The Royals Collection. Rebecca Winters

deceived by it. She was very good at pretence, as he had already discovered, but he was not a naive eighteen-year-old any more, ready to trust a woman just because she was a woman, ready to accept whatever lies she chose to feed him.

       Lily stopped pacing to stare at him in despairing disbelief. How could he think that?

       ‘No,’ she denied. ‘No, that’s not true. I’m so scared—’ Her body gave another violent shudder at the thought of having to endure any kind of intimacy with the man she loathed and feared so much, but Marco didn’t notice. He was too caught up in the defence mechanism within him that refused to allow him to trust her.

       She had come here to his room. She had looked at him as though he was the first man she had seen, the only man she wanted to see, and to his own chagrin he had responded to that look. That was a danger he could not allow to exist. Far better and safer to destroy that response by coming to the conclusion that he had than to risk allowing his vulnerability to her. It made sense to punish himself for that vulnerability by facing up to the reality of what she was based on his own assessment of her. It was entirely logical for him to believe that she was trying to manipulate him. If there were holes in the fabric of his argument, if there were fault lines that threatened to bring it down—such as why, for instance, a chance encounter should lead to Lily being willing to stop at nothing to make an ex jealous—then he did not wish to see them.

       ‘You’re lying—again,’ he insisted, in defence of his argument, and shored it up with a cold, ‘But you’re wasting your time. Now, if you’d be kind enough to leave, I’ve got some work to do.’

       Without waiting for her response Marco turned his back on her and headed for the door.

       Marco had got it all wrong. Panic spilled through Lily. She had to make him understand. She couldn’t let him send her back to her room. The ring of the room’s telephone had him turning away from the door and crossing the room to answer the call. He was going to abandon her and leave her defenceless, undefended and unprotected, just as her father had done. She couldn’t let that happen—especially when somehow she knew deep down inside herself that there was a human being who cared about the welfare of others buried deep within that inviolate image he chose to project.

       He had his back to her now, as he reached for the receiver. Her heart banging into her ribs, her actions driven by the adrenaline of fear, Lily ran into the bedroom, pushing the door closed behind her with one hand. She was trembling from head to foot with the panicked need for speed, her mouth dry with anxiety as she climbed into the bed, pulling the bedclothes round her. What she really wanted to do, she recognised, was to hide herself away underneath them, to hide herself away for ever. But of course she couldn’t do that. Marco’s anger had showed her the contempt he felt for what he thought she was doing. Surely in view of that contempt he would leave her where she was? Lily reasoned. Rather than risk contaminating himself by touching her and physically ejecting her from his room?

       She hoped so. Because if there was one thing she did know beyond all other things it was that she could not go back to her suite and stay there all alone, growing more terrified with every second that passed. Men like Anton fed off the fear of their victims. She knew that. But even knowing it she couldn’t control her own fear.

       The bedroom door opened. Marco stood framed in the doorway, his mouth hard with fury.

       ‘I’m not going back to my own room,’ Lily told him defiantly. ‘I’m staying here. With you.’

       It was those last two words that did it, setting a match to Marco’s already tinder-dry fury and making it burn at a white-hot heat. How dared she lie there in his bed and calmly make it plain that she expected him to play along with her little game as though he simply didn’t matter? Did she think he was completely without any male instincts? Any male desire, any male susceptibility to the temptation she was offering?

       His fury burned through his self-control.

       Advancing towards her, he told her savagely, ‘He must have been good.’

       ‘What?’

       ‘He must have been good if you are this desperate to get him back. Making him jealous and getting him back is what this is all about, isn’t it?’ He had reached the bed now, one hand reaching for the covers Lily had drawn up protectively over herself.

       ‘No, of course not. Marco, please let me stay,’ Lily begged him, desperately holding onto the bedding.

       Marco had grabbed a fistful of the fabric and she could feel where his bunched knuckles were grazing the upper curves of her breasts through the layers of material. By some alchemy of their own her nipples started to ache and tighten, and a cord of shockingly hot sweet desire was pulling so taut inside her that she could feel the pulse of its beat sending out waves of awareness from deep inside her to the sensitive nerve-endings lining the soft outer flesh of her sex. A new form of panic seized her. This wasn’t what she should be feeling. Beneath the bedclothes Lily squirmed sensually, choking back a small bemused gasp at the speed with which her sensuality vied with her fear.

       ‘Keep me safe, Marco,’ she pleaded.

       Marco knew his self-control was on a short rope. He could feel it straining and stretching against its tether, that dark well of male desire for her that should not be there surging savagely into life. Her breath grazed his cheek, her lips parting as she fought to resist him—to resist him because she wanted to use him, so that she could arouse within another man the jealousy she had already aroused in him.

       That knowledge was all that was needed to sever his hold on his self-control.

       The extent of the anger he felt at the thought of her with another man was so alien to him that it took Marco several seconds to grasp what it actually was. He was jealous? Jealous because she wanted someone else? How could that be? It could not be. But it was, Marco knew. Somehow she had conjured up from within him a version of himself he had never imagined might exist. A version of himself that was all primeval male.

       The thought of those softly parted lips being possessed by another man ripped at the pride of the previously unknown version of himself she had somehow brought to life inside him. With a smothered oath Marco slid his hand along the soft column of her throat, bending her back against the pillows, telling her thickly, before his mouth closed over hers with angry male possession, ‘Very well, then. If you won’t leave, why don’t we really give him something to be jealous about?’

       Marco was kissing her, and immediately nothing else mattered. Immediately no one else mattered. Immediately she was kissing him back as her heightened emotions exploded into a surge of sensual hunger.

       At some deep level inside he had known from the first minute he had set eyes on her that it would be like this between them. He had sensed it, felt it and tried to reject it. But now it was too late for him to reject it, or her, any longer. He had known that his senses and his body would take fire from the wild sensuality of her. He had told himself that she wasn’t what he wanted. But he had lied to himself, Marco knew. This was why she had angered him—because he had known. His hunger for her ran though him like a deep subterranean power, possessing him and driving him. This was why she had angered him so intensely—because at some level he had known that she would take him down into this dark intensity of need where he had no control.

       Beneath Marco’s kiss Lily gasped and moaned. So this was a woman’s desire for the man who could arouse that in her—this was her need and her longing, her sensuality stripped bare of its protection, whilst her body ached to be stripped bare of its covering by the hands of the man holding her. No wonder she had feared it and tried to hide herself. No wonder she now wanted to give herself up to it entirely and completely, her body, her senses, her emotions—all that she offered in an almost pagan sacrifice to the man whose touch held her in such thrall.

       Instinctively she clung to Marco, needing his strength to sustain her and guide her through such uncharted waters, her senses clamouring for fulfilment of the desires and needs their intimacy had unleashed. Beneath his kiss her tongue-tip hesitantly sought and found his, quickly retreating from the shock of sensation that sent a deep shudder jolting through her