And then he turned, and the truth of his scars, the horror of his injuries, co
nfronted her full-on.
A jagged line ripped down one side of his face from the corner of his eye through his jaw and down his neck, where it thankfully disappeared under the high collar of his jacket.
She gasped. She’d seen scars before. She’d witnessed the results of man’s inhumanity to man during a year where youthful idealism had sent her to one of the world’s hellholes and spat her out at the end, cynical and dispirited. She’d thought she’d seen it all. And she’d seen worse. Much worse. And yet the sheer inequality of this man’s scars—that one side of his face would be so utterly perfect and the other so tragically scored by scars—it seemed so wrong.
His eyes narrowed, glinting like water on marble. ‘Didn’t anyone ever tell you it’s rude to stare?’
Chastened, she blinked and scrabbled for the pocket of her briefcase and the letter from the Professor she’d come armed with. ‘Of course. Count Volta, Professor Rousseau apparently tried several times to contact you last night to tell you that she couldn’t make it.’ She pulled the envelope free and crossed the floor to hand it to him.
He looked down at the letter in her hand as if it was a poisoned chalice. ‘You were not invited here.’
‘Professor Rousseau’s letter will, I’m sure, explain everything.’
‘You are not welcome.’ He turned back to the window, putting his back to her. ‘Bruno will arrange for your immediate return to the mainland.’
His decision was so abrupt—so unjust!—that for a moment she felt the wind knocked out of her sails. He was dismissing her? Sending her away? Denying her the opportunity of working on the most important discovery since the Dead Sea Scrolls for no reason?
No way! ‘I’m not going anywhere.’ The words burst from her lips before she’d had a chance to think, a chance to stop them. ‘I am here to do a job and I will not leave until it is done.’
He spun round and once again she was confronted with the two sides of him—each side of his face so different, each side compelling viewing, the masculinely perfect and the dreadfully scarred. Beauty and the beast, it occurred to her, co-existing under the one skin.
‘Did you hear me? I said Bruno will arrange for your return.’
It was all she could do not to stamp her foot. ‘And I said I’m not leaving!
One arm swept in a wide arc. ‘I have no dealings with you. My arrangement was with Professor Rousseau.’
‘No. According to the documents, your arrangement was with her business, Archival Survival. When the Professor was unable to come, she contracted me.’
He grunted, no way about to concede the point. ‘So what is her excuse for being unable to fulfil her contractual obligations herself?’
‘If you’d read this letter you’d know. Her mother is in hospital after suffering a major stroke and she’s rushed to be with her while she clings to life. Admittedly, as excuses go, that’s pretty thin. Clearly it’s more about inconveniencing you.’
If his eyes were lasers, she figured, with the heated glare he gave her she’d be wearing holes right now, and she wondered if she’d overstepped the mark. She’d grown up in a family that prided itself on being straight-talking. Over the years she’d learned to curb that trait while in civilised company. The Count, she’d already decided, for all his flash clothes and a portrait gallery full of titled ancestors, didn’t qualify.
‘I expected an expert. I do not intend spending a week babysitting someone’s apprentice.’
She sucked in air, hating the fact it was tinged with a hint of sandalwood and spice, with undertones of something else altogether more musky, hating the possibility that it might come from him, hating the possibility that there might be something about him she approved of when the rest of him was so damned objectionable.
But that was still okay, she figured, because finding something she might possibly like only made her more resentful towards him. ‘Seeing you refuse to read this letter, where all the facts are set out in black and white, perhaps I should spell it out for you? I have a Masters in Fine Arts from Melbourne University and a PhD in Antiquities from Oxford, where my thesis was on the preservation and conservation of ancient texts and the challenge of discerning fraud where it was perpetrated centuries ago. So if there’s an apprentice on this island right now, I don’t think it’s me. Does that make you feel more comfortable?’
He arched one critical eyebrow high. ‘You look barely out of high school.’
‘I’m twenty-eight years old. But don’t take my word for it. Perhaps you’d like to check my passport?’
Dust motes danced on the slanted sunlit air between them, oblivious of the tension—dust motes that disappeared with those slanting rays as the sun was swallowed up by a cloud and the room darkened. She resisted the urge to shiver, resisted that damned illogical brain cell that suggested there was some connection between the Count’s dark looks and the weather. And instead she decided that his momentary silence meant assent.
‘And so right now I’d like to get to work. After all, I believe you want this text taken off your hands as soon as possible, and we’ve already wasted enough time, don’t you agree? Perhaps you could arrange someone to show me to the documents so I might get started?’
He scowled as he took the letter from her hands then, scanning its contents, finding everything was as she said and finding nothing to arm him with the ammunition to demand she leave.
He wanted her gone.
He didn’t want women around the place. Not young women, and definitely not halfway to pretty. He had his fix of women once a month, when the launch brought across a local village woman. He never asked her name; she never offered it. Each time she would just wait for him naked in the guest-suite bed, then throw back the covers and close her eyes.
And afterwards the launch would take her back to her village, considerably better off than before she had made the crossing.
No, Alessandro had no need for women.
He shrugged and tossed the letter down on his wide desk. What did it matter what the letter said or didn’t say? ‘I said you are not welcome here, Ms Hunter.’
She stiffened to stone right where she stood, her mouth pursing. ‘Dr Hunter, actually. And I will ensure my stay is as brief as possible. I have no desire to stay any longer than necessary where I am not welcome, I can assure you.’
He sniffed at the correction as he regarded her solemnly. She looked like a woman who had no desires, period. Sure, she was younger than the dried-up Professor, but with her scraped-back hair and that pursed mouth, and in khaki pants and T-shirt, it wasn’t as if she was anything like the women who had once graced his arm and his bed.
God knew, another twenty years or so of staring into her desiccated papers and she’d probably be as dried up and crusty as the Professor. Maybe he had nothing to worry about.
And she was right about one thing: he did want the find off his hands as quickly as possible. If the Professor proved unable to do it personally because of her ailing mother someone else would have to be found, all of it spelling delay after delay.
He ground his teeth together. The longer he waited, the more likely news of the discovery would filter out. The last thing he wanted was the media sniffing around again, turning the place into some kind of fish tank.
‘Then make your assessment as brief as possible and make us all happy by leaving.’ He turned back to gaze out of the window again, knowing she would do exactly that. People always ran from him. And then he frowned, remembering the way her big blue eyes had stared at him.
Yes, she’d been shocked. But where was the revulsion? Where was the pity? Instead she’d examined him as one might regard some kind of science project.
And the snarling beast inside him didn’t like that notion any better.
‘I’d like to see the book now.’
He turned back, surprised she hadn’t changed her mind and taken the opportunity to flee while his back was turned. She was surprisingly feisty, this one, holding her ground when many men twice her age and
size would have gone running for the hills. Did she want the opportunity of examining and documenting this discovery so much that she had somehow summoned the will to fight for it? Or was she always this feisty?
Her eyes held his, bright and blue and cold as ice. Once women had looked at him with lust and desire. But that was long ago. There was no lust in Ms Hunter’s eyes, no desire— or at least not for him. But there was something else he read in them. The yearning to become famous? Probably. This discovery, if it proved authentic, would probably make a young conservator’s career.
‘It’s not all it’s cracked up to be,’ he said.
She blinked—a fan of black lashes against her peaches and cream complexion. And it occurred to him that it was almost a shame to condemn such translucent skin to the Professor’s wrinkled fate. ‘Pardon?’
A rap on the door and the reappearance of Bruno curtailed any response. ‘The boat wishes to leave,’ he grunted. ‘Are you finished with the girl?’
And with the question came Alessandro’s first smile of the day. In one way he was—though not the way his valet was clearly expecting. He’d agreed she could stay, and this meeting was now over. He’d planned to have Bruno take her to the book. He’d need to have little more to do with her. But was he finished with her?
Maybe not.
What would it take to make her run? What would it take to shake up those frosty blue eyes and strip off that sterile scientific cladding she wrapped herself so tightly in and see what really lay beneath? Besides, if he admitted the truth, he could do with a little entertainment. The woman might provide some mild amusement. She was only here for a few days. What possible harm could it do?