The Royals Collection. Rebecca Winters

Why hadn’t he demanded an explanation of her behaviour? Perhaps because he was so used to sleeping with eager women—women he couldn’t love because he loved a girl who was now lost to him for ever—who longed to be close to him that what she had done had barely registered with him.

       Lily’s heart felt very heavy indeed.

      They’d had a very busy full day, visiting two more villas in the morning and stopping briefly for a light lunch before continuing on to visit a private villa on one of Lake Como’s small islands. Yet no amount of busyness was enough to push out of her thoughts everything that she’d felt on waking up in Marco’s arms this morning. It was like holding a special golden treasure whose existence was enough to fill her with happiness. Her treasure, though, was fool’s gold—because it meant nothing to Marco. She meant nothing to Marco.

       It was now late in the afternoon, and they had stopped in a pretty lakeside town for a cup of coffee at Marco’s suggestion, prior to their return to the villa.

       Marco had just gone inside the café to pay their bill, and she was sitting drinking in the relaxing scene around her, when to her horrified disbelief she saw Anton Gillman on the other side of the road. She had assumed and hoped that he had left the area, with the rest of the fashion pack and returned to Milan, but obviously she had been wrong. Lily shrank back in her chair, hoping that he wouldn’t look across the road and see her. For a moment she thought that he wouldn’t, and that she was safe, but then the woman seated at a table close to their own got up, her small lap dog barking shrilly. The sound caught Anton’s attention so that he glanced towards the café. There was nowhere for her to hide, no hope that he wouldn’t see her, and Lily knew that he had when she saw him start to cross the road and come purposefully towards her. It was the worst kind of cruel coincidence.

       Lily shuddered to see the admiring looks he was attracting from the woman with the yapping dog. She was quite obviously impressed by his air of authority, his expensive suit and his immaculate grooming. If only she knew the truth about him and his sexual tastes she wouldn’t be so interested in him or so admiring.

       Lily wasn’t impressed, though. She was a teenage girl again, sick with fear and loathing because she knew what he wanted from her.

       He was smiling at her—that taunting, cruel smile she had never been able to forget.

       ‘Lily, my lovely.’ His voice caressed her as his knuckles stroked along her jaw, and his gaze registered her immediate terrified recoil from him. ‘Delicious that you’ve remained so…sensitive. I shall enjoy discovering just how sensitive when I finally persuade you to give in to me.’

      Inside the café, waiting to pay their bill, Marco saw the tall dark-haired man approaching Lily and recognised him immediately. Her ex-lover. Anger and jealousy surged over him. There were two people ahead of him in the queue to pay, one of them an elderly man who obviously couldn’t see very well, and who was struggling to find the right money. Marco saw the man lean towards Lily, who was out of view. The intensity of the emotion that exploded inside him scorched the truth of his feelings into him. He was jealous. He was jealous of another man’s right to claim Lily’s attention and to claim Lily herself because… Because she meant far more to him than he had previously allowed himself to admit?

       The elderly man was still fumbling with his money, and the woman behind him in the queue was tutting in her impatience, but Marco was oblivious to them both. How had it happened? How could it be that Lily had become so important to him? He didn’t know. He only knew that she was—just as he knew that this was the last thing he had ever have wanted to happen. He had built a life that depended on him not becoming emotionally involved with others, on not allowing himself to become emotionally dependent on anyone. How had Lily managed to slip beneath his guard and touch that place within him where he was so dangerously vulnerable? His formidable inner defences were warning him to step back from the danger that now lay ahead of him, to turn round and walk away from it—and from Lily herself.

      It was illogical for her to feel so afraid, Lily tried to reassure herself. Anton couldn’t do anything to harm her now. She was an adult, not a teenager, and they were in public. She was in command of her own life. But some fears could not be controlled with mere reason, and this one had lived privately hidden within her for a very long time.

       ‘Why don’t we take a little walk, you and I?’ Anton suggested. ‘I’m sure your companion won’t mind, Dr Wrightington.’

       Lily’s stomach swooped sickeningly. He’d been checking up on her, asking questions about her.

       ‘I’m not going anywhere with you.’

       Too late she recognised it was the wrong thing to say, with its echoes of past refusal.

       Where was Marco? Why hadn’t he come back? What if he didn’t come back?

       She looked frantically into the café willing Marco to see her and come to her rescue, but she couldn’t see him because of the customers blocking her view. She was alone with Anton. Abandoned by Marco just as she had been abandoned by her father. There was no one to support her, no one to protect her.

       Hadn’t it always been that way? Hadn’t she always had to protect herself? Hadn’t she always been alone and uncared for by those she’d longed so much to love her? Her mother, her father, Marco… She was so afraid, so alone. She had to get away, to escape. She stood up, her abrupt movement causing her chair to scrape on the stone beneath it with an ugly grating sound, and her panic increased when Anton took advantage of her fear to take hold of her arm.

       In the shop the elderly man had finally paid his bill, scooping up his change with quivering hands, and now the woman was handing over her money.

       Marco looked towards the table where he had left Lily. She was standing up now, the man with her taking her arm. They were standing close together. Had Lily forgotten that the man holding her, the man she was about to give herself to, had already let her down once? If so, then perhaps he should remind her. And risk being told that he was interfering where his interference wasn’t wanted, as it had been with Olivia? Risk being accused of trying to ruin her life?

       In his mind’s eye Marco could see his eighteen-year-old self, humiliated and shamed. He would not be endure that kind of humiliation again.

       Turning his back on the scene being played out beyond the interior of the café, Marco continued to wait to pay their bill.

      ‘Ah, poor Lily—still so afraid of me. How delicious and erotic…even more so now than when you were younger. There is nothing quite like a little bit of fear to add spice to…things.’

       Something snapped inside Lily. Instinct and need pushed aside the rules of modern-day life that told her it was her duty to herself and others not to make a nuisance of herself, not to ask anything of anyone, not to expect others to help her or to forge an emotional bond with her that meant she could turn to them in need. In a last despairing surge she turned towards the interior of the café. She could see Marco now. He was paying their bill.

      ‘Marco…’

       The anguished, almost sobbed sound of Lily’s voice calling his name drew Marco’s gaze in her direction. She was looking at him—looking for him. Her free arm—the arm her companion was not holding—was stretched out toward him. She needed him. Lily needed him!

       Throwing down a note over twice the value of the coffees they had just had, Marco ran towards the door.

       Lily exhaled in relief. Marco had heard her. He was going to help her.

       He reached her, grasping her free hand, holding it safe.

       ‘Make him go away, Marco,’ she begged him wildly, unable to control her distress. ‘Please make him go away.’

       ‘You heard Lily,’ Marco told Anton, confronting her persecutor and impaling him with a coldly hostile look of warning.

       Anton didn’t move, saying mockingly instead, ‘Naughty Lily. You never told me that you have a new…protector.’

       Whilst Lily flinched