Passion and the Prince (16 page)

Lily’s heart felt very heavy indeed.

They’d had a very busy full day, visiting two more villas in the morning and stopping briefly for a light lunch before continuing on to visit a private villa on one of Lake Como’s small islands. Yet no amount of busyness was enough to push out of her thoughts everything that she’d felt on waking up in Marco’s arms this morning. It was like holding a special golden treasure whose existence was enough to fill her with happiness. Her treasure, though, was fool’s gold—because it meant nothing to Marco.
She
meant nothing to Marco.

It was now late in the afternoon, and they had stopped in a pretty lakeside town for a cup of coffee at Marco’s suggestion, prior to their return to the villa.

Marco had just gone inside the café to pay their bill, and she was sitting drinking in the relaxing scene around her, when to her horrified disbelief she saw
Anton Gillman on the other side of the road. She had assumed and hoped that he had left the area, with the rest of the fashion pack and returned to Milan, but obviously she had been wrong. Lily shrank back in her chair, hoping that he wouldn’t look across the road and see her. For a moment she thought that he wouldn’t, and that she was safe, but then the woman seated at a table close to their own got up, her small lap dog barking shrilly. The sound caught Anton’s attention so that he glanced towards the café. There was nowhere for her to hide, no hope that he wouldn’t see her, and Lily knew that he had when she saw him start to cross the road and come purposefully towards her. It was the worst kind of cruel coincidence.

Lily shuddered to see the admiring looks he was attracting from the woman with the yapping dog. She was quite obviously impressed by his air of authority, his expensive suit and his immaculate grooming. If only she knew the truth about him and his sexual tastes she wouldn’t be so interested in him or so admiring.

Lily wasn’t impressed, though. She was a teenage girl again, sick with fear and loathing because she knew what he wanted from her.

He was smiling at her—that taunting, cruel smile she had never been able to forget.

‘Lily, my lovely.’ His voice caressed her as his knuckles stroked along her jaw, and his gaze registered her immediate terrified recoil from him. ‘Delicious that you’ve remained so … sensitive. I shall enjoy discovering just how sensitive when I finally persuade you to give in to me.’

Inside the café, waiting to pay their bill, Marco saw the tall dark-haired man approaching Lily and recognised him immediately. Her ex-lover. Anger and jealousy surged over him. There were two people ahead of him in the queue to pay, one of them an elderly man who obviously couldn’t see very well, and who was struggling to find the right money. Marco saw the man lean towards Lily, who was out of view. The intensity of the emotion that exploded inside him scorched the truth of his feelings into him. He was jealous. He was jealous of another man’s right to claim Lily’s attention and to claim Lily herself because … Because she meant far more to him than he had previously allowed himself to admit?

The elderly man was still fumbling with his money, and the woman behind him in the queue was tutting in her impatience, but Marco was oblivious to them both. How had it happened? How could it be that Lily had become so important to him? He didn’t know. He only knew that she was—just as he knew that this was the last thing he had ever have wanted to happen. He had built a life that depended on him not becoming emotionally involved with others, on not allowing himself to become emotionally dependent on anyone. How had Lily managed to slip beneath his guard and touch that place within him where he was so dangerously vulnerable? His formidable inner defences were warning him to step back from the danger that now lay ahead of him, to turn round and walk away from it—and from Lily herself.

It was illogical for her to feel so afraid, Lily tried to reassure herself. Anton couldn’t do anything to harm
her now. She was an adult, not a teenager, and they were in public. She was in command of her own life. But some fears could not be controlled with mere reason, and this one had lived privately hidden within her for a very long time.

‘Why don’t we take a little walk, you and I?’ Anton suggested. ‘I’m sure your companion won’t mind,
Dr
Wrightington.’

Lily’s stomach swooped sickeningly. He’d been checking up on her, asking questions about her.

‘I’m not going anywhere with you.’

Too late she recognised it was the wrong thing to say, with its echoes of past refusal.

Where was Marco? Why hadn’t he come back? What if he didn’t come back?

She looked frantically into the café willing Marco to see her and come to her rescue, but she couldn’t see him because of the customers blocking her view. She was alone with Anton. Abandoned by Marco just as she had been abandoned by her father. There was no one to support her, no one to protect her.

Hadn’t it always been that way? Hadn’t she always had to protect herself? Hadn’t she always been alone and uncared for by those she’d longed so much to love her? Her mother, her father, Marco … She was so afraid, so alone. She had to get away, to escape. She stood up, her abrupt movement causing her chair to scrape on the stone beneath it with an ugly grating sound, and her panic increased when Anton took advantage of her fear to take hold of her arm.

In the shop the elderly man had finally paid his bill,
scooping up his change with quivering hands, and now the woman was handing over her money.

Marco looked towards the table where he had left Lily. She was standing up now, the man with her taking her arm. They were standing close together. Had Lily forgotten that the man holding her, the man she was about to give herself to, had already let her down once? If so, then perhaps he should remind her. And risk being told that he was interfering where his interference wasn’t wanted, as it had been with Olivia? Risk being accused of trying to ruin her life?

In his mind’s eye Marco could see his eighteen-year-old self, humiliated and shamed. He would not be endure that kind of humiliation again.

Turning his back on the scene being played out beyond the interior of the café, Marco continued to wait to pay their bill.

‘Ah, poor Lily—still so afraid of me. How delicious and erotic … even more so now than when you were younger. There is nothing quite like a little bit of fear to add spice to … things.’

Something snapped inside Lily. Instinct and need pushed aside the rules of modern-day life that told her it was her duty to herself and others not to make a nuisance of herself, not to ask anything of anyone, not to expect others to help her or to forge an emotional bond with her that meant she could turn to them in need. In a last despairing surge she turned towards the interior of the café. She could see Marco now. He was paying their bill.

‘Marco …’

The anguished, almost sobbed sound of Lily’s voice calling his name drew Marco’s gaze in her direction. She was looking at him—looking for him. Her free arm—the arm her companion was not holding—was stretched out toward him. She needed him. Lily
needed
him!

Throwing down a note over twice the value of the coffees they had just had, Marco ran towards the door.

Lily exhaled in relief. Marco had heard her. He was going to help her.

He reached her, grasping her free hand, holding it safe.

‘Make him go away, Marco,’ she begged him wildly, unable to control her distress. ‘Please make him go away.’

‘You heard Lily,’ Marco told Anton, confronting her persecutor and impaling him with a coldly hostile look of warning.

Anton didn’t move, saying mockingly instead, ‘Naughty Lily. You never told me that you have a new … protector.’

Whilst Lily flinched Marco didn’t shift his concentration from the other man’s face. No matter what the relationship between Lily and this man might have been before, it was to
him
that she was now appealing for rescue and refuge, and Marco’s nature and upbringing would not allow him to deny her either.

‘Any decent man would consider it his duty to protect a woman from your sort,’ Marco told Anton curtly. ‘And let me warn you that my protection of Lily will extend beyond this incident. You would be well advised to keep
away from her in future. In fact, I’d advise you to leave Italy today.”

The smirking self-confidence with which Anton had greeted Marco’s arrival had evaporated now into blustering protest as he complained, ‘You can’t make that kind of threat.’

‘I’m not threatening you,’ Marco assured him. ‘I’m simply giving you some advice as a result of your own behaviour.’

Lily listened to their exchange with gratitude and awe. Marco was being magnificent. He was so completely in control, so completely the master of the situation, completely demolishing Anton who, having released her when Marco arrived on the scene, was now backing off, eventually turning his back on them to disappear into the crowd. She looked at Marco. He was standing rather stiffly to one side of her, looking away from her.

Marco knew something had happened to him. Something that threatened his defences. His throat felt raw and tight—with tension, nothing else, he assured himself. He looked back at Lily. She looked stricken, but she didn’t say anything. Her face was paper-white as she turned away from him, dignified in defeat, her manner that of a weary combatant struggling to pick up her weapons and continue to fight on alone. She looked alone. He knew all about how that felt—how it hurt, how the heart hardened around that hurt.

She was trembling violently, her manner that of someone too traumatised to be able to behave rationally. Whatever had happened between her and her ex whilst Marco had been paying their bill had plainly affected her very badly. He stepped towards her, and
then checked himself and stepped back. He wanted to cross the chasm that separated him from obeying his instincts but years of denying those instincts, had laid down rules inside him that had to be obeyed. The voices of his inner rebellion were growing stronger, urging him to join them, but he couldn’t. Because he was too afraid. Afraid of being deceived and betrayed. Out of nowhere, out of nothing he could understand, something inside him rejected that possibility, stating clearly and firmly that Lily wouldn’t do that to him.

All around them people were going about their business, but for Marco his world had come to a halt and was now poised trembling on the brink of something momentous.
Lily.
His heart pounded and surged inside his chest cavity, as though trying to break free of unwanted bonds. Lily. She had turned to him. She had wanted his help and she had trusted him to give it. Trust. Trust was a rare and precious gift when it was exchanged between two people. Lily had offered him the gift of her trust, and that gift demanded surely that he reciprocate in kind. Trust Lily? Trust anyone with his own vulnerabilities? He couldn’t. He scarcely trusted himself with them. That was why he had had to lock them away.

A car horn sounded in the traffic and the moment was gone, banished by the demands of the real world. The danger had passed. The path he had laid down for himself had forked, and briefly he had been tempted to take the wrong fork, but thankfully he had recognised the folly of doing so. Practicality reasserted itself within him, much to his relief—if for no other reason than because it was easier to deal with practical matters than it was for him to deal with emotions.

They had finished their work for the day and, whilst he’d intended to take Lily on a tour of a silk mill as she’d requested, it was plain to Marco that right now she was in no state to do anything. The best thing he could do was get her back to the privacy of the Duchess’s villa.

She didn’t speak as they were driven back to the villa, simply sat stiffly at his side, her stiffness occasionally broken by the tremors that shook her body.

The Duchess was out visiting friends, and Lily made no objection when Marco suggested that she might want to rest in their room, letting him guide her up the stairs and along the corridor to their suite, where she subsided onto the bed, sitting tensely at its edge as she spoke for the first time. ‘Please don’t leave me here on my own,’ she begged.

‘You’re safe now, Lily,’ Marco responded. ‘He can’t come back into your life now—unless you choose to ask him to do so.’

‘Ask Anton into my life?’ Lily shuddered. ‘Never.
Never …
‘

‘You must have cared for him once.’ The cool words, a product of his suspicion and refusal to trust, were forced into the open by those voices within him that warned he had already let down his guard far too much, and that now was the time to rectify that mistake whilst he still could.

But they made Lily flinch visibly, causing him to feel an unexpected stab of guilt as she denied emotionally, ‘No. Never. I disliked him from the start. But he was my father’s friend and I couldn’t avoid him.’

She had met the other man through her
father?
Even
the logical, searching, suspicious voice within him had to accept that that changed things—but it still insisted on reminding her, ‘You were lovers.’

L
ILY
raised her head and looked up at Marco, revulsion darkening her eyes. Marco’s words had filled her with anguish and fear, flooded her mind with memories that undermined her already shaky self-control.

She had kept her secrets to herself for so long—refusing to unburden herself to anyone, bearing the horror of them alone—but now suddenly everything was too much for her. She couldn’t go on any longer. She couldn’t bear the pain and the guilt any more.

She was shivering and trembling, lost in the grip of her emotions and the past.

‘No!
‘ she told Marco vehemently. ‘No. I would never let him even touch me.’ She shuddered. ‘I hated him—loathed him.’ The words gathered speed, spilling out of her in jerky uncoordinated sentences. ‘He kept saying things to me … looking at me … even though he knew how much I hated him. That just made him laugh. He said that he’d get his way in the end and that I wouldn’t be able to stop him. I told him I’d tell my father, but he just laughed at me. I was only fourteen, and my father …’