PENNY JORDAN - The Royal House of Niroli - Scandalous Seductions - The Future King's Pregnant Mistress / Surgeon Prince, Ordinary Wife

But he desired her, and she couldn’t bring herself to give up the fragile hope that maybe, just maybe, things would change, and one day he would look at her and know that he loved her, that one day he would allow her to access that part of himself he guarded with such ferocity and tell her that he wanted them to be together for ever.

THAT was Emily’s dream. But the reality was, recently, she’d felt as if they were growing further apart rather than closer. She’d told herself yesterday morning she would face her fear. She took a deep breath.

‘Marco, I’ve always been open and…and honest with you.’ It was no good, she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t make herself ask him that all-important question: ‘Do you want to end our relationship?’ And, besides, she hadn’t always been honest with him, had she? She hadn’t told him, for instance, that she had fallen in love with him. Her heart gave another painful lurch.

Marco was watching her, his head inclined towards her. He wore his thick dark hair cut short, but not so short that she couldn’t run her fingers through it, shaping the hard bone beneath it as she held him to her when they made love. There was just enough light for her to see the gleam in his eyes, as though he’d guessed the direction her thoughts had taken and knew how much she wanted him. Marco had the most piercingly direct look she’d ever known. He’d focused it on her the night they’d met, when she had tried to cling to reason and rationality, instead of letting herself be blatantly seduced by a pair of tawny-brown predator’s eyes…

Emily knew she should make her stand now and demand an explanation for the change she could sense in Marco, but her childhood made it difficult for her to talk openly about her emotions. Instead she hid them away behind locked doors of calm control and self-possession. Was it because she was afraid of what might happen if she allowed her real feelings to get out of control? Because she was afraid of bringing the truth out into the open? Something was wrong. Marco had changed: he had become withdrawn and preoccupied. There was no way she could pretend otherwise. Had he grown tired of her? Did he want to end their relationship? Wouldn’t it be better, wiser, more self-respecting, if she challenged him to tell her the truth? Did she really think that if she ignored her fears they would simply disappear?

‘You say that you’ve always been open and honest with me, Emily, but that isn’t the truth, is it?’

Emily’s heart somersaulted with slow, sickening despair. He knew? Somehow he had guessed what she was thinking and—almost as bad—she could see he was spoiling for an argument… because that would give him an excuse to end things.

‘Remember the night I took you to dinner and you told me about your marriage? Remember how “open” you were with me then—and what you didn’t tell me?’ Marco recalled sarcastically.

Emily couldn’t speak. A mixture of relief and anguish filled her. Her marriage! All this time she had thought—believed—that Marco had understood the scars her past had inflicted on her, but now she realised that she had been wrong. ‘It wasn’t deliberate, you know that,’ she told him, fighting not to let her voice tremble. ‘I didn’t deliberately hold back anything.’ Why was he bringing that up now? she wondered. Surely he wasn’t planning to use it as an excuse to get rid of her? He wasn’t the kind of man who needed an excuse to do anything, she told herself. He was too arrogant to feel he needed to soften any blows he had to deliver.

Marco looked away from Emily, irritated with himself for saying what he had. Why had he brought up her marriage now, when the last thing he wanted was the danger involved in the sentimentality of looking back to the beginning of their relationship? But it was too late, he was already remembering…

He had taken Emily to dinner, setting the scene for how he had hoped the evening would end by telling her coolly how much he wanted to make love to her and how pleased he was that she was a woman of the world, with a marriage behind her and no children to worry about.

‘Just out of interest,’ he’d quizzed her, ‘what was the reason for your divorce?’ If there was anything in her past, he wanted to know about it before things went any further.

For a moment he thought that she was going to refuse to answer him. But then her eyes widened slightly and he knew that she had correctly interpreted his question, without him having to spell it out to her. She clearly knew that if she did refuse, their relationship would be over before it had properly begun.

When she finally began to speak, she surprised him with the halting, almost stammering way in which she hesitated and then fiddled nervously with her cutlery, suddenly looking far less calm and in control than he had previously seen her. Her face was shadowed with anxiety and he assumed that the cause of the breakdown in her marriage must have been related to something she had done—such as being unfaithful to her husband. The last thing he expected to hear was what she actually told him. So much so, in fact, that he was tempted to accuse her of lying, but something he saw in her eyes stopped him.

Now Marco shifted his weight from one foot to the other, remembering how shocked he’d been by the unexpected and unwilling compassion he had felt for her as she’d struggled to overcome her reluctance to talk about what was obviously a painful subject…

‘I lost my parents in a car accident when I was seven and I was brought up by my widowed paternal grandfather,’ she told him.

‘He wasn’t unkind to me, but he wasn’t a man who was comfortable around young children, especially not emotional young girls. He was a retired Cambridge University academic, very gentle and very unworldly. He read the classics to me as bedtime stories. He knew so much about literature but, although I didn’t realise it at the time, very little about life. My upbringing with him was very sheltered and protected, very restricted in some ways, especially when I reached my early teens and his health started to deteriorate.

‘Gramps’ circle of friends was very small, a handful of elderly fellow academics, and…and Victor.’

‘Victor?’ Marco probed, hearing the hesitation in her voice.

‘Yes. Victor Lewisham, my ex-husband. He had been one of Gramps’ students, before becoming a university lecturer himself.’

‘He must have been considerably older than you?’ Marco guessed.

‘Twenty years older,’ Emily agreed, nodding her head. ‘When it became obvious that my grandfather’s health was deteriorating, he told me that Victor had agreed to look after me after…in his place. Gramps died a few weeks after that. I was in my first year at university then, and, even though I’d known how frail he was, somehow I hadn’t…I wasn’t prepared. Losing him was such a shock. He was all I had, you see, and so when Victor proposed to me and told me that it was what Gramps would have wanted, I…’ She ducked her head and looked away from Marco and then said in a low voice, ‘I should have refused, but somehow I just couldn’t imagine how I would manage on my own. I was so afraid…such a coward.’

‘So it was a marriage of necessity?’ Marco shrugged dismissively. ‘Was he good in bed?’

It continued to irk Marco to have to admit that his direct and unsubtle challenge to Emily had sprung from a sudden surge of physical jealousy that the thought of her with another man had aroused. But then sexual jealousy wasn’t an emotion he’d ever previously had to deal with. Sex was sex, a physical appetite satisfied by a physical act. Emotions didn’t come into it and he had never seen why they should. He still didn’t. And he still had no idea what had made him confront her like that, or what had driven such an out-of-character fury at the thought of her with another man, even though she had had yet to become his. It had caught him totally off guard when he had seen the sudden shimmer of suppressed tears in her eyes. At first he’d wanted to believe they were caused by her grief at the breakdown of her marriage, but to his shock, she had told him quietly: