The Royals Collection. Rebecca Winters

was raw with emotion as he murmured, ‘You’re wrong. I do want to hear it. There’s nothing I’ve wanted to hear more than that my love for you is returned.’

       Lily pulled back so that she could look into his eyes. What she could see in them told its own story, but still she had to whisper, ‘You love me?’

       And then she gasped with joy when Marco whispered back, between fiercely passionate kisses, ‘Yes, yes—yes a thousand times. I love you and I always will. Lily, you’ve freed me from the prison I’d built round myself. You’ve shown me, taught me to trust in my emotions as well as to trust you. You’ve made me complete. You’ve healed me and made me whole. I love you for all those reasons, but more than that I love you because I cannot do anything else but love you. You stole my heart the first time I saw you, even though I didn’t know it then. I fought against loving you. I tried to deny what was happening to me. I told myself that I would be a fool to let myself be controlled by my feelings. I told myself that I couldn’t trust you.’

       ‘Because of her? Because she hurt you so very badly?’ Lily guessed, cupping his face in her hands and kissing him tenderly. ‘I knew there must have been something—someone who had made you want to lock away your feelings.’

       Marco removed one of her hands from his face and slowly kissed each finger.

       ‘It wasn’t Olivia’s fault—not really. My parents were caring, but of the old school. Physical intimacy wasn’t something they encouraged. Such behaviour wasn’t something they considered princely. When my governess took me down from the nursery to see them before I went to bed I had to bow to my mother and shake hands with my father.’

       Lily’s soft, compassionate, ‘Oh, you poor little boy!’ was all the balm that childhood ache needed.

       ‘My governess and my school taught me that emotions were something that had to be controlled, not given in to. As a future prince I must be in control of them, not the other way around. I learned that emotions were dangerous. They certainly made me feel awkward, and contemptuous of the weakness of that awkwardness whilst I was growing up. Looking back now, knowing how I feel about you, I can see so much more clearly why Olivia might have wanted to rebel against that upbringing—and hers was much the same as mine. I should have been kinder to her—more understanding. What made it worse was that the woman in charge of the model agency that had hired her pretended to be on my side. She assured me that Olivia would be safe, and because of what I believed to be my right to having my opinions treated as important I was stupid and arrogant enough not to even question that she might be lying to me—which she was.’

       That still galled him, Lily could tell. And why not? It would gall any man of pride. Marco was a proud man, and in her opinion he had a right to that pride, she decided lovingly. There was more than injured pride in his voice, though—much more. There was also pain and regret and guilt, and it made Lily’s heart ache for him.

       ‘She procured young models for men under the guise of finding them work.’

       ‘And that was why you thought what you did about me?’

       ‘Yes,’ Marco admitted. ‘I told myself that you were two of a kind and kept on telling myself that—even when deep inside I knew you were nothing like her. But by then, of course, I had another and far more personal reason for not wanting to trust you. So I punished you for my mistakes and my own weakness. I misjudged you in so many different ways—over Pietro, over Anton—because I wanted and needed to misjudge you. It was easier and safer than acknowledging what I really felt about you. I thought I was being strong, but in reality I was being weak.’

       ‘Not weak, Marco. You could never be weak. You were doing what you had taught yourself to do. What loving Olivia and losing her in such a terrible way had taught you to do,’ Lily told him sympathetically.

       Marco shook his head.

       ‘No,’ he said quietly. ‘I didn’t love her. At least not in the way that you mean. She was more like a sister to me than a future wife. I have only loved and will only love one woman, Lily, and that woman is you.’

       He meant it, Lily could see.

       ‘I was so afraid of loving you,’ she admitted. ‘I was afraid of being like my mother and loving a man who would only hurt me. And when you were so contemptuous of me, when you wouldn’t believe me…’

       ‘I hurt you,’ Marco groaned, kissing her again. ‘I hurt you because I was locked in a world where my emotions weren’t allowed to exist. But you aroused them, and when you did I had to reject what you were making me feel. I had to tell myself that I couldn’t trust you because I knew I couldn’t trust myself to resist you.’

       ‘But you saved me from Anton even though you didn’t trust me.’

       ‘You were so afraid. I couldn’t turn my back on you.’

       ‘And that is the man you really are, Marco. A man who can’t turn his back on those in need even when he believes he has very good reason to reject them.’

       ‘You give me credit where I don’t deserve it.’

       ‘No. You don’t give yourself credit here, and you do deserve it.’

       ‘I love you so much. So very much. I want you to marry me, Lily. I want us to be together for always. I want us to give our children—the children we shall create in our love for one another—the childhood that we never had.’

       ‘Yes, I want that too,’ Lily whispered beneath his kiss, as her senses and her body flowered into fresh eager longing beneath his touch.

       EPILOGUE

      THE final sound of the bells ringing out from the castello’s chapel to announce their marriage were dying away, and the rose petals Lily had insisted on, instead of vulnerable doves being released, as their wedding planner had wanted were still drifting down from a perfect blue spring sky. The gentlest of breezes brushed the slender column of her wedding dress, its silk embossed with a traditional family design and especially made for her at the silk mill in Como in which Marco had an interest.

       It had been a perfect day—but then every day since the day Marco had told her he loved her had been perfect in its own individual way.

       ‘So many generations of your family have married and lived here,’ Lily said as they stood arm in arm, watching their wedding guests.

       ‘And hopefully many more will,’ Marco told her, his hand resting deliberately against her body, where earlier that week the test Lily had done had confirmed their first child was already growing. A baby that would be born seven months into their marriage.

       ‘I just hope we’ve done the right thing letting Rick take the photographs and video of the wedding,’ she admitted to Marco, watching her half-brother photographing a group of pretty girls who were amongst the wedding guests.

       Pietro, Marco’s nephew, was assisting him. Once the misunderstanding over his modelling had been cleared up the two young men, so close in age, had become good friends, and were now work colleagues.

       ‘It was very generous of you to fund the film Rick’s going to make about the California wineries. His mother has told me that she intends to keep an eye on both him and Pietro whilst they are over there working on it.’

       ‘Your brother is a good man at heart. But enough of family. I can’t wait for us to leave for our honeymoon, so that I can have you to myself and show you and tell you how happy you’ve made me today, Lily. The happiest man in the world and the luckiest.’

       ‘We’ve both been lucky,’ Lily whispered back. ‘Lucky to have found one another. Oh, Marco if we hadn’t…’

       ‘We had to,’ Marco told her. ‘We were destined to meet and love one another. Destined to be together, and we always will be.’

      * * * * *