was like a chain reaction. His glance, her heartbeat, harsh breathing—her or him?—and tension—tension like she’d never experienced before.
Streaks of colour accentuated his aristocratic cheekbones and he stepped towards her at exactly the same moment she moved towards him. The attraction was so fierce and frantic that when she heard a ringing sound she actually wondered whether an alarm had gone off.
Then she realised that it was the phone.
Hauling his gaze from hers, Casper inhaled sharply. ‘Don’t answer that.’
Still reeling from the explosion of sexual excitement, Holly doubted she’d be capable of answering it even if she’d wanted to. Her legs were trembling and the rhythm of her breathing was all wrong.
She watched dizzily as he crossed the room and lifted a bunch of papers from the printer.
Mouth grim, shoulders tense, he leafed through them and then lifted his gaze to hers. ‘What were you doing? Profiling your target?’
Having completely forgotten that she’d actually printed out some of the sheets on him, including a particularly flattering picture, Holly suddenly wished she could sink through the floor. ‘I—I was looking you up.’ What else could she say? She could hardly deny it, given that he was holding the evidence of her transgression in his hands.
‘Of course you were.’ He gave a derisive smile. ‘I’m sure you wanted to know just how well you’d done. So, now we’ve cleared that up, let’s drop the pretence of innocence, shall we?’
‘OK, so I’m human!’ Her face scarlet, her knees trembling, Holly ran damp palms over her tee-shirt, wishing she could go and change into something else. He looked like something out of a glossy magazine, and she was dressed in her most comfortable tee-shirt that dated back at least six years. ‘I admit that I wanted to find out stuff about you. You were my first lover.’
‘So you’re sticking to that story.’ He dropped the papers back onto the desk and Holly lifted her chin.
‘It’s not a story. It’s the truth.’
‘I just hope you don’t regret what you’ve done when you have two hundred camera lenses trained on your face and the world’s press yelling questions at you.’
She shrank at the thought. ‘That isn’t going to happen.’
‘Let me tell you something about the life you’ve chosen, Holly.’ Tall and powerfully built, he looked as out of place in her flat as a thoroughbred racehorse in a donkey derby. From the stylish trousers and long cashmere coat, to the look of cool confidence on his impossibly handsome face, everything about him shrieked of enormous wealth and privilege. ‘Everywhere you go there will be a photographer stalking you, and most of the time you won’t even know they’re there until you see the picture next day. Everyone is going to want a piece of you, and that means you can no longer have friends, because even friends have their price and you’ll never know who you can trust.’
‘I don’t need to hear this—’
‘Yes, you do. You won’t be able to smile without someone demanding to know why you’re happy and you won’t be able to frown without someone saying that you’re suffering from depression and about to be admitted to a clinic.’ He hammered home the facts with lethal precision. ‘You’ll either be too thin or too fat—’
‘Too fat, obviously.’ Heart pounding, Holly sank down onto the sofa. ‘Enough. You can stop now. I get the picture.’
‘I’m describing your new life, Holly. The life you’ve chosen.’
There was a tense, electric silence and she licked her lips nervously. ‘What are you saying?’
‘You have made sure that the whole world believes that this is my baby. And, as a result, the whole world is now waiting for me to take appropriate action.’
Pacing back over to the window, he stared down into the street.
Holly had a sudden sick feeling in her stomach. ‘A—appropriate action? What do you mean?’
There was a deathly silence and then he turned, his eyes empty of emotion. ‘You’re going to marry me, Holly.’ The savage bite in his tone was a perfect match for the chill in his eyes. ‘And you may think that I’ve just made your wildest dreams come true, but I can assure you that you’re about to embark on your worst nightmare.’
‘SO WHEN do you think he’ll be back?’ Holly paced across the priceless rug in the Georgian manor house. ‘I mean, he’s been gone for two weeks, Emilio! I haven’t even had a chance to talk to him since that day at the flat.’ The day he’d announced that she was going to marry him. ‘Not that this house isn’t fabulous and luxurious and all that—but he virtually kidnapped me!’
‘On the contrary, His Highness was merely concerned for your safety,’ Emilio said gently. ‘The press had discovered where you were and the situation was about to turn extremely ugly. It was imperative that we extracted you from there as fast as possible.’
Remembering the crowd of reporters that had suddenly converged on Nicky’s flat, and the slick security operation that had ensured their escape, Holly rubbed her fingers over her forehead. ‘Yes, all right, I accept that, but that doesn’t explain why he hasn’t been in touch. When is he planning to come back? We need to talk.’
There was so much she needed to say to him.
When she’d opened the door to the flat and seen the prince standing there, her first reaction had been one of pure joy. For a crazy moment she’d actually thought that he was there because he’d spent the past two weeks thinking about her and decided that he needed to see her again. Her mind had raced forward, imagining all sorts of unrealistic scenarios that she was now too embarrassed to even recall. Her crazy, stupid brain had actually started to believe that extraordinary things could happen to someone ordinary like her.
And then he’d strode into her flat like a Roman conqueror neutralising the enemy.
Remembering everything he’d said to her, she felt a rush of misery.
He didn’t believe it was his baby and the injustice of that still stung. True, she wasn’t exactly proud of the way she’d behaved, but it seemed he’d conveniently forgotten his own role in the affair.
And as for his proposal of marriage—well, that unexpected twist had more than kept her mind occupied over the past two weeks.
Had he meant it? Was he serious? And, if he was serious, what was her response going to be?
It was the most difficult decision she’d ever had to make, and the arguments for and against had gone round and round in her head like a fairground carousel. Marrying him meant being with a man who didn’t know her or trust her, but not marrying him meant denying her baby a father.
And that was the one thing she’d promised herself would never happen to any child of hers.
Reminding herself of that fact, Holly straightened
