Santina's Scandalous Princess(37)

They were married six weeks later, on a secluded beach on  Santina,  with no photographers or reporters in attendance. A single photograph   of her and Ben was sold to a respectable newspaper for a six-figure  sum that was  donated to a charity for helping those with learning  disabilities. After years  of shameful silence, Natalia went public  with her own dyslexia and was now on  the board of the charity and  receiving tutoring herself to help her with reading  and writing  skills.

Their future felt as bright and newly minted as the sun that  rose in  the pearly pink dawn sky the morning after their wedding. Natalia stood   in front of the sliding glass door in Ben's beach house, watching  the sun rise  higher and higher in the sky, growing in heat and  radiance, spreading its  healing rays across the earth.

Ben came up behind her, slipping his arms around her waist, and  kissed her neck before resting his chin on her head.

‘I'm just thinking about that bet of ours,' she said, and she  heard him chuckle.

‘And?'

‘I won.'

‘So you did.'

‘You're mine to command for the day,' she reminded him.

‘For the day,' Ben agreed, ‘and for ever.'

Natalia smiled, happiness buoying her soul. ‘Then let's begin,'  she said, and turned to kiss him.

* * * * *

 Keep reading for an excerpt of A Secret  Disgrace by Penny Jordan!





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CHAPTER ONE

‘YOU say it was your grandparents' wish that their ashes be buried here, in the graveyard of the church of Santa Maria?'

The dispassionate male voice gave away as little as the shadowed face.  Its bone structure was delineated with strokes of sunlight that might  have come from Leonardo's masterly hand, revealing as they did the exact  nature of the man's cultural inheritance. Those high cheekbones, that  slashing line of taut jaw, the hint of olive-toned flesh, the proud  aquiline shape of his nose-all of them spoke of the mixing of genes from  the invaders who had seen Sicily and sought to possess it. His  ancestors had never allowed anything to stand in the way of what they  wanted. And now his attention was focused on her.                      
      
          



      

Instinctively she wanted to distance herself from him, to conceal  herself from him, she recognized, and she couldn't stop herself from  stepping back from him, her ankle threatening to give way as the back of  her pretty wedged shoe came up against the unseen edge of the  gravestone behind her.

‘Take care.'

He moved so fast that she froze, like a rabbit pinned down by the swift,  deathly descent of the falcon from which his family took its name.  Long, lean tanned fingers closed round her wrist as he jerked her  forward, the mint-scented warmth of his breath burning against her face  as he leaned nearer to deliver an admonishment.

It was impossible for her to move. Impossible, too, for her to speak or  even think. All she could do was feel-suffer beneath the lava-hot flow  of emotions that had erupted inside her to spill into every sensitive  nerve-ending she possessed. This was indeed torture. Torture … or torment?  Her body convulsed on a violent surge of self-contempt. Torture. There  was no torment in this man's hold on her, no temptation. Nothing but  self-loathing and … and indifference.

But her whispered, ‘Let go of me,' sounded far more like the broken cry  of a helpless victim than the cool, calm command of a modern and  independent woman.

* * *

She smelled of English roses and lavender; she looked like an  archetypical Englishwoman. She had even sounded like one until he had  touched her, and she had shown him the fierce Sicilian passion and  intensity that was her true heritage.

‘Let go of me!' she had demanded.

Caesar's mouth hardened against the images her words had set free from  his memory. Images and memories so sharply painful that he automatically  recoiled from them. So much pain, so much damage, so much guilt for him  to bear.

So why do what he had to do now? Wasn't that only going to increase her  deserved animosity towards him, and increase his own guilt?

Because he had no choice. Because he had to think of the greater good.  Because he had to think, as he had always had to think, of his people  and his duty to his family line and his name.

The harsh reality was that there could be no true freedom for either of  them. And that was his fault. In every way, all of this was his fault.

His heart had started to pound with heavy hammer-strokes. He hadn't  built in to his calculations the possibility that he would be so aware  of her, so affected by the sensual allure of her. Like Sicily's famous  volcano, she was all fire, covered at its peak by ice, and he was far  more vulnerable to that than he had expected to be.

Why? It wasn't as though there weren't plenty of beautiful, sensual  women all too ready to share his bed-who had, in fact, shared his bed  before he had been forced to recognise that the so-called pleasure of  those encounters tasted of nothing other than an emptiness that left him  aching for something more satisfying and meaningful. Only by then he'd  had nothing he could offer the kind of woman with whom he might have  been able to build such a relationship.

He had, in effect, become a man who could not love on his own terms. A  man whose duty was to follow in the footsteps of his forebears. A man on  whom the future of his people depended.

It was that duty that had been instilled into him from childhood. Even  as an orphaned six-year-old, crying for his parents, he had been told  how important it was that he remember his position and his duty. The  people had even sent a deputation to talk to him-to remind him of what  it meant to stand in his late father's shoes. By outsiders the beliefs  and customs of his people would be considered harsh, and even cruel. He  was doing all he could to change things, but such changes could only be  brought in slowly-especially when the most important headman of the  people's council was so vehemently opposed to new ideas, so set in his  ways. However, Caesar wasn't a boy of six any more, and he was  determined that changes would be made.

Changes. His mind drifted for a moment. Could truly fundamental things  be altered? Could old wrongs be put right? Could a way be found … ?

He shook such dreams from him and turned back to the present.

‘You haven't answered my question about your grandparents,' he reminded Louise.

* * *

As little as she liked his autocratic tone, Louise was relieved enough  at the return of something approaching normality between them to answer  curtly, ‘Yes.'

All she wanted was for this interview, this inspection, to be over and  done with. It went against everything she believed in so passionately  that she was patently expected to virtually grovel to this aristocratic  and arrogant Sicilian duke, with his air of dangerously dark sexuality  and his too-good looks, simply because centuries ago his family had  provided the land on which this small village church had been built. But  that was the way of things here in this remote, almost feudal part of  Sicily.                      
      
          



      

He was owner of the church and the village and heaven knew how many  acres of Sicilian land. He was also the patronne, in the local Sicilian  culture, the ‘father' of the people who traditionally lived on it-even  if those people were members of her grandparents' generation. Like his  title and his land, it was a role he had inherited. She knew that, and  had grown up knowing it, listening to her grandparents' stories of the  hardship of the lives they had lived as children. They had been forced  to work on the land owned by the family of this man who now stood in  front of her in the shaded quiet of the ancient  graveyard.

Louise gave a small shiver as she looked beyond the cloudless blue sky  to the mountains, where the volcano of Etna brooded sulphurously beneath  the hot sun. She checked the sky again surreptitiously. She had never  liked thunderstorms, and those mountains were notorious for conjuring  them out of nothing. Wild and dangerous storms, capable of unleashing  danger with savage cruelty. Like the man now watching her.