‘N…no.’
‘Then what I suggest is this,’ he told her, and he released her and turned away, seeming to search for something. ‘I asked Henri to find this. I’ve been waiting for this for almost thirty years and…yes!’
‘Yes?’ she said, cautiously bemused. Her royal prince was down on his hands and knees now, delving under a huge mahogany desk by the window.
‘He found it,’ he said, triumphant. ‘He’s left it here for me. Good old Henri.’
‘What?’ There was an element of surrealism behind this, she thought. Bride in mediaeval gown, in truly splendid bridal chamber, watching husband in full regimentals-he was still wearing his sword!-crawling under a desk. Hauling out a huge wooden box with a hinged lid.
‘It’s my slot-car set,’ he said and the level of satisfaction in his voice made her stare.
‘Your slot-car set.’
‘I turned six the day before my father kicked us out of the palace,’ he told her. ‘But on my sixth birthday I was given the sort of slot-car set any small boy dreams of. It’s sat here untouched for nearly thirty years and you can’t imagine how many times I thought of it with regret. It’s dumb, I know, but one of the first things I thought of when I knew I had to come back here was this. Then tonight…I figured if we had to stay locked in here all night and you intended to be cold and distant, then I was going to get it out and use it. So I asked Henri to search the attics and see if he could find it.’
A slot-car set. It was so far away from everything she’d been thinking that she couldn’t believe it. She stood and her jaw felt as if it was hitting her ankles.
But something had to be cleared up first.
‘I don’t intend to be cold and distant.’
‘What else do you call making cushion walls in the bath?’
He was impossible. ‘You really do want to play with your slot-cars?’
‘What else are we going to do? Beside divide rooms with cushions.’ He raised his eyebrows and grinned-a grin of pure mischief. ‘Unless you’ve changed your mind. It is a bridal suite, after all. We can always indulge in a spot of seduction. Seduction’s good.’ He wiggled his eyebrows some more. Seduction at its most alluring.
He didn’t know how alluring.
‘Play with your slot-cars,’ she told him-but she smiled. How could she not smile in the face of this man’s delight?
He sighed-but he moved on. ‘You can play, too, if you want,’ he told her and he grinned up at her again as he hauled his box open. ‘There’s a blue car and a red car and two controllers. And so much road… Bridges and tunnels and everything. It’s never been used. What a tragedy.’ He paused. ‘But maybe you’re not even up to playing with slot-cars. Do you want to go into the bedroom and lock the door?’
She hesitated.
She eyed him-cautiously.
She eyed the cars coming out of their box. They’d obviously been state-of-the-art thirty years ago. They looked amazing.
The decision was suddenly easy. ‘I want red,’ she declared and stooped to pick up her little red car. A Porsche. ‘It’s not a Lamborghini,’ she said, sighing, ‘but I guess the peasants have to make do with what they can get.’
He smirked. ‘The blue one’s a Lamborghini.’
‘I knew that.’
‘So why did you choose red?’
‘Red’s my colour.’ Thoroughly distracted, thoroughly disconcerted but thoroughly intrigued, she was now kneeling on the floor, pulling things out of his magic box. They had enough roadway to go all around the room. And the bridges were amazing. ‘Cool!’
‘I can so see that red’s your colour,’ he told her, eyeing her burnished curls with appreciation. ‘Blue’s royal. Red’s for temper. I can wear that.’
‘Raoul…’
‘Mm?’
She was way out of her depth and she knew it. What was she supposed to say?
She said the only thing she could think of.
‘Raoul, shut up and build.’
‘Yes, Your Highness.’
So they built, and they raced, and it was the craziest, funniest night that Jess could remember.
Maybe there had been great nights in the past, back in her childhood, nights where all else was forgotten in the face of pure fun, but an appalling marriage followed by tragedy had driven any such memory from her mind.
She wouldn’t forget this night. This was a night to remember forever.
It took an hour to set up the track. In the face of such an intriguing challenge, Jess’s exhaustion fell away. People around her at the reception, making polite conversation, appraising her as a princess, had made her feel dizzy with fatigue. But here… Here she got her second wind.
Raoul was trying to set up his complicated loop before she built her bridge. He was pinching the pieces she wanted. She’d slept this afternoon. She wasn’t truly tired. Besides, how could a girl go tamely into her bedroom and close the door with such a construction happening on the other side?
She couldn’t.
Especially as Raoul was here.
He’d hauled off his sash, his suit coat, his shoes, his tie and his sword. He still looked like a prince but he looked like…her prince. Yes, he was still very much a prince, she thought, and then tried hard not to think about it.
On the other hand, she was no longer a princess. She’d kicked off her sandals and taken off the great overskirt with train. She was still wearing the bodice and the silken underskirt but-after some hesitation-she’d asked Raoul to loosen the stays that were flattening her breasts. With the ties at the back unfastened, her breasts bounced up again, free. That was a crucial moment in the night. Raoul eyed the swell beneath her loosened bodice. He eyed her-and decided wisely to say nothing.
With that decision safely past, she relaxed. The tension eased.
They were free; two kids with their slot-car set.
The cars were fantastic, and the road they made was amazing; tunnels, bridges, sweeping curves that looped round and round the room. It made the racing excellent. Once the road was finished they raced in earnest. They pushed their cars to the limit, the curves making them overturn, sweep off the sides, fly off into the carpet, crash against each other…
Jess was caught up in a bubble of laughter that wouldn’t go away and Raoul’s rich chuckle sounded out over and over again.
‘You know, those guys outside from the ministry are going to think there’s something really kinky going on in here,’ Jess declared as they stopped laughing for long enough to line up for their final race. They’d decided on the best of three races. Then the best of five. Then the best of seventeen. Now it was the best of forty-seven. They were twenty-three wins apiece, the tiny cars were starting to smell of burned rubber and their little engines were starting to fade.
They lined them up and counted down. Round and round flew the cars, squealing against the rails, clashing against each other, screaming into the next lap, hitting full gear, fast, faster, faster…
They hit the kerb by the bedpost. Raoul’s car clipped her rear tyre. Her tiny red Porsche did a double back somersault and flew into the air.
And hit Raoul beneath the eye.
‘Ouch!’ He fell back against the bed, laughing so hard he could hardly hold his hand to his face. But with his spare hand he was still gripping the controls. Pressing harder…
The crash had done its damage. His tiny blue Lamborghini slowed. It slowed still further.
It stopped six inches from the finish.
Raoul looked sideways at his opposition-and reached out a finger and pushed it over the finishing line.
‘Hey.’ Jess retrieved her little car, which was smoking ominously from the rear end. It was going to need major love to get it going again. ‘You’re not allowed to push.’
‘There’s no rule that says I’m not allowed to push.’
‘I’ll bet there is. You’ve won by foul means.’
‘Whereas you’ve won by throwing a car at me,’ he told her. ‘You’ve even draw
n blood. Talk about foul means.’
‘Blood?’ she said cautiously. ‘You can’t be serious.’
‘It’s serious.’ He lifted his fingers and revealed a scratch a quarter of an inch long. ‘I think it’s mortal.’
She couldn’t stop laughing. The room was a shambles. As a honeymoon suite, it made a great Formula One track.
‘Let me see again?’ she demanded and he lifted his hand away.
‘I think I need plasma,’ he said, mournfully. ‘And I’m a doctor. I’d know. Or at least a kiss better.’ He looked hopeful.
‘I have a better idea. I’ll stitch it,’ she told him. ‘You might be a doctor but I can sew!’
‘Get away from me.’ Still he was laughing. ‘And don’t distract me from what really matters. I demand complete disqualification on the grounds of attack.’
‘You don’t know what attack is.’
‘I won,’ he said smugly.
‘You cheated.’
‘The royal decree is that I won.’
‘I’m royal, too,’ she told him. ‘And my royal decree is that you cheated.’
‘I’m more royal than you are.’
For answer she lifted a cushion-and tossed. The big, squishy cushion fell plump against his face.
He let it fall, then eyed her with caution. He took his hand away from his face and checked his fingers. The really very minor scratch had stopped bleeding.
‘I might live,’ he said grudgingly.
‘If you think you’re getting a sympathy victory, think again. Wuss.’
‘Wuss?’ He lifted a cushion. ‘You can’t call a prince of the blood a wuss.’
‘I can call a prince whinging about an infinitesimal scratch anything I want.’ She eyed the cushion he was raising with a certain amount of trepidation. ‘Don’t you dare.’
‘All’s fair,’ he said softly ‘in love and war.’
He tossed the cushion straight at her.
She lifted her hand to ward it off. Her hand was still holding the tiny, scratched and battered racing car. The car caught the side of the down-filled cushion-and it ripped.
Feathers flew from one end of the room to another.
She sneezed. She was laughing so much there were feathers going into her mouth. She was blinded by a sea of white down.
‘Where are you?’ Raoul was fighting feathers, pushing them away from him, laughing as much as she was. ‘Hell, woman, I can’t fight you if I can’t see you.’
He was reaching for her in the feathers.
‘There are more cushions where they came from,’ she managed, spluttering. ‘And you threw it.’
‘So I did.’
He reached for her.
She reached for a cushion.
She reached the cushion as he reached her. He seized her hands in his before she could lift it. He was gripping hard, trying to keep the cushion from smacking him in the face.
She was fighting him…fighting him…
‘Desist, woman,’ he spluttered.
And suddenly she wasn’t fighting him at all.
How it happened she could never after explain. One minute they were intent on killing each other with cushions. The next…
There was a patch in the carpet where there was no road, a looping curve with carpet in the centre. The rug was piled with feathers, and that was where they were.
He was holding her but he was no longer fighting. He was no longer defending himself from cushions.
He was pulling her against his chest, and she was sinking into him, still laughing but melting…melting into his arms as if everything that had happened in this night had been leading to this moment.
His mouth was claiming hers. His arms were holding her. He was laughing with her in a mixture of exasperation and laughter and tenderness, but the exasperation and the laughter were fading and the tenderness was growing. And with it…
With it an aching, surging need that had no hope of being denied. She was curving against his body as if she belonged, and that was how she felt.
For this moment-right now-this was her man. The vows she’d made… She’d made them as mock-vows-or she’d meant to make them as mock-vows-but her heart hadn’t caught up with her head, and her heart was screaming that she’d vowed to love and honour this man for the rest of her life.
As he’d vowed to love her. No wonder then that he was claiming her as his wife and there was no way she could gainsay him.
For she wanted him as much as he wanted her. More. He was the other half of her whole. They’d joined, loved, declared their commitment before God and man, and they’d been made one.
‘Raoul.’ Somehow she whispered his name. Somehow.
Raoul.
Her hands were under his shirt, feeling the raw strength of him, glorying in his masculinity. Her husband. Hers.
And he was claiming her. The last of the ties were being unfastened. Her bodice was falling away and she didn’t care.
Wrong. She did care. She wanted this. This man was her husband.
Her love.
A thought. A desperate little thought, made at the outer edges of her consciousness where only the last ragged shreds of sanity prevailed, surfaced and started screaming. No. But it had to be said.
‘Raoul, we can’t…’
He pulled away from her then. Just a little, and he was smiling in the firelight with such tenderness that he took her breath away.
‘Why can’t we-my wife?’
‘I… We don’t have protection. Raoul, I can’t…get pregnant.’
How had she found the strength to say it? She didn’t know but it was out. And she caught her breath in dismay.
She wanted him. Oh, she wanted him.
Where was the nearest convenience store to this place?
But there was no need. He was turning her in his arms, cradling her, holding her close but gesturing to something by the bedroom door.
On a hall stand there was a tiny bundle of things that looked like golden coins.
‘This is a bridal chamber,’ he told her, his voice husky with tenderness and with passion. ‘It comes supplied.’
She gasped. She tried to work up indignation.
She failed. ‘How…how…?’ she stammered. Then, ‘If they’ve been sitting there since the last marriage in this place-’
He silenced her with a kiss. When he drew back his eyes were even darker, more intense, loving her with his smile. ‘Henri told me he’d put them in here personally this afternoon,’ he told her. ‘Just in case.’
‘Well, good old Henri,’ she said-trying to make her voice dry. Trying not to let her voice crack with emotion.
‘He is good,’ Raoul told her, his dark eyes flaring with passion. ‘He’s wonderful. But he’s not as wonderful as you, my love.’ His voice lowered then, and it was suddenly husky with passion. ‘You know, I’ve never thought I could feel like I do now. All the decisions I made after Lisle’s death, that I couldn’t love anyone… Jess, I thought that I couldn’t love, because to love and lose again would break my heart. But I’m falling so hard for you. This love thing… Any minute I’m going to be so irrevocably tied that to lose you would tear me apart. I intend to hold you to me forever. Please God, forever.’
‘Oh, Raoul…’
It was too much. She was so close to tears, and all she could do was stare at him with eyes that were lost. Was he saying he loved her?
‘But you’ve lost, too, my love, and a child,’ he said softly and she knew he could see her pain. ‘And your loss is so much more recent-more raw than mine. The leap you’re making here now… I know how brave it is. For you to love me…’
What was he saying? ‘I don’t… I can’t…’
‘You do and you can,’ he said softly and he kissed her long and hard, so deeply that she knew his words were absolute truth. She loved him. Oh, yes, she loved him.
And did that love betray her love for Dominic?
She didn’t know. She couldn’t think straight. She couldn’t think at
all. Not when he was smiling at her. Not when he was loving her, holding her as the most precious thing in the world.
He was her husband. Raoul.
‘And now, my beautiful bride, my princess…my love,’ he whispered, ‘would you like your true wedding setting to be the troop bed beyond? Or would you like your wedding night to be spent between the bridge and the second tunnel of the world’s best racing track?’
There was no need to answer.
She was right between the bridge and the second tunnel of the world’s best racing track.
She took his beloved face in her hands, she drew him into her. Her doubts about her baby son disappeared-to be faced at some time in the future but not now. Please…not now.
For tonight there was only Raoul.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
HAPPINESS lasted until the hour before dawn.
At some time during this truly extraordinary night they’d moved. The bed made for an army had some very real advantages-like sheets-against the alternative of odd pieces of slot-car set digging in their spines. Raoul had carried his bride there at last, and some time long after that they’d slept.
But in the hour before dawn she woke.
She lay, curved into the warmth of her husband’s body. She listened to his soft breathing, she felt his heartbeat, and she knew that here she could find a home.
But could she? Too much had happened too fast for this to seem like a happy ending. Too much had happened for her to take it in and with the first weak light of morning came the slivers of doubt. The fog edged back.
Could she stay here?
Last night she’d melted into him, yet how much of a considered choice had it been? What did she know of him and this whole surreal situation she’d landed herself in?
In this hour before dawn the doubts flooded back in force.
This was a strange and enigmatic man. He was a doctor, yet she’d seen nothing of his medicine. He was a prince, though she knew nothing of his country.
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