the waiting staff began to circulate the table Sabrina struggled to force her mind back to Luis, seated to her right, responding with an ambiguous nod because she didn’t have a clue as to what he’d just said before. Her eyes were drawn across the table where Chloe was now talking to Sebastian.
Then, as a waiter moved between them, Sebastian’s gaze shifted. Caught staring, Sabrina looked away quickly and grabbed Luis’s hand.
She ignored the mortifying fact that Luis’s first instinct was to pull away and she couldn’t ignore the look of alarm in his eyes when she’d laughed quite inanely, as though he’d just said something desperately amusing.
‘Sabrina dear,’ her mother said. ‘They are trying to serve the soup. If you must hold hands...’
Everyone looked and Sabrina let go of Luis’s hand, keeping the blush at bay by sheer force of will. Rather to her surprise he kept hold of it. He actually turned it over, then she realised what he was looking at.
She should either have put on some make-up to cover the bruises on the inside of her forearm or worn long sleeves.
‘How did that happen?’ Luis said, directing a concerned frown at the darkening patches either side of her arm.
‘I bruise easily,’ she said quickly, putting her hand across her middle.
‘Since when?’ Chloe asked.
‘Let me see that, Sabrina.’
‘It’s fine, Mum, it probably happened when I was jostled by the press.’
‘Those animals!’ her protective father rumbled, his face dark with anger as he surged awkwardly to his feet.
‘Arnica,’ her mother said, her eyes on her husband, who after a moment subsided in his seat. ‘It really helps bruising. I wonder if we have any...’
‘I’m fine!’ Sabrina said, her smile strained. ‘Just fine, it’s nothing and—’ She took a deep breath and addressed the rest of her comment directly to Sebastian. ‘I’d like to put what happened behind me, to forget about it and move on.’
A three-year-old could have read the coded message but she found it frustratingly impossible to tell from his expression if he had understood.
It was the King, who was seated at the head of the table, who picked up her theme. ‘We’d all like to move on,’ he pronounced suddenly.
It was rare that he and his father were on the same page but on this occasion moving on seemed an excellent idea and one Sebastian realised he needed to put into action at the first possible opportunity.
He felt as if a protective layer had been stripped from his skin. It wasn’t just what he felt, it was how much he felt.
He’d made the connection between those finger marks on Sabrina’s arm and his rough and ready extraction method the moment Luis had drawn everyone’s attention to them. Knowing he was responsible had shaken loose this painful cascade of emotions he could not identify, emotions he had never come close to feeling in his life before. The depth of the self-loathing he felt was visceral in its intensity.
Having waited until he had everyone’s attention, the King continued, in a deeply disgruntled tone. ‘Though there seems little chance of that when we have that damned book to look forward to. If the legal team had not been persuaded by a certain someone.’ The direction of his poisonous glare left little doubt who the someone in question was.
The only person who didn’t look uncomfortable was the target of the King’s venom.
Sebastian’s broad shoulders lifted in the slightest of shrugs, the cool in his eyes as icy as his father’s barely concealed antagonism was hot.
‘I was asked for my opinion and I gave it, Father,’ Sebastian responded calmly. ‘I have no idea if it influenced the advice you were given, but I thought and I still do think that though a gagging injunction might have prevented the book being published in the UK, it would have been nothing more than a delay. And with people being able to access the details and the book online it would simply have been good publicity for the author.’
‘Why did the lawyers ask you?’ Chloe, who had been listening with curiosity to the interchange, asked.
The King gave a laugh and, ignoring his wife’s speaking look, nodded to have his wine glass filled. ‘Good question, young lady.’
‘It was a field that I worked in for a while.’
‘You’re a lawyer? Why didn’t I know that?’ Chloe asked the table in general. ‘I thought I’d read everything there was to know about you.’
Sabrina, who had felt the tension that had been building in Luis while his brother and father faced off, was less surprised than the others when he replied to Chloe’s question.
‘You tend to read about my little brother falling out of nightclubs, Chloe, but before he became the playboy of the western world he graduated top of his class at Harvard law and worked for the best legal firm in New York. He was even offered a partnership.’
Glancing towards Sebastian, Sabrina glimpsed an expression that on anyone else she would have labelled embarrassment.
The King, looking annoyed at the interruption, took over the story. ‘But he chose to risk everything and—’
‘I’m not really a team-player, Father,’ Sebastian interrupted.
‘You’re a gambler!’ his father condemned.
‘Father!’ Luis protested.
‘It’s all right, Luis, stock speculators are frequently called worse.’
‘Gamblers lose money, Seb, you don’t. And,’ Luis added, addressing his remark to the rest of the table, ‘Sebastian does pro bono work for at least one charity that helps...’
His heated defence came to a stumbling halt when the King, whose normally florid colouring had taken on an alarming purplish hue, cleared his throat loudly and drawled contemptuously, ‘I’m sure we feel honoured to have a financial genius and altruist in our family.’
The Queen reached out and laid her hand over her husband’s. ‘Not the time, Ricard,’ she murmured softly.
The effort to respond to her warning glance deepened the unhealthy ruddiness another couple of shades before the table was engulfed in a painfully awkward silence, broken after a few uncomfortable moments by the Duchess.
‘Sabrina, I thought you were wearing your grandmother’s pearls earlier?’
Sabrina shook her head as the knot of anger in her chest grew. She struggled, and failed, to dampen the tide of righteous fury that was making her head spin. She took a deep breath and exhaled it slowly through flared nostrils. King Ricard, in her opinion, was a poor excuse for a parent—he was in fact a bully!
‘A slight mishap,’ she managed finally, unable to stop her glance flickering towards Sebastian. There had been no mishap involved in the King’s attempt to belittle his son. Sebastian might not need looking after now, but he didn’t deserve—nobody deserved—his parent trying to humiliate him
