The Royals Collection. Rebecca Winters

man turned to white-hot rage.

       ‘I told him I’d tell my father, but he just laughed at me. He told me that he had a thing about virgins—young virgins. It was horrible—sickening. I was so afraid that I ran out of the studio. I didn’t know what to do or where to go. I had a key to my father’s flat, but I was afraid to go there in case somehow he, Anton was there.’

       Marco closed his eyes against the anger boiling up inside him—against the man who had wanted to abuse her, against her father, against the whole of his sex for being what it was, but most of all against himself for not recognising her fear and for not protecting her from it.

       Marco was so silent, so unmoving. Why didn’t he say something? Didn’t he know how much she needed comfort from him? How much she needed him? Defenceless and drained, Lily could only hold out her arms to him in supplication and beg, ‘Hold me, Marco. Please hold me.’

       Lily’s words shocked through Marco. Hold her? He couldn’t. Everything he had taught himself to be recoiled from the thought of such intimacy. He feared the private wounds within himself it might reveal, searing him just as her anguished plea had seared his emotions—those emotions he had fought for so long to deny. If he touched her now he was afraid that he would take her to himself, crush her to himself, and never want to let her go.

       Marco was turning away from her—no doubt filled with contempt for her and for her weakness, Lily recognised mutely, and her pent-up breath escaped on a sound that was humiliatingly close to a small sob.

       Lily was crying? He had made her cry?

       Marco turned round, and from doing that took a step towards her, ignoring the mental lashing of his brain that urged him to stop. How could he when his heart was aching with remorse and longing?

       Lily watched him without speaking, and for a moment Marco thought that she was going to ignore him and walk away from him. Part of him hoped that she would. But then she made a suppressed sound of desperation and almost flung herself against him, wrapping her arms around him, resting her head on his chest, her body trembling against his.

       Slowly, awkwardly, uncomfortably, he lifted his own arms and placed them round her. Defeat. Surrender. The giving in of his will to his emotions. It should have felt wrong. She should have felt wrong. But instead it felt—she felt… Marco understood as he held her close. It felt as though she completed him. He breathed in and then exhaled slowly and deeply, as though he was releasing a burden he had carried for far too long.

       She felt so delicate within his hold, and holding her now, as a woman, Marco could only ache for the fragile, vulnerable girl she must have been. Olivia had never felt like this—but then he had never held her like this. He had never held her at all, really. On those rare occasions when he had kissed her she had never aroused in him a hunger for her, as Lily had done, Marco recognised. Never made him want her and then want equally to reject that wanting because it made him feel vulnerable. Their relationship had been more one of brother and sister than two young people who would one day be husband and wife.

       But it was Lily who needed to be the focus of his thoughts now, not Olivia, and most certainly not his own self-centred fear of losing face through his damaged pride.

       ‘And the rest of that Christmas holiday?’ he pressed her. ‘What happened?’

       ‘I went back to school,’ Lily told him, her voice muffled as she kept her face pressed to his shoulder, ‘I knew I’d be safe there. There were always some girls there who had to stay at school in the holidays. It was lovely. We had a proper Christmas dinner, and the teachers took us to the theatre and museums. It was like being part of a…a family, and I felt…I knew that I was safe.’

       Just as she did now, here with Marco, Lily knew, lifting her head from his shoulder to look at him as she told him, ‘I’m so grateful to you for…for being here for me, and for helping me. Thank you.’

       She leaned forward, intending to kiss his cheek, but he turned his head in such a swift recoil that her lips brushed his instead, causing him to recoil even further and step back from her.

       Mortified, Lily apologised. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t intend… I shouldn’t have asked you to hold me. It was thoughtless of me when I know that what I told you must have made you think of the girl you were going to marry.’

       His response was gruff. ‘I was thinking of her, yes.’ But not as much as I was thinking of you, Marco added to himself privately. Not as much as I shall be thinking about you for ever.

       It was her own fault if his answer had hurt her—her own fault because deep inside herself she must have known that she was falling in love with him, Lily castigated herself. She wouldn’t have burned for him in the way that she had if it hadn’t been for that love. The look on his face made her feel as though her heart was being wrung out and weeping in pain. It was time for her to move on.

       ‘It’s been illogical of me to be so afraid of Anton. I’m an adult now, and he can only intimidate me through my fear if I keep that fear,’ she told him, trying to make sure her voice sounded purposeful and friendly instead of betraying her aching need for him. ‘And what makes that fear even more illogical is that I made sure that I lost my virginity and so removed what it was about me I believed Anton desired the minute I reached my sixteenth birthday.’

       Marco bowed his head. He had lost his own virginity at sixteen himself, to an older girl who had seduced him with enthusiasm and what to him at that age had seemed a great deal of expertise, but it had been an emotionless experience.

       ‘It was a goal I’d set myself—a bridge I had to cross and then burn behind me to keep me safe from Anton,’ Lily continued. ‘As my birthday is in May, it had to be during term-time. At a dance with the boys from a nearby public school a boy asked me to dance who I remembered from the Christmas Dance. I’d liked him because he was quiet and shy. We did the deed with a good deal of fumbling and uncertainty on both sides, more at my instigation than his. It was a practical necessity rather than an…an act of mutual desire, and I have to say that nothing about it has ever made me feel I want to repeat it.’

       Marco’s heart jolted. It was wrong, so wrong, that all either of them had known of sexual intimacy was a cold, emotionless coming together—even if in the years since his first encounter he had acquired all the necessary physical skills to please his partners. Together they could share something unique, give one another something that neither of them had experienced with anyone else—something that he now knew he would never want to experience with anyone other than her.

       Marco considered himself to be a modern man, and indeed something of a pragmatist, but right now, against any kind of logic, there was something inside him that was asking if it was merely circumstance that had brought them together.

       What was he thinking? That they had been fated to meet? That it had been written into their lives from birth—preordained, in fact? Was that what he wanted to believe? Was that what he wanted to trust, to give himself over to? Just as he yearned for Lily to give herself over to him?

       The walls within which he had imprisoned his emotions were crashing down around him and there was no place left for him to hide from them. He must confront them and accept what they were telling him about himself—if he dared.

       Lily’s hesitant, ‘Can I ask you something personal?’ had him giving her a wary look before nodding his head.

       ‘Is it just because I was involved in the modelling world that you don’t trust me? Or is it because of her…your….your girl as well?’ Why was she persisting in adding more pain to the pain she was already enduring? What difference would it make?

       None at all. And yet she found herself exhaling unsteadily when Marco agreed brusquely, ‘Yes.’

       Lily nodded her head, and was about to turn away when Marco added with even more brusque reluctance, ‘And it’s didn’t—not don’t. I didn’t trust you—not I don’t,’ he elucidated, crossing the floor and opening the door, before she could say anything, leaving her to stare after him.

       Did