Читать книгу A Throne for the Taking - Kate Walker - Страница 8

It’s not as if it’s a matter of life or death, Alexei had declared, the scorn in his voice lashing at her cruelly. But it would be if the situation in Mecjoria wasn’t resolved soon; if Ivan took over. The late King Felix might have been petty and mean but he was as nothing when compared to the tyrant who might inherit the throne from him. With a violent effort, Ria controlled the shiver of reaction that threatened her composure.

She hadn’t seen Alexei for ten years, but she had had close contact with his distant cousin Ivan in that time. And hadn’t enjoyed a moment of it. She’d watched Ivan grow from the sort of small boy who pulled wings off butterflies and kicked cats into a man whose volatile, mean-minded temper was usually only barely under control. He was aggressive, greedy, dangerous for the country—and now, she had learned to her horror, a danger to her personally as a result of her father’s machinations. And the only man between them and that possibility was Alexei.

But she knew how much she was asking of him. Especially now, when she knew how he still felt about Mecjoria.

‘Please listen!’

But his face was armoured against her, his eyes hooded, and she felt that every look she turned on him, every word she spoke, simply bounced off his thick skin like a pebble off an elephant’s hide.

‘Please?’ he echoed sardonically, his mouth twisting on the word as he turned it into a cruelly derisory echoing of her tone. ‘I didn’t even realise that you knew that word. Please what, Sweetheart?’

‘You don’t want to know.’

Bleak honesty made her admit it. She could read it in his face, in the cruel opacity of those coal-black eyes. There wasn’t the faintest sign of softening in his expression or any of the lines around his nose and mouth. How could he take a gentle word like ‘sweetheart’ and turn it into something hateful and vile with just his tone?

‘Oh, but I do,’ Alexei drawled, folding his arms across his broad chest and lounging back against the wall, one foot hooked round the base of the door so as to keep it open and so making it plain that he was still waiting—expecting her to leave. ‘I’d love to know just what you’ve come looking for.’

‘Really?’

Unexpected hope kicked hard in her heart. Had she got this all wrong, read him completely the wrong way round?

‘Really,’ he echoed sardonically. ‘It’s fascinating to see the tables turned. Remember how I once asked you for just one thing?’

He’d asked her to help him, and his mother. Asked her to talk to her father, plead with him to at least let them have something to live on, some part of his father’s vast fortune that the state had confiscated, leaving Alexei and his mother penniless as well as homeless. And not knowing the truth, not understanding the machinations of the plotters, or how sick his mother actually was, she had seen him as a threat and sided with her father.

‘I made a mistake …’ she managed. She’d known that her father was ruthless, ambitious, but she had never really believed that he would lie through his teeth, that he would manipulate an innocent woman and her son.

For the good of the country, Honoria, he had said. And, seeing the outrage Alexei’s wayward behaviour had created, she had believed him. Because she had trusted her father. Trusted him and believed in the values of upright behaviour, of loyalty to the crown that he’d insisted on. So she’d believed him when he’d told her how the scandal of Alexei’s mother’s ‘affair’ with one of the younger royal sons was creating problems of state. It was only now, years later, that she’d discovered how much further his deception had gone, and how it had involved her.

‘What is it, darling?’ Alexei taunted. ‘Not enjoying this?’

She saw the gleam of cruel amusement in his eyes, the fiendish smile curling the corners of the beautiful mouth. Each of them spoke of cold contempt, but together they spelled a callous triumph at the thought of getting her exactly where he wanted her. She knew now that this man would delight in rejecting anything she said, if only to have his revenge on the family that he saw as the ringleaders of his downfall. And who could blame him?

But would he do the same for his country?

‘It’s no fun having to beg, is it? No fun having to crawl to someone you’d much rather die than even talk to.’

Once more that searing gaze raked over her from the top of her uncharacteristically controlled hair down to the neat, highly polished black shoes. It was a look that took her back ten years, forced her to remember how coldly he had regarded her before he had walked away and out of her life. For good, she had thought then.

‘And I should know, angel—I’ve been there, remember? I’ve been exactly where you are now—begged, pleaded—and walked away with nothing.’

He might look indolently relaxed and at his ease as he lounged back against the wall, still with those strong arms crossed over the width of his chest, but in reality his position was the taut, expectant posture of a wily, knowing hunter, a predator that was poised, watching and waiting. He only needed his prey—her—to make one move and then he would pounce, hard and fast.

But still she had to try.

‘You are wanted back in Mecjoria,’ she blurted out in an uneven rush.

She could tell his response even before he opened his mouth. The way that long straight spine stiffened, the tightening of the beautiful lips, the way a muscle in his jaw jerked just once.

‘You couldn’t have said anything less likely to make me want to know more,’ he drawled, dark and slow. ‘But you could try to persuade me …’

She could try, but it would have no effect, his tone, his stony expression told her. And she didn’t like the thought of just what sort of ‘persuasion’ could be in his mind. She wasn’t prepared to give him that satisfaction.

Calling on every ounce of strength she possessed, stiffening her back, straightening her shoulders, she managed to lift her head high, force her green eyes to meet those icy black ones head-on.

‘No thank you,’ she managed, her tone pure ice.

Her father would have been proud of her for this at least. She was the Grand Duchess Honoria Maria at her very best. The only daughter of the Chancellor, faced by a troublesome member of the public. The trouble was that after all she had learned about her father’s schemes, the way that he had seen her as a way to further his own power, she didn’t want to be that woman any more. She had actually hoped that by coming here today she could free herself from the toxic inheritance that came with that title.

‘You might get off on that sort of thing, but it certainly does nothing for me.’

If she had hoped that he would look at least a little crestfallen, a touch deflated, then she was doomed to disappointment. There might have been a tiny acknowledgement of her response in his eyes, a gleam that could have been a touch of admiration—or a hint of dark satisfaction from a man who had known all along just how she would respond.

She’d dug herself a hole without him needing to push her into it. But, for now, was discretion the better part of valour? She could let Alexei think that he had won this round at least but it was only one battle, not the whole war. There was too much at stake for that.

‘Thank you for your time.’

She couldn’t so much as turn a glance in his direction, even though she caught another wave of that citrus scent as he came closer, with the undertones of clean male skin that almost destroyed her hard-won courage. But even as she fought with her reactions he fired another comment at her. One that tightened a slackening resolve, and reminded her just how much the boy she had once known had changed.

‘I wish that I could say it had been a pleasure,’ he drawled cynically. ‘But we both know that that would be a lie.’

‘We certainly do,’ Ria managed from between lips that felt as if they had turned to wood, they were so stiff and tight.

‘So now you’ll leave. Give my regards to your father,’ Alexei tossed after her.

He couldn’t have said anything that was more guaranteed to force her to stay. A battle, not the war, she reminded herself. She wasn’t going to let this be the last of it. She couldn’t.

He was going to let her go, Alexei told himself. In fact he would be glad to do so even if the thundering response that she had so unexpectedly woken in his body demanded otherwise. He wanted her to walk away, to take with her the remembrance of the family he had hoped to find, a life he had once tried to live, a girl he had once cared for.

‘Lexei … Please …’

The echo of her voice, soft and shaken—or so he would have sworn—swirled in his thoughts in spite of his determination to clamp down on the memory, to refuse to let it take root there. Violently he shook his head to try and drive away the sound but it seemed to cling like dark smoke around his thoughts, bringing with it too many memories that he had thought he’d driven far away.

At first she had knocked him mentally off-balance with the news she had brought. The news he had been waiting to hear for so long—half a lifetime, it seemed. The document she had held out to him now lay on his desk, giving him the legitimacy, the position in Mecjoria he had wanted—that he had thought he wanted—but he didn’t even spare it a second glance. It was too late. Far, far too late. His mother, to whom this had mattered so much, was dead, and he no longer gave a damn.

But something tugging at the back of his thoughts, an itch of something uncomfortable and unexpected, told him that that wasn’t the real truth. There was more to this than just the delivery of that document.

‘Not so much of Grand Duchess any more,’ Ria had said to him unexpectedly. ‘Not so much of a duchess of any sort.’

And that was when it struck him. There was something missing. Someone missing. Someone he should have noticed was not there from the first moment in the room but he had been so knocked off-balance that he hadn’t registered anything beyond the fact that Ria was there in his office, waiting for him.

Where was the dark-suited bodyguard? The man who had the knack of blending into the background when necessary but who was alert and ready to move forward at any moment if their patron appeared to be in any difficulty?

There was no one with her now. There had been no one when he had arrived in this room to find her waiting for him. And there should have been.

What the hell was going on?

He couldn’t be unaware of the present political situation in Mecjoria. There had been so many reports of marches on the streets, of protest meetings in the square of the capital. Ria’s father, the Grand Duke Escalona, High Chancellor of the country, had been seen making impassioned speeches, ardent broadcasts, calling for calm—ordering the people to stay indoors, keep off the streets. But that had been before first the King and then the new heir to the throne had died so unexpectedly. Before the whole question of the succession had come under scrutiny with meetings and conferences and legal debates to call into question just what would happen next. He had paid it as little attention as it deserved in his own mind, but it had been impossible to ignore some of the headlines—like the ones that declared the country was on the brink of revolution.

It was his father’s country after all. The place he should have called his home if he hadn’t been forced out before he came to settle in any way. Without ever having a chance to get to know the father who had been missing from his life.

‘Lexei … Please …’

He would have been all right if she hadn’t used that name. If she hadn’t—deliberately he was sure—turned on him the once warm, affectionate name she had used back in the gentler, more innocent days when he had thought that they were friends. And so whirled him back into memories of a past he’d wanted to forget.

‘All right, I’m intrigued.’ And that was nothing less than the truth. ‘You clearly have something more to say. So—you have ten minutes. Ten minutes in which to tell me the truth about why you’re here. What had you appearing in my office unannounced, declaring you were no longer a grand duchess. Is that the truth?’

It seemed it had to be—or at least that something in what he had said had really got to her. She had reacted to his words as if she had been stung violently. Her head had gone back, her green eyes widening in reaction at something. Her soft rose-tinted mouth had opened slightly on a gasp of shock.

A shock that ricocheted through his own frame as a hard kick of some totally primitive sexual hunger hit home low down in his body. Those widened eyes looked stunning and dark against the translucent delicacy of her skin, and that mouth was pure temptation in its half-open state.

His little friend Ria had grown up into a beautiful woman and that unthinkingly primitive reaction to the fact jolted him out of any hope of seeing her just as the girl she had once been. Suddenly he was unable to look at her in any way other than as a man looks at a woman he desires. His own mouth hungered to take those softly parted lips, to taste her, feel her yield to him, surrendering, opening … His heart thudded hard and deep in his chest, making him need to catch his breath as his body tightened in pagan hunger.

‘You don’t believe me?’ she questioned and the uncharacteristic hesitation on the word twisted something deep inside him, something he no longer thought existed. Something that it seemed that only this woman could drag up from deep inside him. A woman who had once been the only friend he thought he had and who now had been reincarnated as a woman who heated his blood and turned him on more than he could recall anyone doing in the past months—the past years.

It was like coming awake again after being dead to his senses for years—and it hurt.

‘It’s not that I don’t believe you.’

The fight he was having to control the sensual impulses of his body showed in his voice and he saw the worried, apprehensive look she shot him sideways from under the long, lush lashes. She clearly didn’t know which way to take him, a thought that sent a heated rush of satisfaction through his blood. He wanted her off-balance, on edge. That way she might let slip more than her carefully cultivated, court training would allow her.

‘Merely that I see no reason why you or any member of your family would renounce the royal title that has meant so much to you.’

‘We didn’t renounce it. It was renounced for us.’

A frown snapped Alexei’s black brows together sharply as he focussed even more intently on her face, trying to read what was there.

‘And just what does that mean? I’ve heard nothing of this.’

How had he missed such an important event? The people he had employed to watch what was happening in Mecjoria should have been aware of it. They should have investigated and reported back to him.

‘It’s been kept very quiet—at the moment my father is officially “resting” to recover from illness.’

‘When the reality is?’

‘That he’s under arrest.’

Her voice caught on the word, a soft little hiccup that did disturbing things to the tension at his groin, tightening it a notch or two uncomfortably.

‘And is now in the state prison.’

That was the last thing he’d expected and it shocked some of the desire from him, making his head swim slightly at the rush of blood from one part of his body to his head.

‘On what charge?’ he demanded sharply.

‘No charge.’ She shook her head, sending her dark hair flying. ‘Not as yet—that—that all depends on how things work out.’

‘So what the hell did he do wrong?’ Gregor had always seemed such a canny player. Someone who knew how best to feather his own nest. So had he got too greedy, made some mistake?

‘He—chose the wrong side in the recent inheritance battle. For the throne.’

So that was what was behind this. Alexei might never want to set foot in Mecjoria ever again, but he couldn’t be unaware—no one could be unaware—of the struggle that had gone on over the inheritance of the throne once old King Leopold had died. First Leopold’s son Marcus had inherited, but only briefly. A savage heart attack had killed him barely months into his reign. Because he had died childless, his nephew Felix should have inherited the crown, but his wild way of life had been his undoing, so that he had died in a high-speed car crash before he had even ascended to the throne. Now there were several factions warring over just who was the legal heir to follow Felix.

‘And then when Felix died … My father is currently seen as an enemy—as a threat to the throne.’

She wasn’t telling the full truth, Alexei realised. There was something she was holding back, he was sure of it. Something that clouded those amazing eyes, tightened the muscles around her delicate jawline, pulling the pretty mouth tight, though there was no mistaking the quiver of those softly sensual lips.

Lips that he wished to hell he could taste, feel that trembling softness under his own mouth, plunder the moist interior …

‘It will all work out in the end.’

Once again his own burning inner feelings made the words sound abrupt, dismissive, and he saw her blink slowly, withdrawing from him. Her head came up, that smooth chin lifting in defiance as she met his stare face-on.

‘You can promise that, can you?’ Ria asked, her tone appallingly cynical.

And where her unexpected weakness hadn’t beaten him now, shockingly, her boldness did. There was a new spark in her eyes, fresh colour in her cheeks. She was once more the proud Grand Duchess Honoria and not the strangely defeated girl who had reached out to something he had thought was long dead inside him. This Ria was a challenge; a challenge he welcomed. The sound of his blood was like a roar inside his head, the heated race of his pulse burning along every vein. He had never wanted a woman so much as he wanted her now, and the need was like an ache in every nerve.

‘How would you know? You were the one who turned your back on Mecjoria—haven’t even been back once in ten years.’

‘Not turned my back,’ Alexei growled. ‘We weren’t given a chance to stay. In fact it was made plain that we were not wanted.’

And who had been behind that? Her father—the very same man who was now, according to her story, locked in a prison cell. Did she expect him to feel sorry for him? To give a damn what might happen to the monster who hadn’t even waited to allow him and his mother time to mourn their loss, or even to attend the state funeral, before he had had them escorted to the airport and put on the first plane out of the country?

First making sure that every penny of his father’s fortune, every jewel, every tiny personal inheritance, had been taken from them, leaving them with little but the clothes they stood up in, not even the most basic allowance to see them into their new life in exile. Worst of all, Gregor had taken their name from them. The name his mother had been entitled to, and with it her honour, the legality of her marriage into the royal house of Mecjoria. He must have done it deliberately, hiding away the document that showed the old king’s permission. The document that Ria had been commissioned to bring here so unexpectedly—because it now suited her father. Was it any wonder that he loathed the man—that he would do anything to bring him down?

But it seemed that Gregor had managed that all on his own.

‘And I don’t have to be in the country to know what is going on.’

‘The papers don’t report everything. And certainly not always accurately.’

Something new had clouded those clear eyes and turned her expression into an intriguing mixture of defiance and uncertainty. There was just the tiniest sheen of moisture under one eye, where a trace of an unexpected tear had escaped the determined control she had been trying to impose on it and slipped out on to her lashes.

Unable to resist the impulse, he reached out and touched her face, letting his fingers rest lightly on the fine skin along the high, slanting cheekbone, wiping away that touch of moisture. The warmth and softness of the contact made his nerves burn, sending stinging arrows of response down into his body. He wanted so much more and yet he wanted to keep things just as they were—for now. It was a struggle not to do more, not to curve his hand around her cheek, cup that defiant little chin against his palm, lift her face towards his so that he could capture her mouth …

And that would ruin things completely. She would react like a scalded cat, he had no doubt. All that silent defiance would return in full force, and she’d swing away from him, repulsing the gesture with a rough shake of her head. She was still too tense, too on edge. But like any nervous cat, with a few moments’ careful attention—perhaps a soothing stroke or two—she would soon settle down.

So for now it was enough to watch the storm of emotions that swept over her face. The response that turned those citrine eyes smoky, that darkened and deepened the black of her pupils, making them spread like the flow of ink until they covered almost all of her irises. The way that her mouth opened again to show the tips of small white teeth was a temptation that kicked at his libido, making it hungrier than ever. The clamour in his body urged him to act, to make his move now, when she was at her weakest, but for a little while at least he was enjoying imposing restraint on himself, letting the sensual hunger build—anticipating what might come later—and watching the effect his behaviour had on her.

‘So tell me the rest.’

She didn’t know if she could go through with this. Ria struggled to find some of the certainty, the conviction of doing the right thing, that had buoyed her up on her journey here, held her in the room in spite of the frantic thudding of her heart. So much depended on what she said now and the possible repercussions of her failure, personal and political, were almost impossible to imagine. The image of her mother, too pale, far too thin, drifting through life like a wraith, with no appetite, no interest in anything slid into her mind. Her days were haunted by fears, her nights plagued by terrifying nightmares.

Her father was the cause of those nightmares. Since the night that the state police had come to arrest him, taking him away in handcuffs, they had never seen him for a moment. But they knew where he was. The state prison doors had slammed closed on him and, unless Ria could find some way of helping him, then behind those locked doors was where he was going to stay. She had wanted to help him—wanted to return him to her mother—and it had been because she had been looking for some way to do that that she had found the hidden documents, the ones that proved Alexei’s legitimacy and the others that had revealed the whole truth about what had been going on.

The full, appalling truth.