of his second, stronger, deeper thrust. The sensitive nerve-endings in her flesh wept with joy at the intensity. Instinctively Emily drew in her muscles around him, savouring the sensation.
She could feel his hot breath in her ear, the tip of his tongue tracing the curls of flesh. She felt his teeth against the sensitive cord in her neck. Her whole body was being possessed by a pleasure so heightened she thought she might die from it.
‘Marco…’ She moaned his name as a plea, striking a solitary note of female praise as he thrust deeper, harder and faster now.
‘Mmm.more. Marco…more!’ she urged him, gasping out aloud in delight as he obeyed her and his movements became fast and rhythmic. Then he drove them to their climaxes, and she was left so boneless and weak that she collapsed helplessly against him, trembling in the aftermath.
The heat of the fury that had driven him was cooling on his sweat-slicked skin. Where he should have felt satisfaction and triumph at making Emily acknowledge that he could still arouse her, Marco could only feel a dark sense of stark awareness that he had crossed over a boundary he should not have breached. In forcing Emily to give in to the desire he had summoned in her, he’d also forced himself to acknowledge his need for her. A fleeting need, brought on by his justifiable anger, he assured himself, that was all! It meant nothing in the broader picture of his life.
‘I think we both needed that,’ he told her coolly, ‘and perhaps it was a fitting end to our relationship, a tribute to the mutual attraction that brought us together.’
Emily couldn’t believe what she had done—and what she might have betrayed. She couldn’t bear the thought of Marco thinking now how stupid she had been, maybe guessing she had dreamed that, one day, he might fall in love with her as she had done with him. A wave of irritation surged through her—not against him, but against herself. What a fool she had been, deliberately blinding herself to reality and fixating on something that her common sense could have warned her wouldn’t possibly happen. If Marco had really loved her he would have told her so. But he hadn’t, and he never would. She had deceived herself just as much as Marco had deceived her, and if anything her crime against herself was even greater than his. The fierce turbulent, almost torrid heat of their lovemaking had subsided now, and her anger had burned down into stark bleakness and grinding pain. Her dreams had been swept aside, shown to be pitifully worthless. Marco was a stranger to her, but no more so than she felt at this moment she was to herself.
‘Mutual attraction then, but perhaps mutual contempt now,’ she answered Marco pointedly. ‘I’m not the naïve girl that I was when we first became lovers, Marco.’
‘Meaning what?’ he challenged her, frowning.
‘Meaning that I’ve learned enough about sex from you to know that it isn’t always used as an expression of positive emotions. It’s common knowledge these days that couples on the verge of splitting up do sometimes use sex as a way of venting their negative feelings. Some couples say that they had the best sex of their relationship when the emotional side of it was dying. Of course, I know that we aren’t emotionally intimate with one another.’ What she meant of course, Emily admitted, was that Marco had never been emotionally close with her, because he didn’t want to be, whilst she had had to struggle not to be close when she’d wanted to be. ‘But I think both of us would accept that the break-up of any relation ship—even one like ours—does bring things to the surface that aren’t easy to accept.’
Marco’s frown deepened. She was now being far more matter-of-fact about their relationship ending than he had expected—and he didn’t like that! But he was being ridiculous. He should feel very relieved that she was being so sensible, especially after her earlier, uncharacteristic outburst.
CHAPTER SIX
FROM his seat on the royal jet, Marco looked down onto his family’s private runway at Niroli’s airport to where a group of formally dressed courtiers and officials were waiting to greet him. The ostrich-feather plumes of their dress hats fluttered in the breeze as they stood straight-backed, ignoring the heat of the sun. Marco’s lips twisted with irony at the thought of the heavily gold-braided, bemedalled uniform that his grandfather had sent him, along with strict instructions that he must wear it when he landed and was greeted by the courtly welcoming committee. In fact, the uniform, appropriate for the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in Niroli’s ancient Royal Guard, was lying in its leather dress-trunk in the plane’s hold, whilst he wore his own handmade Saville Row suit. His grandfather wouldn’t be pleased. But Marco intended to let him, and the court, know right from the word go that he would make his own decisions and judgements and he wouldn’t allow them to force theirs on him.
Emily would have appreciated and understood his decision, though she would probably have laughed gently, and teased him as well into wearing that undeniably magnificent, beautifully tailored uniform. Emily.he tried to thrust the thought of her away from him, along with the erotic mental image of her alongside him in his bed that was forming inside his head, but it was too late; she was there, smiling at him, wanting him, as he ached for her. What the hell was this?
He stood up so abruptly that the young Niroli air force aide-de-camp, who’d been sent to escort him home, was caught off guard, and his own attempt to get to his feet before Marco was severely hampered by his ceremonial sword. The red-faced young man saluted as he semi-stuttered, ‘Highness, if you wish to have more time in order to prepare, then please allow me—’
‘No, I am ready,’ Marco told the aide shortly and then relented when he saw his anxious expression. It was not the lad’s fault—and he was little more than a boy, a scion of one of Niroli’s foremost titled families. Marco had chosen to be the man he was, rather than the grandson his grandfather wanted him to be. Damn Emily for pursuing him like this, insinuating herself into his thoughts where she now had no right to be! Her abrupt departure from his apartment had decided him that he should leave London earlier than he had originally planned—much to his grandfather’s delight. Marco suspected the old king would not have been so cock-a-hoop over his ‘victory’ if he had known that it owed less to his own power than to his grandson’s loss of his bed-mate.
The aide-de-camp, who was carrying his own plumed hat as protocol demanded, stood beside his king-to-be as the doors to the royal jet were opened. He bowed as Marco walked past him and stepped out onto the gangway steps and into Niroli’s sunshine. Just for a few seconds, Marco stood motionless and ramrod-straight at the top of the steps, not because he was the island’s future ruler, but because he was one of its returning sons. He had almost forgotten the unique scent of sunshine and sea, mimosa and lemons, all of which hit him on a surge of hot wind. Not even the strong smell of jet fuel and tarmac could detract from them, and Marco felt emotion sting his eyes: this was his home, his country, and the crowds he could see lining the wide straight road that ran from the airport to the main town were his people. Many of them had not had the benefit of being part of a wider, modern world, but he intended to change that. He would give to Niroli’s young the opportunities his grandfather’s old-fashioned rule had denied them. Determinedly, Marco stepped forward. The waiting military band broke into Niroli’s national anthem and the waiting officials removed their hats and bowed their heads. Their faces were familiar to Marco, although more wrinkled and lined than he remembered—the faces of old men.
As he reached his grandfather’s most senior minister the elderly gentleman placed his hands on Marco’s arms, greeting him with a traditional continental embrace. His voice shook with emotion and Marco could see that beneath his proud, stern expression and the determinedly upright stance there was a very aged, tired man, who probably would have preferred to spend his last years with his grandchildren than doing his king’s bidding. Tactfully, Marco adjusted his own walking pace to that of the courtiers surrounding him as they escorted him unsteadily to the waiting open-topped royal limousine.
At
