Robyn Donald - Captured by the Billionaire

She frowned, and before she could speak he went on levelly, ‘In your world, Princess, you’re very well known. Here, you’re not. I am.’

He waited while she absorbed that, watching her frown smooth out and her thoughtful nod.

Slowly, she said, ‘Of course. I didn’t mean to be presumptuous.’ She looked at him. ‘I’ve just realised I have a confession to make—I took photographs of your garden and sent them to my editor as an indication of what gardens are like here. I’m sorry, I’ll get her to delete them.’

Irritated, he said shortly, ‘Just make sure she doesn’t publish them.’

‘She knows they’re not for publication.’

She took another sip of her wine and this time he watched deliberately, noting the way she tasted—as though she was an expert.

Perfectly trained, he thought, and wondered why, when he wanted so urgently to kiss the wine from her lips, to feel the soft meltdown of her body against his, all he could do was search for flaws. Just looking at her was enough to scramble his brain, and he couldn’t afford to allow this unusual desire to overwhelm his common sense.

Only an hour ago he’d spoken to Gerd on the secure line and discovered that, although Doran seemed more than happy to explore the delights of Vanuatu wrecks and reefs, his band of gaming companions had turned up in one of the coastal towns in the border region of Carathia and Montevel.

Ostensibly on holiday.

Had Princess Serina made the somewhat surprising decision to come to New Zealand in order to throw any suspicious person off the scent? He had every reason to believe her brother had gone to Vanuatu for just that reason. That afternoon Gerd had told Alex that the security man he’d sent to infiltrate the group had been overeager and raised suspicion. Alex had ordered the plant’s immediate withdrawal, but from now on they’d have to work on the assumption that the group knew they’d been infiltrated.

How deeply in their confidence was Serina? She’d used her email that afternoon to send photographs. Had she contacted Doran, or the plotters?

He glanced down at her face, as serene as her name, beautiful and remote and desirably tempting.

Her explanation of her brother’s activities had been almost believable, but she hadn’t been persuasive enough to quite convince him. According to his man, there was an excellent chance she was fully aware of what was going on.

With the spy gone, he and Gerd had no other way of finding out anything more but, from what they’d learned, the plotters were getting ready to make a move.

Perhaps it was time to find out whether Serina was ready to sacrifice her body to the cause.

He forced back an instinctive distaste. Lives would be lost if the group were allowed to proceed and, although he had no sympathy for those who believed the end justified the means, he suspected this was one of the times when it really did.

Besides, although Serina was extremely aware of him, she was no fluttering ingénue, hoping that an affair would lead to marriage. Her father, a notorious libertine, would have taught her that such things were transitory.

And he wouldn’t be faking. From the moment he’d met her, he’d found the aloof Princess Serina very alluring and he was enjoying crossing swords with her.

Plenty of very satisfactory relationships, he thought cynically, had been built on much more shaky grounds than that.

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