by Penny Jordan
Safety … Sanctuary …
Such was the extent of Lily’s relief that it was only once she was inside his suite that she took in the fact that Marco’s torso and hair were damp and that all he was apparently wearing was a towel.
Her gaze slithered and skittered as she tried to avoid looking at him and couldn’t. The swift response of her senses to him momentarily distracted her from her purpose in coming to him.
Marco—a man for whom the right and the ability to control his life were things that he took for granted—chose who was allowed into his life and when. He was the Prince di Lucchesi. No one broke the rules he had made for the way he lived his life. Until now. Until Lily had come uninvited—and unwanted—into his room.
Did she know what she was doing to him, looking at him like that? Marco wondered grimly.
‘Why are you here?’ he demanded stiffly. ‘What do you want?’
The sound of Marco’s voice broke the spell that the intimacy of his nearly naked body had spun round her, his curtness bringing Lily back to reality.
‘I had to come. I couldn’t stay in my room …’ Fear and shock disjointed her words.
About the Author
PENNY JORDAN has been writing for more than twenty-five years and has an outstanding record: over 165 novels published, including the phenomenally successful A PERFECT FAMILY, TO LOVE, HONOUR AND BETRAY, THE PERFECT SINNER and POWER PLAY, which hit the Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller lists. She says she hopes to go on writing until she has passed the 200 mark—and maybe even the 250 mark.
Although Penny was born in Preston, Lancashire, and spent her childhood there, she moved to Cheshire as a teenager, and has continued to live there. Following the death of her husband she moved to the small traditional Cheshire market town on which she based her Crighton books.
She lives with her Birman cat Posh, who tries to assist with her writing by sitting on the newspapers and magazines Penny reads to provide her with ideas she can adapt for her fictional books.
Penny is a member and supporter of the Romantic Novelists’ Association and the Romance Writers of America—two organisations dedicated to providing support for both published and yet-to-be-published authors.
PASSION AND THE PRINCE
PENNY JORDAN
www.millsandboon.co.uk
CHAPTER ONE
LIFTING her head from her camera, through which she had been studying a model posing provocatively in matching bra and briefs, Lily recoiled instinctively from the scene in front of her.
Almost naked male and female models—the girls all fragile limbs and pouting mouths, some of them open in conversation, or drinking water through straws so as not to spoil their carefully applied make-up, and the boys with their gym-toned bodies—stood together as they submitted themselves to the attentions of hovering hair and make-up artists. Fingers tapped away on mobile phones, gleaming tanned skin contrasted with the catalogue client’s underwear all the models were wearing for the shoot. Heavy beat music boomed out into the small space despite the fact that some of the models were listening to their own iPods.
In other words it was a normal chaotic studio fashion shoot.
‘Has that last male model arrived yet?’ she asked the hairstylist, who shook her head.
‘Well, we can’t hold the shoot any longer. We’ve only got the studio for today. We’ll have to use one of the other male models twice.’
‘I can spray on some dye that will darken the blond guy’s hair, if you like?’ the stylist offered, reaching out to steady the rail containing more underwear to be modelled as it swayed dangerously when one of the models pushed past it.
Looking around, Lily felt her heart sink. She had grown up in this world—until she had turned her back on it and walked away—and now she disliked, almost hated it, and all that it represented.
Given free choice, this cramped, shabby studio with its familiar smell—a mix of male pheromones, sweat, female anxiety, cigarettes and illegal substances that seemed to hang invisibly in the air—was the last place she wanted to be.
Edging past a chattering group of models to get to the door, she put down her camera on a nearby table and went to check the pose of the pretty girl with the wary charcoal-grey-eyed gaze, wondering as she did so how many young hopefuls had entered the industry imagining that they would leave with a contract to model in a top fashion magazine only to discover a much seamier side to modelling. Too many.
This kind of shoot was the unglamorous rump end of what it meant to work in fashion, and a world away from money-no-object glossy magazine shoots.
She hadn’t wanted to do this. She was here in Milan for a very different purpose. But she had never been able to resist her younger half-brother’s pleas for help and he knew it. Rick’s mother—her father’s second wife—had been very kind to her when she had been young, and she felt that it was her duty now to repay that kindness by helping her half-brother. She couldn’t ignore her sense of duty any more than she could ignore all their late father had been.
She had tried her hardest to dissuade Rick from following in their famous and louche father’s footsteps, but to no avail. Rick had been determined to become a fashion photographer.
Satisfied with the model’s pose, she went back to the camera—only to frown in irritation as the door to the studio swung open, throwing an unwanted shadow across her shot, along with an equally unwanted suit clad male torso. The missing male model had obviously finally arrived—and ruined her shot by stepping into it.
Thoroughly exasperated, she pushed back the shiny swing of her blonde hair and told him, without removing her gaze from her camera, ‘You’re late—and you’re in my shot.’
It was the sudden silence and the stillness that had fallen over the rest of the room that alerted her to the fact that something was wrong. Her senses picked up on it and reacted by sending a quiverful of tiny darts of anxiety skimming along her spine. She stepped back from the camera and looked up—right into the coldly hostile gaze of the man who had just walked in. A tall, dark-haired, broad-shouldered, expensively suited man, whose body language reinforced the same cold hostility she could see in his eyes along with proud disdain. Against her will Lily could feel her eyes widening as she took in the reality of the man confronting her, her pulse beating unsteadily against her skin.
Whoever this man was, he was obviously no model. Even stripped he would be … He would be magnificent, Lily acknowledged, her stomach suddenly hollowing out with a sensation that took her completely off guard. If asked, she would have said—and meant it—that she was inured to male good looks, and that as far as she was concerned sexual attraction was a cruel deceit on the part of Mother Nature, designed to ensure the continuation of the species and best avoided. She had grown up in a world in which beauty and good looks were commodities to be ruthlessly traded and abused, which was why her own beauty was something she chose to downplay.
She intended to be crisp, cool and in control as she queried, ‘Yes?’ But instead of the apology for ruining her shot and the explanation of his presence she was expecting, she received an even more hostile look of silent, angry contempt that raked her from head to toe.
As yet he hadn’t so much as given a sideways look at the scantily clad girls who were now, Lily saw after a look at them herself, all gazing at him. And no wonder, she admitted.
He made the young male models look like the mere boys they were, for all their muscles, but then he was extraordinarily handsome—handsome, but cold. And Lily suspected judgemental. He exuded an air of raw male pride and sensual power, even if there was a grim harshness about his expression that warned her that whatever had brought him here it wasn’t going to be good news—for someone. But not her. He co
uldn’t be here for her, so why did his presence have every one of her carefully rigged inner alarm systems breaking into a cacophony of warning?
She was her parents’ daughter, Lily reminded herself.
At some level that had to mean she was as vulnerable to that kind of overpowering male sensuality as her mother had been. And just as capable of using her own beauty for commercial exploitation? Lily struggled to repress the feeling that made her shudder—as though against an unwanted male touch. She would never allow herself to repeat her mother’s mistakes.
She was here to do a job, she reminded herself, not to give in to her own insecurities.
Whatever had brought him here to this shabby studio it wasn’t the prospect of modelling work. His face might be as commanding and as harshly delineated that a hundred thousand ancient Roman coins might have been struck in its patrician and imposing image. It might be the kind of face that could lead vast armies of men into war and entice any number of women into bed. But it was a face that currently bore an expression of such cutting contempt that if it was captured on camera it was more likely to send prospective buyers running for cover than rushing out to buy what he was supposed to be modelling.
Was he going to say anything to break the pool of tense silence he had created?
Lily took a deep breath, and repeated determinedly, ‘Yes?’
Another ice-cold look. The man must be close to inhuman, removed from the emotional vulnerabilities that affected the rest of the human race, not to be affected by the tension she could almost feel humming on the air.
‘You are the one responsible for this? ‘
His voice was quieter than she had expected, but redolent with the same power as his presence and grimly harsh.
Lily gave the studio and the models a brief concerned glance. He was obviously here on a hostile mission of complaint of some kind, and since she was standing in for her half-brother she knew that she was obliged to agree.
‘Yes.’
‘There’s something I want to say to you—in private.’
A rustle of reaction ran through the room. Lily wanted to tell him that there was nothing he could possibly have to say to her, and certainly not in private, but there was a nagging suspicion at the back of her mind that her half-brother might have done something to provoke this man’s anger.
‘Very well,’ she conceded. ‘But you will have to make whatever you want to say brief. As you can see, I’m in the middle of a shoot.’
The look of blistering contempt he gave her made Lily take a step back from him, before reluctantly moving forward through the door he was holding open for her. Out of old-fashioned good manners, or more in the manner of a guard determined not to allow his prisoner to escape?
The studio was in an old building, its door sturdy enough to block out the speculative questions Lily knew would be being asked by all the models and stylists inside it. She stood on the small landing at the top of the stairs that led to the studio, keeping as close to the door as she could.
At such close quarters to him there was nowhere to escape to—he was blocking her exit via the stairs by standing next to them.
‘Call me old-fashioned and sexist,’ he told her, ‘but somehow finding that it is a woman who is procuring young flesh for others and profiting financially by doing so is even more abhorrent and repellent than a man doing the same thing. And you are such a woman, aren’t you? You are a woman who lives off the vanity and foolishness of others, feeding them with false hope and empty dreams.’
Lily stared at him in disbelief. Revulsion filled her at the accusation he had made, accompanied by shock that he should have made it. The thought crossed her mind that he might be some kind of deranged madman—only to be squashed by the message from her senses that this was a man who was perfectly sane.
She pushed her hand into her hair a habitual gesture of insecurity and told him shakily, ‘I don’t know what all this is about, but I think you must have made a mistake.’
‘You’re a photographer who seeks out vulnerable young idiots with the promise of a glamorous modelling career that you know is all too likely to destroy them.’
‘That’s not true,’ Lily defended herself, but her voice wobbled slightly as she made the denial. After all, wasn’t what he was saying really very much in line with the way she herself felt about the modelling industry?
She took a deep breath, intending to tell him that, but before she could do so he continued grimly. ‘Have you no sense of shame? No compunction or guilt about what you do?’
Guilt. Ah, that was the word above all others that could trigger off an avalanche of dark memories inside her—a word like a poisoned dart aimed at her unprotected emotions. She had to get away from him, but she couldn’t. She was trapped here with him on the tiny landing. In her mind’s eye she saw the panic he was causing in her manifesting itself into a wild flight to escape from him, a desire to curl herself up into a ball of flesh so small that it could not be seen—or touched. But that was just in her imagination. The reality was that she could not escape.
‘This world into which you are attempting to drag Pietro—my nephew—is one of cruelty and corruption in which young flesh is used and abused by those who crave its beauty for their own debauched purposes.’
His nephew? Lily’s heart was thumping wildly. Every word he said carved a fresh wound into her own emotions, lacerating the too thin layer of fragility that was all she had to protect them.
‘I have no idea how many young people have fallen victim to your promises of fame and fortune, but I can tell you this. My nephew will not be one of them. Thank goodness he had the good sense to tell his family how he had been approached with promises of modelling work and money.’
Lily’s mouth had gone dry. She had always particularly disliked this aspect of her father’s work, knowing what painful fires of experience young models could be drawn into by the unscrupulous. To be accused as she was being accused now was such a shock that it robbed her of the ability to defend herself.
‘Here’s your money back.’ The man was slamming down a wad of euros. ‘Blood money—flesh money …
How many of the vilest sort of predators were you planning to introduce him to at this party you invited him to attend with you after the shoot? Don’t bother to answer. Let me guess. As many of them as you could. Because that is what this business is about, isn’t it?’
Rick had invited the young man to accompany him to a party? Lily’s heart sank even further. Rick was a sociable guy. It was normal for him to go out after shoots and have a drink. Besides, it was fashion week, and Milan was full of important people from the top of the fashion tree. It was also full of those at the bottom of that world, though. The kind who …
She could feel a shudder of revulsion gripping her as her skin turned clammy with remembered fear and her heart pounded. She wanted to breathe fresh air. She wanted to escape from the past this man and their surroundings had brought back to her.
‘People like you disgust me. Outwardly you may possess the kind of beauty that stops men in the street, but all that beauty does is cloak your inner corruption.’
She had to get some fresh air. If she didn’t she was going to pass out. Think of something else, Lily told herself. Think of the present, not the past. Focus on something else.
The effort of trying to refocus her thoughts caused her to sway slightly on her feet. Immediately he came towards her, taking hold of her to steady her. Her brain knew the truth, but her body was reacting to a very different message that had her demanding with fierce anguish, ‘Don’t touch me.’ Her reaction to being imprisoned was instinctive and immediate, ripped from deep within her as she panicked and used her free hand to try and prise his fingers away from her wrist. But all he did was drag her further into his imprisoning hold.
Crushed against his body, Lily waited for the familiar feelings of nausea and terror to flood through her, but instead—unbelievably, and surely impossibly—her senses were sending her mess
ages of an awareness of her captor so unfamiliar to her that they stunned her into a bewildered stillness.
Could it really be happening that, instead of filling her with repugnance, the cool cologne-over-male-warmth smell of him was actually arousing her desire to move closer to its source? How was it that the solid strength of his male body against her own felt somehow right? As though it was something her flesh approved of instead of feared. It was as though she had opened a door and walked into a world that was topsy-turvy—an Alice in Wonderland world in which what she’d expected to feel had been replaced by the unexpected. The totally unexpected, she acknowledged as she looked with bewilderment at the way her free hand was splayed out against his chest, her skin pale next to the dark fabric of his suit.
Only seconds had passed—seconds in time but an aeon in terms of her emotions. Now, alongside the confusion of what she was feeling, she had a growing sense of urgency. A desire—no, a need to be free from the intimacy of his hold. And not because she feared him, but because she feared her own awareness of him.
There was an odd look in his eyes, a sort of shocked and furious disbelief, as though he couldn’t fully comprehend something.
‘Let me go.’
The words, echoing from her past, had a galvanising effect on her captor, banishing that look immediately and replacing it with the anger she could now see in his eyes. Anger was better—anger meant that they were enemies and on opposite sides, even though it was obvious to Lily that, whoever and whatever he was, he wasn’t used to women rejecting him. His gaze was a dangerous volcano of molten gold, fixing on hers, pinning her beneath it. She could feel herself starting to tremble, weakness filling her. Tiny betraying shivers of sensation rayed out all over her body from its point of contact with his hand. Sexual awareness? Sexual desire? From her? For this man who was a stranger to her—a stranger who had already shown his bitter contempt for her? How could he have such an intense impact on her, sidetracking her away from telling him just how wrong he was about her?