Forced Wife, Royal Love-Child(30)

‘Who’s asking you to? You said yourself that your mother loved your father. It doesn’t have to be that way for us. That’s what I’m trying to prevent.’

She laughed then, a release so unexpected that it left her almost dizzy in its wake, dizzy and so close to tears she could feel the moisture seeping through. ‘But that’s the problem, Rafe, it’s already too late. Because I…I love you.’

Stunned didn’t come close to expressing the way Rafe felt. She couldn’t be serious. She couldn’t be.

Dio! He wheeled around, both hands clutching at his temples, tangling into his hair, searching for answers he couldn’t find. It was the last thing he wanted to happen. It was the worst thing that could have happened.

‘I don’t believe you.’

I don’t want to believe you.

‘You think right now I care what you believe?’

‘Yet you say you love me.’

‘Do you think I want to? Do you think I went looking for love with a man who practically dragged me kicking and screaming into a marriage I didn’t and still don’t want? What kind of masochist do you think I am?’

He couldn’t answer. He didn’t know. All he knew was that something was wrong, his convenient marriage slipping beyond reach, sliding towards a disaster he’d never seen coming.

A disaster he’d been trying to avoid ever since he’d been a child.

‘Don’t waste your time on love.

Don’t lose your heart.’

He couldn’t love and, damn it all, she wasn’t supposed to love him.

He looked up at her, at her face of porcelain-like skin, at her hair kissed gold by the sun, her eyes wide with questions he knew he’d never be the one to answer. And inexplicably he ached with that knowledge, the gears in his chest crunching and grinding together.

And he didn’t have the faintest idea of how to stop them.

‘You must go,’ he said, his voice a coarse whisper, while in his mind the tear-streaked face of his mother played, kissing him goodnight the nights she’d managed to stay up longer than he did, the scent of perfume more and more giving way to the fumes of alcoholic despair. He didn’t want that fate for Sienna, but neither could he bear to witness it here, where he couldn’t give her what she needed. ‘Get out now, before it’s too late!’

She hovered uncertainly, her eyes shining, or was that merely his?

‘Rafe,’ she said, putting out a hand to him. ‘It doesn’t have to be like this. Can’t we talk about it? There must be a way, has to be a way.’

‘There is no way!’

‘But your babies. One day we will share children, maybe even the heirs Montvelatte needs. You’re not thinking straight.’

‘Send me the first-born son!’ he yelled, the pulse in his head pounding like drums. ‘You can keep the other.’

She reeled back as if he’d physically thrust her aside. ‘Rafe. I’m sorry.’



‘No, you’re not! You’ve been trying to figure out a way to get out of this marriage from day one. And now you’ve finally hit on the perfect plan. You knew I could never do to a woman what my father had done to my mother. I’d told you what he’d done! What better way to secure your release.’

‘Rafe, it’s not like that. Listen to me. I love you.’

‘And for the last time, I don’t want your love! Get out. Go! I never want to see you again.’

Blinded by tears she could no longer control, Sienna somehow stumbled out of the room, blundering past curious staff, who called out to her in concerned voices, past the palace guard that had held her hostage that first day and now stood by to let her flee.

Outside the wind tugged at her hair, the sky an ominous shade of grey, but she took no notice, running full pelt for the one person she knew might help her. The one place where escape lay waiting.

It was still there, the small pick-up truck just driving off. Any minute the JetRanger and her lifeline to the outside world would be gone. She screamed out, but her words were carried away on the wind, and the pilot climbed into the cabin and pulled his door shut.

She had time. She knew the time he would take to get the bird off the ground, to turn on the master electrical switch and avionics, to check fuel levels and turn the fuel valve master on.

She was halfway down the road as the navigation lights turned on. Right on cue.

She pushed herself harder as the rotors began to turn, ducking down low as she made for the pilot’s door, her fist slamming on the window.

The pilot, Randall, looked around, first in shock, a smile of recognition tinged with concern spreading his lips wide a moment later before he opened the door. ‘Hey, there,’ he said in his lazy American drawl. ‘I thought you weren’t coming. What’s up?’

She gulped down air into burning lungs and did her best to smile while she swiped away at her damp cheeks. ‘No time for small talk. Just get me out of here.’

‘I love it when a lady tells me exactly what to do.’ He grinned and waited until she was in the seat alongside him, her seatbelt buckled, before he raised the helicopter from the ground. ‘You almost missed me,’ he said, shouting to make himself heard. ‘Any later and we would have been stuck here for the night. Damn curfew.’

She nodded, still trying to regain her breath. She knew all about the damn curfew.

‘We missed you at the office,’ Randall said, as the bird moved under his expert hands. ‘Been taking a vacation?’

‘You could say that.’

He flicked a glance into the back. ‘You didn’t bring any luggage.’

‘Sudden change of plans.’

‘Only there was this rumour going ’round, y’know, that you were maybe stuck on Montvelatte for good.’

‘Big storm coming,’ she said, pointing out the windscreen, and the pilot beside her laughed. ‘I get the picture. And, yeah, it might get a bit bumpy, so hang on.’

The bumps didn’t worry her, at least not the bumps in the air. It was the bumps that life dealt out that were infinitely worse. She turned around, trying to gauge their distance from the island, wondering when she’d ever be far enough. Escape had been ridiculously easy in the end. But, then, Rafe had practically thrown her out.

Sienna sat back down in her seat, letting out a long breath. To their left the looming peak that was Iseo’s Pyramid claimed sovereignty over the surrounding waters, a dark prince in a darker sea, and she shivered as she let her gaze drift over its frightening dimensions, its sheer size just as overwhelming from above as below. She wasn’t afraid. She’d left the real Beast of Iseo behind on Montvelatte, but still the dark brooding shape held the power to fascinate, the power to disturb.

She sensed it rather than heard it, something no passenger would notice but an experienced pilot would. She looked across at the pilot and then down at the gauges at the exact same time he did. ‘What is it?’

‘I don’t know.’ His eyes scanned the controls, nothing evident, and then it happened again, a tiny blip, a momentary loss of power, and this time Randall’s hands were hard at work. ‘Damn,’ he yelled. ‘Whatever it is, we’ll have to turn around back to Montvelatte.’ And her spirits plummeted. To be foiled when she was so close to escape! How could she return to that island? How could she ever risk facing him again, the man who had banished her because she had been foolish enough to love him? But right now there was no other choice.

Then a bolt of lightning rent the sky in two, the world around her appearing in black and white, like some crazy negative, and she would have sworn the bolt hit the very rock itself. Birds erupted from the peak like magma from a volcano, a cloud of huge seabirds, panicked from sleep and lumbering through the air in every direction. Normally they would have been fine where they were, far enough from the rock and the wheeling cloud of birds that they would be in no danger, but these birds were stunned, beyond instinct other than to escape.

‘Watch out,’ she cried, as Randall continued to do battle with the handicapped craft. But it was already too late. There was a bang as something hit the rotors and the aircraft shuddered and yawed to one side, the smell of smoke filling the cockpit. And now she was helping him with the controls, battling to put the chopper into autorotation and regain control, but it was no use.

‘We’re going down,’ he called, ‘we won’t make it to the island.’ But she was already at the radio, barking out a Mayday call.

‘Head for the rock,’ she said, and the pilot tossed her a look that said she was as mad as Iseo himself. ‘There’s a small beach,’ she shouted, clutching at the controls, ‘around the side.’ And the only place they had a chance of making an emergency landing.

For a few hairy seconds she almost thought they would make it, the two of them almost enough to get the helicopter under control. Until the second bird hit. It penetrated the cockpit like a missile, a sickening crunch that sprayed blood and gore everywhere as it slammed into the pilot.

‘Randall!’ she screamed, as he slumped over his controls, feathers stuck to blood she had no way of knowing belonged to him or the bird.

She battled to push him back into his seat while trying to manage the controls for both of them, the rock looming ever larger, the wind wilder where the rock ended and the sea began.