was lying not ten yards away. She was wearing the bottom of a tiny, crimson bikini. Nothing else. She was lying face down but she was propped up on her elbows, reading, and he could see the generous curve of her lovely breasts. Her fair curls were tangled down her shoulders. She’d been swimming and her hair was still damp. She looked…free, he thought suddenly; free in a way he could never be. And quite extraordinarily beautiful.
The knot of anger and tension that had been clenched inside him for weeks dissolved, just like that. It was replaced by a sensation so strong he had to fight to stand in the one spot. She hadn’t noticed his approach. He could just walk forward and lie down beside her, let his body touch hers, take her in his arms as he’d taken her all those years ago.
Right. He was here to avert calamitous gossip—not make more.
‘Get yourself decent,’ he growled in a voice he scarcely recognized, and her head jerked up and she hauled herself upright in fright, reaching for her discarded bikini top. She clutched it, hauling it against her but not before he’d seen what lay beneath.
She was almost ten years older than last time he’d seen her. She had a woman’s body now. A full, sensuous collection of curves that together could make a man…
‘What are you doing here?’ she snapped, cutting across his thoughts. She frantically retied her top, then reached down and grabbed her towel, wrapping it round herself tightly and hanging on to it for dear life.
‘I own the island,’ he said mildly and waited for her reaction.
It didn’t come. She didn’t say anything.
‘I need to speak to you,’ he said at last. ‘That’s why I brought you here.’
‘You could have telephoned. We aren’t exactly in the Dark Ages.’
‘No,’ he agreed. ‘But telephones are bugged.’
‘Yours?’
‘Yours.’
She gasped at that, incredulous. ‘Why would anyone bug my telephone?’
‘Because my entire kingdom wants to know what happened with us.’ He hesitated. ‘Let’s go back to the house.’
‘If you want to drag me back screaming.’
‘Holly, cooperate.’
‘Give me one good reason why I should.’
‘You owe me the truth!’ It was said with such passion that it brought her up short. Her eyes widened and there was suddenly a trace of uncertainty in her eyes.
‘I owe you nothing,’ she whispered.
‘You bore my son.’
It was said with such heaviness, such dull certainty that it hurt. He saw her flinch. The fingers that had been clutching her towel so tightly loosened. It was as if she suddenly had nothing more to protect.
‘I did,’ she whispered. Her gaze met his, steady, unapologetic, but behind the defiance he saw a hurt that ran bone deep.
‘You never told me.’ The roughness had gone from his voice. The confused fury that had driven him for the last weeks had unexpectedly weakened.
‘No.’ It was a flat negative, nothing more.
He said nothing. There was almost perfect stillness around them—the faint lapping of the water on the golden sand but nothing, nothing, nothing.
Nothing to distract them from this thing that was between them. This awful, immutable truth.
‘I believe I had the right to know,’ he said at last, heavily, and he watched as the anger flashed back into her eyes.
‘As I had the right to receive the letters you told me you’d write. Not a phone call, Andreas. Nothing. One polite note to my parents thanking them for their hospitality, written on royal letterhead—typed by some palace secretary—and that was it.’
‘You know I couldn’t…’
‘Extend the relationship? Of course I did. You were engaged before you came to Australia. But we were kids. I was a teenager, Andreas. I’d never had a boyfriend. You had no right to take advantage…’
‘It wasn’t all one way!’
‘It wasn’t, was it?’ she said, and he thought he saw a faint trace of a smile behind her eyes. ‘But I was still a kid.’
That was the problem. He knew it. They both knew it. She’d been seventeen when he first met her. Seventeen. Not eighteen.
It made all the difference in the world.
‘Did you know you were pregnant when I left?’ he asked, trying to focus on the personal, rather than the political, ramifications of what had happened.
‘Yes,’ she said, and he flinched. Suddenly the personal was all that mattered.
‘So that last time…’
‘Oh, I didn’t know for sure,’ she said. ‘My home is hardly the place where you can pop down to the supermarket for a pregnancy test. But I guessed.’
‘Then why…’
‘Because you were engaged to be married,’ she said, sounding out each syllable as if she were talking to a simpleton. ‘Andreas, I don’t want to talk about this. Tell me, what would you have done if you’d discovered I was pregnant?’
‘Married you.’
It was said with such certainty that she blinked. But then she smiled drearily and shook her head.
‘No. That’s air-dreaming. We talked about it—don’t you remember? How we loved each other and wanted to be together for always. How you’d take me to Aristo and I’d be a princess. How my parents would cope without me and your father would forgive you eventually. Only there was already a princess, Andreas. Christina was waiting in the wings, and your marriage was meant to help to strengthen international ties. You talked about defying your father but you never once said you could break your engagement to Christina.’
‘We were promised as children,’ he said and he knew it sounded weak. It had sounded weak then, too. Holly hadn’t understood how such marriages worked. How Christina, five years older than he, had been raised from childhood to see herself as his wife. Christina would never have looked at another man. To tell Christina—aged twenty-five—that he no longer intended to marry her, would have been personally devastating to her, as well as politically disastrous.
He had a duty and he’d known it. Holly had known it, too.
She shivered and her towel dropped. She bent to retrieve it but he was before her, wrapping it round her shoulders, ignoring her involuntary protest.
‘I’m getting sunburned,’ she said, flinching at the feel of his hands on his shoulders, stepping away from him, her voice flat and dull. ‘I need to go back to the house. If that’s all you want to say to me…well, you’ve said it. Can you arrange transport back to
