Chapter Twelve
ROBYN DONALD can’t remember not being able to read, and will be eternally grateful to the local farmers who carefully avoided her on a dusty country road as she read her way to and from school, transported to places and times far away from her small village in Northland, New Zealand. Growing up fed her habit. As well as training as a teacher, marrying and raising two children, she discovered the delights of romances and read them voraciously, especially enjoying the ones written by New Zealand writers. So much so that one day she decided to write one herself. Writing soon grew to be as much of a delight as reading—although infinitely more challenging—and when eventually her first book was accepted by Mills & Boon she felt she’d arrived home. She still lives in a small town in Northland, with her family close by, using the landscape as a setting for much of her work. Her life is enriched by the friends she’s made among writers and readers, and complicated by a determined corgi called Buster, who is convinced that blackbirds are evil entities. Her greatest hobby is still reading, with travelling a very close second.
NARROW-EYED, Alex Matthews surveyed the ballroom of the palace. The band had just played a few bars of the Carathian national folk song, a tune in waltz-time that was the signal for guests to take their partners for the first dance of the evening. The resultant rustle around the margins of the room flashed colour from the women’s elaborate gowns and magnificent jewellery.
Alex’s angular features softened a little when he saw the bride. His half-sister outshone any jewel, her blazing happiness making Alex feel uncomfortably like an intruder. Quite a few years younger, Rosie was the daughter of his father’s second wife and, although they’d become friends over the past few years, he’d never had a close relationship with her.
Alex transferred his gaze to his brother-in-law of a few hours, the Grand Duke of Carathia. Gerd wasn’t given to displays of overt emotion, but Alex blinked at the other man’s unguarded expression when he looked down at the woman on his arm. It was as though there was no one in the room but the two of them.
It lasted scarcely a moment, just long enough for Alex to wonder at the subtle emotion that twisted inside him.
Envy? No.
Sex and affection he understood—respect and liking also—but love was foreign to him.
Probably always would be. The ability to feel such intense emotion didn’t seem to be part of his character. And since breaking hearts wasn’t something he enjoyed—a lesson he’d learned from a painful experience in his youth—he now chose lovers who could accept his essential aloofness.
However, although he couldn’t imagine that sort of emotion in himself, he was glad his half-sister loved a man worthy of her, one who not only returned her ardour but valued her for it. Although he and Gerd were distant cousins, they had grown up more like brothers—and if anyone deserved Rosie’s love, Gerd did.
Couples began to group around the royal pair, leaving them a space in the middle of the ballroom.
The man beside him said, ‘Are you planning to sit this one out, Alex?’
‘No, I’m pledged for it.’ Alex’s blue gaze moved to a woman standing alone at the side of the room.
Elegant and smoothly confident, Princess Serina’s beautiful face revealed nothing beyond calm pleasure. Yet until Rosie and Gerd had announced their engagement, most of the rarefied circle of high society she moved in had assumed the Princess would be the next Grand Duchess of Carathia.
Regally inscrutable, if Serina of Montevel was secretly grieving she refused to give anyone the titillating satisfaction of seeing it. Alex admired her for that.
During the last few days he’d overheard several remarks from watchful wedding guests—a few compassionate but most from people looking for drama, the chance to see a cracked heart exposed.
Made obscurely angry by their snide spite, Alex mentally shrugged. The Princess didn’t need his protection; her impervious armour of breeding and self-suffi-ciency deflected all snide comments, denied all attempts at sympathy.
He’d met her a year ago at Gerd’s coronation ball, introduced by an elderly Spanish aristocrat who had formally reeled off her full complement of surnames. Surprised by a quick masculine desire, Alex had read amusement in the Princess’s amazing, darkly violet eyes.
A little sardonically he’d commented on that roll call of blood and pride, power and position.
Her low amused chuckle had further fired his senses. ‘If you had the same conventions in New Zealand you’d have a phalanx of names too,’ she’d informed him with unruffled composure. ‘They’re nothing more than a kind of family tree.’
Possibly she’d meant it, but now, possessed of disturbing knowledge about her brother, Alex wasn’t so sure. Doran of Montevel was only too aware that those names were embedded in European history. Did the Princess have any idea of what her younger brother had got himself mixed up with?
If she did she’d done nothing about it, so perhaps she also wanted to see herself back in Montevel, a true princess instead of the bearer of a defunct title inherited from her deposed grandfather.
And Alex needed to find out just what she did know. He set off towards her.
She saw him coming, of course, and immediately produced an irritatingly gracious smile. The smoky violet of her gown echoed the colour of her eyes and hugged a narrow waist, displaying curves that unleashed something elemental and fierce inside Alex, an urge to discover what lay beneath that lovely façade, to challenge her on the most fundamental level—man to woman.
‘Alex,’ she said, the smile widening a fraction when he stopped in front of her. ‘This is such a happy occasion for us all. I’ve never seen such a blissful bride, and Gerd looks—well, almost transfigured.’
A controlled man himself, Alex admired her skill in conveying that her heart wasn’t broken. ‘Indeed,’ he responded. ‘My dance, I believe.’
Still smiling, she laid a slender hand on his arm and together they walked into the waiting, chattering circle around Rosie and Gerd.
Alex glanced down, a phrase from childhood echoing in his head. White as snow, red as blood, black as ebony. Snow White, he remembered.
And
