Читать книгу The Mills & Boon Stars Collection - Мишель Смарт, Cathy Williams - Страница 50
ОглавлениеRAFE WAS WOKEN by the insistent sound of his phone vibrating and he stifled a groan as he picked it up. It was one of several he owned but the only one whose number was given to those closest to him. He glanced at the flashing screen to see that it was William, one of his assistants, calling from New York. He frowned. William was in a completely different time zone and had strict instructions not to disturb him unless absolutely necessary.
He hit the button and waited.
‘Rafe?’
‘Of course it’s me! Who else did you think it would be? It’s five o’clock in the flaming morning!’ Rafe answered, his mood not enhanced by the sight of Sophie’s discarded swimsuit lying on the floor of the en-suite bathroom. Or by the fact that an image of her face had been haunting him for hours, meaning that he’d only fallen into a fitful sleep a restless hour ago.
A rush of heat flooded through his groin as he remembered the sex of the night before. Remembered her beautiful body laid out like a feast on top of his sheets with those big blue eyes looking up at him and her long legs parted in invitation. And she had been a virgin, he reminded himself grimly. She hadn’t bothered telling him that before she had thrust her wet breasts against him in the swimming pool, had she?
Because women had their secrets, he thought bitterly. Every damned one of them keeping stuff hidden away and not caring about the consequences.
And sometimes their secrets became your secrets and they gnawed away deep inside you until there was nothing but a dark and empty hole.
He sat up, his fingers tightening around the phone. ‘I thought I told you I wasn’t to be disturbed unless absolutely necessary,’ he bit out.
His assistant’s voice grew serious. ‘This is very necessary, Rafe.’
Rafe stilled, because even though he came from the world’s most dysfunctional family, they were still family. Yet if somebody was ill, it wouldn’t be his assistant ringing him. It would be Amber, or one of his half-brothers, surely. ‘What’s the matter?’ he demanded. ‘Is someone sick?’
‘No. Nobody’s sick.’
‘What, then?’ questioned Rafe impatiently.
There was a split-second pause. ‘That girl you’ve got working at the station.’
‘Sophie,’ said Rafe instantly and then could have cursed himself. Surely he should have taken longer than a nanosecond to recall the name of one of his itinerant workers. ‘The cook.’
‘She’s not a cook.’
‘She may have only the most basic of culinary skills, but I can assure you she most certainly is.’
‘She’s a princess.’
There was a pause. ‘William, have you been drinking?’
‘She’s a princess from Isolaverde,’ his assistant continued doggedly. ‘One of the world’s richest islands. Gold, diamonds, petroleum, natural gas, uranium. They hold some international yacht race every year. They’ve even—’
‘I get the idea, William. And I’ve heard of it. Get on with it.’
‘She’s young and beautiful—’
You’re telling me. ‘The facts,’ bit out Rafe.
‘She was engaged to some prince. Prince Luciano of Mardovia—known as Luc. Bit of a player—lived on another Mediterranean island—known each other since they were kids. Just before the engagement was due to be announced he goes and makes some English dressmaker pregnant. Big scandal. He was forced to marry the dressmaker—so the wedding with Princess Sophie had to be called off. And that’s when she disappeared.’
‘Disappeared?’ repeated Rafe slowly, his mind spinning as he tried to get his head round the relevant facts. Not just the fact that the name Luc rang a distant bell in his memory, but a far more worrying one. He’d just had sex with a virgin princess?
‘Into thin air. She ran away. Or rather, flew away. Nobody really knew about it because her brother instigated an information lockdown. And no one had any idea where she was. At least, not until now.’ Another pause. ‘They know she’s at Poonbarra, Rafe.’
‘And how...?’ Rafe drew in a deep breath. ‘How the hell do they know that?’
‘Seems like Eileen Donahue—that’s the woman who runs the general store in Corksville—recognised Sophie yesterday. Said she was, and I quote, “All dolled up for a change” and that she seemed “familiar”. So she looked her up on the Internet—and what do you know? Sophie is familiar. She’s royal, no less. Eileen contacted one of the papers in Brisbane and I’m afraid the rest is exactly how you imagine it would be. The journalists did their research and I’m ringing to say that you can expect a deputation of the world’s press on your doorstep before too long.’
Rafe’s fingers clasped the phone so tightly that he heard his knuckles crack. ‘That can’t be allowed to happen, William,’ he said in a low voice. ‘I don’t want a circus invading town. Poonbarra is a place of privacy. The one place in the world where I am guaranteed peace. I want you to kill this story and I want you to kill it now.’
‘I don’t see how that’s going to be possible, boss. It’s already got legs.’
‘Well, just get me out of here before they arrive.’ Rafe’s voice was cold.
There was a pause. ‘Let me see what I can do.’
Rafe swore as he cut the connection and resisted the desire to crush the phone in the palm of his hand. Pushing back the sheet, he got out of bed, trying to temper his mood and think rationally—even though all he wanted to do was storm through the homestead to find Sophie Doukas and give her a piece of his mind. Another wave of anger enveloped him. Not only had she kept her innocence secret, but she’d omitted to tell him that she was a royal. A royal on the run! Deceitful woman. Scheming woman.
Anger and resentment washed over him but he could still smell her on his skin and taste her in his mouth and it was tantalising and distracting. Even the thought of her was making his body grow hard, so he forced himself to stand beneath the icy jets of the shower, which did little to cool his heated blood. Dragging a razor across his jaw, he somehow managed to nick his skin in the process and that only increased his frustration.
Pulling on a shirt and a pair of trousers, he went looking for her but, since it wasn’t quite six, the house was completely silent and there were no sounds of clatter coming from the kitchen. His rage mounting, he strode along the quiet corridors—forcing himself to knock on her door even though part of him just wanted to kick it open in a primitive way, which was not his usual style at all.
She was already up and dressed and answered the knock immediately but her eyes were hooded and cautious when she saw it was him. She was wearing a pair of shapeless cotton trousers and a T-shirt, yet all he could think about was the magnificence of her naked body and the way she’d cried out when he’d opened her legs and entered her. And once again he was furious with himself for the hot surge of lust which flooded through his bloodstream, knowing that he should be concentrating on her lies and subterfuge, not her undeniable physical appeal.
‘Rafe,’ she said, her fingers flying to the base of her throat where he could see a small pulse hammering.
‘Oh, don’t worry,’ he said, with a disdainful curl of his lips. ‘I haven’t come here for sex.’
‘Oh? Then why have you come here?’
She tilted her chin in a defiant gesture and suddenly Rafe wondered how he could have been so dense. Of course she was someone—hadn’t that been apparent from the start? A diamond in the rough—that had been his initial reaction on seeing her and he had been right. And when he stopped to think about it, her high-born status had been apparent in every gesture she made. It had been there in the way she moved and the way she walked. In her flawless skin and heart-shaped face and the thick, lustrous bounce of her hair. She was a princess. Of course she was. A runaway virgin princess who had chosen him as her first lover.
Why?
‘I’m still trying to get my head around what happened last night,’ he said. ‘About the fact that you let a virtual stranger take your virginity. And wondering if there’s anything else you’ve omitted to tell me?’
Sophie went very still, because something in his eyes told her the game was up—but still she clung to her fake freedom for a few last, precious seconds. She tried to convince herself it was her own guilty conscience making her think he’d found out who she really was—but that was impossible. Just because he’d been deep inside her body the night before, didn’t mean he’d suddenly developed the ability to read her mind, did it? How could he possibly know?
‘Like what?’ she questioned nonchalantly.
Her words seemed to make something inside him snap and he took a step towards her. ‘Oh, sweetheart,’ he said softly. ‘Why do women find it impossible to give a straight answer? Why is deceit always their default setting? I gave you the chance to tell me the truth, but surprise surprise—you chose not to take it. I’m talking about the fact that you’re a princess—and that the world’s press know you’re here.’
‘No,’ she whispered, her fingers moving from her neck to her lips.
‘Yes,’ he said grimly.
She shook her head. ‘They can’t know. I’ve been here for months and been left in peace. How...how did they find out?’
‘Apparently, the woman who runs the store at Corksville recognised you.’
And Sophie could have wept. How could she have been so stupid? Why hadn’t she just behaved the same way she’d always behaved with her nondescript clothes and her hair hidden beneath a big hat? But, no. Rafe Carter had returned and the lure of feminine pride had been too strong to resist. For once she’d worn a dress. For once she’d applied mascara and left her hair loose. Vanity and desire had been her downfall. She had discarded her habitual disguise and someone had identified her. She had nobody to blame but herself.
But her regret was fleeting. There was no time for regrets. No time for anything except to work out what she did next.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘It’s a bit late for that,’ he snapped.
‘What else do you expect me to say?’ she said, and walked back inside her bedroom. ‘Excuse me. I have a lot to do.’
But Rafe had followed her and was reaching out to catch hold of her wrist, and even in the middle of all her confusion and fear—even in the middle of all that—she could still feel her hotly instinctive response to his touch. She wanted him to pull her close. To kiss her again. To put his tongue inside her mouth and his erection deep inside her body and make her feel all those things he’d made her feel last night.
‘What I can’t work out is how you got here,’ he bit out. ‘A royal princess travelling all the way from Isolaverde to the east coast of Australia without anyone knowing.’
Sophie snatched her hand away and stared at the faint imprint his fingers had left on her wrist. Her journey here seemed like a dream now. Like something out of an adventure film. But why not tell him? Surely it would reinforce the fact that she had been brave and resilient—and she could be those things all over again if only she believed in herself.
‘The man I was meant to marry made another woman pregnant.’
‘So my assistant just informed me.’
Sophie’s mouth pleated in dismay as she experienced that old familiar feeling of people talking about her behind her back. ‘It was the biggest outrage to happen in years and everyone seemed to have an opinion about it,’ she continued. ‘It was claustrophobic on the island and I knew I had to get away. No bodyguards or ladies-in-waiting, or people fussing round me. I just wanted to be on my own for the first time in my life, to lick my wounds and decide what I wanted to do next. But more than that, I wanted to feel like a normal person for once. To shake off all the royal trappings and do something on my own.’
‘I’m not interested in the pop psychology behind your actions,’ he said coldly. ‘More the practicalities.’
‘My brother was away on a hunting trip,’ she said slowly. ‘So I left him a note saying I was leaving and not to try to find me. And then I persuaded one of the palace pilots to fly me to the west coast of the USA.’
He frowned. ‘How the hell did you persuade him to do that?’
She shrugged. ‘It shouldn’t take too much of a stretch of your imagination to work it out. I made it worth his while.’
‘Of course you did. And you would have needed to pay him a lot of money,’ he said cynically. ‘Since presumably smuggling you out of there meant the end of his flying career at the palace?’
‘I didn’t force him to agree!’ She felt a sudden flicker of rebellion. ‘He was happy to do it.’
‘So what happened next?’ he said, in a hard voice.
‘He took me to one of the smaller Californian ports and introduced me to a friend of his—a man named Travis Matthews—who had a boat big enough to cross the Pacific. And that’s what I did.’
Now he was staring at her in disbelief. ‘You crossed the Pacific?’
‘I’m a good sailor,’ she said defensively. ‘I love boats more than anything. And there was a crew of six, so I was just an extra. It took us weeks. It was...’
As her voice faltered he frowned. ‘It was what?’
Sophie swallowed. This had been the bit she hadn’t counted on. The bit which had soothed her wounded ego and hurt pride and put it all in perspective. The sheer beauty of being that far out at sea—the ever-changing ocean and the bright stars at night. And a sense of freedom she’d never known before. It had been a heady experience and one she would never forget.
She looked at the sculpted lines of Rafe’s hard face, at the steely grey eyes, which last night had darkened with hunger, yet today were glittering with fury. Why tell him things which would bore him rigid? Stick to the facts, she told herself fiercely. The practicalities.
‘It was an interesting experience,’ she said.
‘And when you got to Australia? What then?’
She shrugged. ‘We docked at Cairns where Travis had a contact of his pick me up and drive me out this way. En route I stopped off at a store and bought an entire new wardrobe.’
‘Discount clothes?’ he questioned dryly, with a sardonic glance at her outfit.
‘Exactly that. Nothing which could possibly identify me.’ Reflectively she rubbed the hem of her cheap T-shirt between thumb and forefinger. ‘And you know what? That was a liberation, too. Putting on something which was indistinguishable from what the woman at the checkout was wearing made me feel that I was the same as everyone else for the first time in my life.’
Rafe shook his head. ‘Except that most women at the checkout don’t have a multimillion-dollar trust fund bolstering up their little adventures,’ he said sarcastically, before something occurred to him. Something which chimed with the nagging memory in his mind. ‘Did you know this was my cattle station?’
She hesitated and he saw an uncomfortable look cross her face. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘No more lies or evasion, Sophie,’ he bit out. ‘Just tell me the truth.’
‘Yes, I’d heard about your station.’
‘How?’
She shrugged. ‘The man I was supposed to marry is called Prince Luc and your sister Amber’s husband is an art dealer who once sold him a painting. Luc was telling me about Conall Devlin marrying into the Carter family—about how you’re all scattered across the world and how none of you conform. He mentioned that you were some bigshot entrepreneur who had a huge cattle station.’
‘And you liked the sound of me, did you?’ he questioned arrogantly.
‘Hardly,’ came her frosty retort. ‘The thing that attracted me was the fact that you were never here. I knew from talking to Travis that most cattle stations employed a cook and that I could probably teach myself.’
‘But we already had a cook working here,’ he said.
She flushed a little. ‘I know you did. But I met her for a drink and...’
‘Let me guess. You offered her money to go earlier than planned?’
Flushing a little, she nodded. ‘That’s right.’
‘Oh, Sophie. How easy it is for you to delude yourself,’ he said softly. ‘For all your commendable announcements about wanting to be the same as everyone else, it must give you a pretty big buzz to realise you can buy pretty much anything you want if you throw enough money at it.’
‘Are you telling me you’ve never used your own fortune to do exactly the same?’
Rafe stiffened as he met the challenge in her eyes and an unwanted feeling of regret coursed through him. How would she react if he told her that the only things he’d ever wanted were things which money could never buy? Things which could never have a price attached to them. Things he had lost and could never get back. He shook his head. ‘This is your story, not mine,’ he said bitterly. ‘Get on with it.’
‘I’ve told you everything you need to know.’ She walked over to the top of the wardrobe to pull down a huge rucksack, which she threw on top of the bed. ‘Just console yourself with the fact that you won’t have to put up with me for much longer!’
‘What do you think you’re doing?’
‘What does it look like I’m doing? I’m leaving. I can’t stay here,’ she said, tugging open a drawer and pulling out a stack of T-shirts, which she began to layer haphazardly in the rucksack. ‘If I stay it’ll be too much hassle for you.’
‘Oh, please. Spare me the spin. I don’t imagine you’re leaving out of the goodness of your heart, are you, little Miss Princess?’
Sophie heard the venom in his voice and thought about the way he’d touched her last night. The way he’d made her feel so safe and protected. As if she was capable of anything. She remembered the way she’d trembled with delight as he’d explored her skin with his fingers and his mouth. The way she’d gasped with pleasure with each deep stroke he’d made. She had taken a long time to have sex for reasons which were complex and unique, but Rafe Carter had been the perfect lover—even if now he was looking at her as if she were something he’d found squashed beneath the sole of his shoe.
And surely what happened last night had been about more than sexual liberation. She had given herself to him freely—so didn’t that give her the right to treat him as an equal and be treated as an equal herself?
‘Is it fair to criticise me because I was born with a title?’ she said. ‘Something which is completely outside my control.’
‘Would you prefer that I criticised you for your deceit instead? For failing to tell me who you really were?’
‘But I couldn’t tell you,’ she said simply. ‘How could I? I couldn’t tell anyone—it would have made it impossible for me to stay here. Surely you can see that. It would have altered everything.’
‘And of course, if you’d told me, particularly the part about your lack of sexual experience...’ his eyes glinted ‘...then at least I would have had a choice about whether I wanted to be used as an experimental lover in your big round-the-world adventure.’
‘It wasn’t like that!’ she said fiercely.
‘No? You chose me because we’d forged a deep bond in less than a week of knowing one another?’
‘I actually wasn’t analysing it very much at all—I was just going with the flow. And aren’t you forgetting that there were two people involved in what happened?’ she questioned quietly. ‘Or just preferring to forget your part in it?’
‘So what was it? Did I tick all the right boxes, Sophie?’ He began to tap each one of his fingers in turn. ‘Rich, single, hot and therefore the perfect candidate to give the rejected royal her first taste of sexual pleasure?’
Flinging a belt on top of the T-shirts, Sophie lifted her head, grabbing at the streak of anger which flashed through her because surely anger was better than buckling under these sudden feelings of vulnerability and sadness which were bubbling up inside her. ‘You bastard,’ she whispered shakily, but Rafe Carter didn’t look in the least bit shocked by her first ever public use of a swear word. The only emotion she could see flickering in his hard grey eyes was bitter cynicism.
‘Yeah. For a while I was exactly that. A bastard,’ he drawled. ‘My father didn’t marry my mother until three days after I was born. As it turned out, they should never have bothered.’
His phone started to vibrate in his pocket and he slid it out to take the call, listening in silence as Sophie continued to pack the rucksack.
‘Where are you planning to go?’ he questioned, once the connection had been cut.
She didn’t look up, terrified now that her vulnerability would be impossible to hide. ‘I haven’t really thought about it.’
‘Well, start thinking!’ He felt a flicker of temper. ‘You’re not protected by your royal status now, Sophie. You’re out in the middle of Queensland with a limited choice of transport available, no matter how much money you’re suddenly able to produce. That was my assistant on the phone. He says your presence in my Outback home is generating a lot of interest on a quiet news day—not least because I’m just about to mount a bid for one of Malaysia’s biggest cell-phone networks and there’s been a lot of opposition to the deal.’ His mouth twisted. ‘So thanks very much for that.’
‘I’m sorry this has impacted on you because it was never intended to,’ she said. ‘But I’ll be out of your life soon, Rafe. You can put all this down to experience and forget it ever happened. Which is precisely what you wanted in the first place, isn’t it?’
She zipped up the rucksack and swept her tumbled hair away from flushed cheeks and Rafe was reminded of the way she’d moved over him the night before. He remembered the brush of her pubic hair as he’d tangled his fingers in it. The beat of her heart and how tight she’d felt. The way he’d kissed away her cries of pleasure. And damn it if he couldn’t feel the sudden debilitating jerk of sexual desire as he visualised pushing her down on that bed and ripping open the ugly cotton trousers and doing it to her all over again.
‘If only it was that easy,’ he growled. ‘What do you think it’s going to do for my reputation if I leave you here to fend for yourself among the rabble of newshounds who are due to arrive?’
‘Heaven forbid I might damage your reputation!’
‘You might not care about my reputation, sweetheart, but I do. And I’m not letting you go anywhere on your own.’
She tilted her chin in defiance. ‘That sounds awfully like an order to me.’
‘At least that’s something you’ve got right. Because if that’s what it takes to make you see sense, then it’s an order.’ His eyes bored into her. ‘What’s the matter, Little Princess? Not used to somebody else telling you what to do?’
She stared at the door behind him, as if planning to make a rush for it. ‘If you must know, I’ve spent my whole life being told what I can and can’t do and this is the first time I’ve ever been able to decide things on my terms. So please don’t trouble yourself with concerns about my personal safety, Rafe. I can have some Isolaverdian bodyguards sent out here to look after me.’
‘And how long is that going to take?’ he demanded. ‘Even if your rarefied palace protection people knew how to cope with life in the bush, which I doubt. The situation could dissolve into complete farce with people suffering from heatstroke or getting spooked by some animal they’ve never seen before, or worse. Is that what you want?’
Sophie bit her lip. She didn’t know what she wanted. Well, in a stupid way she did. She wanted to rewind time so that she was back in his arms. She wanted to feel like a normal woman again. And that was never going to happen.
‘I don’t know,’ she admitted, hating the sudden break in her voice.
Rafe stiffened as he steeled himself against that unexpected trace of vulnerability. Because it was all an act, he reminded himself grimly. Everything about her was false. And until her playboy fiancé had jumped ship, she’d presumably been given everything she wanted, no matter how much she might protest otherwise. Well, she was about to learn that around here he was the one who called the shots.
‘You’re going to have to come with me,’ he said, an idea slowly forming in his head. ‘And perhaps we can each do one another a favour at the same time.’
‘Come where?’ She narrowed her eyes suspiciously. ‘And what kind of a favour?’
Rafe stared down at the bulging rucksack as it occurred to him that this—like all bad situations—could be turned into an advantage. Couldn’t the unbearable prospect of having to face Sharla again be diluted by taking Sophie to his nephew’s christening? Because the presence of a beautiful princess would easily trump the fact that one of the world’s most famous supermodels was going to be there.
Haunting him with what she’d done. Or, rather, what she had failed to do.
‘To England,’ he said. ‘I have a family christening I can’t get out of. This is the first time the Carters have been together in a long time and I’m not looking forward to it.’
‘Why not?’
‘Why is none of your business,’ he snapped. ‘Let’s just say that family reunions have never been my thing. But since there’s safety in numbers, you can be my plus one. You get safe passage out of here, and I get someone who can deflect some of the attention away from me.’
‘But I don’t want to go to England for a family christening—and I certainly don’t want to be your “plus one”.’
‘No? Then what else are you going to do?’
Sophie fished around for a suitable answer but with a sinking heart realised her options were limited. They always were. She didn’t want to go home—not right now, when the people of her country would still look at her with sympathy in their eyes. Yet anywhere else would only emphasise her lone status—especially around Christmas time. Wouldn’t travelling with Rafe stop the press from getting too close, while she decided what she was going to do next? Hadn’t she proved that she could cope with hard work and be resourceful? She was young and fit and there was a great big world out there. Why shouldn’t she use this opportunity to decide how best to embrace her new life?
She met the steely gleam of his eyes, thinking about the harsh things he’d said to her. She didn’t like him very much but something told her she’d be safe with him. Not because they shared a special connection because of what had happened last night, but because he was strong and powerful. A man like this could protect you, she thought wistfully. And he could make you want him, even if you knew that wanting him was the last thing you needed.
She could do nothing to stop the ripple of sexual awareness which had started spreading over her body but she did her best not to think about it. His offer made perfect sense but she could only accept it if she took it at face value. She would go along for the ride, but no further. She mustn’t start yearning for things Rafe Carter was never going to give her. Because even though he’d taken her to heaven and back last night, this morning his eyes were cold and unwelcoming.
He doesn’t much like you either, she thought.
And even though his opinion didn’t matter, wasn’t it funny how something like that could hurt?
