A Bride For The Playboy Prince. Sandra Marton

capable of giving her. Instant pleasure which could be hers any time she liked.

      But something told her that she shouldn’t slip into intimacy with him—no matter how tempting the prospect—because to do so would be to lose sight of his essential ruthlessness. He had brought her here like some kind of possession. An old-fashioned chattel who carried his child. He had married her despite all her protestations, and there hadn’t been a thing she could do about it. She was trapped. The deal had been sealed. She had made her bed and now she must lie in it.

      She just didn’t intend sharing it with him.

      That was the only thing she was certain of—that she wasn’t going to complicate things by having sex with a man who had blackmailed her to the altar. Her resistance would be the key to her freedom, because a man with Luc’s legendary libido would never endure a sexless marriage. Inevitably, he would be driven into the arms of other women and she would be able to divorce him on grounds of infidelity. She pushed his hand away, telling herself it was better this way. Better never to start something which could only end in heartache. But that didn’t stop her body from missing that brief caress of his fingers, from wishing that she could close her eyes and pretend not to care when they slipped beneath her dress and began to pleasure her...

      ‘We may be married,’ she said. ‘But it’s going to be in name only.’

      ‘Do I take that to mean you’re imposing a sex ban?’ he questioned gravely.

      She smoothed down the ruffled silk jersey, which still bore the imprint of his hand, and waited until her heart had stopped racing quite so much. ‘A ban would imply that something was ongoing, which is definitely not the case. We had one night together—and not even a whole night because you couldn’t wait to get away from me, could you, Luc? So please don’t try suggesting that I’m withdrawing something which never really got off the ground.’

      Luc frowned, unused to having his advances rejected, or for a woman to look at him with such determination in her eyes. His power and status had always worked in his favour—but it was his natural charisma which had always guaranteed him a hundred per cent success rate with the opposite sex. Yet he could sense that this time was different. Because Lisa was different. She always had been. He remembered the silent vow he had taken as she’d walked towards him in all her wedding finery. A vow to be the best husband he could. She was a newly crowned princess and she was pregnant—so shouldn’t he cut her a little slack?

      ‘I hear what you say,’ he said. ‘But the past is done, Lisa. All we have is the present. And the future, of course.’

      ‘And I need you to hear this,’ she answered, in a low and fervent voice. ‘Which is that I will perform my role as your princess, at least until after the birth. But I will be your wife in name only. I meant what I said and I will not share a bed with you, Luc. I don’t intend to have sex with you. Be very clear about that.’

      ‘And is there any particular reason why?’ His eyes mocked her, his gaze lingering with a certain insolence on the swell of her breasts. ‘Because you want me, Lisa. You want me very badly. We both know that.’

      There was silence for a moment as Lisa willed her nipples to stop tingling in response to his lazy scrutiny. She swallowed. ‘Because sex can weaken women. It can blind them to the truth, so that they end up making stupid mistakes.’

      ‘And you have experience of this, do you?’

      She shrugged. ‘Indirectly.’

      His voice was cool. ‘Are you going to tell me about it? We need something to do if we aren’t going to celebrate our union in the more conventional manner.’

      Lisa hesitated. As usual, his words sounded more like an order than a question and her instinct was to keep things bottled up inside her, just as she’d always done. He’d never been interested in this kind of thing in the past, but she guessed things were different now. And maybe Luc needed to know why she meant what she said. To realise that the stuff she’d experienced went bone deep and she wasn’t about to change. She didn’t dare change. She needed to stay exactly as she was—in control. So that nobody could get near to her and nobody could ever hurt her. ‘Oh, it’s a knock-on effect from my scarred childhood,’ she said flippantly.

      Pillowing his hands behind his dark head, he leaned back in the aircraft seat and studied her. ‘What happened in your childhood?’

      It took a tense few moments before the words came out and that was when she realised she’d never talked about it before. Not even with Britt. She’d buried it all away. She’d shut it all out and put that mask on. But suddenly she was tired of wearing a mask all the time—and she certainly had no need to impress Luc. Why, if she gave him a glimpse into her dysfunctional background, maybe he might do them both a favour and finish the marriage before it really started.

      ‘My father died when my sister and I were little,’ she said. ‘I was too young to remember much about him and Britt was just a baby. He was much older than my mother and he was rich. Very rich.’ She met his sapphire gaze and said it before he could. ‘I think that was the reason she married him.’

      ‘Some women crave security,’ he observed with a shrug.

      She had expected condemnation, not understanding, and slowly she let out the breath she hadn’t even realised she’d been holding. ‘She was brought up in poverty,’ she said slowly. ‘Not the being-broke-before-payday kind, but the genuine never knowing where your next meal is coming from. She once told me that if you’d ever experienced hunger—real hunger—then you never forgot it. And marrying my father ensured that hunger became a thing of the past. When he died she became a very wealthy woman...’

      ‘And?’ he prompted as her voice trailed off, his eyes blue and luminous.

      ‘And...’ Lisa hesitated. She had tried to understand her mother’s behaviour and some of it she could. But not all. She compressed her lips to stop them wobbling. ‘She found herself in the grip of lust for the first time in her life and decided to reverse her earlier trend by marrying a man much younger than herself. A toy boy,’ she finished defiantly. ‘Although I don’t believe the word was even invented then.’

      ‘A man more interested in her money than in a widow with two young children to care for?’

      She gazed at him suspiciously. ‘How did you know that?’

      ‘Something in your tone told me that might be the case, but I am a pragmatist, not a romantic, Lisa,’ he said drily. ‘And all relationships usually involve some sort of barter.’

      ‘Like ours, you mean?’ she said.

      ‘I think you know the answer to that question,’ he answered lightly.

      She stared down at the silk-covered bump of her belly before lifting her gaze to his again. ‘He wasn’t a good choice of partner. My stepfather was an extremely good-looking man who didn’t know the meaning of the word fidelity. He used to screw around with girls his own age—and every time he was unfaithful, it broke my mother just a little bit more.’

      ‘And that affected you?’

      ‘Of course it affected me!’ she hit back. ‘It affected me and my sister. There was always so much tension in the house! One never-ending drama. I used to get home from school and my mother would just be sitting there gazing out of the window, her face all red and blotchy from crying. I used to tidy up and cook tea for me and Britt, but all Mum cared about was whether or not he would come home that night. Only by then he’d also discovered the lure of gambling and the fact that she was weak enough to bankroll it for him, so it doesn’t take much imagination to work out what happened next.’

      His dark lashes shuttered his eyes. ‘He worked his way through her money?’

      Lisa stared at him, trying not to be affected by the understanding gleam in his eyes and the way they were burning into her. But she was affected.

      ‘Lisa? What happened? Did he leave you broke?’

      She thought she could