The Santina Crown Collection. Кейт Хьюит

if he thought he was going to frighten her off with his forbidding manner towards her, he was wrong. He no doubt remembered her as the young girl who was very easily hurt by any hint that she might have offended the man she hero-worshipped so intensely, but she wasn’t that young girl any more, and when it came to being hurt and surviving that hurt … well, she could easily lay claim to having qualified for a master’s degree in that particular emotional journey.

      Ash could feel the tension invading his body. Sophia had dared to mention his marriage. He allowed no one to do that. It was a taboo subject.

      ‘I do not discuss either my late wife or our marriage with anyone.’

      The words delivered in a harsh blistering tone only confirmed what Sophia already felt she knew, and that was how much Ash still loved his dead wife.

      She must not think about that, though. She must think instead about her own need for his help.

      From the minute she had learned he was coming to the engagement party, she had seen him as her salvation and her only hope of rescue from a situation she simply could not bear. She must not falter now, no matter how vulnerable she felt inside.

      Sophia had gone silent. Ash turned to look at her. She was trying to appear confident but he could see the apprehension beneath. It was a protective device she had often employed as a child. A child who as the youngest of the family, and a girl, was often overlooked. Somehow against his will, he found his anger receding.

      Ash’s penetrating gaze was assessing her with hawklike scrutiny, Sophia recognised, and yet there was something in his expression that had softened, as though the bones of his face had subtly moved so that she could see again the Ash whose memory she cherished, beneath the harshness that time had overlaid on those bones—something that resurrected her desperate hope.

      There was no time to waste, she decided. She must be brave and strong, and trust in her own judgement, her own belief in him.

      ‘My father wants to marry me to off to some Spanish prince he’s found.’

      What was that sensation that uncurled inside him and attacked with the deadly speed of a poisonous snake, causing his heart to lurch inside his chest? Nothing. Nothing at all.

      ‘So your father wishes to arrange a dynastic and diplomatic marriage for you.’

      Ash shrugged dismissively, but Sophia stopped him. ‘It would be a forced marriage, and I would be the one forced into it.’

      Her words might have been those of the passionate, emotional, sensitive young girl he remembered. How fierce she had been then in her defence of people’s personal freedoms, her conviction that everyone had the right to dictate the pathway of their own lives. It was no real wonder given how often she and her father had clashed, as they were obviously doing now.

      ‘Don’t you think you’re being a tad dramatic?’ he asked her in a wry voice. ‘You aren’t a naive girl any more, Sophia. Royalty marries royalty, that is the way of our kind. Marriages are arranged, heirs conceived and born, and that is how we fulfil our duty to our forebears and our people.’

      This was not how she had imagined he would react when she had lain sleepless at night, longing for his arrival, aching for his help, needing his support.

      ‘I’m not being dramatic,’ she defended herself. ‘Surely I should have some rights as a person, a human being, some say in my own fate, instead of having my future decided for me by my father?’

      ‘I’m sure he only has your best interests at heart.’

      Ash just did not want to get involved in this. Why should he? He was a busy man about to enter the final negotiations on a contract, the success of which would secure the future of his people for generations to come.

      ‘No. No,’ she denied immediately. ‘He doesn’t have my best interests at heart. All he is interested in is securing a royal marriage for a daughter of the house of Santina. He told me that himself when I begged him to reconsider, that he had had to promise this Spanish prince that I would be an obedient and dutiful wife, a wife who would not try to interfere in his own preferred lifestyle of bed hopping amongst his many mistresses.

      ‘When I told him that I didn’t want to marry this prince, he said that I was ungrateful and ignoring my royal duty. He said that I would grow accustomed to my husband. Accustomed. To endure marriage to a man who has simply agreed to marry me because he wants an heir, and to whom my father has virtually auctioned me off in exchange for a royal alliance. How could that ever be having my best interests at heart?’

      ‘I should have thought such a marriage would suit you, Sophia. After all, it’s well documented that your own chosen lifestyle involves something very similar, when it comes to bed hopping.’

      A body blow indeed and one that drove the blood from Sophia’s face and doubled the pain in her heart. It shouldn’t matter what Ash thought of her. That was not part of her plan. But still his denunciation of her hurt and it wasn’t one she could defend herself against. Not without telling him far more than she wanted him to know.

      ‘Then you thought wrong,’ was all she could permit herself to say. ‘That is not the kind of marriage I want. I can’t bear the thought of this marriage.’ Her panic and fear was there in her voice; even she could hear it herself, so how much more obvious must it be to Ash?

      She must try to stay calm. Not even to Ash could she truly explain the distaste, the loathing, the fear, she had of being forced by law to give herself in a marriage bed in the most intimate way possible when … No, that was one secret that she must keep no matter what, just as she had already kept it for so long.

      Not even to Ash? Definitely not to Ash. Now she was letting her emotions get muddled instead of focusing on the practicalities of her situation.

      Steadying her breathing she told Ash as calmly as she could, ‘When I marry I want to know and respect my husband and our marriage. I want to love him and be loved by him. I want us to bring our children up in the safe secure circle of that love.’ That, after all, was the truth.

      And it was a truth that Ash heard and couldn’t refute. He frowned. Against his will he was forced to acknowledge that there was something in her voice that touched old nerves, revived old memories. Revived them? Since when had they really needed reviving? He had never forgotten, could never forget.

      ‘Please, Ash, I’m begging you for your help.’

      CHAPTER TWO

      THOSE words—the same words with which she had cried out to him once before—sliced through his self-control, cutting the cords that held fast the doors to the past.

      Once before Sophia had begged him for something.

      She’d been just past her sixteenth birthday the last time he’d seen her. He could still remember the shock he had felt at seeing her all grown-up. One minute—or so it had seemed—she had been a child, but somehow six months later she had been trembling on the brink of what would become her womanhood, a girl still for all her burgeoning physical maturity, a girl with tears tracking down her cheeks, her huge dark brown eyes drowning in tears. Then she had still been an innocent: naive, unknowing, virginal and vulnerable. He had been determined that it would not be through him that any of those things were taken from her, no matter how hard she begged him to do so.

      What had happened to her during those intervening years to turn her into the wanton sensualist she was now? Why should he care? The sixteen-year-old towards whom he had felt so protective belonged to another life, another Ash.

      Even then she’d been sensationally beautiful, with everything about her already hinting at the sensuality to come. Then she had had the promise of a sweet, almost ready-to-ripen peach, yet still a girl compared to his adult-male maturity, and his natural sense of responsibility and moral probity had naturally reacted to that. He had known that he had a duty towards her to protect her not just from herself but from that shock of awareness within himself of the fact that she was becoming a desirable woman.