CATALINA WONDERED IF she’d misheard him. ‘Your aunt?’
He shook his head, his lips forming into a sneer. ‘Not my aunt. She was my uncle’s wife but I never thought of her as my aunt. When my parents died I thought of her as the Wicked Witch of the West.’
It was as if Catalina’s tongue had stuck to the roof of her mouth. She simply could not think of a response.
He’d had an affair with his uncle’s wife?
‘You remember the fight Dominic and I had that resulted in my expulsion?’
She managed a nod.
‘I told you I was sent to my uncle’s home in disgrace and that he was away on business. I expected to be dumped with a nanny or something of the sort but I guess Angelique didn’t have the chance to get anything organised. She had to deal with me herself rather than fob me off and pretend I didn’t exist.’ The distaste in his voice was clear. ‘I remember how she looked at me when she opened the door. It was the look the wolf gave Little Red Riding Hood. Physically, I’d changed a lot that year; I’d shot up and filled out. For the first time, she didn’t ignore my existence. She plied me with wine, dressed up, cooked me a special meal... I didn’t know it then but it was the beginning of her seduction.’ He shook his head. ‘You don’t need to hear the details but suffice to say when she crept into my bed I was in no position to turn her away. She was a beautiful woman at the height of her powers and she knew exactly what she was doing.’
Finally Catalina was able to speak. ‘She seduced a seventeen-year-old boy?’
‘Yes. She did. She seduced me. And I let her.’
Catalina shuddered, nausea swelling in her stomach. ‘That’s sick.’
His jaw clenched and he breathed heavily. ‘I did warn you.’
She placed a hand on his arm, worried he would think she was speaking about him. ‘No, not you. I mean Angelique. What a bitch.’
It was the first time Nathaniel had ever heard a curse fall from Catalina’s lips.
‘I have to take some of the blame. I let her.’
‘You were seventeen.’
‘Seventeen-year-olds know right from wrong and I knew very well that what we were doing was not just wrong but, as you rightly said, sick. My uncle took me in from the age of seven. He raised me...’
‘He let Angelique send you to boarding school.’
‘He did the best he could under the circumstances. He was there for every significant event and that was how I repaid him. The moral compass everyone else has does not apply to me. We slept together intermittently for six months, until the day my uncle came home from work early and caught her sneaking out of my room in only her underwear.’
He drained the rest of his beer and grimaced. ‘My uncle threw her out on the spot and gave me a week to move out. He said he would transfer the remainder of my trust fund to me on the condition I moved out of Paris and he never had to see me again.’
‘Have you seen him since?’
He shook his head. ‘I tried making contact a couple of times but he doesn’t want to know. He’s got a new life now. He divorced Angelique and remarried. He has a couple of kids of his own now. I know he’ll never forgive me. He was the last of my family—my grandmother had died by then—and I destroyed our relationship.’
The last of his family...
And she had run away carrying the child that would be the first true blood tie he’d had in a generation.
‘Did you ever make the first move on her?’
‘No.’ His answer was so vehement that she believed him. ‘I never wanted it to happen. It sickened me but on another level I must have wanted it because I allowed it to happen.’
She nodded slowly. ‘When I was at finishing school, I remember one of the English girls talking about her teenage brothers. She said they were randy little sods—her words—and that if we ever visited we should make sure to wear chastity belts.’
‘Don’t make excuses for me.’
‘I’m not. What you did was wrong, yes, but you were practically a child. Angelique was quite clearly a predator and the one in the position of power. She was beautiful and you were a walking hormone stick.’
A walking hormone stick?
Despite the gravity of the subject, Nathaniel couldn’t hold back the small burst of mirth that came to him, surprised to find he felt a fraction lighter.
He’d never spoken of this to anyone before. His uncle had never either—the press would have had a field day if he had. And nor had Angelique.
That his uncle had kept his counsel after the heinous way Nathaniel had repaid the love he’d given him only verified the qualities of the man who had taken in his orphan nephew and done his best to be a father to him.
Catalina gave the glimmer of a smile and said gently, ‘The age of consent in Monte Cleure is eighteen. If Angelique had seduced you there, she would have been guilty of statutory rape. Whatever guilt you’re holding onto, I seriously suggest you try to let it go.’
Looking into the chocolate eyes ringing with such gentle compassion, he remembered all of the reasons why he’d kept his distance from her before; the innocence he’d conveniently ignored when he’d been intent on her seduction and had got them into this situation in the first place.
He could no longer call their situation a mess. She was carrying his child. In many ways it was a miracle.
And despite everything she had done, the part of his heart that wasn’t still furious with her knew she was the complete antithesis of the woman who he had allowed to seduce him as a teenage boy.
Catalina had been driven to run by desperation. She was only returning to Monte Cleure with him for his sake. Unlike Angelique, she didn’t have a selfish bone in her body.
‘It’s not that easy.’
Her eyes were kind as she shook her head. ‘I don’t imagine it is.’
Their conversation was mercifully interrupted by their food being brought out to them.
Nathaniel watched Catalina cut into her steak, her eyes widening with appreciation as she chewed her first bite.
Something low in his gut moved, like an intense tug, while a fist clenched simultaneously in his chest.
They ate in silence for a while before she put down her fork to gaze at him. ‘What happened between you and Angelique...’
‘I can’t believe I told you that,’ he admitted. He’d thought he would go to his grave without sharing his shame.
He braced himself for her judgement. He’d expected disgust but her initial reaction hadn’t been at all what he’d thought it would be. She’d had a few minutes to gather her thoughts however...
‘I’m an expert at keeping secrets.’
He could well believe it; after all, she’d lived in the Monte Cleure palace all her life.
‘But one thing that has never been a secret is my father’s affairs.’
It was true. They had been well documented through the years.
‘He didn’t suffer from guilt of any kind,’ she continued. ‘If he was a better man he would have. Dominic’s the same as him. To them, women are possessions. You feel remorse. Whatever happened when you were seventeen, you’re a hundred times the men they are.’
His heart expanded so much he didn’t know if there was enough space in his chest to contain it.
Guilt didn’t begin to describe the emotions he’d been living with for these past eighteen years but feeling remorse didn’t make him any better than her father. How could it when the cost of his actions was losing the last of his family, the one person since the death of his parents who had been there for him?
He didn’t see women as possessions as the King and Dominic did. He liked their company, and not only in a sexual context, but until he’d been forced into this situation with Catalina he’d always known when it was time to move on. He didn’t need or want anyone. He was better off on his own. You couldn’t hurt anyone when there was only you. And you couldn’t be hurt either.
‘How did your mother handle the affairs?’ he asked, thinking of his uncle’s devastation.
She shrugged and picked up her fork again. ‘I don’t know if his affairs bothered her much. Not on an emotional level. She wasn’t in love with him. Theirs was a marriage much as I was supposed to have.’
‘A marriage of duty,’ Nathaniel supplied, a strange tightness spreading through him as he spoke the words. He satisfied himself that the actions he and Catalina would be taking would free her from the life she’d had mapped out for her.
‘Yes.’ She focused her attention back on the plate of food before her and speared a tomato.
‘Did your mother have affairs too?’
There was the slightest twitch under her eye. ‘A woman in my mother’s position would never have had an affair. She had too much to lose.’
His eyes asked his next question for him.
‘My father has all the power, you must see that. Dominic is second to him. My mother was barely any higher on the scale of influence than I am: nowhere. If she’d been caught having an affair my father could have banished her from the country. He could have cut her off from her children. He could have taken away everything she had—do you really think she would have risked all that for a tawdry, seedy affair?’
He shook his head, instinctively knowing there was more to this than she was letting on.
She put her knife and fork together and pushed her plate to one side.
‘My mother didn’t have an affair. She fell in love.’ She met his eyes. ‘It was my mother I caught making love in the palace herb garden all those years ago. It was with the head gardener. I can only assume their mutual love of gardening drew them together. What I do know for certain is that it was no tawdry affair—she would never have risked it if it didn’t mean something. They must have loved each other deeply. When she was too ill to leave her rooms any more and see him, I’m sure it contributed to her deterioration. He was so near to her but so far out of her reach. It broke her heart and her death broke his.’ Her voice broke. ‘He gassed himself two months after she died.’
‘Did anyone else know?’ he asked, shocked to his core. ‘Your father?’
‘No one.’ She shook her head emphatically. ‘Only me. If my father had found out he would have killed them both.’ Her eyes filled with a sudden well of tears and her chin wobbled. She took a few deep breaths before looking back at him. ‘You can never tell anyone that. No one can know. I will not have her reputation dragged through the mud.’
No one can know. The same words she’d whispered when she’d admitted him into her room all those weeks ago.
‘I will tell no one.’
She dabbed her eyes with a napkin and visibly gathered herself before saying, ‘So now we know each other’s darkest secrets, we both have a weapon to make sure we each keep our ends of our arrangement.’
‘And keep our mouths shut,’ he finished for her with an understanding nod.
Except the look that passed between them was more than just that of untrusting co-conspirators.
He didn’t know what it was or what it meant, but his heart throbbed at it.
* * *
‘Would you like to use the bathroom first?’ Nathaniel asked once they were back in their room.
They’d kept the rest of their conversation at the dinner table light but there had been nothing light about the chemistry seeping its way between them.
He could feel it. He could taste it. And Catalina could too.
She nodded, pulling a washbag and a towel from her case. ‘I won’t be long.’
‘Take as long as you need.’
‘I’ll leave my things in there for you seeing as you haven’t got any of your own.’ She met his eye and a light colour crept over her cheekbones, but she didn’t drop her gaze.
‘The hotel provides toiletries. They’re by the shower.’
‘Really?’
‘All hotels do.’
‘Am I supposed to use them?’
Her naivety hit him like a punch in the gut. ‘No,’ he said softly. ‘It’s not compulsory. You can use your own toiletries.’
When he heard the lock of the bathroom door, he sank onto the bed and put his head in his hands.
Just when he managed to forget the Princess she really was, she said something that brought it all back home to him.
He could hear the shower running.
She would be standing under it, naked...
He smothered a groan and turned onto his back, his arms arched above his head.
Anticipation filled his thoughts, his body...his veins...everywhere.
* * *
Catalina lay on her back beneath the heavy sheets with a hammering heart and a dry mouth, trying not to turn her head to watch the ticking clock beside her bed.
She looked.
Nine minutes and thirty-three seconds. The length of time Nathaniel had been in the bathroom.
She’d left it with nothing but her towel wrapped around herself. He’d been lying on his back. He’d sat up and pierced her with a stare that had turned her brain into mush before strolling past her and into the bathroom.
Ten minutes and fourteen seconds.
The door opened.
If her heart had been hammering before, it thrashed against her ribs now.
His eyes found her.
Only a small low-slung towel covered him, the hard, muscular chest she remembered so clearly revealed to her. The dark hairs scattered in a fine swirl across it glistening under the gleam of the bathroom light.
Not taking his gaze from her, he extended an arm into the bathroom and switched off the light.
Now the only light came from the reflection of the snow still falling outside. The clouds had cleared and the moon was full and bright, seeping through the centre of the heavy curtains.
She didn’t need light to see him clearly. He had etched himself onto her retinas over two months ago.
The night she had opened her door for him, she had been naked beneath her robe. Tonight she didn’t even have the robe as a barrier.
She sat up slowly, letting the bedsheets drop down to her waist.
His throat moved.
And then he moved.
Like a panther, he strode to the bed and, so quickly she couldn’t remember how he had got there, she was pinned beneath him and his hands held hers firmly either side of her head.
He stared down at her with eyes that glittered, his breaths ragged and whispering against her lips. His mouth was so close she could tilt her chin and capture his lips with her own.
She wanted him so much there were times she struggled to catch her breath from the ache of it all.
‘Kiss me,’ she whispered when she could bear the anticipation no more. ‘Please. Kiss me.’
The glittering in his eyes darkened, his desire stark.
‘Kiss me.’
And then his lips were on hers, his tongue sweeping in her mouth and he was kissing her so hard and with such passion that her bones melted in the wave of heat he unleashed.
His grip on her wrists loosened and she wound her arms around him, threading her fingers through his hair, touching him as she had been dreaming of since their one night together.
Lips and tongues entwined, they explored each other’s mouths, his body pressing down on hers, his chest firm against her breasts.
One hand burrowed in her hair, the other stroking its way down the side of her body and then back up again, leaving a trail of fire on her sensitive flesh.
He raised his head so the tips of their noses were touching and took hold of her hand, lacing his fingers through hers. ‘You make me feel like I could eat you whole,’ he said hoarsely.
Her chest filled with something different but equally acute as the need racing through her veins.
‘I want you so much,’ she breathed, lifting her head enough to meet his lips again. ‘So very much.’
Pinioned beneath his weight, her senses more alive than she had known to be possible, she moaned as he pressed his face into her neck and ran his tongue over her skin.
Slowly he made his way down her body with his mouth. She strained into him, desperate to feel as much of him against her as she could. When he took her breast into his mouth a moan escaped from her throat.
Every part of her felt alive, heat searing through her pores. Every part of her ached for his touch, for his kiss. And every part ached to touch him in return.
On their one night together, his tongue had caressed her there, between her legs, something that had shocked her to the very core. This time...
This time, remembering the pleasure that had replaced the shock, she writhed beneath him, hoping against hope that he would repeat it.
So many nights she had replayed their lovemaking in her head. So many days too. Always it was there, in the back of her mind. Always he was there, in the back of her mind.
His lips continued their caresses down her body, over her navel and down to her abdomen.
Her breaths shortened and she closed her eyes. When he dipped his head even lower and pressed his mouth against her, she sighed and relaxed into his erotic ministrations.
His movements were languid, his tongue pressing against the very core of her pleasure as if he had all the time in the world. Yet as she felt the tension within her grow, his breathing deepened. The fingers holding her hips tightened their grip and bit deliciously into her flesh.
The almost painful tension grew until it reached a peak. As her body exploded in a delight of shimmering ripples, she knew this was one intimacy she would never share with anyone else.
This was all for him.
Nathaniel felt the change happen. She’d writhed quietly beneath him, hardly making a sound, and then her body lifted as if she was rising off the bed and she released a long, quiet moan.
After a few, silent moments, her head lifted off the pillow and her eyes opened. Catalina gazed at him with a smile of wonder.
Another sigh flew from her mouth and her head flopped back down to the pillow. ‘You’re amazing,’ she said in a breathless whisper.
A gripping sensation caught in his chest, his erratic heart pumping harder than he had ever known.
There was nothing special about desire but his desire for Catalina...it was as if his blood had been injected with a pure dose of longing, a total undiluted concentration he had no control over. He had never wanted to possess someone so much.
Snaking his tongue back up over her creamy skin, over her softly rounded stomach and in the valley between her breasts, inhaling the glorious scent that drove him so crazy, he captured her mouth for a kiss.
Her hands flew to his head and gripped his hair. Her legs parted, her thighs raised and hooked around his and, without any guidance from either of them, he was inside her in one deep thrust.
She cried out into his mouth and it was the sweetest sound he had ever heard.
He raised himself enough to gaze into her eyes, and they began to move as one, in perfect unity.
A perfect fit. It was as if their bodies had been especially tuned to each other.
A languidness took over him; he was filled with the desire to make this last as long as it could, to exult in every sensation.
Because he had never felt anything like it. The sensation was in every part of him.
He didn’t want it to end. He could gaze into her eyes that widened with every slow thrust, listen to her soft moans, kiss her sweet lips and slide deep into her tightness for ever and a day.
He felt her pleasure grow. Her breaths shallowed and became little gasps as she thickened around him. Her head tipped back, exposing her neck, and her grasp on his hair strengthened as the pulsations inside her pulled him so deeply into her that he couldn’t hold back any longer. With a cry that seemed to come from his very heart, he flew over the edge, thrusting into her one final time. His senses exploded and engulfed him, taking him far away...but taking her there with him, where they were together as one.
For the longest time they lay there, fused together, the only sound their shortened breaths. He could feel her heart through his chest, thrumming against his own, the most perfect feeling in the world.
Eventually he lifted his head and rested his elbows on either side of her face to stare at her. Then he kissed her one last time before reluctantly moving and gathering her to him.
Wrapped in each other’s arms, they drifted off to sleep.
* * *
A compression in the bed woke her.
Catalina opened her eyes. Her limbs felt heavy. Wonderfully heavy.
Turning her head, she saw it was eight a.m.
She had woken a number of times throughout the night. As if he were on the same sleeping pattern, Nathaniel had woken too. There had been no words, just an almost drugged sense of their lips coming together and then a fusing of their bodies until they were sated.
Now she looked up and smiled, reaching out a hand to palm his cheek.
He was perched on the bed beside her, a glass of water in hand, his brown hair mussed. She brushed her thumb against the stubble on his jawline, her heart racing at the feel of the heat of his skin. She could smell the muskiness of their lovemaking on him.
Their first night together had been special. Not only had it been her first time with a man but also the first time she had ever done anything remotely out of line with what was expected of her. The fear of getting caught had hung in the room with them.
Last night had been something else entirely. There had been no fear. Just bliss. It wasn’t just the intimacy of what he had done with his tongue that she didn’t want to share with anyone else. It was all of it.
He was gazing at her, a question in his eyes. She stared back, taking in every line on his rugged, handsome face.
She knew what the query in his eyes meant.
Did he sense her shifting feelings...?
‘Is this the moment you remind me we have a plane to catch?’ she said, keeping her voice light.
He turned and kissed her palm, his eyes crinkling with the relief she hadn’t known she’d been dreading. ‘Can you be ready to leave in an hour?’