world which you inhabit!’
Cathy saw the contempt which had twisted his sensual lips, and flinched at how little he obviously thought of her. Oh, what a fool she had been. What a stupid little fool. Her greatest gift and she had given it to a man who had thrown it back in her face as if it had been a dirty rag. Her virginity treated with the contempt with which he might have viewed the bargain-basket at the supermarket. Except that she doubted this man had ever been near a supermarket in his life.
‘As a matter of fact, he said he thought we should wait until we were married!’ she objected heatedly.
‘And you—a woman who turns on as quickly as you do—you were happy to wait?’he demanded, in disbelief.
‘Well, yes! Actually, I was.’ With Peter waiting had never been a problem and in view of his job it had been more than appropriate. ‘He wasn’t like you,’ she finished miserably.
‘Nobody is like me,’ he qualified arrogantly, before his features darkened even more. ‘I have been duped,’ he grated.
Cathy stared at him. Wasn’t he forgetting something? ‘And what about me?’ she whispered. ‘You duped me, too, didn’t you? Pretending to be a painter and decorator! What was that all about?’
But he was not listening, his mind working overtime—until the realisation of what must have happened hit him like a dull blow in the solar plexus. He thought of the Englishman, Rupert. The way she had whirled away from him when he had entered the hotel that morning. Surely he was not the fiancé?
‘It is this…this…Rupert?’ he accused hotly.
For a moment Cathy stared at him in complete puzzlement. ‘What is?’
‘He was the man you were to have married?’
‘No!’ she protested, appalled. ‘My fiancé was a trainee clergyman,’ she added, though this added piece of information seemed to make him even angrier.
Xaviero’s eyes narrowed. Then what the hell was going on—were she and the hotel owner colluding? Had he convinced this little chambermaid to seduce him for his own nefarious purpose? But there was no way he could possibly interrogate her when she was lying there so bare and so beautiful. ‘Cover yourself up!’ he demanded hotly.
Cathy wondered if he meant for her to start dressing and she went to get off the bed when something in her movement made his face darken again and he bent and picked up the silky coverlet which must have slipped to the ground during their love-making. Love-making, she thought in revulsion as she hastily caught the coverlet he tossed towards her, and hauled it over her body. The last word you could ever apply to what had just happened was love.
Xaviero drew a deep breath as he looked at her, at the pale hair beginning to fall out of the pins which constrained it—thinking that he had been so eager to possess her that he hadn’t even got around to letting it spill over her magnificent breasts. A pulse flickered at his temple. ‘Okay,’ he said steadily. ‘Let’s just get it out of the way. Tell me what it is you want?’
‘What I w-want?’
‘You heard me!’
She stared at him. What she wanted was to be rid of this terrible feeling that she had just made the biggest mistake of her life. Or for the last ten minutes not to have happened and for him to come back and start kissing her again. But she suspected that neither of those options was going to happen. ‘I don’t understand what you’re talking about.’
Xaviero looked at her disbelievingly. Had he believed those eyes to be so guileless, her passion to be so sweet, because he had wanted to believe it? But he came from a world where virginity was highly prized—an old-fashioned royal essential to ensure the pure continuation of his ancient bloodline. And he could not believe that any woman would have given it away so carelessly unless she had some kind of separate agenda.
‘You must want something to have behaved so impetuously,’ he snapped. ‘Did you collude with your boss? Provide the irresistible bait with your too-tight uniform and your over-made-up eyes? Knowing all the obvious ploys which will hook in a man. Yet I knew all that, and still I fell for it,’ he added bitterly. ‘Because sexual hunger has made fools of men since the beginning of time.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Cathy again, beginning to grow a little bit angry now. Yes, he was a prince and yes, he seemed genuinely shocked that she had been a virgin—but everything was about him, wasn’t it? Him, him, him! Didn’t he stop to think for a moment about how she was feeling right now? Foolish and empty and aware that she had been carried away by a hopeless fantasy that there was a spark of something real between her and the golden-eyed man. Something which had begun the very first time she’d seen him. Inexperience had made her attribute the passion of his kiss to something more than mere lust. So hadn’t she been the fool, not him?
Clutching onto the silken coverlet, she lifted her chin. ‘Why on earth should I want to collude with Rupert?’
‘To negotiate a better price?’ he returned, golden eyes lancing into her.
For a moment the room seemed to sway and Cathy felt sick. ‘To negotiate a better price?’ she echoed in disbelief. Surely—oh, please, no—surely he wasn’t implying that she was selling herself. She swallowed down the acrid taste in her throat. ‘A better price for what?’
‘For the hotel, of course,’ he snapped.
There was an odd, debilitating kind of silence. A moment when it seemed to her that everything which was dark in the world had formed itself into a horrible, tight little ball and been hurled, hard—at her stomach. ‘For the hotel?’ she whispered.
There was a pause. ‘He hasn’t told you?’
‘Told…told me what?’
‘That he’s selling?’ His eyes narrowed as he saw her face blanch. ‘No, clearly he hasn’t.’
‘To…you?’
Xaviero gave a grim kind of smile. ‘Of course to me.’
Through the series of befuddled impressions which began ricocheting through her mind, Cathy’s overriding thought was that she would have to leave now. She would have to. Prince Xaviero as her boss? How could she bear it? But then she met the cold, metallic gleam of his golden eyes and wondered who on earth she thought she was kidding. As if a man who had made his contempt for her so apparent would ever keep her on the payroll.
But something didn’t make sense to her. She knew that princes in modern times had ‘normal’ careers—but this? She tried to imagine him doing a stocktake of the cellar—or taking the chef to task when he had one of his periodical tantrums.
‘You mean…you’re going to be a hotelier?’ she questioned, mystified.
There was a moment of stunned silence before Xaviero gave an arrogant laugh, knowing that he should have been outraged at her suggestion and yet, in a way, didn’t it make walking away from her not just easy—but necessary? Because her ridiculous question had simply confirmed that he could not have picked a more unsuitable lover if he had searched to the ends of the earth to find one.
‘You can see me—running
