towards her with languorous, knowing ease, stopping only a hairsbreadth away. She could feel his heat, smell the faint woodsy tang of his aftershave. She stared determinedly at his shirt, refusing to be intimidated, to show how afraid—how affected—she was. Yet even so, her gaze helplessly moved upwards from the buttons of his fine silk shirt to where they were undone, to that brown column of his throat where a pulse leaped and jerked, and Phoebe felt an answering response deep inside, a tug in her belly that could only be called yearning. Desire.
She flushed in shame.
Leo gave a low chuckle. He raised one hand to brush a wayward curl from her forehead, and Phoebe jerked instinctively in response, felt the heat of his fingers against her skin.
‘Are you so sure about that?’ he queried softly.
‘Yes…’
Yet at that moment she wasn’t, and they both knew it. Heard it in her ragged breathing, saw it in how she almost swayed towards him. Horrible man, Phoebe thought savagely, yet she condemned herself as well. She shouldn’t let him affect her like this, not if she loved Anders, which she did.
Didn’t she?
‘So sure,’ Leo whispered, his voice a soft sneer, and his hand dropped from her forehead to her throat, where her pulse beat as frantically as a trapped bird’s. With one finger he gently touched that sensitive hollow, causing Phoebe to gasp aloud in what—? Shock? Outrage?
Pleasure?
She could still feel the reverberation of his touch, as if a string had been plucked in her soul, and the single note of seduction played throughout her body.
‘Phoebe!’
Gasping again, this time in relief, Phoebe stumbled away from Leo, from his knowing smile and hands. She turned towards the doorway and saw Anders, appearing like the golden god Baldur from the Norse myth, smiling at Phoebe with a radiant certainty that dispelled all her own fears like the dawn mist over the mountains. ‘I’ve been looking for you. No one would tell me where you were—’
‘I’ve been here—’ tears of relief stung Phoebe’s eyes as she hurried towards him ‘—with your cousin.’
Anders glanced at Leo, and his expression darkened with a deeper emotion. Phoebe couldn’t tell if it was disapproval or fear or perhaps even jealousy. She swallowed and glanced at Leo. She saw with a sharp jolt of shock that he was staring at his cousin with a bland expression that somehow still managed to convey a deep and unwavering coldness. Hatred. And Phoebe was reminded of the ending of the Norse myth she’d read about during her travels through Scandinavia: that Baldur had been murdered by his twin brother, Hod, the god of darkness and winter.
‘What do you want with Phoebe, Leo?’ Anders demanded, and his voice sounded strained, even petulant.
‘Nothing.’ Leo smiled, shrugged, spreading his hands wide in a universal gesture of innocence. ‘She obviously loves you, Anders.’ His mouth twisted in a smile that didn’t look quite right.
‘She does,’ Anders agreed, putting an arm around Phoebe’s shoulder. She leaned against him, grateful for his strength, yet still conscious of Leo’s dark, unwavering gaze. ‘I don’t know why you were talking to her, Leo, but we’re both determined to be together—’
‘And such determination is so very admirable,’ Leo cut across him softly. ‘I will tell the king so.’
Anders’s expression hardened, his lower lip jutting out in an expression more appropriate to a six-year-old before he shrugged and nodded. ‘You may do so. If he wanted you to convince me otherwise…’
Leo smiled and that simple gesture made Phoebe want to shiver. There was nothing kind or good or loving about it. ‘Obviously, I cannot.’ He lifted one shoulder. ‘What more is there to say?’
‘Nothing,’ Anders finished. He turned to Phoebe. ‘It’s time for us to leave, Phoebe. There’s nothing for us here. We can take the ferry to Oslo and then catch the afternoon train to Paris.’
Phoebe nodded, relieved, knowing she should be excited. Ecstatic.
Yet as she walked from the room, Anders’s arm still around her shoulders, she was conscious only of Leo’s unrelenting gaze, and that dark emotion emanating from him which seemed strangely—impossibly—like sorrow.
CHAPTER TWO
Six years later
IT WAS raining in Paris, a needling grey drizzle that blanketed the royal mourners in grey, and made the images on the television screen blurry and virtually unrecognisable.
Not, Phoebe acknowledged, that she’d met any of Anders’s family besides his cousin. Leo. Even now his name made her skin prickle, made her recall that terrible, cold look he’d given Anders as they’d left the Amarnesian palace. That was the last time either she or Anders had seen any of his family, or even stepped foot in his native country.
Six years ago…a lifetime, or two. Certainly more than one life had been affected—formed, changed—in the last half-decade.
‘Mommy?’ Christian stood behind the sofa where Phoebe had curled up, watching the funeral on one of those obscure cable channels. Now she turned to smile at her five-year-old son, who was gazing at the television with a faint frown. ‘What are you watching?’
‘Just…’ Phoebe shrugged, reaching to turn off the television. How to explain to Christian that his father—the father he hadn’t ever even seen—had died? It would be meaningless to Christian, who had long ago accepted the fact that he didn’t have a daddy. He didn’t need one, had been happy with the life Phoebe had provided, with friends and relatives and school here in New York.
‘Just what?’ Christian put his hands on his hips, his expression halfway between a pout and a mischievous grin. He was all boy, curious about everything, always asking what, why, who.
‘Watching something,’ Phoebe murmured. She rose from the sofa, giving her son a quick one-armed hug. ‘Isn’t it time for dinner?’ Smiling, she pulled him along, tousling his hair, into the kitchen of their Greenwich Village apartment. Outside the sunlight slanted across Washington Square, filling the space with golden light.
Yet as she pulled pots and pans from the cupboards, mindlessly listening to Christian talk about his latest craze—some kind of superhero, or were they superrobots? Pheobe could never keep them straight—her mind slipped back to the blurry image of the funeral on television.
Anders, her husband of exactly one month, was dead. She shook her head, unable to summon more than a sense of sorrowful pity for a man who had swept into her life and out again with equal abruptness. It hadn’t taken very long for Anders to realise Phoebe had been nothing more than a passing fancy, and Phoebe had understood with equal speed how shallow and spoiled Anders really was. Yet at least that brief period of folly had given her something wonderful…Christian.
‘I like the green ones best…’ Christian tugged on her sleeve. ‘Mom, are you listening?’
‘Sorry, honey.’ Phoebe smiled down at Christian in apology even as she noticed that she’d let the water for the pasta boil dry. She had to get her mind out of the past. She hadn’t thought about Anders
