by Kendrick, Sharon; Lawrence, Kim; Crews, Caitlin; Milburne, Melanie
‘You!’ His brother’s jaw hit his chest before he recovered. ‘You’ve been in love?’ Luis shook his head. ‘Who? When? What happened?’
‘What always happens—the glitter rubs off. I found out she snored and her laugh grated, but for a while I believed that she was perfect. Actually, I’ve believed quite a few were perfect since, the difference being I no longer expect it to last.’
In Sebastian’s opinion, if you were looking for a formula for unhappiness it would be hard to come up with a more sure-fire method than tying yourself to one person for life based on a short-lived chemical high.
‘Perfect? Like you, you mean?’
Sebastian winced and grinned, watching as Luis, his expression growing distracted, moved to one of the two chairs arranged at the foot of the bed. Sebastian held up a warning hand.
‘I wouldn’t do that. I made the same mistake. The leg dropped off. I’ve propped it.’
Luis made a detour to the other chair.
Sebastian’s gaze moved around the room of faded grandeur. ‘It’s not what I was expecting. They really are strapped for cash. No wonder,’ he observed cynically, ‘they are so willing to sell their daughter off to the highest bidder.’
‘They’re not selling her!’ Luis protested. ‘Sabrina understands. She respects—’
‘Our mother understood,’ Sebastian interrupted, wondering if the anger he felt would ever go away. Anger at the system that had trapped his mother in a marriage that had, in the end, destroyed her. ‘And that didn’t turn out so well.’
‘It’s not the same!’ his brother protested, flushing as he surged to his feet.
Sebastian arched a brow. ‘From where I’m standing it looks like a classic case of history repeating itself.’
Luis’s horrified rebuttal was immediate. ‘I’m not like…him.’
Then break the blasted cycle!
Sebastian didn’t voice his thought. What would be the point? He knew his brother would never challenge their father, and, if the positions were reversed, was he so damned sure that he would? Easy to criticise from where he stood.
‘I wonder, Seb. What do you think he’d do if he knew…?’
Sebastian’s irritation slipped away as he walked across to where his brother stood and laid a hand on Luis’s shoulder. ‘He won’t,’ he said firmly. ‘We burnt the letters. No one knows they ever existed.’
The young brothers had not known at the time they discovered the love letters hidden under a floorboard that despite breaking off the affair after she discovered she was carrying her lover’s child she had continued to see him after the child she had conceived with him had been born.
The irony was that they were right, there was a royal bastard, only it wasn’t the son that the scandal-mongers had identified.
‘As far as the world is concerned, the affair only started the year I was born.’ Sebastian could see no reason anyone should ever know. ‘We are the only two people who know, unless you plan on telling him?’
Luis shuddered. ‘I stood by and watched you being bullied at school and then at home when we both know that you should be King. I have no legitimate claim to the throne. I’m not even his son.’
Sebastian shook his head. ‘Be glad of that every day. Be glad of it, Luis!’ he said, his voice gruff with ferocious sincerity. ‘You’ve escaped the taint that I carry. I’m the son the bastard deserves. You will make a better King than I ever could be. You’re the one who has made all the sacrifices…and you are still making them.’ Sebastian straightened up, relaxing the grip on his brother’s shoulders. ‘You don’t have to marry her, you know. You could say no.’
Luis shook his head and dodged his brother’s gaze. ‘Easy for you to say. I’m not—’
‘Selfish as hell?’ Sebastian thought of where being unselfish had got his mother. He’d choose selfish every time.
Luis’s gaze lifted, just as his brother vanished into the bathroom. ‘I’m not a rebel like you. I need to… I care about what people think about me.’
Sebastian re-emerged with a fresh towel, which he rubbed vigorously over his damp hair.
‘And this marriage isn’t about me, it’s about bigger things. I’m realistic about it.’
‘So how does she feel about it?’
Luis gave an uncomprehending shrug. ‘How do you mean?’
‘I mean what does Sabrina expect from this marriage? Is she realistic too?’ He gave a sudden shrug, annoyed with himself for wasting time on a subject that was none of his business. ‘Is the warm glow of doing the right thing enough for her too?’ He began to vigorously rub his already towel-dried hair, asking himself where this swell of outrage was coming from. She’d made her bed and she seemed happy to lie in it…with his brother. ‘Hell, Luis, do you two even talk?’
‘We have a lifetime to talk,’ Luis responded, not sounding as though the life he saw stretching ahead filled him with joy. ‘But you mean sex, don’t you? It’s not like you to be so squeamish. Actually no, I haven’t slept with her.’
‘That’s not what I meant, but as you’ve shared aren’t you taking this untouched virgin bride stuff a bit too far, Luis?’
Luis laughed. ‘Even father doesn’t expect that.’
‘How incredibly liberal-minded of him.’ Sebastian was still struggling with the implication of some of Sabrina’s unguarded comments. Was it really possible that Sabrina had not had a lover, out of fear of falling in love?
‘What if you’re not compatible? Have you thought of that?’
Luis for once looked annoyed. ‘For God’s sake, Seb, this isn’t about how good she is in bed!’
As the comment unlocked a stream of graphic images that flowed relentlessly through his head, Sebastian lowered his eyelids to half-mast. His jaw clenched as he struggled to stem the flow and pretended an amusement he was a long way from feeling. ‘But it would help.’
It would help him even more, Sebastian mused darkly, if he could stop thinking of unfastening glossy honey hair and watching it fall over bare shoulders, pushing it back to reveal small firm breasts…
Oblivious to the tension underpinning his brother’s taut delivery, Luis laughed. ‘I really like her.’
‘Like?’
Luis tipped his head in acknowledgment. ‘She’s sweet,’ he began with the attitude of a man who was clutching at straws.
‘And,’ he ploughed on with determination, ‘she has a lot of common sense.’
Were they even talking about the same woman? Sebastian wondered, thinking about the woman who had attempted to punch her way out of his locked car just to avoid being shut in there with him.
He recognised she’d been driven to this drastic move by desperation and fear and he had fully intended saying something to soothe her, but the expression on her face when she’d recognised him, the fact that she’d looked as though she had just discovered she had jumped into a car beside the Devil himself…he simply hadn’t been able to resist playing up to her prejudices a little.
But then she had challenged his own firmly embedded prejudices. In the abstract he had been able to despise Sabrina Summerville, or at least the idea of her, a woman who, despite coming from a different generation, was just as willing as his own mother had been to be a compliant, political pawn.
The first surprise had been the desire that had twisted inside him when he’d found himself sitting just inches away from her, which shouldn’t have happened. He had seen the photos. He already knew that she was good-looking, admittedly more classy than classically beautiful. But what those photos had not prepared him for was the crystal clarity of her skin, the sprinkling of freckles across the bridge of her small straight nose, the deep liquid darkness of her eyes that seemed to reflect her every mood like a mirror. And last, but definitely not least, the pink lushness of her amazing lips.
The blood-roaring primal intensity of his reaction had effectively blocked everything else from his mind for what might only have been seconds, but could have been an hour.
And the hits had just kept coming!
He’d expected a passive victim; he had got a feisty fighter, who clearly thought he was a total waste of space. What had got to him the most had been the conflict in her eyes, her vulnerability.
He’d just wanted to tell her not to do it. Not to marry Luis. Instead he’d kissed her…a greedy response to a need that had been visceral in its intensity.
‘I’ve never seen her lose her temper,’ Luis said.
Sebastian could not control the bark of laughter that bubbled up from his chest as he lifted a hand to his cheek where the imprint of her fingers had lasted, but he didn’t react to his brother’s puzzled look.
‘Perhaps you should try giving her cause and see what happens?’
‘She’s very pretty,’ Luis added, his tone almost defensive as though he expected his brother to deny the fact.
Was Luis serious? The woman was beautiful. She wasn’t his type, he had never leaned in the direction of cut-glass delicacy, but even he could recognise her natural beauty, the rare ‘get out of bed with her hair mussed and still look knockout gorgeous’ beauty, not that he would ever get the chance to prove his theory.
She was his brother’s.
The reminder slowed the heat rising inside him but did not stop its slow, inexorable progress.
What are you, Seb? Fifteen? Get a grip, man!
‘Are you asking me for an opinion?’ Sebastian struggled hard to tap into the sympathy he normally felt for his brother, who was the one expected to make a marriage of convenience, the one looking ahead to a life of being the acceptable public face of the crown.
‘No, yes? I suppose?’ His brother produced one of his genuine smiles, seeming to suddenly shrug off his mood with an ease that Sebastian envied.
‘Maybe you should go on a date.’
‘With Sabrina?’
‘Well, the dating ritual is kind of what people do before they get married, unless you have one of those “wake up in Vegas with a tattoo, a hangover and a wife” marriages. I can recommend the first two as a way of passing a weekend.’
Luis’s eyes slid from his brother’s as he sketched a smile. ‘I haven’t thanked you yet, for getting her out of that press scrum.’
‘Glad to be of help,’ Sebastian said, wondering about the change of subject and his brother’s unusually evasive attitude. Luis, he decided as he studied his brother’s face, looked positively shifty.
‘I’m sure she took it all in her stride.’
Sebastian clamped his jaw as he fought a compulsion to defend Sabrina from the criticism he could hear behind this faint praise. ‘You’d have preferred she’d have fallen apart?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Actually she was pretty shaken, but she came out fighting.’ He saw no point adding that the fight had been mostly directed, quite deservedly, at him.
Luis got to his feet. ‘She was lucky you were so close.’
‘She might not agree… I’d been drinking.’
Luis looked amused. ‘Fall asleep and snore, did you?’
Sebastian’s eyes fell. ‘Not exactly.’
* * *
Sabrina stubbornly refused to acknowledge the lump in her throat as she unpacked. The task didn’t take long. There wasn’t much, just a few pieces of clothing and personal items she had hastily crammed into a holdall.
They represented the majority of her things from the London flat she’d shared with a couple of girlfriends, or had up until two days ago.
The embassy staff hadn’t wanted her to return at all that day, but in the end she’d been given the begrudging go-ahead for half an hour with what they’d termed a discreet security presence, which had turned out to consist of a team of four large dark-suited men.
Sabrina had retained enough of her natural sense of irony—just—to wonder what non-discreet looked like, as two of the silent, unsmiling figures had stared straight ahead as she’d packed and written a note for her flatmates, who had both been sleeping after a long night shift. The other two minders had been, as they’d put it, securing the exits… She really didn’t want to know what that involved! Though the dawning realisation that soon this bizarre would be her normal had made her lose whatever humour she might have seen in the situation.
When it had come to making a goodbye visit to the research unit where she had worked for just over the last year she’d changed tack, not requesting permission, instead just announcing her intention the next morning. Wait, no, it had been this morning. Things were happening so fast it was a struggle to retain any sense of time in this speeded-up version of her own life. She had hidden her surprise when the tactic had worked. Perhaps in the future she should stop saying please and simply demand?
Being the future Queen had to have some benefits.
You’re getting ahead of yourself, Brina. You’re not even a princess yet.
Her ironic grin barely surfaced before it vanished, because soon she would be.
She supposed she didn’t really have the right to feel so shocked, it was hardly news, but in the past it had been a distant thing. Now it was all very real and there was no more pretending that her life was normal.
An expression of impatience drifted across her heart-shaped face, firming the lines of her delicate jaw and soft full lips as she cut off the self-pitying direction of her thoughts.
It is what it is, Brina, so get over it, she told herself sternly as she shook out the silky blouse she was clutching and put it on a hanger.
Was it actually worth the effort of unpacking?
The rate at which things were moving now would mean this wouldn’t be her home for much longer. They were talking June wedding. Weeks away, not months or years. Once more she stubbornly ignored the flurry in her belly, less butterflies and more a buzzard’s wings flapping this time in the pit of her stomach.
Her determined composure wobbled, as did her lower lip, as she pulled out the last item. The outline of the white lab coat she held up blurred as her dark eyes filled with hot tears.
She dashed a hand impatiently across the dampness on her cheeks and blinked hard as her thoughts were inexorably dragged back to when the colleagues she had worked beside for the past year had given her an impromptu leaving party. Some party poppers left from New Year had been pulled from a drawer and dutifully popped, exciting a mild overreaction from the security men, one of whom had flung her to the floor.
Someone whose name she didn’t even know was willing to put himself between her and a bullet. She could see the surreal realisation hit her friends almost as hard as it did her.
In the subsequent dampened party atmosphere someone had handed around sausage rolls hastily bought from the twenty-four-hour mini-mart on the corner, and then they had presented her with the lab coat, a crown emblem sewn onto the breast pocket.
She had struggled to smile at the joke while accepting the leaving present and hugs of colleagues, who’d all said how much they were going to miss her, while she had tried hard not to think about how much she would miss them. She’d miss, too, the challenge of her work—unlike the challenges that lay ahead, this one had been of her own choosing.
Despite the hugs she’d been able to see they were looking at her differently, thinking about her differently. The realisation had saddened but not surprised her. Experience had taught her to expect no less. It was why once she’d had a choice in such things she had never advertised her title or background. She’d wanted to be accepted for who she was with no preconceptions.
She would always treasure her time at university, both as a medical student and then staff member at the prestigious research unit. Dr Summerville was a title she had earned
and was proud of. Lady Sabrina, daughter of the Duke and Duchess of East Vela, was simply an accident of birth, the same accident that would see her promotion to Princess and one day Queen of the soon-to-be-reunified island kingdom.
She had relished the opportunity to be judged for her ability and not who her parents were. She had liked that when people had asked her where she was from, East Vela had drawn a puzzled frown and an inevitable, where is that? Or, don’t you mean Vela Main?
There were big advantages for someone who did not like attention of being a royal from somewhere so obscure, the main one being that a third-division royal did not rate heavy security—one of those things she was learning that you did not fully appreciate until it vanished.
For the last few years Velatian politics had seemed a long way away, and she had kept it there, enjoying her freedom, her taste of real life. Sure, she’d been able to hear the clock ticking down, and the knowledge of what lay ahead had never vanished, but she had always known that her parents would make sure she was eased gently into her future role.
But there had been no gentle easing, more like a total immersion. A sink-or-swim introduction of what it meant to be Queen-in-waiting.
One day she had gone to bed as Dr Summerville, an invisible white coat in a laboratory, and had walked out into the street the next morning to calls of, ‘Lady Sabrina, when is the wedding?’
Her eyes clouded with memories as she rubbed her arm where the imprint of his fingers was beginning to turn from black to a more mellow yellow. She squeezed her eyes shut but couldn’t block out his face…or her guilt, or the feeling in the pit of her stomach when she remembered how his mouth had felt against hers, his taste, the raw sexual energy he exuded.
She lifted both hands to her head and yelled, ‘Go away!’
‘Why? What have I done?’ Sabrina’s eyes flew open as her sister walked into the room and flung herself face down on the bed.
‘There’s a wasp…do you mind?’ Sabrina said, pretending a crossness she didn’t feel because she was glad to see her sister. She eased a dress out from under Chloe’s prone form. ‘I am wearing this tonight.’