never talked with their mouths full. When she went home she would have to remember her manners, but right now she could do whatever she wanted. It was an exhilarating thought.
Corran was pouring coffee from a flask into plastic mugs, but he put it down so that he could brush a cobweb from Lotty’s shoulder. ‘You’re filthy,’ he said.
It was a careless touch, but Lotty’s skin tightened all the same and she was conscious of a zing of awareness.
‘That’s what happens when you try and get rid of forty years’ of dirt,’ she said, embarrassed to find that she was suddenly breathless.
It wasn’t as if Corran was particularly attractive. He was as hard and unyielding as the rock they were sitting on. The dark brows were drawn together over the pale, piercing eyes in what seemed a permanent frown. And yet one graze of his fingers was enough to send the blood skittering around in her veins, one look at his mouth and her heart bumped alarmingly against her ribs.
Unaware of her reaction, Corran handed her a mug. ‘I couldn’t remember how you took your coffee this morning, so I put milk in.’
‘It doesn’t make much difference to me,’ said Lotty, glad of the excuse to shift her position on the rock. She wrinkled her nose as she looked down in the mug. ‘I don’t want you to think I’m not grateful, but this isn’t what I call coffee.’
‘I might have known you’d turn out to be a princess,’ said Corran, and Lotty jerked, spilling most of the mug over his shirt.
‘What?’
‘You’re very particular about your coffee.’ His eyes sharpened suddenly. He was clearly putting something together. ‘You were singing in French just now… I didn’t guess because your English is perfect, but you’re French, aren’t you?’
Perhaps it would have been easier to have pretended that she was French, but pride in her country was ingrained in Lotty. ‘I’m from Montluce,’ she corrected him, chin lifting.
‘Isn’t that part of France?’
Lotty bridled. People always thought that. ‘No, it isn’t! We speak French, but Montluce is an independent state with its own monarchy.’
‘And a big chip on its shoulder?’ Corran suggested with a sideways glance.
‘Not at all. We’re small, but we have a very high opinion of ourselves!’
The corner of his mouth lifted. ‘I see. Does everyone in Montluce speak such good English, or is it just you? I wouldn’t have guessed if I hadn’t heard you singing.’
‘I was sent away to school in England after my mother died,’ she told him. ‘You soon pick up the language when you have to.’
‘Must have been tough to lose your mother and be sent to a strange country at the same time,’ said Corran.
‘It wasn’t the best time of my life,’ Lotty allowed, ‘but I just had to get on with it.’
She had begged her father to let her stay with him in Montluce, but it was her grandmother who had dealt with all the practicalities of life after her mother’s death. Lotty needed to speak English, the Dowager Blanche had decreed, and it would do her good to have a change of scene. The child was much too nervous as it was. She couldn’t be allowed to mope around Montluce. Yes, her mother’s death was sad, but Lotty had to learn to deal with whatever life handed her. There were to be no tears, no complaints. She was a princess.
So Lotty had gone away to school and she hadn’t cried and she hadn’t complained. But she had hated it.
‘It was awful at first,’ she said, sipping at her coffee in spite of everything she’d had to say about it. ‘I don’t know what I’d have done if I hadn’t met my friend Caro there. We were both really plain and both horribly shy and, as if that wasn’t bad enough, I had a stammer. I still stammer a little when I’m nervous,’ she confessed.
‘I noticed.’
Everyone else pretended that they didn’t.
Corran’s eyes rested on her face. ‘You changed,’ he said.
‘I lost my puppy fat eventually and grew up,’ she acknowledged.
‘You did more than that. You’re a beautiful woman,’ said Corran in a matter-of-fact voice, ‘as I’m sure you must know.’
Lotty heard that a lot. The beautiful Princess Charlotte. It made her uncomfortable. All beauty ever did was put her on a pedestal, where people gawped at her and admired her, but nobody got close enough to touch.
‘I’d rather be pretty,’ she said.
‘Isn’t beautiful better than pretty?’
‘Pretty is warmer, less intimidating.’ She stirred the shingle with the toe of her shoe. ‘Being beautiful isn’t the same as being desirable.’
‘No,’ said Corran thoughtfully after a moment. ‘I suppose that’s true.’
Not but you’re desirable, Lotty. Not I think you’re wrong. I find beautiful women very desirable.
Well, what had she expected? Lotty chewed glumly on the second half of her sandwich. It was stupid to feel disappointed because he didn’t think that she was desirable.
A pedestal could be a cold and lonely place. Thousands of people said they thought she was beautiful. Thousands loved her. But would they still love her, still want her, if they really knew her? Lotty wondered. If they could get past the mystique of royalty, past the security guards, past the rigid protocol of palace?
Lotty longed for someone to want her enough to try.
She longed to be desired, not for her title or her wealth, but for her body. She longed to know what it was like to love a man, to know what every other woman, it seemed, knew. What was the point of being beautiful if you could get to twenty-eight having barely been kissed? Lotty had never met a man who wasn’t intimidated by the suffocating etiquette that surrounded her in Montluce. Sometimes it felt as if she was the only twenty-eight-year-old virgin in the world.
Dispiritedly, Lotty finished her sandwich and brushed the crumbs from her hands. Beside her, Corran was drinking his coffee, his eyes narrowed at the hills across the loch. The fingers around the mug looked very strong. He had a farmer’s hands, square and capable and scarred with nicks and scratches. There was a focused quality to him, a forcefulness that sharpened the air around him and made it impossible to ignore even the smallest detail: the flat hairs at his wrist, the plaster dust in his hair, the creases edging his eyes.
He sat easily on the rock, long legs thrust ahead of him into the shingle, dusty boots crossed at the ankle. Never in a million years would Lotty have that assurance, that sense of being utterly at home in one’s skin. Corran McKenna wasn’t a man who would be intimidated by anything. If he wanted something, he would go out and get it.
He wouldn’t care about mystique. If Corran wanted her, he wouldn’t think twice about brushing aside her close protection team and knocking down her pedestal.
If Corran wanted to lose his virginity, he wouldn’t bleat about
