Luc. The fact that you don’t as yet have a son, an heir, makes them feel insecure! And besides, your wedding would help to take people’s minds off all this fuss that’s going on with these foolish young hotheads who are claiming that we are guilty of allowing criminals and murderers to make use of our country to hide their blood money, as they insist on calling it.’
Luc suppressed a sigh as he listened. From a personal point of view he completely sympathised with the opinions expressed by the so-called ‘foolish young hotheads’, but his position meant that he could not publicly take sides—and besides, he naturally felt honour-bound to protect not just his late grandfather’s reputation but also the now sadly out of date and, because of that, vulnerable remaining members of the government who had been his grandfather’s peers.
‘I have already made it clear that as ruler of this state there is no way I intend to allow anyone guilty of profiting from the death of other human beings, or indeed any other illegal activities, to take advantage of our tax laws here,’ Luc began quietly, and then stopped as he looked down from his window into the market square below.
There was a woman standing there with her back to him, the sun shimmering on the tousled silky fall of her blonde hair. Lifting a hand, she raked her fingers through it, as though impatient with its waywardness. Immediately he stiffened, his stance unconsciously that of a hunter, silent but awesomely effective, as if he instinctively scented a prey. There was something about her bearing, about the fiercely eloquent independence of it, that he instantly recognised.
‘I am sorry, Giovanni, but I will have to discuss this with you later.’
Whilst his cousin watched in confusion, Luc thrust open the door and strode swiftly through it.
Carrie had no need to ask for directions to the Countess’s quarters. She knew exactly where the suite of rooms she occupied was, just as she knew how to evade having to go through the formality of entering the main doors to the castle and making herself known to the impressively uniformed major-domo stranding guard there, behind the equally impressive-looking pair of traditionally uniformed, helmeted and musket-carrying sentries.
They were there more for show than anything else, their muskets unloaded, but that did not mean that either the palace or its occupants were not very efficiently and discreetly protected by the ex-military un-uniformed men who formed the bulk of Luc’s security guards.
As she slipped through the small side door a hundred memories flooded back over her: the smell of the palace—a mixture of precious old furniture, works of art and ancient stone—and even more the smell of Luc, both before he had made love to her and after—a heady, dangerous mixture of male testosterone and those other indefinable scents that were his alone…
Or was she just allowing her imagination and her dangerous memories to play even more dangerous tricks on her?
Angrily Carrie closed her eyes, trying to blot out her unexpectedly sharply focused memories. Better that she remembered the icy hauteur of the Countess’s voice, the contempt and the cruelty with which she had been treated—at Luc’s behest after all—as well as the pain she herself had felt when…
‘So it is you! I thought so!’
‘Luc!’
Shocked, Carrie stepped back against the protection of the wall, her eyes widening betrayingly.
What was he doing here? Maria had insisted that he would be in Brussels.
And she had insisted that she was not afraid of seeing him, Carrie reminded herself! And she wasn’t! No way.
‘Well—an unexpected visitor indeed!’
Unlike her, Luc was dressed formally in a crisp white shirt and an expensive beige linen suit. His dark hair was immaculately groomed, his skin the same warm honey colour she had remembered during those long, aching nights when she had been so obsessed with the misery of losing him that all she had been able to remember was him.
His skin might look and feel warm, but his heart was icy cold—at least where she was concerned! Did the small whorls of body hair covering his chest still curl into small licks of curls, delicious to kiss in the damp heat of his bed? Did he still emerge from the shower looking like a Greek god, with the kind of physical proportions that…?
Aghast, and furious with herself, Carrie brought her thoughts to order. After all, she wasn’t some wide-eyed innocent teenager now, awash with excitable hormones!
Lifting her chin, she told him briskly, ‘Actually, I’ve come to see the Countess.’
Immediately Luc frowned.
‘My godmother? She isn’t here. She’s away visiting her niece in Florence. What did you want to see her about? As I recall there was little love lost between the two of you,’ Luc pointed out sardonically.
That he had known that and still allowed his godmother to humiliate her as she had done was all the reminder Carrie needed to make her bristle with antagonism and tell him challengingly, ‘I’ve got a message for her. From Maria!’
She was supposed to be savouring this, Carrie reminded herself, and her stomach suddenly dropped like a high-speed lift when she saw the way Luc was looking at her, his eyes narrowed intently, so dark that they looked almost black instead of the dark grey she knew them to be.
She could feel the silence stretching dangerously between them, taut with unspoken hostility and aggression.
‘What message? Give it to me!’
He was so arrogant! At eighteen she might have been so idiotically adoring that she had accepted it, but not now! She could feel the swift burn of her own immediate antagonism. Carrie took a deep breath, too infuriated to think of delaying the retribution she was about to deliver.
‘With the greatest of pleasure,’ she told him ‘She wanted you to know that she has married Harry, my brother.’ She smiled unkindly at him. ‘She loves him, and he loves her, and—’
CHAPTER TWO
‘LUC let go of me!’ Carrie demanded breathlessly, her face going hot with fury. But the relentless grip of his fingers on her upper arm did not relax one iota, and nor did the speed at which he was almost dragging her down the richly polished corridor, its walls ornamented with suits of armour and dangerous-looking heavy swords.
Carrie had a brief glimpse of the d’Urbino family crest above the imposing double doors before Luc pushed them open and half-dragged, half-thrust her into the elegantly furnished salon that lay beyond them.
She was, Carrie recognised angrily, in the main entertaining salon that formed part of the suite of private rooms occupied by Luc. Very little had changed since the last time she had been in this room; the silks and damasks might perhaps have faded a little more, and her own eight-year absence might have given her a more mature appreciation of the exquisite beauty of the room’s furnishings, but that was all. The heavy silver-framed photograph of Luc’s parents still dominated the highly polished sofa table, with Luc himself standing between them, a child of two.
Carrie remembered how she had so foolishly and fondly believed that the fact that both of them had lost their mothers at a young age somehow forged a special bond between them.
But Luc hadn’t merely lost his mother—he had lost both his parents in the appalling atrocity of a terrorist
