The Mills & Boon Stars Collection. Cathy Williams

indistinguishable from what the woman at the checkout was wearing made me feel that I was the same as everyone else for the first time in my life.’

      Rafe shook his head. ‘Except that most women at the checkout don’t have a multimillion-dollar trust fund bolstering up their little adventures,’ he said sarcastically, before something occurred to him. Something which chimed with the nagging memory in his mind. ‘Did you know this was my cattle station?’

      She hesitated and he saw an uncomfortable look cross her face. ‘Why do you ask?’

      ‘No more lies or evasion, Sophie,’ he bit out. ‘Just tell me the truth.’

      ‘Yes, I’d heard about your station.’

      ‘How?’

      She shrugged. ‘The man I was supposed to marry is called Prince Luc and your sister Amber’s husband is an art dealer who once sold him a painting. Luc was telling me about Conall Devlin marrying into the Carter family—about how you’re all scattered across the world and how none of you conform. He mentioned that you were some bigshot entrepreneur who had a huge cattle station.’

      ‘And you liked the sound of me, did you?’ he questioned arrogantly.

      ‘Hardly,’ came her frosty retort. ‘The thing that attracted me was the fact that you were never here. I knew from talking to Travis that most cattle stations employed a cook and that I could probably teach myself.’

      ‘But we already had a cook working here,’ he said.

      She flushed a little. ‘I know you did. But I met her for a drink and...’

      ‘Let me guess. You offered her money to go earlier than planned?’

      Flushing a little, she nodded. ‘That’s right.’

      ‘Oh, Sophie. How easy it is for you to delude yourself,’ he said softly. ‘For all your commendable announcements about wanting to be the same as everyone else, it must give you a pretty big buzz to realise you can buy pretty much anything you want if you throw enough money at it.’

      ‘Are you telling me you’ve never used your own fortune to do exactly the same?’

      Rafe stiffened as he met the challenge in her eyes and an unwanted feeling of regret coursed through him. How would she react if he told her that the only things he’d ever wanted were things which money could never buy? Things which could never have a price attached to them. Things he had lost and could never get back. He shook his head. ‘This is your story, not mine,’ he said bitterly. ‘Get on with it.’

      ‘I’ve told you everything you need to know.’ She walked over to the top of the wardrobe to pull down a huge rucksack, which she threw on top of the bed. ‘Just console yourself with the fact that you won’t have to put up with me for much longer!’

      ‘What do you think you’re doing?’

      ‘What does it look like I’m doing? I’m leaving. I can’t stay here,’ she said, tugging open a drawer and pulling out a stack of T-shirts, which she began to layer haphazardly in the rucksack. ‘If I stay it’ll be too much hassle for you.’

      ‘Oh, please. Spare me the spin. I don’t imagine you’re leaving out of the goodness of your heart, are you, little Miss Princess?’

      Sophie heard the venom in his voice and thought about the way he’d touched her last night. The way he’d made her feel so safe and protected. As if she was capable of anything. She remembered the way she’d trembled with delight as he’d explored her skin with his fingers and his mouth. The way she’d gasped with pleasure with each deep stroke he’d made. She had taken a long time to have sex for reasons which were complex and unique, but Rafe Carter had been the perfect lover—even if now he was looking at her as if she were something he’d found squashed beneath the sole of his shoe.

      And surely what happened last night had been about more than sexual liberation. She had given herself to him freely—so didn’t that give her the right to treat him as an equal and be treated as an equal herself?

      ‘Is it fair to criticise me because I was born with a title?’ she said. ‘Something which is completely outside my control.’

      ‘Would you prefer that I criticised you for your deceit instead? For failing to tell me who you really were?’

      ‘But I couldn’t tell you,’ she said simply. ‘How could I? I couldn’t tell anyone—it would have made it impossible for me to stay here. Surely you can see that. It would have altered everything.’

      ‘And of course, if you’d told me, particularly the part about your lack of sexual experience...’ his eyes glinted ‘...then at least I would have had a choice about whether I wanted to be used as an experimental lover in your big round-the-world adventure.’

      ‘It wasn’t like that!’ she said fiercely.

      ‘No? You chose me because we’d forged a deep bond in less than a week of knowing one another?’

      ‘I actually wasn’t analysing it very much at all—I was just going with the flow. And aren’t you forgetting that there were two people involved in what happened?’ she questioned quietly. ‘Or just preferring to forget your part in it?’

      ‘So what was it? Did I tick all the right boxes, Sophie?’ He began to tap each one of his fingers in turn. ‘Rich, single, hot and therefore the perfect candidate to give the rejected royal her first taste of sexual pleasure?’

      Flinging a belt on top of the T-shirts, Sophie lifted her head, grabbing at the streak of anger which flashed through her because surely anger was better than buckling under these sudden feelings of vulnerability and sadness which were bubbling up inside her. ‘You bastard,’ she whispered shakily, but Rafe Carter didn’t look in the least bit shocked by her first ever public use of a swear word. The only emotion she could see flickering in his hard grey eyes was bitter cynicism.

      ‘Yeah. For a while I was exactly that. A bastard,’ he drawled. ‘My father didn’t marry my mother until three days after I was born. As it turned out, they should never have bothered.’

      His phone started to vibrate in his pocket and he slid it out to take the call, listening in silence as Sophie continued to pack the rucksack.

      ‘Where are you planning to go?’ he questioned, once the connection had been cut.

      She didn’t look up, terrified now that her vulnerability would be impossible to hide. ‘I haven’t really thought about it.’

      ‘Well, start thinking!’ He felt a flicker of temper. ‘You’re not protected by your royal status now, Sophie. You’re out in the middle of Queensland with a limited choice of transport available, no matter how much money you’re suddenly able to produce. That was my assistant on the phone. He says your presence in my Outback home is generating a lot of interest on a quiet news day—not least because I’m just about to mount a bid for one of Malaysia’s biggest cell-phone networks and there’s been a lot of opposition to the deal.’ His mouth twisted. ‘So thanks very much for that.’

      ‘I’m sorry this has impacted on you because it was never intended to,’ she said. ‘But I’ll be out of your life soon, Rafe. You can put all this down to experience and forget it ever happened. Which is precisely what you wanted in the first place, isn’t it?’

      She zipped up the rucksack and swept her tumbled hair away from flushed cheeks and Rafe was reminded of the way she’d moved over him the night before. He remembered the brush of her pubic hair as he’d tangled his fingers in it. The beat of her heart and how tight she’d felt. The way he’d kissed away her cries of pleasure. And damn it if he couldn’t feel the sudden debilitating jerk of sexual desire as he visualised pushing her down on that bed and ripping open the ugly cotton trousers and doing it to her all over again.

      ‘If only it was that easy,’ he growled. ‘What do you think it’s going to do for my reputation if I leave you here to fend for yourself among the rabble