The Throne He Must Take. Chantelle Shaw

rubbed her hand across her brow to try to ease her tension headache and glanced at the clock. Professor Heppel was due to arrive for dinner at Chalet Soline in two hours, which gave her time for a soak in the hot tub and a chance to get a grip on her wayward emotions.

      The next time she met Jarek she was determined to be coolly professional.

      * * *

      Jarek switched off his laptop, having finalised another successful business deal. The one thing he could rely on in the grim mess that was his life was his ability to make money, he thought cynically. Although he had not always been lucky.

      Over the past two years his instinct for correctly guessing how global markets would perform had catapulted him onto the list of the world’s top ten most successful traders, and enabled him to recoup the huge losses he’d made at Saunderson’s Bank.

      That embarrassing episode had resulted from an unfortunate combination of events. He had taken a particularly risky gamble on the Asian stockmarkets, and an earthquake in Japan had led to a temporary suspension of trading on the Nikkei—with disastrous consequences for his investments and the near-collapse of one of England’s oldest and most prestigious private banks.

      Ralph Saunderson had probably turned in his grave, Jarek thought sardonically. He had been a feral boy of nearly ten when he had been taken from war-ravaged Sarajevo to live at Cuckmere Hall, and his resistance to authority had meant that there had been no love lost between him and Ralph. Following his adoptive father’s death, he had been shocked to discover that he had been excluded from Ralph’s will, and that Cortez Ramos—Ralph’s biological son—had inherited Cuckmere Hall and the chairmanship of Saunderson’s Bank.

      He knew why Ralph had chosen Cortez to be his heir. Ralph had blamed him, Jarek, for Lorna Saunderson’s death, and Jarek had for once agreed with his adoptive father.

      He was haunted by memories of when his adoptive mother had been fatally shot by an armed raider during a robbery at a jeweller’s. The four years that had passed since that terrible day had not dimmed the images in his mind of Lorna lying crumpled on the floor, and Elin kneeling beside her sobbing hysterically. The keening cry his sister had given when she’d realised that her adored mama was dead would echo in his head for ever.

      In Sarajevo, Jarek had seen the bodies of dead soldiers and heard the rattling last breaths of young men—some of whom had been teenagers, only a few years older than him. He’d thought that nothing could be worse than the atrocities he’d seen in that bloody and brutal civil war, but the knowledge that Mama had died because of his reckless attempt to overpower the gunman was an agony that would be with him for ever.

      He would never forgive himself, even though Elin loyally insisted that he wasn’t to blame.

      It had been his idea to set up a charity to support orphans in honour of Lorna Saunderson and, ironically, his willingness to take risks on the stockmarket meant he had earned a fortune for Lorna’s Gift. It was some kind of reparation for what he had done, but nothing would ever ease his guilt.

      God knew what a psychologist would make of him if he ever revealed the dark torment in his soul, Jarek thought grimly. But he had no intention of exploring his emotions with the deliciously sexy Dr Maitland.

      Some things were best left alone—which was why he had decided not to respond to the request he had received from the head of the National Council of Vostov, asking him to have a DNA test which might prove that he was related to Vostov’s royal family, who had all perished in a car accident twenty years ago.

      There was no possibility that it could be true, he assured himself. The idea was ridiculous. But what if his nightmares were not simply horrific figments of his imagination? his conscience whispered. It would mean that the images in his mind were of real events, real people...his parents.

      At the orphanage he had been told that his mother and father had been killed early in the war, when the apartment block where they’d lived had been destroyed by a bomb. Jarek and his baby sister had been pulled from the rubble and the trauma had wiped out all his memories of his life before that day.

      He’d accepted the explanation eventually—after he had been beaten by the orphanage staff whenever he’d talked about his strange dreams. But now his nightmares had returned, more vivid and terrible than when he was a boy. And if the scenes that played out in his subconscious mind were real events then he had something even more devastating than his adoptive mother’s death on his conscience.

      Jarek pushed his hair off his brow and acknowledged that if he had not been stuck halfway up a mountain he would have headed to the nearest bar and sought to escape the demons inside him with another bottle of vodka and an attractive blonde—or two. He remembered the girls at Bibiana’s Bar and for a moment was tempted to take the four-by-four parked outside the chalet and drive himself to Arlenwald, to hook up with Halfrida and her friends.

      It would be worth it just to ruffle Dr Maitland’s feathers.

      His lips twitched as he remembered Holly’s outraged expression when she’d discovered him in the bar. The truth was he would like to do more than ruffle her, he brooded. His body stirred as he pictured her delectable curves. She was an intriguing mix of uptight schoolmistress and sensual siren, and Jarek couldn’t remember the last time he had been intrigued by a woman.

      If she had been someone other than his psychologist... Hell, if he had been someone else—someone better than the man he knew he was—he would have enjoyed allowing their mutual sexual attraction to reach its logical conclusion and taken her to bed.

      But Holly had stated that she wanted to find out what made him tick, and he was utterly determined to prevent her from uncovering the secrets buried deep in his soul.