Preitalle, Mr Chatsfield.’ She spoke in a coolly polite tone that had a hint of a French accent to it. She held out her right hand to him but he sensed it was out of a grim commitment to duty rather than any desire to make physical contact.
He took her hand and watched as her rainforest-green eyes widened fractionally as his fingers wrapped firmly around hers, almost swallowing her tiny hand whole. Her skin was rose-petal soft and cool like silk. She tilted her head right back to keep eye contact with him, making him feel every millimetre of his six-foot-two height.
Her hand fluttered like a little bird inside the cage of his, sending a shock wave of heat through his pelvis like the backdraft of a fire. He released her hand and had to physically stop himself from wriggling his fingers to rid himself of the electric tingling her touch had evoked.
‘Thank you, Your Royal Highness,’ he said with exaggerated politeness. He might be an irascible rake but he knew how to behave when the occasion called for it, even if he privately thought it was all complete and utter nonsense. In his opinion people were people. Rich or poor. Royal or common.
She pressed her lips together so tightly as if she were trying to hold an invisible piece of paper between them steady. He wasn’t sure if it was out of annoyance or a gesture of nervousness or shyness, but it drew his gaze like starving eyes to a feast. She had a bee-stung mouth, full lipped and rosy pink without the adornment of lipstick or even a layer of clear lip gloss. It was a mouth that looked capable of intense passion but it seemed somewhat at odds with the rest of her downplayed and rather starchily set features.
A feather of intrigue tickled Lucca’s interest. Did she have a wild side behind those frumpy clothes and that frosty facade?
Maybe his exile here wouldn’t be a complete waste of time, after all….
She stepped back from him like someone does in front of a suddenly too-hot fire. She squared her slim shoulders and crossed her hands over the front of her body, cupping her elbows with the opposite hands. ‘I believe you have been appointed as my assistant.’
Lucca was seriously getting off on her priggish hauteur. It was so different from the way women usually responded to him. There was no simpering and batting of eyelashes. No breathy coos and whispers. No coy come-hither looks or pouting lips and delectable cleavages on show.
No, sirree.
She was buttoned up to the neck and spoke to him in clipped formal sentences and looked at him down the length of her retroussé nose as if he was something unpleasant stuck to her sole of her sensible shoe.
‘That’s correct.’ He gave her a mocking at-your-service bow.
Her chin came up a little higher and those striking eyes flashed like green-tinged lightning behind those conservative spectacle frames. ‘I think you should know that your appointment is both unnecessary and expressly against my wishes.’
Wow. Now that was some attitude.
He’d had every intention of leaving her to it but something about her stiff unfriendliness irked him. He wasn’t used to being dismissed as if he was nothing more than a lowly ranked servant who had failed to come up to scratch. He was an heir of one of the richest families in England. He decided to dig his heels in. He wasn’t going to let some hoity-toity little princess rob him of his allowance by dismissing him before he put in a day’s ‘work.’ He would play the game for the sake of appearances and keep everybody at home happy.
‘Your sister’s wedding cannot go ahead without my family’s cooperation,’ he said. ‘The Chatsfield Hotel is the only venue large and modern enough in Preitalle to accommodate a royal wedding reception.’
She gave him a defiant stare. ‘We can have it here at the palace ballroom. It’s what I proposed to my sister in the first place.’
‘But that’s not what your sister wants,’ he countered neatly. It felt like a verbal fencing match and just as stimulating. He could feel the stirring of his blood, like a tapping beat picking up its tempo, taking heat to his groin like a spreading fire. ‘The hotel is closer to the cathedral and she wants the neutral ground of Chatsfield to show how forward-thinking the royal house of Preitalle is becoming, does she not?’
Her lips compressed again. He could almost hear the cogs of her smart little brain ticking over. She was planning a counterattack. He could see the flickering behind her eyes as if she was mentally shuffling through her storehouse of comments to choose the most waspish one to send his way. ‘I fail to see how a man who spends his life frittering away his time and his family’s money on a profligate lifestyle such as yours could have anything to offer me in terms of services.’
Lucca smiled a satirical smile. ‘Au contraire, little princess. I think I have just the services you need to get this place rocking into the twenty-first century.’
Her cheeks blushed a fiery red but her mouth was still flattened chalk-white in disapproval. ‘You do not have permission to address me informally. Please refrain from doing so. I am Your Royal Highness at first greeting and then Ma’am henceforth.’
‘Would that be Ma’am as in schoolmarm?’
She drew in a sharp little breath and stalked to the other side of the room, still with her arms crossed over her body, her head at that proud height as she looked out of the windows to the formal palace gardens outside. Her whole body seemed to be vibrating with anger like a battery-operated toy set on an uneven surface. He could see her trying to control it, he assumed out of years of royal training. Presumably royals had tempers just like everybody else but they weren’t allowed to use them, or at least not in public. But he had a feeling Her Royal High and Mightiness would give her best tiara right now for an opportunity to slap one of her dainty little fingernail-chewed hands across his face.
‘I do not wish to have anything further to do with you,’ she said in clearly enunciated tones. ‘Please leave.’
‘Listen, sweetheart,’ Lucca said with a cavalier disregard for protocol. ‘Way I see it, we’re stuck with each other, at least for the sake of appearances. Your big sister seems pretty keen on us working together and I get the feeling that what she says around here goes. Quite frankly, I’d rather be working on my tan on one of your beaches, preferably with a couple of blonde beach bunnies peeling grapes for me. So kick me out if you dare. I’m cool with it, but you can say goodbye to using the Chatsfield.’
She turned and gave him a look one would do when a cockroach appears on the table in the middle of a formal dining setting. ‘You are the most disreputable man I have ever met.’
‘Looks like you need to get out more.’ He gave her his fallen angel’s smile. ‘I can assure you there’s plenty more out there like me.’
Her eyes slitted like a cat facing a feral dog, her hands balling into fists at her sides. ‘Get out before I have you thrown out by my security team.’
He gave an indolent shrug as he ambled over to the door. ‘I’ll be staying in the penthouse at the Chatsfield if you want me.’ He turned and blew her a kiss across his open palm. ‘Ciao.’
LOTTIE STORMED INTO her sister’s suite of rooms a few minutes later. ‘You cannot be serious. That man is insufferable! He’s quite possibly the rudest, most uncouth man I’ve
