by Kim Lawrence
Hannah was taking a last deep breath of fresh air and painting on a smile just as a figure emerged, his eyes scanning as if he was searching for something or someone. Her bodyguard stood out like a sore thumb, albeit one in black tie.
Hannah found herself moving backwards into the shadow of a tree. She realised she was holding her breath and closing her eyes like a child who wanted to disappear. She looked down at her hands clenched into tight fists and slowly unfurled them. The sight of the deep grooves her nails had cut into the flesh of her palm drew a fleeting frown of acknowledgement but didn’t lessen her defiance.
The buzz lasted a few moments, but as the exhilaration of her small rebellion faded away she stared at her shoes sinking into the damp ground. Was this going to be her life in future? Ignoring ‘don’t walk on the grass’ signs just to feel alive?
As rebellions went it was pathetic.
She was pathetic.
She took a deep breath and, taking her shoes off and holding them in one hand, she used the other to lift her skirt free of the damp grass as she straightened her slender shoulder. ‘Man up, Hannah,’ she muttered to herself as she moved towards the lights that filtered through the bank of trees.
‘Hello, Hannah. I knew you wanted me to follow you.’
Hannah let out a soft yelp of shock and dropped both her shoes and skirt. The fabric trailed on the wet ground as she turned around.
The comment came from a man with a massive ego, a man who thought everything was about him.
The acknowledgement shocked Hannah more than the fact Rob had followed her. Even after she had discovered his infidelities there had been a small, irrational corner of her brain that had made excuses for him.
There were no excuses, not for him and not for her either for being so damned gullible—for not seeing past the perfect manners, the practised smile and the thoughtful gifts. She’d seen little flashes of the real Rob and she’d chosen to ignore them and the growing unease she had felt. If she hadn’t walked into Sal’s room and found them...
She closed her eyes to blot out the mental image, and lifted her chin. She had been dreading this moment but now that it was here...how bad could it be? She’d spent two days in a prison cell. She could definitely cope with an awkward situation.
‘Hello, Rob.’ He’d been drinking heavily. She could smell it even before he stepped into the patch of moonlight and she was able to see his high colour and glazed eyes. Seeing Rob when she had thought he was the love of her life had always made her stomach quiver, but now it quivered with distaste.
‘No, I didn’t want you to follow me. I really didn’t.’
He looked taken aback by her reaction. Clearly I’m not following the script he wrote, she thought. Drunk or not drunk, he was still a very handsome man, the premature silvered wings of hair giving him a distinguished look, along with the horn-rimmed glasses that she had been amazed to discover were plain glass, though they gave a superficial impression of intellect and sensitivity.
But then Rob always had been more about style than substance. Deep down Hannah had always known that, she had just chosen not to think about it. But for the first time now she was struck by a softness about him. Not just the thickness around the middle that regular sessions with a personal trainer could never quite eliminate, but in his features... Had he always looked that way or was it just the contrast? She had spent the last two days in the company of a man who made granite look soft.
An image of Kamel floated into her mind: his strong-boned aristocratic features, his mobile, sensual mouth.
‘Just like old times. Remember the time we brought a bottle of champagne out here and—?’
Hannah stiffened and matched his hot stare with one of cold contempt. ‘That wasn’t me.’
He stopped, his eyes falling as his lips compressed in a petulant line. ‘Oh! She never meant anything—’
Did he even remember who she was? The anger and bitterness was still there, and most of all the knowledge that she had been a total fool. But now she could see the black humour in it...in him.
He was a joke.
‘And now you mean nothing to me.’
As he sensed her shift of attitude, sensed he had lost his power, his expression darkened. ‘That’s not true and we both know it.’
‘Look, Rob, Dad wanted you to be here and that’s fine. But you and I are never going to be friends. Let’s settle for civil...?’ She gave a sigh and felt relief. This was the moment she had been dreading—coming face to face with the man she had considered the love of her life only to discover he meant nothing.
Her relieved sigh became a sharp intake of alarm as Rob lumbered drunkenly towards her, forcing Hannah to retreat until her back hit the tree trunk. She winced as the bark grazed her back through the thin fabric of her gown.
‘You were meant to be with me. We are soul mates... What went wrong, Hannah?’
A contemptuous laugh came from Hannah’s lips. She was too angry at being manhandled to be afraid. ‘Maybe all my friends—the ones you bedded after we were engaged?’ She made the sarcastic suggestion without particular rancour. Rob was pathetic.
‘I told you, they meant nothing. They were just cheap...’ His lips curled. ‘Not like you—you’re pure and perfect. I was willing to wait for you. It would have been different after we were married. I would have given you everything.’ He clasped a hand to his heart.
The dramatic gesture caused Hannah’s discomfort to tip over into amusement. He looked so ridiculous.
His eyes narrowed at her laugh, then slid to the jewels that gleamed against the skin of her throat. ‘But I wasn’t enough for you, was I?’
She swallowed; the laugh had been a bad idea. ‘I think I’d better go.’
‘A love match, is it? Or should that be an oil deal?’ He saw her look of shock and smiled. ‘People talk, and I know a lot of people.’
On the receiving end of his fixed lascivious stare, she felt sick. ‘Well, I’m not pure or perfect but I am extremely pis—’
Rob, in full florid flow, cut across her. ‘A work of art,’ he raved. ‘Sheer perfection, my perfect queen, not his—he doesn’t appreciate you like I would have. I’d have looked after you...the other women, they meant nothing to me,’ he slurred. ‘You must know that—you are the only woman I have ever loved.’
How did I ever think he was the man of my dreams? she wondered, feeling queasy as he planted a hand on the tree trunk beside her head and leaned in closer.
Struggling not to breathe in the fumes, she countered acidly, ‘Well, you know, you can’t miss what you’ve never had.’
Having followed the spiky imprints of her heels across the wet grass, Kamel took only a few minutes to locate the couple in the tree. He didn’t pause. Unable to see them, he heard their voices as with a face like thunder he charged straight through a shrub.
This wasn’t a moment to stop and consider, not a moment for subtlety. He’d bent over backwards to be reasonable but she wasn’t a woman who responded to reasonable. Was she pushing boundaries, checking just how far she could push him? Or maybe she simply lacked any normal sense of propriety? This wasn’t about jealousy. It was one thing to have a pragmatic approach to marriage, but she had not just crossed the line, she had obliterated it!
The couple came into his line of vision about the same moment that he mentally processed the interchange he had just heard. It was astonishing enough to stop him in his tracks.
‘Well, he’s welcome to you!’
Hannah struggled and failed to swallow a caustic retort to this petulant response. ‘Well, the idea that I was your soul mate didn’t last long, did it?’
‘Bitch!’ Rob snarled. ‘You think you’ve landed on your feet now, but we all know what happens to people when they get in your husband’s way...’
Hannah was shaken by the m
alice and ugly jealousy in his face. Jealousy...! She shook her head in disbelief. Perhaps he’d been acting the injured party so long he actually believed it.
The full realisation of just how lucky she had been hit home. She could have been married to him.
Her stomach gave a fresh shudder of disgust as she pulled in a breath, trying to surreptitiously ease away from him. As nice as it would have been to drop the icy dignity that had got her through that awful day, this wasn’t the time and definitely not the place, she thought, to have the last word.
This could get ugly.
‘They have a habit of disappearing.’ He mimed a slashing action across his throat. ‘So watch yourself.’
The sinister comment drew a startled laugh from her. It was clearly not the reaction Rob had wanted, as his face darkened and he grabbed for her. Things happened with dizzying speed so that later when she thought about it Hannah couldn’t recall the exact sequence of events.
Kamel surged forward but Hannah was quicker. Unable to escape, she ducked and her attacker’s head hit the tree trunk with a dull thud.
Her attempt to slip under his arm was less successful, and by the time Kamel reached her the man, with blood streaming from a superficial head wound, had caught her arm and swung her back.
‘Bitch!’
Hannah hit out blindly with her free hand and then quite suddenly she was free. Off balance, she fell and landed on her bottom on the wet grass. When she looked up Rob was standing with one hand twisted behind his back with Kamel whispering what she doubted were sweet nothings into the older man’s ear, if the white-lipped fury stamped on his face was any indication.
Rob, who had blood seeping from a gash on his head, seemed to shrink before her eyes and started muttering excuses in full self-preservation mode.
‘If I ever see you in the same postcode as my wife...if you so much as look in her direction...’ Kamel leaned in closer, his nostrils flaring in distaste at the smell of booze and fear that enveloped the man like a cloud, and told him what would happen to him, sparing little detail.
Hannah struggled to her feet imagining the headlines. ‘Don’t hurt him!’
The plea caused Kamel’s attention to swivel from the man he held to Hannah.
‘Please?’
A muscle along his jaw clenched as he stared at her. Then, with a nod that caused two invisible figures to emerge from the trees, he stood aside and the trio walked away.
‘Sure you don’t want to go and hold his hand?’
‘I wasn’t protecting him. I was protecting you.’ Why are you explaining yourself to him? she wondered. It’s not as if he’s going to believe you and it’s not like you care what he thinks.
A look of scowling incredulity spread across his face. ‘Me? You are protecting me?’ He had no idea why her caring about someone who was clearly an abusive loser bothered him so much, but it did.
Her eyes moved slowly up the long, lean length of his muscle-packed body. It was hard to imagine anyone who looked less like he needed looking after.
‘The press could dub you something worse than The Heartbreaker Prince.’ She paused and saw him absorb her comment. His anger still permeated the air around them but it simmered now where it had boiled before. ‘Rob likes to play the victim. I can just see the headlines now...’
‘I wasn’t going to hit him, but if I had he wouldn’t have been running to any scandal sheet,’ he retorted, managing to sound every bit as sinister as Rob had implied he was. While Hannah believed Rob’s comments were motivated by malice, there was no escaping the fact that she knew very little about the man she had married and what he was capable of.
Unwilling to release his image of her as a cold-hearted, unapproachable ice bitch, he asked, ‘What the hell were you thinking of meeting him out here?’
What the hell had she been thinking about getting involved with him to begin with? The man had been mentally filed in his head as a victim. Stupid, but a victim, and now he turned out to be a... His fists clenched as he found himself wishing he had not shown restraint.
Temper fizzed through her body, sparking wrathful blue flames in her eyes. ‘Are you implying that I arranged this? Rob followed me!’
‘And I followed him.’ It was an impulse that he had not checked even though it was a situation that had not required his personal intervention. In fact his abrupt departure had probably caused more speculation than Hannah’s.
‘Why? I thought you delegated all that sort of thing.’
‘There are some things that a husband cannot delegate.’ She might not be wife material but she was definitely mistress material. She might be the sort of woman he would normally cross the road to avoid, but there was no denying that physically she was perfect.
‘So you thought it was your duty to rescue me.’ She had about as much luck injecting amusement into her voice as she had escaping his dark, relentless stare. It was becoming harder to rationalise her response to his strong personal magnetism, or control the pulse-racing mixture of dread and excitement whenever he was close by.
‘Little did I know you had it all under control.’
Her clenched teeth ached at the sarcasm. ‘My hero riding to the rescue yet again.’
‘I thought I was rescuing your...’
‘Victim?’
He dragged his smouldering glance free of her cushiony soft lips and found himself staring at her heaving bosom. ‘The man is...’ He said a word that she didn’t understand but it was not hard to get the drift. ‘What is your ex doing at our wedding party?’
The accusation made her blink. ‘The word party suggests celebration. Tonight has felt more like a punishment. And yes, we all know this is my fault, though I have to tell you that line is getting a bit boring. I’m willing to take my medicine and make nice and pretend you’re almost as marvellous as you think you are, but if this marriage is going to last, and I’m talking beyond the next few seconds, it won’t be on a speak-when-you’re-spoken-to, walk-two-steps-behind-me way. I am not willing to be a doormat!’
She released a shuddering sigh and warmed to her theme. ‘So from now on I expect to be treated with some damned respect, and not just in public!’ Oh, God! Overwhelmed with a mixture of horror and exhilaration, she could not recall losing control of herself quite so completely in her life. Hannah brought her lashes down in a protective veil as she gulped in several shallow breaths while her heart rate continued to race.
The ice queen is dead! Long live the princess of passion! His mental headline tugged the corners of his mouth upwards, but the curve flattened out as he felt his body stir lustfully. It wasn’t the physical response that bothered him; it was the strength of it and the fact it kept intruding.
Mentally and physically, discipline and order were important to Kamel. He had never made a conscious decision to compartmentalise the disparate aspects of his life, but he took the ability for granted and it enabled him to combine the role he had unexpectedly inherited and any sort of personal life.
It had not crossed his mind that being married would lead to any overlap. Tonight came under the heading of duty, with a capital D. Such occasions were more than useful, they were essential, and he definitely shouldn’t be thinking about how she’d look naked, and how soft and inviting her mouth was. Had she just said what he thought she had? He clenched his teeth and struggled to regroup his thoughts. Focus, Kamel—but not on her mouth.
‘Would I be right in thinking that was an...’ he spoke slowly, winged brows drawn into a straight line, and shaking his head slightly as though the concept he was about to voice was just so off the planet as to be unreal ‘...ultimatum?’
Hannah didn’t pause to analyse the weirdness in his voice. If he wanted to call it that it was fine by her! Like an angry curtain, the protective veil of her lashes lifted, but her militant response was delayed as their glanc
es connected and the subsequent sensual jolt caused her brain to stall.
‘I if...I...?’
The nerve endings in her brain might have stopped sending messages, but during that long, nerve-shredding pause those elsewhere had stepped up to fill the vacuum. She could almost feel the blood racing through her veins—it felt dark and hot like the ache low in her pelvis. She snatched a breath, let it out in a quivering sigh, and lifted her chin.
‘Yes, it is, and,’ she added, wagging her finger as she took a squelchy step towards him, ‘if you want to know about the damned guest list why ask me? Ask Dad. I probably know half a dozen people here by first name. You’re the one in the loop. I’m here to smile and take one for the team.’
‘Take one for the team?’
‘What else would you call it?’ His outrage struck her as the height of hypocrisy. ‘Apologies to your ego, but don’t expect me to pretend I like the situation when we’re alone!’
‘No. You’ll just pretend you haven’t thought about what it will be like.’
‘What what would be like?’
His slow predatory smile sent a pulse of sexual heat through her body.
‘Oh, that.’ She faked amusement to cover her embarrassment. ‘Now? Here?’ She laughed a high-pitched laugh. ‘Has anyone ever mentioned your awful timing?’
‘Actually, no.’
She swallowed hard, thinking, That I can believe. ‘Silly me! Of course, even if you were lousy in bed they’d still tell you how marvellous you were because you’re—’ She broke off and finished lamely, ‘You’re...a prince.’
‘You’re a princess.’
‘What?’
‘You’re a princess.’
As in dignified, serene, gracious, aloof...qualities that when she’d been plain old Hannah Latimer she’d had in abundance. Now she was the real deal—a real princess—she’d turned into some sort of fishwife!