by Penny Jordan
That was certainly her easiest option, Emily felt. But did she have the strength to do it? Could she walk away from Marco without telling him? She loved her child enough already to do whatever she had to do to protect him or her, including leaving the man she adored; she knew that, almost without having to think about it. However, did she also love Marco enough to spare him the necessity of having to take on board prospective fatherhood and the problems that would cause for him? Was she strong enough to deny her instinctive longing to share her news with him, even though she knew he couldn’t, and wouldn’t, share her growing joy at the prospect of having his baby?
It was an extraordinarily wonderful gift that fate was giving her: a child, and not just any child, but the seed of the man she loved. She could picture him now; somehow Emily already knew that her baby would be a boy. He would have Marco’s features and perhaps a little of his arrogance. He would look at her with Marco’s eyes and she would melt with love for him and the man who had fathered him. And, later, when he was old enough to demand his father’s name? She would deal with that when it happened. For now, what concerned her most was her baby’s health and whether she could leave Niroli without Marco suspecting anything. So how was she going to do that? She couldn’t just tell him she didn’t want him any more. He would never believe her.
Perhaps he would believe her if she told him she wasn’t comfortable with her role in his life. She wasn’t even his formally recognised mistress, and she felt it could reflect on her business reputation. Marco’s own pride meant that he would be able to identify with that. Last night, when they had made love, he hadn’t questioned the way she had encouraged him to gentle his possession of her, holding her breath a little, caught as she was between her maternal anxiety for her baby and the intense physical desire he always aroused in her. But Marco was a skilled and a sensual lover, who knew every single one of her body’s responses and how to invoke them. There was no way he wouldn’t soon notice a new desire on her part to make his penetration of her less intense.
A small, sad semi-smile touched her lips. Marco didn’t know it yet, but the sightseeing journey they were taking together today could well be the last they would make together. Now she was destined to set out on a new path, which she would share with this gift he had given her.
‘Seat belt,’ Marco reminded her. He reached across to secure the belt for her, before she could stop him. Immediately Emily breathed in, protectively. There was no bump of any kind to betray her, but still she felt a sharp clutch of anxiety for the vulnerability of her child. It would be like this for the rest of her life, she recognised. No matter that one day this baby she had conceived so unintentionally would be an adult; as a mother she would always be fiercely protective. Though, of course, there would be many things she could not protect her child from, foremost amongst which would be the pain of knowing his father hadn’t wanted him.
‘Emily?’
To her shock, Marco had placed his hand flat against her belly. Fearfully she turned to look at him. Had he, by some intuitive means, actually guessed?
‘You’re looking so much better than you did when you first arrived here,’ she heard him tell her. ‘Niroli’s sunshine has done you good.’
Shakily, Emily released her pent-up breath. He hadn’t guessed; it was just her own anxiety that was making her think that he must have done.
‘I don’t think anyone wouldn’t enjoy it. I know I haven’t seen much of the island…’
‘Today, we’re going to see as much of it as we can,’ Marco told her as he started the car, ‘and my royal duties will just have to wait.’
Whatever else the future held for Marco’s child, she was glad that it wouldn’t be the dark shadow of duty that fell across Marco’s life, Emily decided emotionally. The little boy might have to grow up not knowing his father, but he would be free of the burden Marco carried, and she was passionately grateful for that. Though, at the same time, almost overwhelmed by the intensity of her love for Marco, she reflected as he turned the car off the main road into a much narrower lane that ran close to the high, rocky coastline where cliffs plunged down into the sea.
‘This was one of my favourite places when I was a boy,’ Marco confided as he stopped the car.
Emily could understand why. There was an elemental wildness about it; in some ways, the landscape matched the man.
‘Come on, let’s get out of the car.’
Emily wasn’t sure she wanted to. The height of the cliffs gave her an uncomfortable feeling of vertigo. But she could see that Marco was determined and she didn’t want to have to explain to him how she felt.
‘I used to come here and gaze out to sea, and promise myself that one day I’d get away from here and from my grandfather. But, of course, even then I knew that ultimately I would have to come back,’ Marco confessed, once they were standing a few feet back from the edge of the cliff-top. He bent down and picked up a handful of the thin, stony soil that lay at the roots of the weather-beaten gorse bushes that grew in such abundance along this part of the coast, and flung it as far out to sea as he could.
Watching him, Emily knew that this was a re-enactment of something he had done many times as a boy—as a way of releasing the anger inside him? It was an emotion he had partially dissipated by leaving the island and making a life for himself. But it would never really leave him so long as he and his grandfather struggled for supremacy one over the other. And whilst they were embroiled in that struggle, others would suffer. She could not allow her child to be one of them.
All of a sudden it hit her: she had to tell Marco that she intended to leave. She couldn’t stop herself from reaching out to touch him and placed her hand on his bare forearm. Immediately he turned towards her.
‘Marco,’ she began tentatively, and then stopped. Unexpectedly he reached for her and took her in his arms, kissing her with such fiercely sweet passion that it made her eyes sting with tears.
Why was he doing this? Marco asked himself. He knew that it couldn’t go on. Already, deep down inside, he knew he was becoming too dependent on her, and she was becoming too important to him. That couldn’t be allowed to happen. There was no room in his life for that kind of relationship with her. He was Niroli’s future king and he intended to devote every ounce of his mental and physical energy to his country and its people. He would break down the restrictions that centuries of royal rule had placed, he would open the door for Niroli’s population to walk freely into the new century. There was no legitimate place in his life for the kind of relationship he had with Emily. He was reeling at the way he felt about her now, the intensity that was being demanded of him. It was only recently he had started to feel like this, to recognise there was within him this dangerous need to have her close, a need that went far beyond any kind of sexual desire. But such emotion could not be allowed to exist, it could not be given a name, or a place in his life.
He started to pull away from her and then stopped, smothering a savage groan before he tightened his hold on her and kissed her again.
Emily’s mouth felt soft and giving beneath his own, her body warm, and he longed to possess her and fill her and lose himself in her and know the passion of loving her.
‘Marco!’ Emily objected, somehow managing to stem her own longing and drag her mouth from beneath his. She was trembling from head to foot, afraid not of him but of herself and the intensity of her feelings, and stumbling over the words in her desperation.
‘There’s no easy way to say this, but the truth is that I should never have come here. Niroli is different from London, and my role in your life has changed. I can’t live like this, Marco, a semi-secret mistress, despised and ignored by the court, and forced to live in the shadows. I’m going back to the UK just as soon as it can be arranged. It will be best for both of us.’
She was only saying what he already knew to be true, and yet he felt as shocked as though his guts had been splintered with ice picks. She couldn’t do this! He wasn’t ready to let
her go. He needed her here with him. He should, he knew, be feeling relieved, but instead he felt more as though he had suffered a mortal blow. Pain rolled over him in mind-numbing waves, crashing through him and drowning out reason, spreading its unbearable agony to every part of him. He could hardly think for it, do anything other than try somehow to survive its rapacious teeth as it savaged him and tormented him. How could this have happened? How could he be experiencing this? The thoughts and feelings that filled him were so new and unfamiliar that they made him feel as though he was suddenly a stranger to him-self. He felt like a man possessed by…by what? He shook his head, unable to allow the word pulsing in his heart to form. He had wanted it to happen, he had wanted her to leave. But not like this. He’d wanted to be the one to tell her to go. But how? That he didn’t want her here because he was afraid that she would come between him and his duty? His whole body shuddered as the pain savaged it once more.
Why didn’t Marco say something, anything? Emily worried anxiously.
What could she say without risking betraying the truth?
‘I loved the life we shared together in London, Marco. But things are different here. The time we’re sharing together is borrowed time, stolen time, perhaps,’ she told him sadly. ‘It’s better that I go now.’
Marco could feel the heavy drum of his heartbeat thudding out a requiem for their relationship as he heard the finality in her voice.
‘There’ll never be anyone else in my life like you, Marco, nor a relationship to match the one we’ve shared.’
The words felt as though they were being ripped from her like a layer of her skin, but she couldn’t hold them back; they were after all the truth, even though she knew she was a fool for having said them.
But it didn’t matter now that she was compounding that error by lifting her hand to his face, tears burning at the backs of her eyes as she felt the familiar texture that was hard with the beginnings of his beard against the softness of her palm.
‘Emily.’
He had caught hold of her hand before she could stop him, lifting it to his lips and then dropping it when he felt her tremble, to pull her bodily into his arms and then plunder her mouth with his own. Not that she made any attempt to resist him. Instead, she gave him the sweetness he was demanding whilst she clung helplessly to him.
Few people visited this part of the island, and Marco realised that an irresistible need was flooding through him to know the intimacy of sex on this wild headland. He couldn’t let her go without this one last time, a final memory he would have to make last a lifetime of days and nights once he was without her. There had been many many times when their pleasure had been more sensual and more sustained, when he had deliberately set himself the task of pleasing her. But no time had ever been more intense than this, or more emotional. Because this was the last time that finally he could give to himself what he had previously so rigidly denied, and that was the right to feel with his emotions what he was feeling with his flesh.
This was too much, Emily told herself. She just wasn’t strong enough to endure this kind of passion. It was as though Marco had wrenched away, with his clothes, the barrier she had always sensed he kept raised against her.
As they lay together on the lavender-scented turf, the sun warming their naked bodies, the kisses he lavished on her body were hot and fierce with a desire that went beyond the merely physical. As though by shared consent, neither of them spoke. What words were there to say, after all? Emily wondered, with dry-eyed hurt. Words would only be lies, or, worse, create wounds. It was better this way, that their last memory of one another was one filled with a shared but unspoken awareness of what they’d shared and what they would never have again. It seemed to Emily as she touched him that she had never loved him more. Something within her, that was maybe both lover and prospective mother, swelled her heart with bitter-sweet emotion.
They kissed and touched, their lips clinging, their bodies urgent, trying desperately to hold onto every second of their pleasure. But, like sand, it could not be held, running swiftly through their fingers instead as Emily’s cries of pleasure became soft sighs of contentment.
She would treasure her memories of this day for the rest of her life.
She smiled lazily up at Marco as he leaned over her.
‘I don’t want you to leave.’
Marco had no idea where the words had come from. No! That was lie. He knew exactly where they had come from and why. And even if he hadn’t, the heavy pounding of his heart would have told him. What on earth was he doing, when he had already decided that she must go? What had happened to him to make him want to change his mind on the strength of a few minutes of good sex? he derided himself. But it wasn’t the good sex he didn’t want to lose—it was Emily herself.
Emily wondered if anything else in her life could ever be as poignant as this. Marco had never, ever asked her for anything, never mind pleaded with her so emotionally! She so wanted to fling herself into his arms and cover his face with passionately joyful kisses as she told him there was nothing she wanted more than to be with him. But how could she?
‘Marco, I’m sorry. I can’t.’ Her voice was little more than an anguished whisper, but Marco heard it, releasing her abruptly and turning away from her. She knew how much it must have cost him to ask her to stay. Given his inbuilt sense of male arrogance and his pride, along with his background and upbringing, she could only marvel that he had.
She got to her feet and said his name unsteadily, but he was already heading back to the car.
‘Marco!’ she protested. ‘Please listen to me…’
He stopped walking and turned around. She saw his chest lift as he breathed in sharply and the sadness that filled her was not just for herself, but for both of them. She knew what she had to do, where her responsibility now lay, but how could she walk away letting him think that she hadn’t wanted to stay with him? She couldn’t, she decided frantically. Yes, she had her baby to think of and, yes, she was afraid of Marco’s reaction to the news that she was pregnant. But she loved Marco, too, and the knowledge that he wanted her enough to actually ask her to stay was too sweetly precious that she couldn’t deny its tremendous effect on her.
She still had to leave, nothing could change that, but she knew she couldn’t go away from him without telling him why it was so important that she went.
She took a deep breath; this was the most difficult thing she had ever had to do. ‘I don’t want to leave you, Marco. But I have to. You see, I’m having your child. I’m pregnant.’
What? Marco could feel her words exploding inside his skull as he battled with his own disbelief.
‘I know you told me at the beginning of our relationship that there must not be any accidents,’ Emily continued, carefully cutting into the tension of his complete silence, ‘and…and of course I understand now why you said that. The future King of Niroli’s bastard isn’t the title I want for our baby.’ She gave a small shrug. ‘The truth is, I don’t want him to have any title at all, and if there is one thing in all of this that I am grateful for, it’s that our son won’t ever have to live the kind of controlled and confined life you will have to live. What I want for him more than anything else is the kind of personal freedom that you don’t have and that you can’t give to your legitimate children. I want him to grow up in a home filled with love, where what matters most is that he finds his own sense of where his life lies and how his talents should be used. I don’t want his future to be corrupted by wealth and position. I don’t want him to have to carry the burdens I can see you carrying, Marco. I can’t give him his father, but I can give him the right to define his own life, and to me that heritage is of far more value than anything your legitimate children will inherit.’
For a few seconds, Marco was too taken aback by what she had said to speak. From the moment of his birth he had been brought up to be aware of the tremendous importance of his role and his family. The thought that someone was not awed and impressed by it wa
s something he found hard to take in. But he could see that Emily meant what she’d said. Senses of isolation and aloneness, of having lost something he could never regain, an awareness that somehow, somewhere, he had turned his back on something precious stabbed through him. With it came the drift of painful memories: of himself as a young boy longing passionately for the freedom to be himself. He could see his father’s struggles and his mother’s anguish and, of course, his grandfather’s anger. He could also hear the echo of his own childishly piping voice stating defiantly, ‘When I am grown up and I can do what I want, I won’t be a prince!’ But with a kick like an iron-tipped boot, slowly but surely his position and its claims on him had reshaped him. He pictured two small boys, both dark-haired and sturdy, one of them grubby and laughing as he played happily with his friends. The other was sad-eyed and alone, held at a respectful distance by his peers, protected by privilege, or was he imprisoned by it?
What folly was this? Marco forced back the memories, refusing to acknowledge them any more, letting his pride take over instead. ‘You are being naïve. No one else will share your views, Emily. In fact, they will think you a fool. And, besides, being King of Niroli is about more than any of those things,’ he retaliated sharply. ‘It’s about making a difference to my people, it’s about leading them to a better future. Do you really think our son, my son, will thank you for denying him his birthright?’
‘He has no birthright here on Niroli. I am your mistress, and he will be illegitimate.’
‘He has the birthright I choose to give him.’
‘By recognising him and making him face the world as less than your children born within royal wedlock? By making him grow up in an environment where he will always be beneath them—in their eyes and, ultimately, in his own?’
‘He will be a member of the Niroli royal family, how can you think of denying him that? Do you really think he will thank you when he is old enough to know what he has lost?’