by Various
And for once he hadn’t been cynical or mocking or taken the opportunity to tease her about being a child. She had had a kind of breathless, dizzying feeling that he was about to let her into a place that was as closely guarded as the inner sanctum of the palace. And then at the last minute he had withdrawn behind those thick stone walls and let down the portcullis, and the evening had been over.
She got abruptly to her feet, and strode over to the CD player. ‘Anyway,’ she said briskly, desperate to calm the sudden fizz and crackle of desire that had gripped her whole body. ‘Shall we carry on? Now you’ve got the hang of the positions we can do some more advanced moves.’
Ultimately she just hadn’t been special enough, she thought angrily, turning on the CD. Maybe the whole ‘deep and meaningful conversation’ routine was one of the many strategies in his seduction repertoire, and in the end he’d just decided she was too dull, too gauche, too unbroken, to be worth the effort.
Luciana had gone over to the barre and was standing there waiting, her body held very upright, her eyes fixed on Emily’s face. Seeing the anxiety in them Emily instantly felt awful. She hadn’t meant to sound so terse. Consciously forcing herself to relax she did a little pirouette and then swept down in a low bow.
‘Would Princess Luciana give me the honour of this dance?’
The music was a plodding polka, intended for exercise work, but Emily swept Luciana up in her arms and waltzed her around the room, swooping and hopping until they were both breathless and Luciana was giggling uncontrollably. Neither of them heard the door open, or were aware that they were being watched, until they whirled round and saw the solid figure in a starched nurse’s uniform standing squarely in the middle of the floor.
Emily staggered backwards, letting Luciana slide from her arms. The laughter on her lips instantly died as she saw the expression of supreme disapproval on Senhora Costa’s face, which didn’t alter as, with a rustle of starch, she curtsied to Luciana.
Emily felt her insides go cold.
‘It is time for Her Highness’s lunch and her afternoon nap,’ the nanny said stiffly, taking Luciana by the hand and marching towards the door. ‘In future, Senhora Balfour, I would ask that you could return the Princess to the nursery yourself at one o’clock sharp. The importance of routine cannot be underestimated.’
‘I—I’m sorry…’ Emily called after them, but as the door slammed in their wake she knew she wasn’t remotely sorry about lunch or naps or routine. She was sorry for Luciana.
Viciously she stabbed the off button, and the music ceased. Emily tugged off her ballet shoes and threw them back into her bag, where they landed on top of the pointe shoes she had brought with her.
She paused, her heart still beating out a hard, angry rhythm. And then lowering herself down onto the smooth, blond wood floor she took the satin slippers out of her bag.
They were old ones—one of the few things that she had brought with her from Balfour, and the toes were frayed and worn. Picking one up she ran the tattered satin ribbons through her fingers and flexed the shoe between her hands so it was folded almost in half, thinking about when she’d worn them, to dance Sleeping Beauty in her final year.
Her lucky shoes. That’s how she’d always thought of them. That’s why she’d brought them with her when she left home, but of course by then their luck seemed to have deserted them. She shoved her foot into the left shoe, pushing her toes down hard to the block at the end, feeling the pain. Pain was part of ballet; she’d never been afraid of that—of the blisters and the blood, and the ugly, raw calluses.
Behind her the door opened. She looked round, but the tingling sensation in her spine had already told her who she would see. Luis’s broad shoulders almost filled the door frame and the spotlights set into the ceiling of the studio shone on his bronze hair and turned it to gold.
‘I’m afraid you just missed Luciana,’ she said, turning away again and concentrating hard on tightening her pointe shoe. ‘Senhora Costa took her back to the nursery for lunch and her rest.’
‘It was you I wanted.’
His voice was perfectly neutral. So why did her heart feel like a rubber ball that had been bounced against her ribs? She took the ribbons of her shoe and crossed them tight across her ankle, winding round and pulling hard.
‘What for?’
Footsteps on the wooden floor, coming towards her. She kept her head bent over her foot, but the hairs on the back of her neck rose as he came to a standstill right behind her. ‘I just wanted to ask you…’ He paused, and she lifted her head and looked into the mirror in front of her. Their eyes met, and Emily experienced the same sensation as you got when you touched an electric fence. An electric fence around a huge, black chasm, warning her to keep away from the edge. ‘I wanted to ask you if you’d like to come—’
She looked swiftly down again. ‘I don’t think so.’
He came forward so he was standing in front of her, leaning against the barre. ‘You haven’t heard what I was going to say yet.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’ She finished tying the ribbon around her ankle and tucked the knot in, neatly, out of sight. ‘I just think that after last night it would be better—simpler—if we kept things on a professional basis. Could you please pass me the other shoe?’
It was lying on the top of her ballet bag. He bent and picked it up, but he didn’t hand it to her straight away. ‘This is professional,’ he said absently, turning it over in his hands, feeling the hardness of the pointe. ‘I was going to ask if you’d like to come with me to the ballet.’
Emily looked up, holding onto her bare foot. ‘The ballet?’
‘It’s the Brazilian National Ballet performing.’ He frowned, still looking at the shoe. ‘I assumed that ballet shoes would be soft, but this is rock hard. Doesn’t it hurt?’
‘Yes, but you get used to it. After a while you stop noticing. Which ballet is it?’
A shadow of some emotion she couldn’t read passed across his face. With a faint, twisted smile he handed her the shoe.
‘I think it had a girl’s name,’ he said tonelessly. ‘Beginning with G?’
‘Not Giselle?’ She couldn’t quite hide the wistfulness in her voice, and swallowed it back as she raised her knee and eased her foot into the satin shoe. It was still warm from being held between his hands, and her foot flexed and pointed almost of its own accord, as if it remembered how that felt. Suddenly she was right back in the hotel room, lying on the bed while he cradled her foot between his palms, massaging her instep with his thumb…
He was watching her, his eyes opaque and gold. Every inch of her body thrummed with awareness as he nodded slowly. ‘I think that was it. If so, is that a yes?’
The room was very quiet, and for a long moment the silence stretched and swelled as uncertainty and longing fought within her. She had told herself to stay away from him, to keep to the path and not stray into the woods, but after all this time the lure of the ballet was impossible to resist. She lowered her gaze, concentrating on tying the ribbons of her shoe. ‘Yes,’ she said in a low voice, as she stood and rose tentatively onto her pointes, bending each foot in turn and arching it hard against the floor. ‘Yes, please.’
He levered himself off the barre and began to walk towards the door, suddenly businesslike and offhand again. ‘Good. It’s a week on Saturday. Someone will come and see you about clothes, just to make sure you’ve got something suitable. I’ll see you then.’
A week on Saturday? Emily gripped the barre as a bolt of irrational panic shot through her, catching her completely off guard. ‘I won’t see you before then? Are you going away?’
He stopped in the doorway and turned round. He looked distant, controlled, perfect. ‘No. I’ll be here. But I think you’re right. It is better if we keep things on a professional footing. I look forward to hearing about Luciana’s progress a week on Saturday.’
And then he was gone.
Luis walked quickly away.
A week on
Saturday. That was, what? Ten days? Eleven?
Eleven days to get his head together before he saw her again. To bury himself in work and make himself remember exactly why he had made this punishing, inhuman promise to Rico. And to wipe the memory of her extraordinary, erotic feet from his mind.
Or if that didn’t work, to drink himself into oblivion.
Chapter Ten
THE touch on her face was as light as the caress of a butterfly’s wing, but Emily couldn’t suppress the shiver that rippled through her.
For the past eleven days she had been looking forward to this, the excitement mounting as the days went by. And now, finally, it was Saturday and every inch of her body was tingling, trembling with nerves and anticipation, so that just sitting still while the girl did her make-up was a major challenge.
It was the excitement of going to the ballet again, after all this time, she told herself. It had been more than six months since she’d last been to Covent Garden, just before Christmas when she and her mother made their usual trip to London for shopping and The Nutcracker—a tradition they’d followed since she was a child.
That seemed like a lifetime ago now.
Her eyes sprang open. The face that looked back at her, reflected from every angle by the triple mirror on the dressing table, was almost unrecognizable. Leaning forward she gave a little squeak of surprise and pleasure, batting her lashes and admiring the smoky-eyed effect that Eloisa, the make-up girl, had created with eyeliner and shadow.
‘Oh, you’re so clever! I look—’
‘Sexy.’ Eloisa spoke hardly any English, but she said this word with huge assurance, making Emily wonder fleetingly about the circumstances under which she’d picked it up.
‘I was going to say grown-up,’ she said ruefully, but Eloisa merely shrugged blankly and brandished a lipstick, making any further comment impossible.
Tipping her face up, Emily closed her eyes, and felt the butterflies rise up in her stomach once again as she parted her lips, and the darkness behind her lids was suddenly filled with images and memories. She almost gasped out loud as she felt the stroke of the brush against her quivering mouth, moving firmly, expertly over her lips…
‘OK. Pronto.’
Eloisa’s matter-of-fact voice brought Emily firmly back to reality and she opened her eyes, blinking guiltily and pressing her tingling lips together. Getting to her feet and going over to the full-length mirror she smoothed down the wine-red silk dress and raised a hand tentatively to touch the diamond comb that held her piled-up hair in place.
Gone was the wan, wide-eyed waif that Luis had brought with him to Santosa and in her place was a sophisticated dark-haired temptress. Thanks to the skill of the palace chef she had filled out, losing her previous gauntness so that her collarbones no longer stood out like coat hangers, and her pale breasts swelled slightly above the tight bodice of the red dress.
Standing behind her Eloisa sighed. ‘Bonita, senhora. Príncipe Luis e muito afortunado.’
Prince Luis.
Emily couldn’t be sure what the rest of the sentence meant, but those two words leaped out at her as if they’d been accompanied by a foot-high sign.
‘You go to the ballet?’ Eloisa asked now, briskly stowing her brushes and pencils and pots of powder back into an industrial-size silver tool box.
‘Yes.’ Emily reached for the crisp voile wrap that matched her dress. The ballet. That’s what she should be thinking of, focusing on. The ballet that she’d been looking forward to.
‘Ahh…fabuloso.’ Eloisa replied enviously. ‘Qual bale?’
Which ballet? Emily understood the question and opened her mouth to answer. And realised she couldn’t for the life of her remember.
Sitting at the desk in his private suite of rooms Luis tried to focus on the charity report in front of him, and not on the whisky decanter he could see from the corner of his eye.
He could really do with a drink. It had been a draining day, one of many in an exhausting, cheerless and seemingly endless week when he had visited his father numerous times—publicly, to appease Josefina—made several statements to the press, which had varied from the simply anodyne to the blatantly untruthful, and begun to look properly into the huge and horrifying implications of what would happen when the King inevitably died.
The night at the Purple Parrot seemed like a very long time ago indeed.
Sighing he forced his mind back onto the report, glancing once again at the name of the charity printed at the top of the page. The Santosan Preservation Trust, it said in gold embossed letters. Keeping Our Heritage Safe for the Future.
Luis grimaced. He was trying to go through the charities of which King Marcos Fernando was patron and decide which ones he would continue to support personally, but it was a massive undertaking. And one that carried a very real risk of death by boredom. We undertake to protect Santosa from the corrosive effects of the modern world, he read wearily, and preserve the values, traditions and environment which our ancestors worked so hard to establish.
Luis sighed deeply. There were few things more depressing than the thought of Santosa being locked for ever in some suffocating bubble, cut off from reality and the rest of the world, but a quick look at the names on the Santosan Preservation Trust’s board of governors—most of which made up the current government cabinet—told him that cutting royal ties with this particular charity might not be a popular decision. He put the paper on the growing pile of keepers and checked his watch.
She was exactly six minutes late. But since he’d practically been counting the hours until he would see her for the past eleven days, six minutes hardly mattered. Deus, it was ridiculous. He was like some hormonally unbalanced teenager. Impatiently he picked up the next report in the pile and opened it, hoping it was going to be something interesting enough to take his mind off the pull of desire low down in the pit of his stomach that had been with him almost constantly for more than a week.
It just confirmed how shallow and reprehensible he was, he thought bitterly. All the time he’d been sitting at his dying father’s bedside, or going through the complicated practical and constitutional issues associated with the king’s failing health and his own accession to the throne, all he could think about was Emily Balfour’s mouth, her slender, supple body, glistening with water from the bath, her feet…
Deus, her feet…
He gritted his teeth and frowned. The problem was he wasn’t used to wanting something—or someone—and not being able to have it. Since his mother had died his life had been about sublimating real emotions for sexual satisfaction, about instant gratification and taking what he wanted, when he wanted it, and the combination of his looks and his title had ensured no woman ever refused him.
Until he’d met Emily Balfour. Until he’d kissed her beneath the cherry blossom and she’d pulled away, and he had seen the fear in her wide blue eyes and realised what he had become.
There was a discreet knock at the door, and the duty footman appeared. ‘Senhora Balfour, Your Highness.’
She was wearing red. At first that was all Luis was aware of, other than that she was the most extraordinarily beautiful girl he had ever seen.
Woman, not girl, he corrected himself mentally, as his gaze moved slowly over her. The dress had a close-fitting bodice that showed off the narrowness of her frame and her small, perfect breasts, while the billowing full skirt that fell to just above her ankles emphasized her hips. And, he noticed with a pang, made it possible to see her feet.
Without realising it he had got up, and suddenly he was aware that he was standing by the desk, the pen still in his hand, staring at her. He threw the pen down and ran a finger round the collar of his evening shirt as he went towards her.
‘Sorry,’ he said curtly, leaning down to give her a perfunctory kiss on each cheek. ‘I’m just catching up on some paperwork. I was miles away.’
He pulled away from her quickly, as if she were red hot. Which she was, he thought darkly. Dangerously so
, in every sense.
She lowered her eyes with a sweep of impossibly long black lashes, and Luis felt a moment of relief to be shielded from that direct blue gaze. ‘I’m sorry—if you’re busy I can always wait outside until you’re ready…?’
‘No.’ The word came out as an autocratic bark. Deus, Josefina would be thrilled at such uncharacteristic regality. ‘That won’t be necessary. Would you like a drink before we go?’
She looked up at him uncertainly. ‘Are you having one?’
‘I can’t.’ No matter how much he needed one. He nodded in the direction of one of the rows of windows which looked out over the circular sweep of lawn beyond the formal garden. The helicopter waited there, the setting sun glinting on the royal crest on the side. ‘I’m flying.’
Her eyes widened. ‘We’re going in that? Alone?’
‘Yes. It’s the quickest way to travel to the mainland. Not as comfortable as the jet, of course, but more direct. Is that a problem?’
‘No…no, of course not,’ she stammered, but not before he had seen the expression of alarm flicker across her face and knew that she was thinking of Rico.
‘Good,’ he said blandly, picking up his mobile phone and walking towards the door. He had been about to reassure her that it was quite safe, but that was an untruth too far. ‘Shall we go, then?’
The diaphanous wrap she wore brushed against the back of his hand as she walked past him through the door, and he caught a fleeting breath of the delicate scent of her skin. ‘You look beautiful, by the way.’
That much at least was true.
Being a Cordoba is about saying the correct thing, not the honest thing. Wasn’t that what he’d said that night at the restaurant? That’s the deal and you can’t change it.