The Royals Collection. Rebecca Winters

but in my rather more old-fashioned world it’s making yourself cheap. Having sex with another man so that you can boast about doing so to an ex-lover is several notches lower down the scale from that, and it doesn’t have a name I’d like to utter in a woman’s presence—even a woman like you. As a man, I warn you that if you really think having sex with me is going to persuade your ex to take you back then you don’t know as much about men as you think you do,’ he finished curtly, getting up off the bed.

       To Lily, still trying to come to terms with the intense, agonising ache of unsatisfied desire ravaging her body, his words made her feel as though her emotions were being flayed with a whip that left them ripped and bloodied in a torment of humiliation and pain. How could she have allowed herself to be so…so aroused that nothing else had mattered more than Marco possessing her? Not even her own pride and self-worth? Her shame felt like hot tar being poured into those wounds. He had deliberately led her on, deliberately tricked and trapped her into exposing her vulnerability.

       She felt sick with shock and shame, and the only defence she was able to utter was a broken, ‘That wasn’t supposed to happen.’

       It hurt her physically inside, as well as emotionally, that he should think so badly of her—but she was in no state to explain that to him. She was too shocked by her own response to him to be able to do anything more than try to take in what had happened.

       ‘You’re damned right it wasn’t,’ Marco agreed angrily. He couldn’t trust himself to say anything else to her. He couldn’t trust himself to stay in the same room with her, he admitted. Because if he did stay he couldn’t trust himself not to go back to her. Not to take her in his arms again and make love to her until she was as incapable of wanting any other man as he already was of wanting any other woman.

       Furious with himself for that weakness, Marco headed for the door to his suite’s sitting room, acutely aware of the need to put some distance between them.

       His chest felt tight with the intensity of his emotions—emotions that were totally at odds with his nature. He had never felt like this before, never imagined he could feel like this—possessed by the kind of raw, out-of-control male needs, thoughts and desires he had believed himself too much in control ever to know. That it was a woman like Lily who had made him feel them only made the situation so very much worse. How could he, of all men, be reduced to this by a woman he should only despise?

       He looked at the closed door to the bedroom. The Marco he recognised, the Marco he had always believed himself to be, would have lost no time in going back into the bedroom and ejecting Lily from his bed, if necessary. However, the Marco he was now simply didn’t trust himself to go back into that room with her—because he knew that, far from ejecting her from his bed, he was more likely to end up back in it with her. That, of course, could not be allowed to happen.

       How she must be laughing at him, gloating over her hold over him. Marco paced the room, his thoughts feeding his anger, knowing that he could neither escape from it or from her—Lily—the cause of it.

      In the bedroom Lily lay tensely in the bed, watching the door. Marco had been so contemptuous of her, and she couldn’t blame him. What on earth had possessed her to behave in the way she had? She, of all people, who had grown up fearing a woman’s need to give herself completely to the man she loved because of what it did to a woman. She who had grown up believing that sexual desire was something that at its worst led to abuse and degradation, used by one person to have power over another, and at best took from those who experienced it all control over themselves and their lives. She had always been so glad that she was immune to its call, unconcerned about discovering its allure and power. She had felt safe in her celibate world—a world in which she could breathe the dusty air of the past instead of the high-octane air of a world she had learned to mistrust.

       Anton Gillman had brought her a fear that had dominated every aspect of her life—a fear that ridding herself of her virginity the minute she was sixteen, with a boy as clumsy and untutored as she herself had been had calmed to some extent, but not banished for ever. Everything she had done in her adult life had been to keep herself safe from what she had left behind—even her choice of career. She had been too confident that she had succeeded, though. She recognised that now. Too ready to believe that she was safe from the problems she had seen sex cause in the lives of others.

       The truth of that had been brought home to her now. Only minutes ago in Marco’s room, in Marco’s bed and in Marco’s arms, she had forgotten everything she had ever learned, too aroused by her own desire for him to recognise or care about her own danger.

       She wanted to creep away and hide herself somewhere like the child she had once been, hiding in the cupboard off the studio where her father had kept some of his photographic equipment. But there was no hiding place from what was within herself. Her body was still tight with longing. Shamefully, she knew that it wouldn’t take much at all for her desire to be reawakened to the point where it was out of her control. Marco’s single touch, his briefest kiss, would be enough to do it.

       Marco! She had come here to his suite because at some deep emotional level she had felt that he represented the protection and security she had always wanted and never had. But now she knew that Marco was far more dangerous than any threat Anton might make to her.

       What would she do if Marcus came to her now and took her back in his arms?

       The leap of aching longing that gripped her told her all she needed to know. Not that Marco was likely to do that, of course. He had made that more than plain. But she couldn’t get out of the bedroom without going into the sitting room beyond it, and she couldn’t do that, Lily knew. If she did she couldn’t trust herself not to humiliate herself even more by begging Marcus to take her back to bed.

       An instinct she desperately wanted to ignore was trying to tell her that what had happened had not been a merely physical act, disengaged from her mind and her emotions. She didn’t want to listen to it, and she certainly wasn’t going to believe it. Yes, she had been overwhelmed—but that was just because she wasn’t used to such an intensity of physical desire. Nothing more.

       After all, she had seen what giving everything to one man—wanting him, needing him, loving him utterly and completely—had done to her mother when that one man had grown tired of her and wanted her out of his life. She had seen the pain of that destroy her mother emotionally, and then mentally, and finally physically—until all she had wanted was death. As a child her father had often told her that she was just like her mother. She must not let what had happened to her mother happen to her. She must not repeat her mother’s mistakes.

       She knew how little what had happened meant to Marco. And she must make sure that it was the same for herself—at least as far as Marco was concerned.

       CHAPTER SIX

      MORNING. The beginning of a new day. A joy for those who knew happiness, but a misery for those who longed to hang on to the dark hours of the night to conceal their pain, Marco acknowledged as he stood in front of the uncurtained bedroom window, looking out across the lake whilst the sun rose in the sky.

       He had barely slept. He was too tall to sleep comfortably in an armchair, and besides his thoughts had been even more uncomfortable than the chair. How could he have allowed himself to be dragged into Lily’s grubby, manipulative plans? His contempt for himself was now every bit as great as his contempt for her. How could he have felt any kind of desire for her? How could he have wanted her with such intensity? He had no idea what had caused last night’s weakness to overtake him, but he did know that it must not be allowed to happen again.

       He rubbed his jaw with his hand, grimacing at the rough feel of his stubble. He needed a shave and a shower. He also needed to get dressed. For that, of course, he needed access to his bathroom, and his clothes. He looked grimly at the closed door between the two rooms, before striding over to it and turning the handle.

       Lily was lying motionless in the large bed, all that was visible of her above the bedclothes the tumble of her hair and the curve of her throat. Her body