‘Don’t worry about it. I’m sorry I disturbed you,’ she managed to say, but she could hear the brittle hurt in her own voice. Right now, she wanted to be as far away from Marco and his damn office as she could get! She was perilously close to tears and the last thing she wanted was the humiliation of Marco seeing how much he’d wounded her. To her relief, she could hear sounds from the outer office suggesting that his PA had returned, enabling her to use the face-saving fib that she didn’t want to have Mrs Lawson coming in to shoo her out. Emily opened the door and left, barely pausing to acknowledge the PA’s surprise at seeing her, Emily hurried out of the office, her head down and her throat thick with unshed tears.
What was it with her? she asked herself wretchedly, five minutes later as she hailed a taxi. She wasn’t a young girl with emotions so new and raw that she overreacted to every sucked-in breath! She was in her twenties and divorced, and she and Marco had been together for nearly three years, the intimacy of their sex life having given her an outward patina of radiant sensuality. It had been so palpable in the first year they’d been together, one of her clients had told her semi-jokingly, ‘Now that you’re with Marco you’re going to start losing clients if you aren’t careful.’
‘Why?’ Emily had asked.
‘Jealousy,’ had been the client’s succinct answer.
Emily remembered how she had smiled with rueful acknowledgement. ‘You mean, because I’m with Marco and they’d like to change places with me?’ she had guessed.
‘They may very well want to do that, but I was thinking more of their concerns that their husbands might be tempted by the creamy glow of sexual completion you’re carrying around with you right now, Emily.’
Emily remembered she had blushed and made some confused denial, but the client had shaken her head and told her wisely, ‘You can’t deny or ignore it. That glow shimmers round you like a force-field and men are going to be drawn to you because of it. There is nothing more likely to make a man want a woman than her confident wearing of another man’s sexual interest in her.’
She doubted that she still wore that magnetic sexual aura now, Emily admitted sadly. That was the trouble: when you broke the rules, it didn’t only make you ache for what you didn’t have, it also damaged what you did.
The taxi driver was waiting for her to tell him where she wanted to go. She leaned forward and gave him the address of Marco’s apartment. Marco’s apartment, she noted—for that was how she thought of it. Not as their apartment, even though he had invited her to make it over to suit her own tastes and had given her a lavish budget for its renovation. Material possessions, even for one’s home that evoked deep-rooted attachments, were nothing without the right kind of emotions to surround them. Why had it had to happen? Why had she fallen in love with Marco? Why couldn’t she have stayed as she was, thrillingly aware of him on the most intimate kind of sexual level, buoyed up by the intensity of their desire for one another, overwhelmed by relief and joy because he had brought her from the dark, wretched nowhere she’d inhabited after her divorce to the brilliant glittering landscape of unimaginable beauty that was the intimacy they shared together? Why, why, why couldn’t that have been enough? Why had she had to go and fall for him?
Emily shivered, sinking deeper into the seat of the taxi. And why, having fallen for him, did she have to torment herself by hoping that one day things would change, that one day he would look at her and in his eyes she would see his love for her? The hope that, one day, it would happen sometimes felt so fragile and so unrealistic that she was afraid for herself, afraid of her vulnerability as a woman who needed one particular man so badly she was prepared to cling to such a fine thread. But what else could she do? She could tell him, honestly, how she felt. Emily bit her lip, guiltily aware that she wasn’t being open with him. Because she was afraid in case she lost him…Why was she letting herself be dragged down by these uncomfortable, painful thoughts and questions? Why did they keep on escaping from the place where she tried to incarcerate and conceal them? What kind of woman was she to live a lie with the man she loved? What kind of relationship was it when that man stated openly that there was no place for love in the life he wanted to live?
The taxi stopped abruptly, catching her off guard. She didn’t really want to go up to the apartment, not feeling the way she was right now, but another person was already hurrying purposefully towards the taxi, wanting to lay claim to it.
Emily got out and paid her fare to the driver, shivering as she waited for her change. Her stomach had already begun its familiar nauseous churning—this time, it had to be a result of Marco’s rejection of her appeal to him, though she had to admit she had also felt too nauseous to want any breakfast this morning. She was definitely beginning to feel slightly dizzy and faint as well as unwell now.
Psychosomatic, she told herself unsympathetically as she headed up to the apartment.
It had started to rain while Emily was getting out of the taxi. Yes, the miserable weather was adding to her feelings of lowness. Why couldn’t she talk to Marco? They were lovers, after all, sharing the closest of physical intimacy. Physical intimacy—but they did not share any emotional intimacy. Emily’s experiences as a child had made her wary of appearing needy. It was now second nature to her to hide the most vulnerable part of her true self. Only in Marco’s arms, at the height of their shared passion, did she feel safe enough to allow her body to show him what was in her heart, knowing that he wasn’t likely to be able to recognise it.
She let herself into the apartment, mutely aware of how empty and impersonal it felt, for all her attempts to turn it into a shared home.
‘Yes, Grandfather, I do understand, but I cannot work miracles. It is impossible for me to return to Niroli before the end of the month as we had already tentatively agreed.’ Marco managed to hold onto his temper as his grandfather’s complaints grew louder, before finally interrupting to say dryly, ‘Very well, then, I accept that whilst I had talked about the end of the month, you had not agreed to it. But that doesn’t alter the fact that I cannot return sooner.’
The sound of his grandfather slamming down the receiver reverberated in Marco’s eardrum. Replacing his own handset, he stood up and turned to look out of the window of his office. It was raining. In Niroli, the sun would be shining. Marco’s grandfather was obviously furious that he had refused to give in and alter the timing of his return and bring his arrival on Niroli forward. But his grandfather’s rage did not worry Marco. He was used to it and unaffected by it, apart from the fact that he too didn’t like having his plans challenged. He looked irritably at his watch. He was hungry and very much in need of the gentle calm of Emily’s company. That, plus the natural reserve that made her the kind of woman who was never going to court the attention of the paparazzi, or expose their relationship to the avid curiosity of others, were two other major plus-points about her. But not quite as major as the sensuality that spilled from her like sweetness from a honeycomb, even if she didn’t realise it.
The direction his thoughts were taking surprised him. It was nonsense for him to be thinking about Emily like this when he was about to end their relationship! Far better that he focused on the things he didn’t like about her, such as… Such as the way she insisted on keeping professional commitments even when he had made other plans. Is that the only criticism you can make of her? an increasingly voluble and irritating inner voice demanded sardonically. Marco sighed, mentally acknowledging the irony of his own thoughts. Yes, it was true that, in many ways, Emily was the perfect mistress for the man he had been whilst he’d lived in London. But he wasn’t going to be that man for much longer.
When the time came for him to take a royal mistress, she would have to have qualities that Emily did not possess. Chief amongst those would be an accepting, possibly older husband. This was an example of the kind of protocol at the royal
