Книга - Playboy’s Lesson

Playboy's Lesson
MELANIE MILBURNE


When the heir of The Chatsfield comes to play…Lucca Chatsfield lives his life by one simple motto: no rings, no strings. Adored wherever he goes, he has yet to meet a woman who can resist his killer charm. Until he is sent to the small principality of Preitalle and meets his greatest challenge ever…Poised and polished, Princess Charlotte does not do drama. The very last person she needs interfering in her life is reckless Lucca — he doesn’t know the meaning of duty! Lottie is determined to resist Lucca’s seduction, but his charm is potent and practically perfect Lottie finds herself risking everything for just one more touch…Welcome to The Chatsfield, Monte Carlo!












‘I do not wish to have anything further to do with you,’ she said in clearly enunciated tones. ‘Please leave.’


‘Listen, sweetheart,’ Lucca said, with a cavalier disregard for protocol. ‘Way I see it, we’re stuck with each other, at least for the sake of appearances. Your big sister seems pretty keen on us working together and I get the feeling that what she says around here goes. Quite frankly, I’d rather be working on my tan on one of your beaches, preferably with a couple of blonde beach bunnies peeling grapes for me. So kick me out if you dare. I’m cool with it, but you can say goodbye to using The Chatsfield.’

She turned and gave him a look one would do when a cockroach appears on the table in the middle of a formal dining setting. ‘You are the most disreputable man I have ever met.’

‘Looks like you need to get out more.’ He gave her his fallen angel’s smile. ‘I can assure you there’s plenty more out there like me.’

Her eyes slitted like a cat facing a feral dog, her hands balling into fists at her sides. ‘Get out before I have you thrown out by my security team.’

He gave an indolent shrug as he ambled over to the door. ‘I’ll be staying in the penthouse at The Chatsfield if you want me.’ He turned and blew her a kiss across his open palm. ‘Ciao.’









Step into the opulent glory of the world’s most elite hotel, where clients are the impossibly rich and exceptionally famous.

Whether you’re in America, Australia, Europe or Dubai, our doors will always be open …

Welcome to






Synonymous with style, sensation … and scandal!

For years, the children of Gene Chatsfield—global hotel entrepreneur—have shocked the world’s media with their exploits. But no longer! When Gene appoints a new CEO, Christos Giatrakos, to bring his children into line, little did he know what he was starting.

Christos’ first command scatters the Chatsfields to the furthest reaches of their international holdings—from Las Vegas to Monte Carlo, Sydney to San Francisco … but will they rise to the challenge set by a man who hides dark secrets in his past?

Let the games begin!

Your room has been reserved, so check in to enjoy all the passion and scandal we have to offer.

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www.thechatsfield.com (http://www.thechatsfield.com)


From as soon as MELANIE MILBURNE could pick up a pen she knew she wanted to write. It was when she picked up her first Mills & Boon


novel at seventeen that she realised she wanted to write romance. Distracted for a few years by meeting and marrying her own handsome hero, surgeon husband Steve, and having two boys, plus completing a Master’s of Education and becoming a nationally ranked athlete (masters swimming), she then decided to write. Five submissions later she sold her first book and is now a multi-published bestselling, award-winning, USA TODAY author. In 2008 she won the Australian Readers’ Association most popular category/series romance and in 2011 she won the prestigious Romance Writers of Australia R*BY award.

Melanie loves to hear from her readers via her website, www.melaniemilburne.com.au (http://www.melaniemilburne.com.au), or on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Melanie-Milburne/351594482609 (http://www.facebook.com/pages/Melanie-Milburne/351594482609).




Playboy’s

Lesson

Melanie Milburne

























www.thechatsfield.com (http://www.thechatsfield.com)




Family Tree (#ulink_046f5dde-a5db-5045-96a6-c9590984b409)








To my fellow Chatsfield authors:

Lucy Monroe, Michelle Conder,

Chantelle Shaw, Trish Morey, Abby Green,

Annie West, Lynn Raye Harris.

Wasn’t this huge fun? I loved doing this continuity with you all. xxx




Table of Contents


Cover (#uc44c77de-012c-5c52-a7b2-5964e2749b2a)

Excerpt (#uebd80dcc-f86b-5e3e-8913-1e89b87289dd)

About the Author (#u763802c0-8f7b-573f-a381-bd83750a9a1c)

Title Page (#u7bf39e9e-2e94-5105-bf0f-519642e1c690)

Family Tree (#u25617eb6-6245-5df0-bb7a-4c7a0d6a59c7)

Dedication (#u6a574a23-bf0f-54c1-976a-f3f73fac0ab0)

Chapter One (#ub1093dcc-6a5c-5ec7-acdb-79df809ad9b4)

Chapter Two (#u4eff6844-1f6b-5b94-b5ff-2453d8d8c256)

Chapter Three (#u92f4a8ab-5791-5e54-91b2-4fdaf098339e)

Chapter Four (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)

Readers’ Extras (#litres_trial_promo)

Discover The Chatsfield (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)




CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_24bf3a42-631b-5b74-a85e-9d8e0d447d6b)


EVEN BY CHATSFIELD standards Lucca had to admit this latest one of his to hit the London tabloids was a doozy. He lounged in the chair opposite his father’s new broom, Christos Giatrakos, and gave one his trademark lazy smiles. ‘What was it that got up your nose? The handcuffs or the studded leather codpiece?’

What the newly appointed CEO of the Chatsfield Hotel chain lacked in terms of a sense of humour was more than made up for in ice-cold ruthlessness. The Greek’s face was set like marble, his blue eyes glacial and his mouth set in a line so thin it hinted at a streak of cruelty underpinning his intractable personality. ‘We’re used to reading your sordid exploits in the tabloids, but this news is all over the internet. You’ve brought nothing but shame to the brand of this hotel with the way you carry on your affairs.’

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Lucca didn’t bother disguising a yawn. Bor-ing. Heard it all before. A hundred … probably trillions of times. He rocked back on the legs of the chair, expertly balancing his weight as he kept his gaze trained on the hardened CEO. He was used to showdown meetings like this. He enjoyed them. It was his way of making up for the way he had disgraced himself by wetting his pants when he was called into the headmaster’s office at boarding school when he was seven. He never allowed himself to be intimidated.

Never.

‘The only thing that’s predictable about you is your unpredictability,’ the CEO continued. ‘Since you’ve consistently refused to clean up your act, it will now be cleaned up for you.’

‘It was just a party that got a little out of hand,’ Lucca said. ‘The press made it out to be an orgy. I didn’t even sleep with any of those girls. Well, maybe just the one, but that was because I was handcuffed to the bed at the time, so what else was I supposed to do?’

A muscle in the CEO’s jaw pulsed. On. Off. ‘Your father is refusing to give you a single penny of your allowance from the Chatsfield Family Trust unless you agree to fulfil the assignment I have appointed you. It will make quite a change for you working for a living instead of being a professional party boy with nothing better to do than get laid by a host of wannabe starlets and trashy gold-diggers.’

Lucca set his chair legs back down on the carpeted floor with a little thump. He had an exclusive art auction he wanted to attend in Monte Carlo next week. He was building a private collection of miniature paintings and there was one in particular he wanted to get his hands on. His gut instinct told him it would be worth millions in a few years. He didn’t want to be exiled to some godforsaken place and miss out on the deal of a lifetime, but neither did he want to forfeit his allowance.

The way he saw it, his family—his train wreck of a family—owed it to him.

‘What sort of mission?’

‘A month working at the Chatsfield Hotel on the island of Preitalle in the Mediterranean.’

Lucca mentally breathed out a sigh of relief. The royal principality of Preitalle was a short ferry trip or helicopter ride to Monte Carlo. But he figured it might be in his interests to appear unhappy about being exiled. His father’s CEO wanted to dish out punishment and he clearly was enjoying doing it. Just like that headmaster.

Bastard.

‘Doing what?’ He feigned a suitable amount of apprehension. That was all part of his game. Give the opponent what they want but only on the outside. Inside he was totally in control. Totally.

The CEO’s cold eyes gleamed with malice. ‘Working alongside Her Royal Highness Princess Charlotte as she plans her sister Madeleine’s wedding at the end of the month.’

Lucca threw his head back and laughed so loudly the sound bounced off the walls and came back at him like an echo in a canyon. ‘You’re joking, right? Me? Plan a wedding? I know nothing about wedding planning. Parties? Yes. Weddings? Zilch. Can’t even remember the last time I went to one.’

‘Then this will be a perfect opportunity to learn.’ Christos clicked his pen on and off again as he eyeballed him. On. Off. The annoying sound was in perfect time with that muscle in his jaw. On. Off. ‘You’re reputedly an expert at knowing what women want. Here’s your chance to finally put that expertise to good use.’

Lucca decided to play along. How hard could it be? With the wedding this close, the bulk of the planning would have already been done. He would leave the last-minute work to the people who knew how to do this sort of stuff while he had a bit of time out on one of the beaches on Preitalle.

He was getting a bit tired of the London scene in any case. It used to be so much fun, courting scandal, poking fun at the establishment, doing the most outrageous things he could think of just for the heck of it. Exploiting every situation to his advantage. But there was only so much partying and nightclubbing and sleeping around any man could do. It was exhausting.

Even—dared he say it—boring?

Besides, he wanted more time to concentrate on his art. Not just the ones he was collecting but his own etchings. His passion for drawing had been present from the moment he had been old enough to hold a pencil in his hand. Drawing was his way of retreating into a private world where he could be quiet and centred. It had been his way of anchoring himself during his chaotic childhood. The eye of the family storm could bluster and blow all around him but he could always escape to his inner world of creative peace. He had spent hours sitting cross-legged beneath Graham Laurent’s painting of his mother, desperately trying to capture the features that were fast fading from his memory, yet somehow resolutely captured for all time in the portrait before him. He enjoyed the process of creating those first scratches of a pencil on a tiny canvas to the end result of having a framed miniature painting with his signature in the right-hand corner.

Spending the month of June in the Mediterranean would be just the ticket to indulge that passion instead of his more base ones. It would be easy. He would jump through the hoops and have a whoop of a time doing it.

‘So—’ he rocked back in his chair again ‘—what does the little princess think about having an offsider?’

‘An offsider?’ Lottie looked at her sister, Madeleine, in wounded affront. ‘Why do you think I need someone to help me? Don’t you think I’m up to the task of planning your wedding? Did Mama suggest it? Papa? One of the palace officials?’

Madeleine held up her hands as if warding off a barrage of enemy fire. ‘Whoa, there! No need to shoot the messenger. It’s part of the deal with conducting the reception at the Chatsfield Hotel. It’s come from the top level of management but I’ve given it my full approval. The CEO is sending a representative of the Chatsfield family to work alongside you in the interest of public relations.’

‘But I’ve already done all the planning.’ Lottie rapped her knuckles on the encyclopedia-thick folder she had brought with her. ‘Every minute detail is set out in there. The last thing I need right now is someone coming in to change everything at the last minute.’

Madeleine lounged back in her seat and elegantly crossed one leg over the other as she inspected her newly painted toenails. ‘I think it will be good for you to have someone to share the workload with.’ She looked up with an I-know-better-than-you look that always grated on Lottie’s nerves like a rasp on a raw wound. ‘Someone young and hip and a little more in touch with the party scene.’

Lottie narrowed her gaze as the back of her neck began to prickle. ‘Who are they sending?’

‘One of the twin brothers.’

She knew her sister thought her a little out of touch with the modern world but did she have to make it so obvious by recruiting someone who did nothing but party? The Chatsfield twins, Lucca and Orsino, were notorious bad boys who were in and out of the press almost weekly with their wild exploits.

Hells bells … please let it not be … ‘Which one?’

‘Lucca.’

Lottie blinked. Twice. Three times. ‘Did you say …?’

Madeleine nodded. ‘Yup.’

Lottie gulped. ‘The one whose photograph has been splashed all over the internet? The one in that hotel room wearing nothing but a studded leather—whatever it’s called?’

‘Codpiece.’

She clapped a hand over her forehead. ‘Oh, dear God.’

‘I’m sure he’ll behave himself impeccably while he’s here,’ Madeleine assured her. At least even the scandalous Lucca Chatsfield had drawn a line at posting a selfie of that picture on Twitter, Lottie thought.

‘Word has it his allowance from the Chatsfield Family Trust will be cut off if he doesn’t.’

Lottie dropped her hand and scowled at her sister. ‘So I’m to be some sort of behaviour modification coach or something? Who on earth thought of this ridiculous scheme? Are you sure it’s not a joke? Tell me it’s a joke.’

‘It’s not a joke,’ Madeleine said. ‘In fact, I think it’s going to be good for us in the long run. You know how everyone is always saying how backward and irrelevant we royals in Preitalle are. We don’t have quite the same standing as other European royals. But if we show how embracing we are of modernity it could make our future in this region so much more secure. Lucca Chatsfield has been at every high-profile party in England, Europe and America. He moves in circles most people can only dream about. Rock stars, celebrities, actors and film directors—you name it. Having him involved in the organising of my reception will heighten my popularity—I’m absolutely sure of it.’

Lottie rolled her eyes. ‘How, for pity’s sake, is a notorious hard-partying playboy going to help me organise a royal wedding?’

‘Why don’t you ask him?’ Madeleine gave another one of her smug older and wiser sister smiles. ‘Hear that helicopter landing outside? He’s just arrived.’

Lucca had it all planned. He would pop into the palace, meet the party-plan princess and then hotfoot it out of there and leave her to fuss over the flower arrangements and the wedding fripperies while he laid back on a sun lounger on the nearest beach with a cocktail and a bikini-clad waitress by his side. Or three.

He’d done a little research on the trip over. The older sister and heir to the throne, Princess Madeleine, was known as the pampered princess. Not an out-and-out diva as such, but a young woman who knew her destiny from an early age and wholly embraced it. For years she had been squired by men from all over Europe but had recently become engaged to a studious-looking Englishman called Edward Trowbridge. Apparently Madeleine wanted a wedding reception extravaganza at the Chatsfield Hotel and had appointed her baby sister, Charlotte, as chief wedding planner.

He’d seen plenty of photographs of Madeleine De Chavelier in the press. She was a gorgeous, rather buxom twenty-six-year-old blonde with blue eyes and an extroverted personality that would stand her in good stead once it came time for her to take over the throne from her parents, Guillaume and Evaline. Clearly a favourite with the paparazzi, there wasn’t a single photograph of Madeleine that could even loosely be described as unflattering. Fashion designers courted her, knowing she had only to appear in public once in one of their outfits and the item would sell out and a new trend would be set.

However, the same could not be said of Princess Charlotte. There were scores of unflattering comments about her lack of fashion sense, and some rather nasty and unfair, he thought, comparisons made between her and her sister. As if to back up their criticisms the press had sourced several candid shots that made Charlotte look severe and much older than her years. There was nothing about her private life other than one small snippet about a fling with a diplomat’s son while she was at finishing school in Switzerland when she was eighteen. But if she had an active social life since it certainly wasn’t wild enough to attract the paparazzi’s attention, which, quite frankly, was a little intriguing.

There was nothing he liked better than to ride a dark horse.

‘This way, Mr Chatsfield.’ A palace official bowed as he opened a door leading into a morning room. ‘Her Royal Highness Princess Charlotte will receive you now.’

The first thing Lucca noticed when he stepped into the room was a pair of startlingly green eyes glaring at him from behind a pair of tortoiseshell-rimmed spectacles. The princess was standing with her back ramrod straight, reminding him of a small tin soldier facing an imaginary battle. Nary a muscle on her slim framed body moved. It was as if she had been snap frozen … all except for a betraying little movement of her left index finger against her thumbnail, an agitated flicking movement that he suspected might have been an unconscious habit, like picking at a hangnail.

However, he could see why the press made such sport of her clothes. If what she was currently wearing was any indication, she either didn’t have a clue what suited her or deliberately dressed in the most unflattering way possible. The below-the-knee plaid skirt teamed with a brown cotton blouse and covered by a cardigan that swamped her small frame made her look like a bag lady rather than a princess second in line to the throne. Her hair was neither blonde nor brown, but a tawny shade, and tied back severely from her face, giving her a prim, schoolmarmish look.

‘Welcome to the royal palace of Preitalle, Mr Chatsfield.’ She spoke in a coolly polite tone that had a hint of a French accent to it. She held out her right hand to him but he sensed it was out of a grim commitment to duty rather than any desire to make physical contact.

He took her hand and watched as her rainforest-green eyes widened fractionally as his fingers wrapped firmly around hers, almost swallowing her tiny hand whole. Her skin was rose-petal soft and cool like silk. She tilted her head right back to keep eye contact with him, making him feel every millimetre of his six-foot-two height.

Her hand fluttered like a little bird inside the cage of his, sending a shock wave of heat through his pelvis like the backdraft of a fire. He released her hand and had to physically stop himself from wriggling his fingers to rid himself of the electric tingling her touch had evoked.

‘Thank you, Your Royal Highness,’ he said with exaggerated politeness. He might be an irascible rake but he knew how to behave when the occasion called for it, even if he privately thought it was all complete and utter nonsense. In his opinion people were people. Rich or poor. Royal or common.

She pressed her lips together so tightly as if she were trying to hold an invisible piece of paper between them steady. He wasn’t sure if it was out of annoyance or a gesture of nervousness or shyness, but it drew his gaze like starving eyes to a feast. She had a bee-stung mouth, full lipped and rosy pink without the adornment of lipstick or even a layer of clear lip gloss. It was a mouth that looked capable of intense passion but it seemed somewhat at odds with the rest of her downplayed and rather starchily set features.

A feather of intrigue tickled Lucca’s interest. Did she have a wild side behind those frumpy clothes and that frosty facade?

Maybe his exile here wouldn’t be a complete waste of time, after all….

She stepped back from him like someone does in front of a suddenly too-hot fire. She squared her slim shoulders and crossed her hands over the front of her body, cupping her elbows with the opposite hands. ‘I believe you have been appointed as my assistant.’

Lucca was seriously getting off on her priggish hauteur. It was so different from the way women usually responded to him. There was no simpering and batting of eyelashes. No breathy coos and whispers. No coy come-hither looks or pouting lips and delectable cleavages on show.

No, sirree.

She was buttoned up to the neck and spoke to him in clipped formal sentences and looked at him down the length of her retroussé nose as if he was something unpleasant stuck to her sole of her sensible shoe.

‘That’s correct.’ He gave her a mocking at-your-service bow.

Her chin came up a little higher and those striking eyes flashed like green-tinged lightning behind those conservative spectacle frames. ‘I think you should know that your appointment is both unnecessary and expressly against my wishes.’

Wow. Now that was some attitude.

He’d had every intention of leaving her to it but something about her stiff unfriendliness irked him. He wasn’t used to being dismissed as if he was nothing more than a lowly ranked servant who had failed to come up to scratch. He was an heir of one of the richest families in England. He decided to dig his heels in. He wasn’t going to let some hoity-toity little princess rob him of his allowance by dismissing him before he put in a day’s ‘work.’ He would play the game for the sake of appearances and keep everybody at home happy.

‘Your sister’s wedding cannot go ahead without my family’s cooperation,’ he said. ‘The Chatsfield Hotel is the only venue large and modern enough in Preitalle to accommodate a royal wedding reception.’

She gave him a defiant stare. ‘We can have it here at the palace ballroom. It’s what I proposed to my sister in the first place.’

‘But that’s not what your sister wants,’ he countered neatly. It felt like a verbal fencing match and just as stimulating. He could feel the stirring of his blood, like a tapping beat picking up its tempo, taking heat to his groin like a spreading fire. ‘The hotel is closer to the cathedral and she wants the neutral ground of Chatsfield to show how forward-thinking the royal house of Preitalle is becoming, does she not?’

Her lips compressed again. He could almost hear the cogs of her smart little brain ticking over. She was planning a counterattack. He could see the flickering behind her eyes as if she was mentally shuffling through her storehouse of comments to choose the most waspish one to send his way. ‘I fail to see how a man who spends his life frittering away his time and his family’s money on a profligate lifestyle such as yours could have anything to offer me in terms of services.’

Lucca smiled a satirical smile. ‘Au contraire, little princess. I think I have just the services you need to get this place rocking into the twenty-first century.’

Her cheeks blushed a fiery red but her mouth was still flattened chalk-white in disapproval. ‘You do not have permission to address me informally. Please refrain from doing so. I am Your Royal Highness at first greeting and then Ma’am henceforth.’

‘Would that be Ma’am as in schoolmarm?’

She drew in a sharp little breath and stalked to the other side of the room, still with her arms crossed over her body, her head at that proud height as she looked out of the windows to the formal palace gardens outside. Her whole body seemed to be vibrating with anger like a battery-operated toy set on an uneven surface. He could see her trying to control it, he assumed out of years of royal training. Presumably royals had tempers just like everybody else but they weren’t allowed to use them, or at least not in public. But he had a feeling Her Royal High and Mightiness would give her best tiara right now for an opportunity to slap one of her dainty little fingernail-chewed hands across his face.

‘I do not wish to have anything further to do with you,’ she said in clearly enunciated tones. ‘Please leave.’

‘Listen, sweetheart,’ Lucca said with a cavalier disregard for protocol. ‘Way I see it, we’re stuck with each other, at least for the sake of appearances. Your big sister seems pretty keen on us working together and I get the feeling that what she says around here goes. Quite frankly, I’d rather be working on my tan on one of your beaches, preferably with a couple of blonde beach bunnies peeling grapes for me. So kick me out if you dare. I’m cool with it, but you can say goodbye to using the Chatsfield.’

She turned and gave him a look one would do when a cockroach appears on the table in the middle of a formal dining setting. ‘You are the most disreputable man I have ever met.’

‘Looks like you need to get out more.’ He gave her his fallen angel’s smile. ‘I can assure you there’s plenty more out there like me.’

Her eyes slitted like a cat facing a feral dog, her hands balling into fists at her sides. ‘Get out before I have you thrown out by my security team.’

He gave an indolent shrug as he ambled over to the door. ‘I’ll be staying in the penthouse at the Chatsfield if you want me.’ He turned and blew her a kiss across his open palm. ‘Ciao.’




CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_4b4419c7-c663-5771-ad5d-0fb1ccd43fc6)


LOTTIE STORMED INTO her sister’s suite of rooms a few minutes later. ‘You cannot be serious. That man is insufferable! He’s quite possibly the rudest, most uncouth man I’ve ever met. What can you be thinking to bring him here? I won’t work with him. I won’t! I won’t! I won’t!’

Madeleine slowly turned on the velvet-covered stool in front of the antique dressing table where she had been experimenting with a new eye shadow. ‘You will. You will. You will. I want my reception at the Chatsfield Hotel. We’ve talked about it since we were children. I am not going to let a little personality clash ruin my fairytale wedding.’

Lottie loved her sister but she hated the streak of bossiness in Madeleine’s nature. There were only three years’ difference in their ages but once her older sister’s mind was made up it was virtually impossible to change it.

But she was going to have a damn good try.

‘Personality clash, you call it? I’d call it a personality collision! That man is nothing but trouble. He came swaggering in as if I was a housemaid instead of a princess. He called me sweetheart!’

Madeleine giggled. ‘Did he?’

Lottie glowered. ‘Not only that, he held my hand far too long.’ She didn’t mention the blown kiss. She was still too furious about that to put the words together. The audacity of the man was unbelievable. The effrontery of him made her blood boil. How dare he treat her like one of his shallow little strumpets?

‘He’s rather gorgeous, isn’t he?’ Madeleine swivelled back to apply dove-grey eye shadow to her left eyelid with a slim-handled sable brush. ‘If I wasn’t already taken I’d make a play for him myself. He’s got that wild, bad-boy thing going on. That element of totally unapologetic outrageous wickedness that makes a girl go weak at the knees.’

Lottie locked her knees together just in case they took it upon themselves to be influenced by her sister’s comments. Not that they hadn’t already been influenced, not by comments about the man, but by the man himself. As soon as Lucca Chatsfield had taken her proffered hand something had ignited inside her body like a match struck against dried-up tinder. It had raced like a runaway flame right to the centre of her being and had sizzled there in secret ever since. His glinting dark brown eyes had roved over her like a minesweeper, taking in every nuance of her appearance. The mockery in his gaze had infuriated her. She knew she wasn’t the beauty of the family, but did he have to rub her nose in it?

Schoolmarm indeed!

He was here to make trouble for her and she had to get rid of him as quickly as she possibly could. Her plans for a perfect wedding for her sister would be sabotaged if he got any say in it. He was an outright playboy. He didn’t date women. He slept with them and then left them before they had time to put his number in their phone. The press was full of his wild-partying, hooking-up lifestyle. He hadn’t had a single relationship that lasted more than twenty-four hours. He was a one-night-stand man. It was practically his brand, for God’s sake. What possible interest would he have in planning a wedding? She would be made a fool of and the whole world would be watching to see it. Argh!

‘You know he’s not going to do a minute’s work while he’s here,’ Lottie said, jutting her chin as she looked at her sister. ‘He’s only here for show. He’s using it as some sort of layabout holiday. He was disgustingly blatant about it. That shows how unprincipled he is.’

Madeleine picked up her bronzing brush and swept it artfully across each of her regal cheekbones in turn. ‘Then perhaps you should take him on as a project. Put him to work. Get his nose to the grindstone and his shoulder to the wheel or whatever the saying is.’

I’d like to get his back to the wall, Lottie thought with venom. I’d like to scratch his eyes out. I’d like to slap his arrogant face. I’d like to—

Madeleine smiled at her in the mirror. ‘Well, look at you, Lottie, love. I’ve never seen you so fired up. He really has got under your skin, hasn’t he?’

Lottie quickly refashioned her features into her customary ice-princess mask, although inside she was still seething like a kettle left too long on the boil. ‘I can handle him. He’s just a little boy who hasn’t grown up.’

‘He looks all grown up to me.’ Madeleine gave a twinkling smile and waggled her neatly groomed eyebrows as she added, ‘Or at least he did judging by that spread we saw of him in that London tabloid.’

Lottie flickered her eyelids in disdain and swung away. ‘I do not want to be reminded of what that man gets up to in his spare time.’

‘Then make sure he doesn’t have any,’ Madeleine said. ‘Keep him busy with errands. You could do with a bit of practice at delegating. You know you have a tendency to over-control things.’

‘That’s because I’ve always found if I want a good job done I have to do it myself,’ Lottie said. ‘Every time I’ve trusted someone to do the right thing they let me down and I’m the one who ends up with egg dripping off my face.’

Madeleine made a little moue with her lips. ‘You’re not including me in that statement, are you, ma petite?’

There was no point arguing the point. Madeleine liked to think she was the model older sister. Nothing she ever did was wrong. Their parents never criticised her because she had always done well at school and didn’t have to study for hours to get facts and figures to stay in her head long enough to recall them for an exam. The press never found fault with her. She never wore the wrong thing or said the wrong thing or frowned at the wrong time. She didn’t bite her nails when she was nervous. She hadn’t caused a scandal the first time she had been let loose at finishing school. She hadn’t been taken in by false charm and imagined herself in love with a boy who had only slept with her because she was a royal.

No.

Madeleine was perfect.

Lottie let out a long-winded breath. ‘No, of course not.’

Her sister turned around again on the stool. ‘Don’t you think it’s time you loosened up a bit? Got out a bit more, let your hair down? It’s been years since—’

‘Don’t.’

‘You need to get over yourself. It’s been—what?—five years since Switzerland? You won’t even talk about it. Don’t you think it’s time—?’

‘That’s because it’s in the past and I want it to stay there.’ Lottie gave her sister a cautioning look.

‘Every time the word Switzerland is mentioned you flinch. There, you just did it again.’

Lottie pointedly opened the wedding planning folder. ‘The last dress fitting is the week before the wedding. It’s at 10:00 a.m. sharp.’

‘But you haven’t had a date since.’ Madeleine was like a dog with a serious bone addiction. ‘You can’t lock yourself away for ever, you know. One bad love affair doesn’t have to ruin your life. You’re twenty-three years old, for pity’s sake. You should be out partying and having a good time. You’re missing out on the best years of your life.’

‘I’m not missing out on anything.’ Lottie said the words with what conviction she could summon. Although she had never been as outgoing as her sister, she hadn’t been a shrinking violet either … more of a daisy that faded once the sun went down. But her first sexual relationship when she was eighteen had taught her a valuable lesson in trust. Finding pictures of her most intimate moments with her boyfriend on his phone that he had shared with his friends had bludgeoned her innocence to an aching pulp. Fortunately her father had been able to block any further circulation of the images but she had never been intimate with anyone since.

She told herself she didn’t miss it. The sensual glide of flesh touching flesh, the heat and passion of mouth against mouth, the erotic glide of tongue against tongue and the release of pent-up primal urges were things she no longer allowed herself to think about. Passion was too overpowering. It took away rational thought and self-control.

The sensual part of her had shrivelled up and died from neglect … or so she had thought until this afternoon when Lucca Chatsfield’s large masculine hand had encased hers. Trapped hers. Shivers of awareness had cascaded in showers down her spine like the dance of champagne bubbles poured into a crystal glass. She could still feel the stirring of her blood, the way it moved through her veins as if powered by high-octane fuel.

She gave herself a hard mental slap. The very last man on earth she would ever get involved with was a promiscuous playboy with fewer morals than a back-alley tomcat.

No. No. No. A thousand million, squillion, gazillion times no.

She would put him to work instead.

Lucca was sipping a martini—shaken, not stirred—when he heard a sharp businesslike rap on the door of his penthouse suite. He slipped his feet off the ottoman, stood, gave a full-body stretch and sauntered over to the door. ‘Well, hello there, little princess. And bang on time too.’

The look he got from those green eyes would have felled a three-hundred-year-old elm tree at thirty paces. Her chin came up and her chest inflated on a deeply indrawn breath as if she were calling upon some inner reserve to confront him. He found her feistiness strangely endearing given her tightly controlled temperament. So buttoned up and yet positively steaming on the inside.

She was cute. Unique.

She had the sort of looks that grew on you. Not in-your-face beauty like her sister, but an underplayed elegance that was quite captivating the more he saw of her. She was wearing a different pair of glasses this time. A silver metal frame that was not as thick as the tortoiseshell ones, but they still made her look bookish.

‘We have work to do,’ she said without preamble.

‘We do?’

Her mouth was tightly set as if she was holding an arsenal of stinging retorts behind the barrier of her lips and only just managing to keep them there. ‘You are not here to party. You are here to help me. So help me you will.’

He leaned one shoulder idly against the doorjamb. ‘Would you like a drink?’

Her eyebrows snapped together. ‘Mr Chatsfield, I am not here on a social visit. I’m here to assign you specific tasks to do with the wedding.’

‘Humour me.’ He closed the door and smiled down at her lopsidedly. ‘I never do business with a clear head.’

Her eyes pulsed and flickered with such loathing he fully expected the lenses of her glasses to steam up right then and there. Or explode out of the frames. Her dislike of him was so intense and so palpable it made his scalp prickle and the base of his backbone tingle.

This was going to be much more fun than he’d thought.

She was full of passion and fire and yet she was so tightly wound up it made him all the more determined to press her buttons to see if she would explode like a firecracker. Was there a little bedroom firebrand behind that ice-princess thing she had going on?

She pushed the frames of her glasses back up her nose with a jerky movement of her hand. ‘I never do business without one.’

‘Then we’re a perfect match, don’t you think?’ He took a sip of his martini and watched as her eyes narrowed even further in disgust. Little did she know it but she was fulfilling every schoolmistress fantasy he’d ever possessed. She made no effort to disguise her disapproval of his lifestyle and his personality. What would it take to get that tightly compressed mouth to smile at him or to yield to him in a kiss?

He couldn’t stop himself assessing her trim little body with his eyes. She was wearing a classic knee-length beige linen dress with a thin black patent leather belt around her waist, and a matching black three-quarter-sleeved cardigan and low-heeled black court shoes. Although reasonably stylish, the clothes were the wrong colour for her and made her look like a child who had raided her grandmother’s wardrobe for a dressing-up game. She had a simple string of pearls around her neck and pearl studs in her ears, and her hair was still pulled back in that unflattering way, but it exposed her slim elegant neck where he could see a pulse beating like the heart of a hummingbird.

She turned swiftly and marched farther into the suite, stopping near the entertainment centre to face him again, her expression so frosty he was sure the temperature of the room went down ten degrees. ‘Have you been to a wedding recently?’

‘Nope. I generally try to avoid them.’

‘What about your twin brother’s?’ Her brows drew together again. ‘He’s married, isn’t he?’

‘Separated.’ Lucca took another sip of his drink and held it in his mouth for a moment. Orsino’s relationship with Poppy Graham had always been a little complicated. He suspected there was some unfinished business between his twin and his estranged wife but he didn’t like to cause any angst by asking too many questions. Although he was close to his twin, they lived quite different lives. ‘They had a quickie ceremony five years ago. You might’ve read something about it in the press. It got quite a lot of coverage at the time.’

‘I don’t make a habit of reading such unedifying rubbish.’

He gave a little laugh. ‘Nothing but the classics then, eh? Tolstoy? Hardy? Dickens? Dostoyevsky?’

Her eyes fired another round of loathing at him. ‘What about your other siblings? Are any of them married?’

‘No, none of us has been lucky—or unlucky, depending on your take on it—to meet their soul mate. Mind you, given the example our parents set for us it’s no wonder we’re all a little gun-shy in the marriage mart.’

There was a pregnant pause.

Lucca wished he hadn’t revealed quite so much about his background, not that she couldn’t read all about it online or in the gossip magazines if it took her fancy. People were still speculating on the whereabouts of his mother, who had finally walked out on the family soon after his youngest sister, Cara, had been born, leaving signed divorce papers on his father’s desk. No one had seen or heard from her since.

The train wreck of his parents’ marriage had affected all of his siblings in various ways. He liked to think he was the least affected but he knew it wouldn’t take too many sessions with a therapist to see his inability to connect emotionally with people was a hoof-mark of his childhood. He didn’t talk about it. To anyone. He didn’t even think about it. The bewildered little boy who had cried night after night for his mother was long gone.

Lucca’s philosophy in life was to have fun. The only feelings he wanted were pleasurable ones, physical ones. He was a sybarite, through and through. He didn’t deny it and nor did he apologise for it. He had been born to enormous wealth and privilege and he made the most of it. Exploited it. He didn’t believe in working to live or living to work.

He lived to party.

He treated all his relationships as transitory things. Just like a party. He showed up for an hour or two, had a good time and then he left to move on to the next one. His relationships were simply casual hook-ups that had a common goal of pleasure, not permanency. He didn’t set out to deliberately hurt people—he wasn’t wired that way. He had suffered too much hurt in his childhood to make it his life’s mission to do the same to others. He used them certainly, but he always did it with lashings of his signature charm so no feelings were damaged. He got in and out of relationships so adroitly the women he dated hardly noticed they were being dispensed with. The closest he got to commitment was keeping someone’s number in his phone in case he ever fancied a booty call.

But as if the uptight little princess sensed his family background was a painful subject, or perhaps didn’t feel comfortable offering a sympathy she didn’t feel, she brusquely announced, ‘I would like to inspect the hotel ballroom. I would like you to accompany me.’

It was the very last thing she would like, Lucca thought, which made him wonder why she had suddenly changed her mind about including him in the wedding arrangements when she had been so vehemently opposed to it initially. Had her sister put the hard word on her? He knew Princess Madeleine was determined to have a glamorous wedding with all the trimmings and there was no better place than a Chatsfield hotel to put on a party to remember.

Was little Princess Charlotte playing him at his own game? Making him tag along to every tedious meeting or boring inspection of crockery or cutlery until he got so thoroughly sick of it he walked off the job?

He wasn’t going to let her trick him out of what was rightfully his. If he had to tag along, then he would, but he would make sure he had plenty of fun while doing it.

‘Sure.’ He put down his drink and gave her a winsome smile. ‘I’m all yours.’

Lottie kept her back straight as a ruler as she led the way to the hotel lift outside the penthouse. She knew Lucca Chatsfield’s dark brown eyes were following her every move. She could feel the lazy heat of his gaze sliding over her with every step she took. The man was a dissolute rake and she had no business in being even vaguely interested in his childhood with its tragic circumstances of a disappearing mother. What did it matter to her if he and his twin had been lost lonely little boys being brought up by their older siblings and a father who was known for his affairs and his heavy bouts of drinking?

Lucca Chatsfield was here for all the wrong reasons and she had to get rid of him by fair means or foul. She didn’t want anything or anyone to jeopardise her meticulous planning of Madeleine’s wedding. This was the most important month of her life. This was her chance to show not just her family—most especially her sister—but also the entire world she was not just the spare heir.

‘Aren’t you supposed to have bodyguards or something?’ Lucca reached past her to press the call button just as she put her hand out for it.

Lottie snatched her hand back but not before it brushed briefly against his. She felt the tingle and sizzle of his touch travel straight to the centre of her being, pooling there in a hot liquid mass that seemed to take on a life of its own. She felt it moving through her blood, swirling, swelling, hot and urgent like a tide that was threatening to break its banks.

Everything about Lucca Chatsfield unsettled her. His easy smile, that knowing glint in his laughing, mocking eyes and his laid-back, couldn’t-give-a-damn-what-you-think-of-me stance that was such a stark contrast to her straitlaced and serious demeanour.

He was a self-serving playboy, a time waster, a shallow sensualist with nothing better to do than swan around the globe from one holiday destination to the other. As far as she knew he had never held down a proper job and—unlike his twin brother, who contributed to charity through his thrill-seeking sporting activities—did nothing for anyone other than himself.

Lottie stared fixedly at the illuminated lights above the lift as it climbed from the lower floors, conscious of the scent of him, the energy of him, the sheer male overpowering presence of him. His potency seemed to reach out with an invisible hand and stroke her: her hair, making it restless at the roots; her breasts, making them tingle inside their lace cups; her belly, making it quiver as if he had traced its softness with a slow-moving fingertip right down to that secret place between her….

She cleared her throat, hoping her errant thoughts would take the hint. They didn’t. ‘I prefer to move about the principality without a security team unless it’s absolutely necessary.’ Her voice came out cool and clipped and formal while her insides glowed with heat like a ten-bar radiator. ‘It’s different when I travel abroad, but even then I try and play a low profile. It’s my sister everyone is interested in, not me.’

‘Does that bother you?’

Lottie chanced a glance at him to find him looking down at her with a studied expression on his face, his eyebrows drawn slightly together over his eyes. She completely lost her train of thought as her gaze meshed with that dark, suddenly serious one. She moved her eyes back and forth between each of his, transfixed by how deep a brown his were, so deep it was hard to tell where his pupils started and ended.

She let her gaze travel slowly down the length of his strong nose to his mouth…. Oh, that wickedly sexy mouth! She gulped back a tiny swallow as she followed the sculptured perfection of his lips. The lower one was much fuller than the top one, suggesting a powerful sensuality that threatened to melt her bones within the encasement of her skin. He needed a shave; his jaw was liberally peppered with dark stubble and her fingertips suddenly felt the inexplicable urge to see what it would feel like rasping against her skin. It had been so long since she had touched a man….

The pinging sound of the lift arriving at the penthouse floor jolted her out of her mesmerised state.

‘No, of course not.’ She elevated her chin. ‘I’ve never been one for the limelight.’

‘Is that why you dress the way you do?’

Her brows clanged together. ‘What’s wrong with the way I dress?’

He held back the doors of the lift for her with a strong forearm. ‘You dress like you’re going to a funeral of an elderly spinster great-aunt.’

Lottie glared at him. ‘I’ll have you know this dress is a bespoke design. It cost an absolute fortune. And just for the record, I don’t have a spinster great-aunt.’

‘That dress looks like it was designed for someone in their sixties. You’ve got great legs. Why not show them off?’

She stalked into the polished wood and mirrored cabin of the lift, turning to face him as the doors closed with a sigh and a hiss behind him. ‘Why on earth would I want to do that? My legs are my business. They’re not anyone else’s. Just because I’m a princess doesn’t mean everyone has to know what my legs look like. I don’t want people speculating on how much cellulite I have or don’t have or whether I’m fatter or thinner than my sister. Nor do I think it’s anyone’s business what I look like in a bathing suit or what I look like when I’m eating my breakfast or dinner or having a coffee with friends. I just want to be accepted for myself.’

The silence seemed to ring with the echo of her outburst.

Lottie looked at the floor, studying her toes in their conservative shoes with studious intent. For as long as she could remember she had always been compared, measured, against her sister.

Found wanting.

It had been unbearable in her teens; every photo call had been a form of torture for her. The press comments at times were brutal, especially to a young overly sensitive girl who hadn’t yet found her social feet.

But ever since she’d come back from Switzerland she had tried to keep her head below the paparazzi parapet. She deliberately dressed down, even dowdily on occasion. It was her way of thumbing her nose up at the fashion set who thought she wasn’t pretty or stylish enough.

She wasn’t a beautiful blue-eyed blonde. She wasn’t an extroverted butterfly that could work a crowd to her advantage, to make everyone love her in a heartbeat, to be dazzled by her and follow wherever she led.

She was a quiet mouse who liked to mull over things in solitude. To slip by unnoticed, to be in the background, to quietly get on with things that mattered without all the fuss and the fanfare.

‘Must be a tough gig playing second fiddle all the time.’

Lottie looked up at him to find his expression was still ruminative. ‘I wouldn’t want to be playing first even if I had been born to it. Madeleine loves the fact that she’ll eventually be queen. She’s good at giving orders. I’m rubbish at it.’

‘I don’t know about that.’ The corner of his mouth lifted in a wry smile. ‘So far you’ve been pretty good at snapping out orders to me.’

‘That’s different.’ Lottie stabbed at the ballroom-floor button with her index finger. ‘You don’t want my orders any more than I want to be giving them.’

He leaned against the wall of the lift, crossing one ankle over the other in an I’ve-got-all-the-time-in-the-world pose. ‘I know what you’re up to, you know.’

She hitched one of her shoulders in a guileless manner. ‘I haven’t the faintest idea of what you’re talking about.’

He gave one of his low deep laughs that made her insides stumble. ‘You’re going to drag me to every mind-numbing inspection or appointment you can think of until I walk off the job in boredom. But it won’t work.’

We’ll see about that, Lottie thought as she pressed the floor to the ballroom again. ‘What’s taking this lift so long?’

As if to spite her, the lift gave a shuddering jolt and then hissed to a halt.

Fear scuttled up her spine like the sticky legs of a spooked spider. She stabbed at the button again. Frantically. Manically. ‘Come on! Get moving, you stupid thing!’

‘Looks like we’re stuck.’ He didn’t sound too worried about it. In fact, his tone contained a hefty measure of amusement.

‘Stuck?’ Lottie rounded on him, her heart feeling as if it was beating inside her throat instead of her chest. ‘We can’t be stuck! I have things to do. People to see. A wedding to plan!’ I have to get out of here before I get into a claustrophobic meltdown!

He pushed himself away from the wall of the lift to inspect the computerised control panel. ‘We’ve stalled between floors.’

She glared at him crossly, trying to control her fear with anger instead of blind panic. ‘You don’t seem the least bit put out. This is your family’s hotel. Doesn’t it worry you that the lifts are faulty? That surely can’t be good for your reputation.’ She put her fingers up in quotation marks and put on a posh travel guide voice. ‘Come to the Chatsfield and get stuck in a lift for hours.’ She dropped her hands and arched a brow. ‘Not going to look too flash on the website, is it?’

‘Not all the lifts are faulty. Just this one.’ He leaned back against the wall again. ‘This is a private one to the penthouse suite. I reckon you confused it by stabbing at the button too hard. You should try a softly-softly approach next time. Trust me—’ his sleepy, half-lidded gaze slid over her like a caress ‘—you’ll get way better results.’

Lottie ground her teeth. ‘Thanks for the lesson in managing temperamental lifts, but don’t you think you should do something like call someone for help? We could be stuck in here for hours.’

‘What fun.’ His dark eyes glinted, his mouth lifting in a slant of a smile. ‘How do you propose we pass the time till help arrives?’

A tiny shiver raced over her skin. A different one this time, not of cold primal fear but hot primal attraction. The lift wasn’t small by any means, but with him looking at her with those devilishly sexy eyes, and that wickedly tempting mouth smiling in that incendiary way, it felt like the space had shrunk to the size of a cereal box.

She could smell the sharp clean citrus scent of his aftershave, a mix of lemon and lime and some other exotic spice that intoxicated her senses like a potent drug.

She couldn’t seem to drag her gaze away from his mouth. It was quite possibly the most attractive male mouth she had ever laid eyes on. The laughter lines either side of it only added to its knee-wobbling gorgeousness. Was that why women in their hundreds fell over like drunk dominoes whenever he beamed that bad-boy smile their way? He represented everything that was sinful and tempting, wicked and hedonistic.

Lottie swung around and stabbed wildly at the button again. ‘I need to get out.’ Right now.

He stepped up close behind her and covered her hand with the broad span of his. Her heart did a crazy somersault as those long strong fingers touched hers, sending a current of high-voltage electricity through her entire body. ‘Don’t stab at it so savagely.’ His breath teased the hair around her ears in a warm minty-and-martini-scented caress as he took her fingertip between his index finger and thumb and guided it to the button pad. ‘Press softly. There, just like that.’

Lottie could feel the tall lean frame of him behind her from her cheeks of her bottom to her wings of her shoulder blades. She hadn’t been so close to a man since … since for ever.

Her boyfriend in Switzerland had been a boy.

Lucca Chatsfield was unmistakably A Man.

Her senses were not just intoxicated—they were sloshed, smashed, stoned. His hand felt so strong around hers, it made hers feel small and dainty and feminine. His body was so male. She could feel its latent strength in his light hold and in the way his hard and leanly muscled thighs brushed hers from behind.

She could not get her brain to work. It was a swirling mess of jumbled thoughts. Wanton thoughts. Wicked thoughts. Tempting thoughts.

Was he going to turn her around and kiss her? Her heart banged against her breastbone at the thought of that sensual mouth touching hers.

Should she stop him or should she just go with it to see what happened? What would it hurt to have one little kiss? She hadn’t been kissed in years. She had practically forgotten what a man’s mouth felt like. Would his kiss be hard or soft? Rough or smooth? Would it be passionate or beguilingly slow and tempting? Would he taste sweet or salty? Warm or cool?

Yikes! He hadn’t even turned her around and she could already feel the earth moving beneath her feet….

But then she realised it was the lift.

Lucca stepped back with a lazy smile as the lift doors glided open on the ballroom floor. ‘What did I tell you, little princess? Softly-softly works like a charm every single time.’




CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_b113d2a4-90d6-5e47-bc03-411946af8795)


LOTTIE MARCHED INTO the ballroom with her cheeks still glowing hot enough to cook a couple of eggs on. He was playing with her like a mean-spirited cat does with a hapless little mouse. Teasing her, toying with her, making sport of her to pass the time. He was mocking her for her gaucheness, laughing at her. He wasn’t interested in her. He was playing a game. He was here under sufferance so what better way to amuse himself than to have a little flirtation just for the heck of it?

Softly-softly indeed! Nothing about him was subtle. He was blatant. Flagrant. Shameless.

And oh-so-tempting.

She knew what he was up to. She was a challenge he hadn’t encountered before, but she would show him that there was at least one woman in the world that wasn’t taken in by sexy chocolate-dark eyes, a silver tongue and a body built for sin.

She had to get him out of her hair before he tempted her to let it down … and she knew just the way to do it.

The grand ballroom was as wide as it was long, and decorated in a Venetian palazzo style with a high ceiling painted a soft shade of grey with ornate crown mouldings of white and inlaid with gold. A series of archways lined three of the walls with plush crimson velvet curtains, and crystal chandeliers hung like giant handfuls of glittering diamonds, sending prisms of light over the highly polished parquetry floor. It was a perfect setting for a wedding reception. It had the signature Chatsfield style, glamour and sophistication about it that would make any gathering a memorable occasion.

‘Not bad, huh?’ Lucca said.

‘It needs flowers.’ Lottie walked across the floor, turning in circles as she checked out the corbels where she envisaged vases of flowers festooning like floral fountains. ‘Lots and lots of flowers.’

He took out his phone and started scrolling through his messages, presumably from all of his female followers on Twitter. ‘Flowers aren’t my thing. I’ll leave that to your expertise.’

Lottie didn’t tell him she had already discussed at length with the royal florist every placement of every bloom and petal. Instead she gave him a pert look. ‘No, you won’t. I need male input. I might make it too girlie or something. We can’t have all the male guests feeling intimidated, can we?’

His eyes gave a little roll. ‘God forbid.’

‘Come on.’ She turned sharply on her heel. ‘We have work to do.’

‘Where are you taking me?’ To her delight his voice sounded a little pained as he put his phone away.

‘To the palace gardens. I want to pick a selection to see what would work best.’ She gave him a sugar-sweet smile over her shoulder. ‘You can fetch and carry for me. Won’t that be fun?’

The palace gardens were pretty spectacular even for someone who couldn’t tell a rose from a ranunculus, Lucca thought. And early June was a fabulous time for any garden in the Mediterranean. Roses were in abundance everywhere, glorious fragrant bunches of them hanging in a sweet-scented arras over archways and trellises in a kaleidoscope of vivid colour. There were other beds of colourful blooms, old-fashioned cottage flowers such as sweet peas with a border of alyssum and lobelia, stately foxgloves and pink and blue larkspur, carnations and Canterbury bells and Queen Anne’s lace.

Princess Charlotte was moving between the garden beds, stopping every now and again to pick a bloom with a pair of secateurs she had taken from one of the gardeners. She laid each bloom carefully in the flower basket she had hanging over her arm, and every artistic cell of his wanted to capture the vision of her on a canvas.

The late-afternoon sunlight cast her alabaster skin in a golden glow. Her eyes were as mossy green as the clipped box hedges she was leaning over as she snipped a blood-red rose from a bush against a stone wall. Some strands of her hair had worked loose from her tight chignon and were bouncing in tiny cork-screws about her ears. With the abundance of flowers in the foreground and the ancient castle in the background, she looked like she had stepped out of the pages of a fairy tale.

He took out his phone and selected the camera option. Click.

She suddenly turned and glared at him. ‘Did you just take a picture of me?’

‘Yes. It was a beauty. The light was amazing.’

She put the flower basket down on the flagstones and stalked over to him with her hand outstretched. ‘Give me your phone.’

Lucca held the phone just out of her reach. ‘What’s the problem? It’s just a photo.’

Her eyes glittered and burned with resentment. ‘You had no right to photograph me without my permission.’ She made a grab for the phone by doing a series of little leaps. ‘Give it to me, damn you!’

‘Whoa there, sweetheart.’ He wrapped his fingers around her flailing arm to hold her steady on the uneven flagstones. ‘You’ll do yourself an injury bouncing about like that.’

She stamped her foot like a three-year-old child, making those cute little curls beside her ears bob up and down like springs. ‘You are an odious brute!’

‘I know, but that’s part of my endearing charm.’ He loosened his hold a fraction. ‘Now be a good girl and I’ll show you how cool the photo is.’ He brought the picture up and repositioned himself so she was standing shoulder to shoulder with him. ‘See?’

She looked at the picture for a moment and then glanced up at him with a frown puckering her brow. ‘Why did you take it?’

He slipped the phone in his pocket. ‘No special reason.’

‘I don’t like being photographed.’ She gave his fingers around her wrist a scowling look. ‘And I don’t like being manhandled either.’

He turned her wrist over and slowly raised it to his mouth so he could access the sensitive underside with his lips. He held her gaze as he brushed his lips against her delicately scented skin, watching as her eyes widened and her pupils flared like twin spills of black ink.

Lust heated his blood, set it moving, thundering, roaring to his groin as the tip of her small pink tongue darted out and swept over her lips, making them glisten invitingly. Her slim throat rose and fell as she swallowed; he even heard the tiny gulping sound in spite of the background chirruping of birds and the light whistle of the breeze moving through the cypress pines in the distance.

He lowered his head until he was barely a breath away from connecting with her lips, pausing there to give her the chance to pull back if she wanted to. He breathed in the sweet vanilla-milkshake scent of her breath as it danced over his lips as her mouth softly parted.

Come on, little princess, you know you want to….

The sound of the gravel being shifted by the tread of approaching footsteps made Lottie spring back from Lucca as if someone had fired a cannon from the battlements. She whipped around to see Madeleine coming towards them arm in arm with her fiancé, Edward Trowbridge. If the loved-up couple had seen anything untoward they were showing no sign of it; they were too engrossed in each other with their heads bent close together as they ambled along the pathway.

A tiny pang of envy twisted her insides. It would be so wonderful to have a man look at her with nothing but love and adoration in his eyes. No one would ever think she had romance running with wild hopes in her veins, but she secretly longed for a man to look at her as if his world began and ended with her. Would she ever find that sort of happiness? Or would she always be left on the sidelines, the spare part no one needed. The wallflower. The not-pretty-enough, not-smart-enough princess everyone either mocked or pitied.

Madeleine looked up and smiled. ‘Ah, Mr Chatsfield, at last I get the chance to meet you and to personally thank you for stepping in at the last minute to help Lottie with the wedding arrangements.’

‘It’s my very great pleasure, Your Royal Highness,’ Lucca said.

He was so charming, so adaptable to every situation, Lottie thought with growing annoyance. No wonder he had the reputation of being irresistible. That smile would melt through steel and leave it in a little silver puddle at his feet.





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