of the lake. Instead, his attention was focused on the woman beside him and a deep sense of feeling thwarted filled him, as his powerful cavalcade of cars moved through the Italian countryside.
With her mahogany hair gleaming and her body perfectly still, she wasn’t behaving as he’d expected her to behave. As he wanted her to behave—especially now that she had finally given in to his desire that she accompany him to Umbria.
During the flight from London she had kept him at a distance. In every way. She had been polite, yes. Each comment he’d made had been answered with a studied courteousness, although he noticed that she had initiated no conversation of her own. She had picked up a book and started to read and although the book had now been put away in her handbag, it made no difference. He didn’t like being ignored by a woman—especially not one who had previously been so attentive. Who had behaved like a wildcat that last time they had made love...
With her hands lying clasped on her lap and her simple blue dress seeming to echo her muted mood, he couldn’t remember her ever looking quite so serene, nor so beautiful.
Tightly, his hands clenched into fists where they lay on top of his tensed thighs. Was it because the end was in sight that he found himself wanting her more than ever? Or had her own accusation contained more than a kernel of truth? Was it a case of his competitive nature governing him as it had always governed him—driven by the knowledge that he was rarely refused anything, by anyone?
Yet deep down he recognised that it wasn’t quite that simple. The woman she had become since she’d discovered his secret courtship had been like the Cat he’d fallen for. The feisty beauty who had blown him away within seconds of meeting her. Who had looked at the powerful potentate standing in that humble Welsh hotel and spoken to him as if he were...
An equal?
Maybe.
This past weekend, she had been like a butterfly fluttering in out of the sunshine in order to be admired and yet somehow managing to remain tantalisingly aloof. Suddenly, everything had been on her terms. She had kept him guessing. Waiting. She had made him feel uncertain in a way which was totally new to him. And in the time it had taken before she had finally let him back into her arms, he had felt as if he were going out of his mind.
He shook his head in consternation, for he was not given to self-analysis. From childhood, he had been taught to be ruthless and strong. He had been told that his role was to protect and to provide for his country; to sublimate his own desires in the pursuit of those goals. It had been drummed into him that his destiny was to rule with resilience and never appear vulnerable. And that had been the maxim he had embraced all his life.
He had seen less war than his father, mainly because he didn’t share the dead king’s unquenchable lust to conquer new territories, and because he had preferred to use the intricate skills of international diplomacy rather than force. But Murat had seen his own fair share of battle. Etched into his memory was that terrible clash with insurgents at Port D’Leo, when his two most senior commanders had been slain before his eyes. He remembered holding the hand of one of the men, as his lifeblood had seeped like liquid rust into the hot, desert sand. He remembered the choked words which the soldier had asked Murat to take back to his wife: words of regret that he would not live to see his unborn child. And Murat could still recall his own guilt that he had been powerless to save them.
He thought back to his spartan childhood. Of the loneliness of his life in the palace and of the powerful father who had never been there for him, nor for any of his family. Any snatched hours spent with his son had been spent teaching him weaponry and horsemanship, and drumming into him that women could weaken a man and sap his essential strength.
But Murat could never remember being shown affection by the man who had sired him. Even his mother’s love had been diluted by her long, depressive illness, when she would sit staring at the blank wall of her sitting room, rather than engaging with Murat or his sister.
And wasn’t that the truth about human emotion—that you could never rely on it? He thought of his friend Suleiman, the person to whom he had once been closer than to anyone in the world, and the man Murat had relied upon to give his sovereign one hundred per cent unswerving loyalty.
Yet Suleiman had let the wiles of a woman twist him away from that loyalty and devotion, hadn’t he? He had taken the woman destined to be Murat’s bride and had made her his own. And although Murat had now forgiven his oldest friend, he still felt the bitter twist of pain when he remembered how his blood brother had betrayed him.
And that was why he had always kept his heart steeled against an emotion which some men called love, but which Murat saw as nothing but trouble. Human hearts could not be trusted, nor relied upon—and ‘love’ was the most unreliable emotion of all. Far better to stay clear of the clutches of something which had the power to destroy much of what it touched.
‘Hadn’t you better tell me about this meeting?’ Catrin said, her voice breaking his thoughts as she crossed one leg over the other.
It was difficult to concentrate on anything other than the toned gleam of her ankles, but Murat did his best. ‘Well, Niccolo you have, of course, already met.’
‘Yes.’ There was a pause. ‘And is he bringing the lovely Lise with him?’
‘He didn’t say.’ His gaze slid over her. ‘Will you have a problem with that, if he does?’
She shrugged. ‘It’s not my place to have a problem with it. And anyway, she was only telling the truth. If it hadn’t been for Lise, I might still be stumbling around in the dark. Maybe I should be grateful to her, for making me face up to the truth and to see our relationship for what it really is...was,’ she corrected hastily. ‘Who else is coming?’
‘Alekto Sarantos,’ he said. ‘We met him once in Paris, if you remember?’
Memory was a road Catrin didn’t want to take, but sometimes someone planted you on that super-fast highway and there wasn’t a thing you could do about it. She recalled a man with ebony hair and extraordinary blue eyes. Alekto had been surrounded by women, looking more like a rock star than a businessman. But he had seemed almost bored by the adoration of the women surrounding him, as if he would rather be anywhere else than at the city’s most glitzy party.
Unlike her, who had been revelling in every glorious moment. It had been like a dream come true. The most romantic city in the world. With Murat.
Her heart gave a painful wrench as she remembered tickertape cascading from the ceiling at midnight, and the Sultan laughing as he brushed the streams of paper from her face, before bending his head to kiss her.
‘I remember,’ she said, swallowing down the lump in her throat.
She bent her head to stare at her hands, because anything was better than having to look into his hard, hawk-like face and meet the black gleam of his eyes. Every time she looked at him she wanted to touch him. And every time she touched him, it would just make their inevitable parting all the harder. That was a certainty which had been growing all day.
She had realised her mistake in agreeing to come here from the moment she’d stepped onto the plane, discovering that it was all too easy to slip back into the role of being Murat’s consort. It had suddenly dawned on her that she needed to put some kind of distance between the two of them in order to protect herself, which was why she had pulled back a little during the flight. But it hadn’t been easy to remain neutral—not when the Sultan was behaving with such attentiveness towards her.
‘Look up there,’
