LUC watched Gabrielle closely from across the small table at the famous Ivy restaurant in Beverly Hills, drumming his fingers against the white linen tabletop. He tried to keep his temper under control, but he could feel it bubbling up, threatening to erupt.
He could not allow that. Not in a place he had chosen because it was so public, so exposed. He kept a lid on his fury.
Barely.
She had done as he asked. She’d smiled for the scrum of photographers who camped out in front of the Los Angeles landmark, and had even laughed with every indication of delight when Luc had kissed her in a shower of flashbulbs.
So calculated, he thought now. Though another part of him argued that she had only done what he’d told her to do.
Now she sat facing him, her mysterious calm smile locked across her mouth, looking as if she was having a marvelous time trying to pick out celebrities from the crowd around them on the outdoor patio.
He found it infuriating.
He wanted to mess up her perfection, wreck that serene countenance—see what boiled underneath all that bland politeness. Because he’d already had a taste of it, and it had sent a dark need raging through his blood.
“It appears you are quite an actress after all,” he said, pitching his voice low enough to reach her ears but go no further. He watched her stiffen, though her smile did not falter. Just as she’d done at their wedding reception, she managed to avoid broadcasting even the slightest hint of any internal discomfort.
“If you mean that I know how to behave in public, then, yes, I am,” she said. Her voice was smooth, though her chin rose slightly in challenge. “I always assumed that was a result of good breeding.”
“The same good breeding that inspired you to abandon your own wedding reception?” he asked smoothly. “How proud your father was of that display.”
He could see her response in the quiver of her lips and the tense stillness of her body—but, even so, to the untrained eye she might have been discussing the perfect California night that held them both in its soft, warm cocoon.
“That was an aberration,” she said. Through her teeth.
“Lucky me.”
“Tell me,” she invited him, leaning close so he could see the storm in her sea-colored eyes, which pleased him more than it should have, “what would you have done in my position?”
“I would have honored my promises,” he replied at once, harshly.
“How easy for you to say.” She took a ragged breath. “How easy for you to criticize something you know nothing about.”
“Then tell me about it,” he suggested, sitting back in his chair. “We have an entire dinner to get through, Gabrielle, and then the rest of our lives. If there is something you feel I should know, you have all the time in the world to explain it to me. Who knows?” He smiled slightly. Coolly. “I might even see your point of view.”
“You will never see my point of view,” she snapped back at him, surprising him. “You have no interest in why I left—you only care that it injured your pride. Your image! What explanation could possibly soothe the wounded pride of a powerful man?”
Luc definitely did not care for the sarcastic tone she used. But he watched her until she glanced away, one hand moving to her throat.
“You will never know unless you try,” he said. Daring her.
“My father has had very specific expectations of me ever since I was a girl,” she told him after a moment. Reluctantly. “He was—is—a hard man to please, but I tried. I got only top marks at university. I bowed to his wishes and became active on the charity circuit, supporting the causes he thought best instead of using my degree to help him run our country. He did not want his Crown Princess involved in matters of state unless it was to plan events or throw parties. Whatever he wished, I did.”
“Go on,” he urged when she paused again. He tried to picture a young, motherless Gabrielle, growing up in the shadow of her grim, humorless father, and found he did not like the image he conjured up. He wasn’t sure he believed it, either. Surely the obedient child she described would not have run off the way she had?
“It’s not such an interesting story, really,” she said, refolding the napkin on her lap. “I tried my best to please my father up until the day he married me off to a man I’d never met without so much as asking me my opinion on the match.” Her shoulders squared. She looked at him, bravely, and then away. “I felt as if the world was closing in on me. Trapping me. I didn’t mean to leave you like that—but I had to go or be swallowed whole.”
“And you couldn’t speak to me about it.” He tried to keep his voice light, but she glanced at him nervously and he knew he’d failed. “You couldn’t ask for my help.”
“Ask for your help?” She looked mystified by the very idea.
She actually let out a startled laugh. “I wouldn’t …” She shook her head. “You were a stranger,” she said, frowning. “How could I explain this to you when it wasn’t personal at all, and yet involved you all the same?”
Part of him wanted to rage at her—to demand that she acknowledge that she should have run to him, not from him—but he clamped down on it. Why was he so quick to believe this story? Poor little lost princess, desperate to please her autocratic father. It was the story of every rich, entitled noble he’d ever met in one form or another, and yet somehow Gabrielle had found a way to splash them both across a thousand glossy tabloids—something no other woman had managed in a very long time. She claimed it had been unconsciously done on her part—he thought it far more likely a deliberate act. Her first chance for a full-scale rebellion, for all the world to see. Maybe the perfect princess had indeed chafed against her role—but not in the way she claimed tonight. Perhaps the tabloids had been the best weapon she could come up with, and he the best victim.
“I am your husband,” he said, as mildly as he could, his gaze trained on her face. “It is my duty to protect you.”
“Even from yourself?” she asked wryly.
He did not respond—he only watched her reach for her wineglass, tracking the slight tremor in her hand. She pressed the glass to her lips. Luc wondered how he could find such a simple gesture so erotic when he wasn’t sure a single word she spoke was the truth. She was a liar—she had deceived him and made a mockery of him in front of the world—and still he wanted her.
He wanted her—needed her—with a fury he could neither explain nor deny. It had started as he’d watched her smile her way through a week in Nice, had simmered as she’d walked toward him down the aisle in Miravakia, and had only been stoked to an inferno in her absence. Now that he had tracked her down she was so close to him—just across the tiny table—and he burned.
“I am no threat to you,” he told her, though he knew he made himself a liar as he said it. He didn’t care.
Her eyes met his, large and knowing across the table.
“You’ll forgive me, I think,” she said, with that same wry twist of her mouth, turning his own words back on him, “if somehow I cannot quite believe you.”
The dinner passed in a strange, tense bubble. Gabrielle was aware of far too much—the scrape of her blouse against her overheated skin, the swell of her breasts against the silky material of her bra, the rush of warm, fragrant air into her lungs, and always Luc’s inflexible, brooding presence that she was convinced she could feel. He was too big for the table—he overwhelmed it, his long legs brushing up against hers at odd, shocking intervals, his body seeming to block out the night. She could see, taste, only Luc. She barely touched her plate of grilled shrimp, and was startled when the waiter brought them both coffee.
“You don’t care for coffee?” Luc asked, in that smooth voice that sounded so polite and yet set off every alarm in her body.
She kept herself from squirming in her seat only with the most iron control.
“What makes you say that?” she asked, stalling. She picked up her cup and blew on the hot liquid, wishing she could cool herself as easily.
“You made a face,” he said. “Or I should say you almost made a face? You are, of course, too well trained to make one in public.”
“I don’t think I did anything of the kind,” she said stiffly, aware that he was toying with her, yet unable to do anything but respond as he intended. It made her feel annoyed at herself. As if she was a mouse too close to the claws of a cat.
“I am beginning to understand the intricacies of your public face,” he told her, eyeing her over his own coffee. His gaze was neither kind nor cutting, but it made Gabrielle shiver slightly. She decided to blame the slight breeze. “Soon enough I will be able to read you, and what will you do then?”
“If you could read me,” she replied lightly, “you would not have to wonder if I was lying to you.”
“There is that.”
“Then I hope you’re a quick study,” she threw at him, riding the wave of emotion that flashed through her.
“Oh, I am,” he promised her, his dark voice hinting at things she was sure she didn’t want to understand. Their eyes met and her breath caught—and then his gaze traveled over her mouth, pointedly.
Gabrielle swallowed and put her coffee down.
“Are you finished?” he nearly purred, raising a hand to signal the waiter. He never looked away from her face. “We can head home whenever you like.”
Head home? she repeated to herself. Together?
That was impossible. Surely he didn’t expect …?
“Home?” she echoed nervously. “You mean Cassandra’s house?”
“Is that her name?” He sounded bored. And also amused.
“Surely you have a hotel somewhere?” she said.
His lips twitched. “I own a number of hotels,” he said. “Most of them in Asia—though there are a few in France and Italy as well. None in this country.”
“That’s not what I mean,” she said crossly. “You can’t stay at Cassandra’s house with—with—” She cut herself off. Flustered.
“With you?” He finished for her, his gaze enigmatic. “Can’t I?”
“Of course not. That’s ridiculous. We are not …” She looked down at her lap and saw her hands had curled into fists. Resolutely, she unclenched them both and placed them before her on the table, like a civilized person. “And you can’t think that we—”
“I meant what I said earlier,” Luc said—so unbending, so resolute. His gaze serious. “I expect you to be my wife—in every sense of the term.”
“You’re insane!” she whispered, too overwrought to scream as she wanted to do. Though she felt the force of it as if she had made enough noise to tear at her throat. Or perhaps that was the other part of her—the part that was fascinated by him? The part that secretly wanted to be his wife, in every sense of the term, just as he’d said. She drew in a jagged breath.
“Tell yourself whatever you need to tell yourself, Gabrielle,” he threw back at her, his dark eyes glittering. He leaned forward, seeming to loom over the table, dwarfing her before him. “You play the offended innocent so well, but you’re fooling no one.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she blustered, with all the bravado she could summon.
“All I have to do is touch you,” Luc murmured, reaching over and capturing her hand with his. He laced his fingers with hers—the contact shocking, intimate. Flesh against flesh. Electricity leapt between them, igniting her blood—making her gasp. Her breasts felt heavy, and once more she felt that hot, wet need between her legs.
His dark eyes shone with a hard, masculine triumph.
“And again,” he said quietly, with an intense satisfaction that she couldn’t mistake, “you are made a liar.”
Outside the restaurant, Gabrielle fought for composure while Luc called for his driver.
She wanted to rage at Luc—for his high-handedness, for his ruthlessness, but most of all because she feared that he knew things about her body, about her, that she was afraid to discover.
She knew she could not survive this. Him. No matter how loudly her body clamored, no matter the searing ache radiating out from her core. He would change her, mark her. She couldn’t let it happen—and yet, as he had proved, all he had to do was lay his fingers against hers and her body betrayed her in an instant.
She was desperate.
But she had to keep her plastic, perfect smile on her face, no matter what. She had to act delighted when Luc returned to her side, and she had to gaze at him adoringly as they waited for the car. All of which she executed flawlessly, as if she really was the carefree new bride he wanted her to be.
What would it be like if I was that blissful new bride? a traitorous voice whispered. If she had not run—if she had stayed with him that evening—where would they be now?
Gabrielle shook the disturbing questions away, and concentrated on maintaining her composure. Luc accused her of being an actress, as if it was something shameful, but he was lucky she’d had the training she’d had. Without it she might have shattered into pieces right there on the street and left it to the photographers to clean up the mess.
“Finally,” Luc said, much closer than she’d expected, as his sleek black car approached the curb.
His lips barely touched the delicate shell of her ear, and yet she felt the hot lash of desire spike in her belly and then flood through her body. She hated that he affected her this way. She hated that her knees weakened at the thought of the night to come, even when her mind balked.
There would be no night to come. She barely knew the man! She’d been in his company for all of six hours in total—including their wedding! He was delusional if he thought she would leap into bed with him—no matter if he was, technically, her husband. No matter if her own body seemed to want him in ways she was afraid to explore.
She knew that she would be burned without recognition—forever altered—if he got his way, and she could not allow it to happen. She had to hold on to what little sense of self she’d somehow wrested from the ruins of the last week—from her whole previous life as a dutiful, controlled princess. It was as if she’d finally woken up from a very long bad dream, and here was a nightmare in human form, threatening to suck her back down under.
But she kept her smile firmly in place as Luc handed her into the backseat of the luxurious sedan. She opened her mouth to thank him, but his attention was caught by one of the men standing in the pack of photographers jostling for position around the car.
Luc stiffened almost imperceptibly, and the harsh curve of his mouth went glacial. It was frightening to watch—though Gabrielle allowed herself a quick moment of relief that he was not looking at her that way. As if he would like to tear the man apart with his bare hands, and was strongly considering doing so.
“Silvio—what a delightful surprise,” Luc said in deeply sardonic Italian. “What brings you to California? A vacation?”
However angry he had been with her—and was still—Gabrielle knew he had never used that horribly cold, vicious tone before. Not on her. Not yet. She shivered. The other man, obviously a paparazzo if the camera slung across his neck was any indication, seemed oblivious. He even smiled at Luc, a bland and casual smile that drew attention to his cold eyes, as if he could not sense the danger.
“Where my prince goes, I follow,” he replied in the same language, his mockery all too evident. “How’s married life treating you, Luc? Is it all you dreamed now that you’ve finally run her to ground?”
“And more,” Luc said, baring his teeth. “I’m sure I’ll see you around.”
“You can count on it,” Silvio shot back.
“I always do,” Luc retorted, that feral smile in place.
Then, much worse, he climbed into the car next to Gabrielle, closed the door, and turned all that icy ferocity on her.