gave a throaty chuckle that sounded cruel to Sabrina. ‘Welcome to the rest of your life, cara.’
‘I’m not spending the rest of my life with you.’ Or even another second, if she had her way.
‘My loss, I’m sure,’ he drawled sarcastically.
She clenched her teeth. ‘But why the cameras? The journalists? I don’t understand.’
His dark brows lifted. ‘Really? I’d heard you were bright. Ah, well, bright doesn’t always equate with quick on the uptake, I suppose,’ he conceded as she flushed angrily. ‘There has been a leak.’
Crazily, all she could think about with those blue eyes mocking her was the leak in her bathroom that had occurred last winter, the one that had taken the landlord a month to fix.
He sighed, the sound the auditory equivalent of an eye roll. It was the last straw for Sabrina.
‘Look, I’m sure having cameras and microphones thrust in your face is all part of a normal day in your life but it’s not in mine, so shall we pretend just for a moment that you have an ounce of sensitivity? I’m badly traumatised and, like you said, not so quick on the uptake!’
A tense silence followed her outburst. She never yelled!
‘Ever heard of volume control?’
She said nothing, afraid if she opened her mouth again she’d do something even more embarrassing like cry.
As he stared at her the humorous glint in his eyes completely faded, though there was certainly no softening in his blunt delivery as he spelt out the situation. ‘Someone in the inner circle sold the story: wedding, reunification, the whole master plan.’
She shook her head and swallowed past the lump the size of a tennis ball that was lodged in her throat ‘Why would anyone do that?’
‘Oh, I don’t know, maybe for money?’
She gnawed on her full lower lip, resenting the ease with which he made her feel gauche and naive.
‘But don’t worry, we know it wasn’t you.’
Her eyes flew wide, the pallor that emphasised the sprinkling of freckles across the bridge of her small straight nose deepening. ‘What?’
‘Well, first thought was that you might have got tired of waiting for Luis to pop the question and decided to nudge things along.’
‘Why the hell would I want to do that?’ In the hothouse emotional atmosphere her knee-jerk reaction emerged uncensored. ‘I mean...’ Her eyes fell from his searing stare. No, he couldn’t see what was in her head; how the hell could he? At that moment she didn’t even know what was in her head.
‘I touched a nerve...interesting.’
‘I am not a science experiment!’
One side of his mouth lifted in an incredibly attractive half-smile that made her fight to catch her breath while her skin prickled with antagonism.
‘I am sensing that this is bad timing?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ The bad timing was the twisting sensation in her stomach.
‘No need to be coy. I’m assuming that there is a boyfriend in the wings you want to break the news to? Does this guy know that you’ve been tagged as a sacrifice to the great cause of reunification for years?’
‘I am not a sacrifice!’
‘Sorry, a willing victim, then. How many barrels of oil do you reckon marrying my brother is worth, just an estimate?’
She clenched her teeth. ‘I am not a victim—’
‘And the oil deposits in your rocky little kingdom have nothing whatsoever to do with the sudden enthusiasm to reunify our lovely island state? Sorry, not actually sudden. How old were you when they told you the plan? That the feel-good factor of a royal wedding would silence the traditionalists on both sides of the border who cling to the good old days when we hated each other’s guts.’ He pushed his broad, muscular shoulders a little deeper into the leather backrest and let his head fall back. ‘It must make you feel very special to know that you make up an entire chapter in a legal document that took two countries ten years to agree on.’
‘You forgot one important factor...my family ran out of male heirs and, for the record, some guts,’ she told him with grim sincerity, ‘are easier to hate than others.’
His head lifted; he was grinning his insanely attractive smile. ‘Go ahead,’ he invited, tossing her his phone, which she caught on instinct. ‘I’ll pretend to be deaf.’
Lips clamped tight, she tossed it back. ‘Thanks but I have my own phone and I don’t have a boyfriend.’ At university she’d dated a bit, but nothing serious, and then her best friend had met, fallen for and got engaged to a fellow student all in the space of a month. And though Sabrina could not imagine finding herself similarly smitten she had asked herself, what if?
Did she really want to find her soul mate only to be forced to walk away from him? The anger she hadn’t even acknowledged to herself at the time suddenly found its voice—its loud voice.
‘I don’t date. You go on dates to hopefully get butterflies wondering if he is the one, right? So what would be the point?’ She stopped, bringing her lashes down in a concealing curtain across her eyes, appalled as much by the bitter outburst as the person she had chosen to open up to. ‘Besides, I’ve been far too busy with work for much else.’
‘And now you’re going to give that up too like a good little girl, anxious to please. I can see now why it never actually crossed anyone’s mind that you were the leak. The general consensus being that you have never broken a rule in your life.’
His scorn stung, even if what he claimed was depressingly true. She had always been the good girl; she was not about to apologise for it. ‘You make that sound like a vice.’
‘As opposed to what...a virtue?’ On the point of answering his own blighting question, he seemed to change his mind when after a short static pause he added, in an oddly flat voice, ‘The culprit—and, mea culpa, he is one of ours—has been found, and he is, as we speak, being dealt with severely.’
‘Dealt with?’ It sounded sinister, especially when Sebastian said it.
His grin reappeared but it didn’t reach his blue eyes. ‘Don’t worry, despite the bad press we get we haven’t actually executed anyone for a century or so, as for thumbscrews we have found them not really that effective, so we just sacked him.’
‘He lost his job?’
The air escaped through his clenched teeth in an irritated hiss. ‘You’re worried about the fate of a man who was responsible for throwing you to the wolves back there? Wow, you really are going to have to toughen up if you’re joining our family, sweetheart!’ he ground out. ‘But if it makes you feel better the guy won’t be penniless. His insider story of what goes on behind closed doors is pretty much guaranteed to make the bestseller list after it has been serialised in the Sunday papers.’
The
