her future brother-in-law. His suit was beautifully cut and a dark charcoal, the jacket stretched across broad shoulders, unbuttoned to reveal the white T-shirt he wore instead of a shirt and tie. The T-shirt clung just enough to suggest the strong, well-developed contours of his broad chest. It wasn’t his tailoring that made her scalp tingle though—under the laconic surface there was an explosive quality about him. In the toughness stakes Sebastian Zorzi could have given the bulletproof glass a run for its money.
Obviously she had been aware that the brothers were physically dissimilar. Nothing surprising about that; siblings often were. She and Chloe looked nothing alike, after all.
But the Zorzi Princes were not just different, they were total opposites in everything. It went beyond their colouring or build, or even their smiles, actually especially their smiles! One’s made you feel safe, the other? She gave a little shudder. Safe was not a word she could imagine many people using when it came to Sebastian Zorzi!
‘That’s right, Lady Sabrina, I’m the rescue party.’ He lifted his hand and spoke into the phone cradled in his palm. Sabrina noticed his fingers were very long, the ends square-tipped and capable. They were definitely strong hands.
‘Yes, I’ve got her. She’s...’ The dark lashes lifted from the angular jut of his high carved cheekbones, his blue eyes seemed to consider her for a moment—the bone-stripping intensity making her shift in her seat before he responded to the question she couldn’t hear. ‘In one piece, just about. She looks like she’s been dragged through a hedge backwards, but she retains the ability to look down her well-bred little nose... So, yes, all right—if you like that sort of thing.’
His tone suggested that personally he didn’t like, but then, having seen the sort of women Sebastian thought of as fine, Sabrina was actually quite glad.
He had a type.
And it had nothing to do with IQ points.
Hard to imagine that the endless succession of tall, leggy blondes whose names had been linked with his were universally dumb, but Sabrina had always imagined, with an uncharacteristic lack of charity, that they probably pretended to be dim! There was a type of man who just couldn’t cope with a woman who could challenge them intellectually, and in her opinion the black sheep of the Zorzi family ticked all the boxes for that type!
He was the sort of royal prince who made republicans say smugly, I told you so...or they should do, she reflected grimly. It was just that somehow Sebastian made the unacceptable seem charming and no matter what his indiscretions everyone seemed to forgive him; and not only that, they liked him despite the fact he’d been sticking a finger up to authority all of his adult life.
It had always mystified Sabrina. Yet sitting a few feet away from him in an enclosed space, she began to understand it better. He didn’t have to deliver a charm offensive, he just had to breathe!
The sensual shock wave of his presence had to be experienced to be believed! She had, and Sabrina no longer believed that any of the stories that circulated about him were exaggerated.
In the past it would not have been strange that they had never met. For many years relations between the two Velatian royal families had been, if not frigid, definitely cool.
Times had changed. No longer enemies, the two royal families had become the best of friends and co-conspirators, united in a common cause.
But at every social occasion where both families had been present, somehow Sebastian had always been absent. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise her if Sebastian had been banned from such occasions. The only time Sabrina had even been in the same room as Sebastian Zorzi previously, it had been a very large room and he had vanished very early in the evening through a back exit, along with the much younger wife of an elderly diplomat, before they’d had the chance to be formally introduced.
Later that same evening she remembered the awe-inspiring and rather cold, or so it had always seemed to her, King Ricard coming to find his younger son. Luis, she recalled, had covered for his brother. It seemed to be the pattern of the siblings’ relationship, his brother breaking the rules and Luis covering up for him.
If that meeting had ever happened she might have been prepared for the aura of raw masculinity Sebastian projected like a force field. It was primitive, raw sex appeal in its most concentrated form.
It made her skin prickle, her heart race and her limbs grow heavy and shakily weak. She didn’t like it, but she accepted that she might well be in the minority there. A lot, if not most, might not exactly disapprove of the blatant sexuality of his wide, mobile mouth and the hard sculpted lines of his face. She took comfort in the knowledge that any second-year medical student, or, for that matter, sensible person, would have known her symptoms were caused by the after-effects of shock.
‘Did anyone see us leave...?’ He repeated the mystery caller’s question. ‘A few, I’d say.’ His eyes, glittering with malicious amusement, found her own and she stopped the frenzied smoothing of her hair while he responded to the person on the other end of the line. ‘I wasn’t actually counting, but, no, she didn’t give them any quotes, barring the curses. I learnt a few new ones!’ He winced and lifted the phone away from his ear, waiting a moment, a smile playing across his lips until eventually he pressed it back into the angle of his jaw. ‘Of course I’m not being serious. She was the epitome of inbred princess cool,’ he soothed, before sliding the phone back into the breast pocket of his jacket.
Sabrina still didn’t really know what was happening, but in that moment her desire to find out came second to her desire to react to his comments. ‘The next time you accuse someone of being inbred I think maybe you should consult your own family tree.’
He gave a low throaty chuckle that alarmingly raised goosebumps over the surface of her skin. ‘Point taken, though, as I’m sure you are aware, there was for some time a question mark over my genetic inheritance.’
Her eyes fell even though he displayed none of the awkwardness she immediately felt. Of course she knew. News of the late Queen’s affair had found its way onto every front page after the love letters she had written to her lover had found their way into the public domain after the man’s death.
Then soon after, in case anyone had missed the lurid headlines, there was the book written by the man’s ex-wife and the nanny, who had been the first to connect the dates with the birth of the Queen’s second son and shared her suspicions with a tabloid.
There had been a show of solidarity by the Zorzi royal family at the time too. The Queen had appeared looking beautiful and frail at the side of her husband, the two Princes with their hair slicked back and faces shiny.
‘But nobody believes that now,’ Sabrina said uncomfortably.
He threw her a sardonic look. ‘Oh, plenty believe it, cara, and a lot more wish it was true...’ One slanted brow arched as he shrugged his shoulders. ‘Myself included.’
Distracted from her own situation by this statement, she could not hide her astonishment. ‘You wish you were a bastard? I’m sorry, I...’ She broke off, blushing furiously, but Sebastian Zorzi did not appear even slightly put out by being referred to as a bastard.
‘Let’s just say I don’t wake up feeling lucky that Zorzi blood is running through my veins.’
‘Well, Luis is proud of his heritage,’ she countered defensively.
‘My brother is more forgiving than I am.’
‘Forgiving
