The #1 Bestsellers Collection 2011(54)

Rafe leant back in his chair and stretched his legs out long in front of him. ‘I visited them once in the prison.’

‘And?’

He remembered the day, before his coronation, when he’d gone to see them. He wasn’t even entirely sure why he’d wanted to go, just that if they could talk, maybe he could make some sense of what had happened, but all he’d got was their hatred, their sneers and looks of derision, reminding him how he had felt long ago, as if he was still the bastard son who counted for nothing. He shook his head. ‘Nothing’s changed.’

She blinked and took a deep breath, then turned her eyes up at him over the cup and smiled apologetically. ‘What am I talking about? You’re getting married, big brother. How amazing is that?’

‘Why should it be amazing? I’m thirty-three years old. High time I settled down, wouldn’t you say?’

She laughed and put her cup down. ‘Except you were the one who was never going to settle down.’

He looked away. Wondered why he hadn’t yet heard any sound of Sebastiano returning with Sienna.

‘Where is she?’

‘What?’

‘Your fiancée. Where is she? When do I get the chance to meet her?’

‘Oh.’ He shook his head. ‘Soon. I’d like you to be one of her bridesmaids. It’s probably just as well you’re here early.’

‘That’s what I figured,’ she said, sipping at her tea innocently. ‘Anyone else I know in the wedding party?’

‘Probably only Yannis. I’ve asked him to be my best man, of course.’

The cup stilled at her lips, and something briefly clouded her eyes, something he didn’t quite understand, before she looked up at him and threw him one of those dazzling smiles that lit up the room. ‘Of course. Who else? Anyway, what’s she like, this bride of yours. Tell me about her. This is so amazing, big brother, I’ve never know you to stick with a woman for more than a month in your life. She must be something to have got you to commit.’

‘She is,’ he said with surprise, his voice choking, his ears straining for any sound. ‘You’ll meet her soon.’

‘Is she pretty?’

He jerked his head around, his fingers tangling together, his feet itchy, unable to keep still. Was she pretty? In his mind’s eye he saw her hair, coiling around her face, refusing to be restrained, and shining copper against the most perfect translucent skin. Dio, she wasn’t just pretty, she was breathtaking, a breath of fresh air on a stifling summer’s day, a slice of paradise in every smile. ‘She’ll make a great first lady for Montvelatte,’ he said, realising how lame the words sounded the minute they’d left his mouth.

Marietta considered him carefully, her long-lashed eyes as calculating as any computer. ‘But you love her, right?’

Sienna had made a hash of the afternoon. Blown any sense of camaraderie she and Rafe had been building up because she’d had an epiphany. An epiphany she wanted to run kicking and screaming from. A thunderclap that, at first, had seen continuing her endeavours to make him love her all but pointless.

She’d wanted to wallow in the depths then. She deserved to wallow. To consider herself lost, like some storm-tossed traveller at sea, miles from home, without a sign of land, and bereft of loved ones. Iseo’s Pyramid had never looked so appealing.

But there was no escape, and nothing would change the truth. She loved Rafe Lombardi. Prince Raphael Lombardi. She wasn’t supposed to love him, but she did.

And she could deny it all she wanted. She could rail against the injustice of it. She could drive herself and everyone around her crazy by fighting it and fighting them, but then what good would that do?

Or she could keep going with her plan. Just because her father had never loved her mother, didn’t mean that Rafe could never love her. She was sure he felt something for her. There was a spark—something—that was worth pursuing, no matter how much he tried to compartmentalize her usefulness in his life between recreation and procreation.

It was no consolation that her mother had probably felt just as sure that she would be able to make Sienna’s father love her. It was no help at all.

But if she was to win through this, then she had to look to the positives. Rafe could love her, she was sure.

She had to be sure.

Sebastiano seemed to respect her need for quiet and drove at a gentle pace up the mountain to the Castello, the shadow thrown by the building casting the road into a half-light that seemed strangely to fit her mood.

Half-light. Where she felt now, knowing she loved Rafe. Knowing he didn’t love her.

Half-light. A possible future of unreciprocated one-way affection if she didn’t try.