The #1 Bestsellers Collection 2011

by Catherine Mann

  Rafe nodded.

  ‘Telling me not to fall in love with you?’

  ‘Telling you how it has to be.’

  ‘Because you don’t love me.’

  ‘Because I can’t love you. I can’t love anyone.’

  She shook her head, the injustice of it all threatening to swamp her, the sheer unfairness too much to comprehend. ‘But you don’t know that.’

  ‘I know what I saw what my mother go through. I know I will never put myself in such a position.’

  ‘And you’re trying to tell me that this is the only way this marriage can work, by you not loving me and me not loving you.’

  He held up his hands. ‘We can still have a good marriage.’

  She took a step back towards the door, the pleas of her mother running through her head, begging her father not to leave them. The sound of her father yelling back, telling her that he’d never wanted her, that he’d never loved her. The sound of the hatch slamming down, as he’d left them for ever. That was not going to be her future. But it would be if she married Rafe. She could fight and fight and do everything she could to try to make him love her, but his mind was made up. She’d already lost him.

  ‘No.’

  His eyes narrowed, his stance more alert. ‘What do you mean, no?’ And just like his stance, the tone of his voice had also changed, shifting from conciliatory to wary in a moment when he realized he didn’t have the upper hand any more.

  ‘I’m not prepared to marry you on those terms. I could never marry someone who didn’t love me—who was incapable of loving me. Don’t you see? My mother was just the same as yours. She loved my father with all her heart, and he turned that power back on her and crushed her with it. And nothing, not even the child that had forced them into marriage, was enough to keep them together.

  ‘I made a promise to myself years ago that I would never marry a man for the sake of an unplanned pregnancy, especially without that man’s love.’ She looked at him, her eyes scanning his features, wanting to imprint his face on her memory so that she might remember every last perfect detail of him in case it was the last time she saw him this close, beginning to believe it might very well be. ‘And I was starting to think it might work. I thought there was a chance—that we could make it work. But, no. I can see that’s not possible.’ She glanced at her watch, cursing to herself when she saw the time. So much for catching up with an old colleague. The chopper was probably already gone, just one more disappointment in what had turned out to be a gut-slammer of a day. But that didn’t matter right now. She just wanted to get away, find some space, sort out a head too full of cries of injustice and a heart too shredded with pain.

  She reached for the door, pulling it open. ‘I guess the only bright spot is that it’s lucky we had this conversation now, before we went through that farce of a marriage.’

  The door slammed shut, Rafe’s hand and his weight behind it. ‘What the hell are you saying?’

  She stared up at him, surprised he’d moved so fast. Unsurprised at his anger. He’d still expect her to marry him come hell or high water. What did it take to make him realize nothing could make her settle for a loveless marriage? ‘What do you expect? You don’t leave me with much choice. I can’t marry you, Rafe, babies or no. I can’t stay here with a man who can’t love. I won’t be my mother all over again.’

  ‘Who’s asking you to? You said yourself that your mother loved your father. It doesn’t have to be that way for us. That’s what I’m trying to prevent.’

  She laughed then, a release so unexpected that it left her almost dizzy in its wake, dizzy and so close to tears she could feel the moisture seeping through. ‘But that’s the problem, Rafe, it’s already too late. Because I … I love you.’

  Stunned didn’t come close to expressing the way Rafe felt. She couldn’t be serious. She couldn’t be.

  Dio! He wheeled around, both hands clutching at his temples, tangling into his hair, searching for answers he couldn’t find. It was the last thing he wanted to happen. It was the worst thing that could have happened.

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  I don’t want to believe you.

  ‘You think right now I care what you believe?’

  ‘Yet you say you love me.’

  ‘Do you think I want to? Do you think I went looking for love with a man who practically dragged me kicking and screaming into a marriage I didn’t and still don’t want? What kind of masochist do you think I am?’

  He couldn’t answer. He didn’t know. All he knew was that something was wrong, his convenient marriage slipping beyond reach, sliding towards a disaster he’d never seen coming.

  A disaster he’d been trying to avoid ever since he’d been a child.

  ‘Don’t waste your time on love.

  Don’t lose your heart.’

  He couldn’t love and, damn it all, she wasn’t supposed to love him.

  He looked up at her, at her face of porcelain-like skin, at her hair kissed gold by the sun, her eyes wide with questions he knew he’d never be the one to answer. And inexplicably he ached with that knowledge, the gears in his chest crunching and grinding together.

  And he didn’t have the faintest idea of how to stop them.

  ‘You must go,’ he said, his voice a coarse whisper, while in his mind the tear-streaked face of his mother played, kissing him goodnight the nights she’d managed to stay up longer than he did, the scent of perfume more and more giving way to the fumes of alcoholic despair. He didn’t want that fate for Sienna, but neither could he bear to witness it here, where he couldn’t give her what she needed. ‘Get out now, before it’s too late!’

  She hovered uncertainly, her eyes shining, or was that merely his?

  ‘Rafe,’ she said, putting out a hand to him. ‘It doesn’t have to be like this. Can’t we talk about it? There must be a way, has to be a way.’

  ‘There is no way!’

  ‘But your babies. One day we will share children, maybe even the heirs Montvelatte needs. You’re not thinking straight.’

  ‘Send me the first-born son!’ he yelled, the pulse in his head pounding like drums. ‘You can keep the other.’

  She reeled back as if he’d physically thrust her aside. ‘Rafe. I’m sorry.’

  ‘No, you’re not! You’ve been trying to figure out a way to get out of this marriage from day one. And now you’ve finally hit on the perfect plan. You knew I could never do to a woman what my father had done to my mother. I’d told you what he’d done! What better way to secure your release.’

  ‘Rafe, it’s not like that. Listen to me. I love you.’

  ‘And for the last time, I don’t want your love! Get out. Go! I never want to see you again.’

  Blinded by tears she could no longer control, Sienna somehow stumbled out of the room, blundering past curious staff, who called out to her in concerned voices, past the palace guard that had held her hostage that first day and now stood by to let her flee.

  Outside the wind tugged at her hair, the sky an ominous shade of grey, but she took no notice, running full pelt for the one person she knew might help her. The one place where escape lay waiting.

  It was still there, the small pick-up truck just driving off. Any minute the JetRanger and her lifeline to the outside world would be gone. She screamed out, but her words were carried away on the wind, and the pilot climbed into the cabin and pulled his door shut.

  She had time. She knew the time he would take to get the bird off the ground, to turn on the master electrical switch and avionics, to check fuel levels and turn the fuel valve master on.

  She was halfway down the road as the navigation lights turned on. Right on cue.

  She pushed herself harder as the rotors began to turn, ducking down low as she made for the pilot’s door, her fist slamming on the window.

  The pilot, Randall, looked around, first in shock, a smile of recognition tinged with concern spreading his lips wide a moment later before he opened the door. ‘Hey
, there,’ he said in his lazy American drawl. ‘I thought you weren’t coming. What’s up?’

  She gulped down air into burning lungs and did her best to smile while she swiped away at her damp cheeks. ‘No time for small talk. Just get me out of here.’

  ‘I love it when a lady tells me exactly what to do.’ He grinned and waited until she was in the seat alongside him, her seatbelt buckled, before he raised the helicopter from the ground. ‘You almost missed me,’ he said, shouting to make himself heard. ‘Any later and we would have been stuck here for the night. Damn curfew.’

  She nodded, still trying to regain her breath. She knew all about the damn curfew.

  ‘We missed you at the office,’ Randall said, as the bird moved under his expert hands. ‘Been taking a vacation?’

  ‘You could say that.’

  He flicked a glance into the back. ‘You didn’t bring any luggage.’

  ‘Sudden change of plans.’

  ‘Only there was this rumour going ’round, y’know, that you were maybe stuck on Montvelatte for good.’

  ‘Big storm coming,’ she said, pointing out the windscreen, and the pilot beside her laughed. ‘I get the picture. And, yeah, it might get a bit bumpy, so hang on.’

  The bumps didn’t worry her, at least not the bumps in the air. It was the bumps that life dealt out that were infinitely worse. She turned around, trying to gauge their distance from the island, wondering when she’d ever be far enough. Escape had been ridiculously easy in the end. But, then, Rafe had practically thrown her out.

  Sienna sat back down in her seat, letting out a long breath. To their left the looming peak that was Iseo’s Pyramid claimed sovereignty over the surrounding waters, a dark prince in a darker sea, and she shivered as she let her gaze drift over its frightening dimensions, its sheer size just as overwhelming from above as below. She wasn’t afraid. She’d left the real Beast of Iseo behind on Montvelatte, but still the dark brooding shape held the power to fascinate, the power to disturb.

  She sensed it rather than heard it, something no passenger would notice but an experienced pilot would. She looked across at the pilot and then down at the gauges at the exact same time he did. ‘What is it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ His eyes scanned the controls, nothing evident, and then it happened again, a tiny blip, a momentary loss of power, and this time Randall’s hands were hard at work. ‘Damn,’ he yelled. ‘Whatever it is, we’ll have to turn around back to Montvelatte.’ And her spirits plummeted. To be foiled when she was so close to escape! How could she return to that island? How could she ever risk facing him again, the man who had banished her because she had been foolish enough to love him? But right now there was no other choice.

  Then a bolt of lightning rent the sky in two, the world around her appearing in black and white, like some crazy negative, and she would have sworn the bolt hit the very rock itself. Birds erupted from the peak like magma from a volcano, a cloud of huge seabirds, panicked from sleep and lumbering through the air in every direction. Normally they would have been fine where they were, far enough from the rock and the wheeling cloud of birds that they would be in no danger, but these birds were stunned, beyond instinct other than to escape.

  ‘Watch out,’ she cried, as Randall continued to do battle with the handicapped craft. But it was already too late. There was a bang as something hit the rotors and the aircraft shuddered and yawed to one side, the smell of smoke filling the cockpit. And now she was helping him with the controls, battling to put the chopper into autorotation and regain control, but it was no use.

  ‘We’re going down,’ he called, ‘we won’t make it to the island.’ But she was already at the radio, barking out a Mayday call.

  ‘Head for the rock,’ she said, and the pilot tossed her a look that said she was as mad as Iseo himself. ‘There’s a small beach,’ she shouted, clutching at the controls, ‘around the side.’ And the only place they had a chance of making an emergency landing.

  For a few hairy seconds she almost thought they would make it, the two of them almost enough to get the helicopter under control. Until the second bird hit. It penetrated the cockpit like a missile, a sickening crunch that sprayed blood and gore everywhere as it slammed into the pilot.

  ‘Randall!’ she screamed, as he slumped over his controls, feathers stuck to blood she had no way of knowing belonged to him or the bird.

  She battled to push him back into his seat while trying to manage the controls for both of them, the rock looming ever larger, the wind wilder where the rock ended and the sea began.

  And then there it was, the tiny patch of sand, barely visible in the growing darkness but there, calling out to her like an invitation, a siren’s call.

  ‘Let’s hope not,’ she muttered through grim lips as she battled the wind and rock and a failing aircraft.

  Rafe was still fuming, stalking around Sienna’s room, waiting for her return, when Sebastiano found him. ‘Prince Raphael,’ he said with a small bow.

  ‘Not now,’ he said gruffly, turning away, not interested in the minutiae of the affairs of state when something of momentous proportions had just taken place. Something he was still battling to get a handle on.

  Sienna had said she loved him. Why? How could it have happened when their mothers’ stories were so similar? How could she embrace love after what her mother had gone through?

  But she hadn’t embraced it.

  He thought about her arguments, her protests. She hadn’t wanted to love him. Something he could identify with.

  And yet she did love him. There was something totally unidentifiable about that. Though, at the same time, something unexpectedly and oddly satisfying.

  ‘I think you will want to hear this.’

  ‘Didn’t you hear me? I said, not now!’ He was still trying to make sense of it, trying to work out why his gut felt so twisted and torn and just plain wrong when he’d done what he’d thought was right and got rid of any chance of someone loving him.

  Except knowing he’d achieved that didn’t make him feel any better. It made him feel a damn sight worse. And he was damned sure his father had never felt this bad when he’d exiled his mother, or he would have changed his mind in a heartbeat and kept her for his own.

  And the gears crunched some more before settling into a new configuration, something that worked on a different level.

  And he remembered another time, another evening, when he’d walked that cliff-top walk with her, and he’d felt the swelling inside that had told him that this marriage would work, and at last he realized what that feeling had truly been. Not a beast inside him, needing to be fed, but a heart so crusted in tragedy and pain that it had taken a woman like Sienna to shed light and crack it free.

  He hadn’t had to make her see this marriage would work. She’d shown him the light, she’d made it possible.

  He couldn’t send her away, because he needed her here now, with him every day of his life. And without fully understanding why, something told him that he had missed an opportunity back there in her room to tell her what he really thought, feelings he was still trying to come to terms with, feelings that would not be suppressed, no matter how much he denied them.

  ‘But it concerns Signorina Wainwright.’

  The wind gusted around the castle then, pummelling the walls and rattling windows until they shook, and a niggling seed of premonition buried itself inside him and took root.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘She was seen leaving in the helicopter. The one that brought Princess Marietta.’

  He looked to the windows, where the tops of trees could be seen dancing wildly in the wind, leaves flying past, the rumble of thunder like an omen.

  ‘She’s out in this? Why the hell didn’t anyone stop her?’

  Sebastiano crossed his hands in front of him and dipped his head. ‘That’s not all. There’s been a Mayday call reported from the helicopter. Some kind of electrical fault, coupled with a birdstrike.’

 
Rafe didn’t hear the words. He felt them like boulders raining down, their pain etching his soul. ‘How far did they get from the island?’

  ‘The Guardia Costiera has been alerted, although in these conditions …’

  ‘How far did they get?’

  Sebastiano hesitated, clearly uncomfortable with imparting his next piece of information.

  ‘Iseo’s Pyramid.’

  Rafe’s blood ran cold. He’d sent her away. He’d told her to go. He might as well have sent her to the very Beast himself. Christo, why had it taken so long for him to realize what should have been so obvious all along? That he wanted this woman because he loved her, in spite of every warning he’d had, he loved her.

  And he wanted her back.

  Ice filling his veins, he somehow made it to the rain-lashed terrace, his eyes searching out the familiar black outline of rock against the clouds and the storm tossed sea. But there was no missing it. Not today, even on the darkest night, no missing that other cloud that rose unnaturally from the other side of the island.

  A single plume of smoke.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  IT HAD taken every shred of every ounce of pulling rank that Rafe could find, every firm promise that the Beast of Iseo was a myth and that the weather was their worst enemy, but finally he’d convinced the Guardia Costiera that he was going with them. Rain lashed his face, his hair was probably wetter than the sea right now, but he felt nothing. Nothing but this great yawning pit that had opened up inside him.

  He’d sent her away. Damn well told her to get out, and she’d done exactly what he’d wanted.

  What he’d thought he’d wanted.

  He must have been insane! Cursed with some kind of madness, because right now the thing he wanted most in the world, the thing he wanted more than anything, was the one thing he’d told her he didn’t want.

  Her love.

  Because that would mean she was alive.

  How could he have let her go?

  How could he have sent her into the darkness, crying and distressed? And the yawning hole in his gut snapped shut, catching him in the inescapable truth.