Rich, Ruthless and Secretly Royal

Hot with shame, she wanted to turn away, but Kelt held her gaze for a second, his own enigmatic and opaque.

However, when he spoke his voice was crisp and aloof. ‘If you need anything, let me know.’

It sounded like a classical double entendre; if he’d been Felipe it would have been.

It was time she stopped judging men by Felipe’s standards. The years in Tukuulu had shown her that most men were not like him, and there was no reason to believe that Kelt Gillan wasn’t a perfectly decent farmer with a face like one of the more arrogant gods, an overdeveloped protective instinct and more than his share of formidable male presence.

‘Thank you—I will,’ she said remotely.

And produced a smile she held until he’d swung up onto his horse and guided it away.

Her face felt frozen when she took refuge in the cottage and stood listening as the sound of hooves dwindled into the warm, sea-scented air. She shivered, crossing her arms and rubbing her hands over her prickling skin.

Again? she thought in mindless panic. The unbidden, unwanted surge of sensual appetite humiliated her. Why on earth was she attracted to dangerous men?

Not that she’d realised Felipe was dangerous when she first met him. And for some unfounded and quite illogical reason she couldn’t believe Kelt would turn out to be like Felipe.

As well, the heady clamour Kelt Gillan summoned in her was different—more earthy and primal, nothing like the fascinated excitement she’d felt when Felipe had pursued her. He’d seemed such a glamorous, fascinating man, with his French title and his famous friends. At eighteen she’d been so green she’d run headlong into peril without a second thought.

Six years older, and much better able to look after herself, she sensed a different danger in Kelt Gillan—a more elemental attraction without the calculation that had marked Felipe’s seduction.

Desperate to take her mind off her enigmatic landlord and his unnerving effect on her, she went across to the kitchen and put on the electric kettle.

‘Displacement activity,’ she said aloud, a mirthless smile curling her mouth as she spooned coffee into the plunger.

Wrapping her attraction to Felipe in a romantic haze had got her into deep trouble; this time she’d face her inconvenient response to Kelt Gillan squarely. Coffee mug in hand, she walked out onto the deck and stood looking out over the sea.

No emotions, no fooling herself that this was love, no silly claptrap about soulmates. She’d already been down that track and it had led to humiliation and heartbreak and terror. Felipe had played on her naivety, setting himself out to charm her into submission.

And succeeding utterly, so that she’d gradually been manipulated into an affair without fully realising where she was heading. When she’d realised what sort of man he was she’d tried to break away, only to have him bind her to him with the cruellest, most degrading chains. To free herself she’d had to sacrifice everything—self-respect, love for her brother, her very future.

Closing her eyes against the dazzling shimmer of the sun on the bay, she thought wearily that she hadn’t planned for her sacrifice to last the rest of her life.

In fact, she hadn’t planned on any further life.

Well, a Mediterranean fisherman with smuggling as a sideline had seen to it that she’d survived. She shivered, and for a foolish few seconds wondered if Kelt Gillan had brought on another attack of fever.

No, her chill was due to memories she wished she could banish.

Only right now she needed them to remind her that no person could ever see into the heart of another, especially when they were blinded by lust.

Ruthlessly she dragged her mind back to the present, and concentrated on the problem at hand—her feelings for Kelt Gillan.

‘Just think rationally,’ she told herself.

What she felt when she looked at Kelt was a powerful physical attraction for a man both formidable and enormously attractive—a primal arousal with a scientific basis. Humans instinctively recognised the people they’d make superb babies with.

Logic played no part in it, nor did common sense. But both could be used as weapons against it, and if she’d learned anything these past six years it was that any relationship between lovers needed much more than desire to be a success.

And there would be no babies for her, ever.

So she’d have dinner with Kelt and then she’d stay well away from him.

Hani missed the children the next day, and not for the first time wondered what on earth she was going to do for three months. Too many empty weeks stretched before her, leaving her far too much time to think, to remember. Without the steady routine of school she faced more than simple boredom; she’d have to deal with emptiness.

At least the cottage had a set of bookshelves stuffed with books of all ages and quite a few magazines. After a brief walk along the beach that reminded her again how unfit she was, she sank into a chair on the deck with a cup of tea and a volume on New Zealand that looked interesting.

She flicked it open and saw a bookplate. Kelt Crysander-Gillan, it stated.

‘Unusual,’ she said aloud. There was an inscription too, but she turned the page on that, feeling as though she was prying.

With a name like that, and if Kelt’s air of forceful authority had led to a nickname like The Duke, imaginative children could well come up with a crown-wearing grandmother somewhere in Europe.

At precisely seven o’clock he arrived to collect her as the sun was dipping behind the forest-covered mountains that ran down the central spine of Northland’s long, narrow peninsula. He drove a large, luxurious four-wheel-drive, which gave Hani a moment of heart-sickness; her brother used to drive the same make…

Hani pushed the thought to the back of her mind. Rafiq thought she was dead, and that was the way she had to stay.

And then Kelt got out, lithe and long-legged, powerfully magnetic and urbane in a short-sleeved shirt that echoed the steely colour of his eyes, and casually elegant trousers, and the bitter, heart-sick memories vanished, replaced by a reckless excitement.

When he opened the gate she went hastily out into the serene evening. The bach might be his, but she didn’t want to sense his dominating presence whenever she walked into the living room.

She knew she looked good. For an hour that afternoon she’d pored over her scanty wardrobe, startled to find herself wistfully remembering her favourites amongst the designer clothes she’d worn in her old life.

In the end she’d chosen a modest dress she’d found in a shop in Tukuulu’s small capital city. Although it was a little too loose on her, the clear salmon hue burnished the gold of her skin and the warm highlights in her dark hair.

Tempted to go without make-up, she decided after a critical survey of her reflection that a naked face might make her look conspicuous, and her security depended on blending in. So she compromised on lipstick a slightly deeper shade than her dress, and pinned her badly cut hair off her face with two frangipani clips made from the moonbeam shimmer of pearl shell.

Kelt waited for her beside the gate. Her shoulders held a little stiffly to hide an absurd self-consciousness, she walked towards him, sensing a darker, more elemental level beneath his coolly sophisticated exterior. Trying to ignore the smouldering need in the pit of her stomach, she saw him as a warrior, riding his big bay gelding into battle…

Not, she thought with an inner shiver, a man to cross swords with.

With a carefully neutral smile she met his gaze, and in a charged moment her wilful memory sabotaged the fragile veneer of her composure by supplying a repeat of how it had felt when he’d carried her—the powerful litheness of his gait, the subtle flexion of his body as he’d lifted her, his controlled strength…

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