Olivia Gates - The Prodigal Prince's Seduction / The Heir's Scandalous Affair

He should have known that she’d had more cards to play. And she’d played them. Played him. And how.

She was the woman he’d spent the most revitalising, enthralling time of his life with. The woman who’d made him forget exhaustion and every preconception about himself and what he could feel.

She whimpered at his sudden withdrawal. It had only been moments since their lips had met, before he’d learned her real name and plunged from the heights of delight to the depths of disillusion.

So what if she wasn’t the woman he’d thought her to be? It should change nothing. His body was reaching critical mass. And she was offering…everything. He should drag her inside, throw her to the ground and take it all. Then walk away.

“I’m Louis DuLac,” said the handsome mystery man with whom she’d just shared a night of incredible passion. His features grew hard and he gazed at her through narrowed eyes.

Sam’s knees almost gave out. If he hadn’t been holding her wrist she might have plunged backwards down the stairs.

“But you can’t be.” The words fell from her lips, dazed and barely coherent. “It’s impossible.”

“Come in,” he said. This time, it was a command rather than an invitation. He still held a firm grip on her wrist.

She felt herself struggling for breath. He tugged her towards him. “You’re my late husband’s…oh no.” She tried to free herself.

He pulled her closer. “You’re not going anywhere.”

Millionaire in Command by Catherine Mann

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The Bride Hunter by Ann Major

Mini-series—Irresistible

Tall, Dark…Westmoreland! by Brenda Jackson

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The Moretti Seduction by Katherine Garbera

The Prodigal Prince’s Seduction by Olivia Gates

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The Heir’s Scandalous Affair by Jennifer Lewis

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www.millsandboon.co.uk

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Dear Reader,

Being a romance author has got to be one of the best jobs there is. For in what other job can one experience the rush of falling in love over and over again?

And it happened again in the second instalment of THE CASTALDINI CROWN trilogy, where I fell in love with my hero, Prince Durante D’Agostino. Each hero I write is another fantastic specimen of manhood and humanity, but Prince Durante has characteristics that surprised even me as I wrote his story. Contrary to all the über alpha males I’ve written about, he was so open to the notion of falling in love, so wholehearted about it. He was like that massive source of romanticism and sensuality that had gone unplumbed until he laid eyes on Gabrielle Williamson and it all came pouring out.

I mean, who could resist a hero who wants to savour the torment of not touching the woman who has him on fire until he gets to know more of the “real” her, who serenades her, who actually offers the other cheek, and who eventually gives up everything to atone for the sin of not trusting her, for hurting her?

I was certainly not immune, and I hope no reader will be, either.

I hope Durante and Gabrielle’s story gives you as much pleasure as it gave me while writing it.

I would love to hear your thoughts at oliviagates@ oliviagates.com.

Also please visit me at www.oliviagates.com.

Thank you for reading.

Olivia Gates

Olivia Gateshas always pursued creative passions—painting, singing and many handicrafts. She still does, but only one of her passions grew gratifying enough, consuming enough, to become an ongoing career: writing.

She is most fulfilled when she is creating worlds and conflicts for her characters, then exploring and untangling them bit by bit, sharing her protagonists’ every heart-wrenching heartache and hope, their every heart-pounding doubt and trial, until she leads them to an indisputably earned and gloriously satisfying happy ending.

When she’s not writing, she is a doctor, a wife to her own alpha male and a mother to one brilliant girl and one demanding angora cat. Visit Olivia at www.oliviagates.com.

To my husband. To my daughter.

Both of you, my one and only. More and more, I wouldn’t be doing all this without you. Thank you for being who you are.

“I want one hour with you.”

Prince Durante D’Agostino froze at the foyer’s threshold.

That voice. Coming out of nowhere. So low he shouldn’t have heard it over the live jazz music blaring its infectious energy from the ballroom where the charity function was in full swing.

He heard nothing but its softness. As if faders had been hit, boosting it, dousing every other sound. More. As if it had been generated inside his head, a caress of a thought, making all else recede from his awareness. An awareness that bristled with responses so tactile that every hair on his body rose as if he were caught in a field of static electricity.

He frowned. What was all this, over hearing a woman’s voice? Over yet another blatant invitation?

A scowl seized his face as he swung around to the offending entity. And everything receded farther. Disappeared. He felt as if his blood stopped in his arteries even as everything else hurtled through him. Heat, sensations. Urges.

Eyes. From the shadows behind the foyer’s door, they trans-fixed him. Pieces of heaven. Staring up at him from a face that was what the offspring of an angel and a siren must look like.

Then the impossible creature spoke again. “One hour. I’ll pay one hundred grand for it.”

His eyes dragged away from the clear skies of hers to the lips spilling that offer. Dimpled, dewy and flushed as if she’d been sucking on bloodred cherries. They were still again, slightly parted. But he could see them as they’d wrapped around each syllable of her spell, could imagine them nibbling and suckling their way down his body…

He shifted, stunned to feel himself hardening, zero to one hundred in two seconds.

Aroused? Here? From just a look and a few words?

He expanded his chest in an effort to draw in more oxygen, to drive blood to his head instead of his loins. He managed only to suck in her scent—clean, with a tinge of jasmine and a deluge of pheromones. Every cell in his body twitched, revved.

Then she stepped out of the shadows and he forgot any intentions or delusions of subduing his body.

This might not be happening anyway. He might still be in the back of his limo, dreaming this apparition as he dozed off on the way to the charity event he was sponsoring. Thirty-six sleepless hours must have taken their toll on his nervous system. It would explain her, the epitome of his every far-fetched fantasy. From hair the shade of fire he’d once seen in a painting and wondered if it truly existed in nature, a waterfall of silk his fingers itched to twist through, to a complexion of such clear olive that it offset the vividness of her hair and the lightness of her eyes, to features sculpted and aligned in such an unusual way that they screamed character and whispered sensuality, to curves and swells in the abundance and the distribution to answer his every specification.