The Royals Collection. Rebecca Winters

set out to undermine and frighten her, and he had succeeded. She knew she wouldn’t feel safe now until she was locked in her room, Lily admitted.

       Marco watched her hurry away. She had been very impatient to go to her suite. Why? Because she had arranged to meet the man he had seen her with there? She hadn’t answered him when he had asked her if he was an old friend. Was he more than merely a friend?

       CHAPTER FIVE

      IT was just over an hour since she had left Marco—over an hour of sitting on the edge of her bed fully dressed, with her muscles clenched and her gaze fixed on the locked door to her room. Beyond that she had also locked the door to her suite, so that she would feel safe. Only Lily knew that she did not feel safe—that she could not feel safe as long as Anton Gillman was in the hotel.

       With every minute that had passed since she had come to her suite her fear had grown. She had tried to apply reason to the situation, to keep calm and remind herself that she wasn’t fourteen any more, that she wasn’t a girl now and was a woman, but it hadn’t made any difference. Her fear had continued to grow until it was out of her control and had taken her over completely. Anton knew which suite she was in thanks to her own clumsiness. How could she feel safe there knowing that—even with her door locked and bolted?

       Lily looked at her watch. It was just gone midnight . The darkest hours of the night lay ahead of her to be got through—alone and in fear. She dared not even close her eyes because of the images she knew her memory would force her to relive. The glass doors to her balcony rattled in the breeze, causing her to start up in dread, her heart hammering into her ribs.

       And then, like a tiny seed of hope pushing its way through the darkness, a new thought emerged as she remembered the dream she had had and how it had made her feel. There was one place where she would be safe. One person with whom she would be safe if only she had the courage to go to him. Marco. She would be safe with him. If she told him about Anton then she would be safe.

       Refusing to give herself time to analyse the instinct driving her, never mind apply any logic to it, Lily got up off the bed, flinging open the locked bedroom door and almost running for the main door as though she was already being pursued. She stopped only to grab her bag before opening the door into the corridor and, having checked that it was empty, hurrying down its length to the door to Marco’s suite.

       Marco had just got out of the shower, reluctantly admitting to himself that it was a relief to be there in the solitude of his room, where he could escape from the effect Lily’s presence had on his self control, when he heard the frantic knocking on his suite door—the kind of knocking that overrode logic and sent his body into immediate emergency response. It had him grabbing a towel to wrap around his hips before striding towards the door.

       He wasn’t sure what he had expected to see when he opened it, but it certainly hadn’t been Lily. Even less welcome than her arrival was the fact that she had rushed past him and was now in his room, inside his sanctuary from the conflict she had set raging inside him.

       Safety… Sanctuary… Such was the extent of Lily’s relief that it was only once she was inside his suite that she took in the fact that Marco’s torso and hair were damp and that all he was wearing was a towel.

       Her gaze slithered and skittered as she tried to avoid looking at him and couldn’t. The swift response of her senses to him momentarily distracted her from her purpose in coming to him.

       Marco, a man to whom the right and the ability to control his life was something he took for granted, always chose who was allowed into his life and when. No one had ever dared to challenge that right. It had been unthinkable that they should. He was the Prince di Luchessi. No one broke the rules he had made for the way he lived his life. Until now. Until Lily had come—uninvited and unwanted—into his room. He had to struggle to come to terms with the fact that she had dared to breach his defences. His personal boundaries, like his privacy, were very important to him. People did not cross those boundaries because he did not allow them to do so. He did not want casual physical intimacy with others, because casual physical intimacy could lead to pressure for emotional intimacy. That was something he would never want or give.

       His status meant that a good deal of his life was played out in public. That made the privacy he claimed for himself even more important to him. As a lover he considered it his duty to ensure that his partners found pleasure and satisfaction in his arms, but as a man he preferred to sleep alone afterwards. And now here was Lily, intruding into his personal space and looking at him as though…

       Did she know what she was doing to him, looking at him like that? Marco wondered grimly. Of course she did. That was why she was doing it. He was not vain about his body—he ate healthily and kept fit without being excessive about it—but that wide-eyed look of dazed, entranced delight Lily was giving him right now, as though his was the most magnificent male form she had ever seen, would boost any man’s ego. Never mind what it was doing to his body. But this was a woman who knew all about manipulating others, Marco reminded himself. Whatever Lily had come to his suite for it certainly wasn’t because she had been filled with an urgent desire for him, no matter what impression she might be trying to give him right now.

       ‘Why are you here?’ he demanded stiffly. ‘What do you want?’

       The sound of Marco’s voice broke the spell that the intimacy of his nearly naked body had spun round her, his curtness bringing Lily back to reality.

       ‘I had to come. Seeing Anton again after so long…so unexpectedly… He knows my suite number. I couldn’t stay in my room. He…’ Fear and shock disjointed her words.

       ‘Anton?’ Marco checked her, and then wished that he had simply told her to leave. After all, he wanted her out of his room. He wanted her out of his life, he acknowledged.

       ‘Anton…Anton Gillman.’ Just saying his name made Lily shudder. Watching her, Marco frowned, guessing, ‘The man you were with earlier this evening, after dinner?’

       ‘Yes,’ Lily acknowledged.

       ‘You gave him your room number?’

       ‘No. I dropped my keycard and he saw it. I was afraid that he’d come looking for me…’

       ‘Why would he do that?’

       There was a look on her face that caught him off guard. Fear. Raw, naked fear. He could see it in her eyes and hear it in her voice. Against his will it touched a nerve within him. To his own disbelief he could feel himself reacting, weakening, as she aroused in him an instinctive male urge to take that fear from her and to protect her.

       He could not and would not allow himself to give in to that urge. He fought against it, insisting, ‘He must have a reason.’

       Lily shuddered as Marco’s words reminded her of exactly what reason Anton did have for persecuting her.

       Marco watched as she shuddered and a mental image from the past was resurrected from the place where he had buried it. Time after time Olivia, her face swollen and bruised, had cried out emotionally to him that she wanted him to take her home, away from her latest ‘boyfriend’ and his physical abuse of her, and then less than twelve hours later she would be telling him that nothing and no one would ever part her from the man she loved, and that his violence towards her was simply caused by jealousy.

       Some women were like that. Some women were drawn to men who abused and humiliated them. Some women even enjoyed deliberately making such men jealous, and went back time and time again to them. Was that why she was here? Because she knew her ex-lover would seek her out and she wanted him to believe she was with someone else?

       It all made sense now, Marco decided cynically. She had come here intending to use him to make another man jealous. And she’d nearly succeeded, he was forced to admit. That knowledge caused him to state harshly, ‘I know what you’re up to. You came here to me because you want to make this Anton believe that you and I are lovers.’