antique dressing table where she had been experimenting with a new eye shadow. ‘You will. You will. You will. I want my reception at the Chatsfield Hotel. We’ve talked about it since we were children. I am not going to let a little personality clash ruin my fairytale wedding.’
Lottie loved her sister but she hated the streak of bossiness in Madeleine’s nature. There were only three years’ difference in their ages but once her older sister’s mind was made up it was virtually impossible to change it.
But she was going to have a damn good try.
‘Personality clash, you call it? I’d call it a personality collision! That man is nothing but trouble. He came swaggering in as if I was a housemaid instead of a princess. He called me sweetheart!’
Madeleine giggled. ‘Did he?’
Lottie glowered. ‘Not only that, he held my hand far too long.’ She didn’t mention the blown kiss. She was still too furious about that to put the words together. The audacity of the man was unbelievable. The effrontery of him made her blood boil. How dare he treat her like one of his shallow little strumpets?
‘He’s rather gorgeous, isn’t he?’ Madeleine swivelled back to apply dove-grey eye shadow to her left eyelid with a slim-handled sable brush. ‘If I wasn’t already taken I’d make a play for him myself. He’s got that wild, bad-boy thing going on. That element of totally unapologetic outrageous wickedness that makes a girl go weak at the knees.’
Lottie locked her knees together just in case they took it upon themselves to be influenced by her sister’s comments. Not that they hadn’t already been influenced, not by comments about the man, but by the man himself. As soon as Lucca Chatsfield had taken her proffered hand something had ignited inside her body like a match struck against dried-up tinder. It had raced like a runaway flame right to the centre of her being and had sizzled there in secret ever since. His glinting dark brown eyes had roved over her like a minesweeper, taking in every nuance of her appearance. The mockery in his gaze had infuriated her. She knew she wasn’t the beauty of the family, but did he have to rub her nose in it?
Schoolmarm indeed!
He was here to make trouble for her and she had to get rid of him as quickly as she possibly could. Her plans for a perfect wedding for her sister would be sabotaged if he got any say in it. He was an outright playboy. He didn’t date women. He slept with them and then left them before they had time to put his number in their phone. The press was full of his wild-partying, hooking-up lifestyle. He hadn’t had a single relationship that lasted more than twenty-four hours. He was a one-night-stand man. It was practically his brand, for God’s sake. What possible interest would he have in planning a wedding? She would be made a fool of and the whole world would be watching to see it. Argh!
‘You know he’s not going to do a minute’s work while he’s here,’ Lottie said, jutting her chin as she looked at her sister. ‘He’s only here for show. He’s using it as some sort of layabout holiday. He was disgustingly blatant about it. That shows how unprincipled he is.’
Madeleine picked up her bronzing brush and swept it artfully across each of her regal cheekbones in turn. ‘Then perhaps you should take him on as a project. Put him to work. Get his nose to the grindstone and his shoulder to the wheel or whatever the saying is.’
I’d like to get his back to the wall, Lottie thought with venom. I’d like to scratch his eyes out. I’d like to slap his arrogant face. I’d like to—
Madeleine smiled at her in the mirror. ‘Well, look at you, Lottie, love. I’ve never seen you so fired up. He really has got under your skin, hasn’t he?’
Lottie quickly refashioned her features into her customary ice-princess mask, although inside she was still seething like a kettle left too long on the boil. ‘I can handle him. He’s just a little boy who hasn’t grown up.’
‘He looks all grown up to me.’ Madeleine gave a twinkling smile and waggled her neatly groomed eyebrows as she added, ‘Or at least he did judging by that spread we saw of him in that London tabloid.’
Lottie flickered her eyelids in disdain and swung away. ‘I do not want to be reminded of what that man gets up to in his spare time.’
‘Then make sure he doesn’t have any,’ Madeleine said. ‘Keep him busy with errands. You could do with a bit of practice at delegating. You know you have a tendency to over-control things.’
‘That’s because I’ve always found if I want a good job done I have to do it myself,’ Lottie said. ‘Every time I’ve trusted someone to do the right thing they let me down and I’m the one who ends up with egg dripping off my face.’
Madeleine made a little moue with her lips. ‘You’re not including me in that statement, are you, ma petite?’
There was no point arguing the point. Madeleine liked to think she was the model older sister. Nothing she ever did was wrong. Their parents never criticised her because she had always done well at school and didn’t have to study for hours to get facts and figures to stay in her head long enough to recall them for an exam. The press never found fault with her. She never wore the wrong thing or said the wrong thing or frowned at the wrong time. She didn’t bite her nails when she was nervous. She hadn’t caused a scandal the first time she had been let loose at finishing school. She hadn’t been taken in by false charm and imagined herself in love with a boy who had only slept with her because she was a royal.
No.
Madeleine was perfect.
Lottie let out a long-winded breath. ‘No, of course not.’
Her sister turned around again on the stool. ‘Don’t you think it’s time you loosened up a bit? Got out a bit more, let your hair down? It’s been years since—’
‘Don’t.’
‘You need to get over yourself. It’s been—what?—five years since Switzerland? You won’t even talk about it. Don’t you think it’s time—?’
‘That’s because it’s in the past and I want it to stay there.’ Lottie gave her sister a cautioning look.
‘Every time the word Switzerland is mentioned you flinch. There, you just did it again.’
Lottie pointedly opened the wedding planning folder. ‘The last dress fitting is the week before the wedding. It’s at 10:00 a.m. sharp.’
‘But you haven’t had a date since.’ Madeleine was like a dog with a serious bone addiction. ‘You can’t lock yourself away for ever, you know. One bad love affair doesn’t have to ruin your life. You’re twenty-three years old, for pity’s sake. You should be out partying and having a good time. You’re missing out on the best years of your life.’
‘I’m not missing out on anything.’ Lottie said the words with what conviction she could summon. Although she had never been as outgoing as her sister, she hadn’t been a shrinking violet either … more of a daisy that faded once the sun went down. But her first sexual relationship when she was eighteen had taught her a valuable lesson in trust. Finding pictures of her most intimate moments with her boyfriend on his phone that he had shared with his friends had bludgeoned her innocence to an aching pulp. Fortunately her father had been able to block any further circulation of the images but she had never been intimate with anyone since.
She
