Robyn Donald - By Royal Demand

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

COMING NEXT MONTH

GABE CONSIDINE looked up from his desk, his hard steel-blue eyes meeting those of his younger brother. ‘So tell me I’m crazy,’ he invited him curtly.

Marco’s frown turned into wry amusement. ‘You’re crazy.’

Gabe got to his feet and strode across to the window, looking out across the walls, still intact, that surrounded the castle. For almost a thousand years his forebears had lived in the Wolf’s Lair and protected the trade route crossing the mountains between the rest of Europe and the small principality of Illyria on the Mediterranean Sea. Forty years previously, civil war, treachery and death had driven his grandparents, the incumbent Grand Duke and Duchess, to fight with partisans in the mountains until their deaths in an ambush. Although Gabe and his siblings had been born in exile, Marco knew that he felt a strong sense of obligation to the people who had suffered so long, secretly hoping that their lord would come back to them.

Gabe’s richly textured voice showed no emotion when he said, ‘Then come up with a better idea.’

‘What about good old-fashioned threats?’ Marco’s voice deepened into a music-hall villain’s sneer. ‘Tell me where the necklace is or I’ll bankrupt you and throw your mother out into the snow.’

‘Her mother’s dead. And threats will be more effective if she’s here, unable to get away.’

‘A prisoner, you mean,’ Marco said flatly.

Gabe shrugged. ‘It wouldn’t be the first time a woman’s been held prisoner here.’

‘Mostly they were hostages rather than prisoners.’

Gabe, Marco and their sister had grown up steeped in stories of their Illyrian heritage. One such hostage had joined the ranks of their ancestors by marrying the ruling Grand Duke.

Marco asked, ‘What if Sara refuses to admit she stole the necklace?’

Gabe lifted a black brow to devastating effect.

‘Then I’ll do whatever’s necessary to get the Queen’s Blood back.’

The stark, medieval name of the necklace containing some of the most valuable rubies in the world still lifted the hairs on Marco’s skin. ‘Strange that any woman would happily wear something with a name like that.’

His brother gave a sardonic smile. ‘Women like pretty things, even those with a barbaric history. And the Queen’s Blood is more than pretty—it’s magnificent, unique and irreplaceable. Flawless rubies that size are no longer being mined. And then there’s the mystery of how they got from Burma to Europe, and who set them in solid gold. Some unknown Dark Age genius? Or is the necklace the sole remaining work of an unknown civilisation?’

Marco gave a snort of laughter. ‘Come on, now, don’t tell me you believe that old story—that it was made in Atlantis?’

His brother’s mouth twisted cynically. ‘Hardly. But, given all that, not many women would care that the original owner died on the mountainside a few kilometres from here, stabbed in the heart by the leader of a band of brigands. Of late, I find I have some sympathy with him.’

Marco understood the cold self-derision in his brother’s tone. Falling in love with a woman, only to have her steal the priceless Considine heirloom, was definitely not like his cynical, hard-headed brother, noted around the world for his ruthless logic and brilliance. Oh, Gabe had had affairs, but they were always discreetly conducted, and the thought of him actually falling in love was—well, difficult to imagine!

It had been an unlikely romance—a man of ancient heritage with the world at his feet, and a woman from nowhere, struggling to make a career as an interior designer.

Yet Gabe had taken one look at Sara Milton and fallen head over heels, breaking every rule in his book with a whirlwind courtship pursued almost entirely in the full spotlight of the world’s media.

Two weeks after their engagement had been announced to an incredulous public, he’d insisted that Sara wear the Queen’s Blood at a ducal wedding in the south of France.

It was a night he’d never forget, Marco thought grimly, and not only because the rubies’ dramatic beauty, glowing with fiery glamour in heavy, exquisitely worked gold, had set off Sara’s dark hair and smoky grey-green eyes superbly. Each magnificent stone had been a perfect foil for her pale, matt skin.

That night the necklace had disappeared, stolen from a safe in the château Sara was staying at—a safe she’d chosen the combination for.

It still made Marco furious that she’d tried to blame the maid, but Gabe had seen through her ploy.

Although the theft had been kept secret, three days later a brief, uncommunicative announcement of the termination of the engagement between Gabe Considine and Sara Milton had set the media on fire again. Some of the more delirious tabloids had called it the scandal of the century.

Marco met Gabe’s hard, intelligent gaze. ‘You’re still absolutely certain she took it? There was no hard evidence to connect her with the theft, after all, and you’d know if she’d tried to sell it.’

In a tone that warned his brother to go no further, Gabriel said, ‘She stole it.’ He cut off Marco’s next observation with a crystalline glance. ‘If she hasn’t sold it, it’s because she doesn’t dare to. I plan to convince her it will be worth her while to return it to me.’

Oh, Gabe could do that, Marco thought, a note in the cold voice making him even more uneasy. His brother’s potent charisma was based more on his formidable personal authority than the interesting mixture of princely and aristocratic bloodlines that had bequeathed him that autocratic face and the lean, powerful body standing well over six feet.

If anyone could seduce the heirloom’s whereabouts from Sara, Gabe could.

Nevertheless, Marco felt obliged to point out, ‘She was going to marry you, Gabe. She could have had the Queen’s Blood permanently.’

‘She’d already changed her mind about that,’ Gabe told him, his lips twisting in self-derision.

Only Marco and Gabe’s head of security—and one photographer—knew what his brother referred to: a damning shot snapped with a telephoto lens from outside the château where Sara had been staying the night the necklace disappeared.

It showed Gabe’s fiancée locked in the arms of the château’s owner, Hawke Kennedy. Both were naked, and the shot had been taken through the window of Sara’s bedroom.

The day after the Queen’s Blood had been stolen, the picture had arrived in Gabe’s e-mail with a threat to sell the negative to the highest bidder if a ransom wasn’t paid.

Marco said, ‘Has your security expert made any progress in finding out who the photographer was?’

‘Yes.’

‘I gather he won’t be publishing the photograph, no matter what happens?’

Gabe’s smile was as narrow and lethal as the blade of a knife. ‘No.’

‘So why didn’t you tell him to publish and be damned? I’d have said you’d be the last man on earth to let yourself be blackmailed into paying a ransom.’

‘Pride,’ Gabe said shortly. ‘Once it was confirmed to be genuine, I felt a complete fool for letting myself be conned into an engagement by a beautiful, clever thief. I resent being turned into an idiot by my own hormones.’

Marco said nothing, and after a moment his brother continued in the same dispassionate voice. ‘Apart from that, just before the theft Alex had suggested that I come back to Illyria and be confirmed as Grand Duke of the Northern Marches.’