Emily and the Notorious Prince

by India Grey

  ‘I’m glad it meets with your approval,’ he said drily.

  ‘Oh, it does. Very much.’

  She rose up on her tiptoes to press a kiss to his mouth, but instantly he stepped away. A tiny beat of disappointment went through her. ‘Careful.’ He gestured down the beach with a nod of his head. ‘We have an audience.’

  From out of the tents Tomás had emerged, looking almost unrecognisable out of his ubiquitous suit and tie. With him was a pretty, plump blonde woman who she assumed was Valentina holding a chubby baby on one hip, and Elena and Paloma, two of the junior nannies from the palace. Senhora Costa, mercifully, did not seem to be in evidence, but there were several young men in shorts and T-shirts whom Emily couldn’t place.

  ‘Inviting half of the security force was the only way I could get Tomás and the chief of security to agree to this,’ Luis said, following her gaze, and she realised that the tanned, relaxed boys down there were the bodyguards she was used to seeing in headsets and uniforms, opening doors for her and following Luis like shadows. Now, here in the fading afternoon sun as they went forward to greet Luciana they looked human for the first time.

  ‘Was it very difficult?’ she asked guiltily.

  ‘Put it this way, it’ll make any future diplomatic dealings I may have with fascist dictators and volatile despots look like schoolboy stuff.’ He gave her a crooked smile. ‘Come on. Let me show you to your boudoir, your ladyship. And let’s get this party started.’

  They played rounders and had piggyback races, with the pretty young nannies shrieking excitedly on the backs of the younger bodyguards. Emily stood on the finish line taking photographs as Luis charged across it with Luciana clinging to him like a little monkey, her face alight with happiness.

  He had long since discarded his T-shirt and, wearing only faded surf shorts, his tawny hair glinting gold in the sun it was hard to imagine the responsibility that rested on his beautiful, butterscotch-brown shoulders. And yet, Emily thought with a wrench of visceral yearning, it was also impossible to forget that he was what he was. Royal. Special. Separate. It was in every powerful inch of him, every self-assured move and graceful gesture.

  She thought back to the night in the restaurant, when they’d played that silly game about animals—the bitterness in his voice when he’d said he wasn’t regal enough to be a lion—but looking at him now in the low, syrupy sunlight, that was exactly what he reminded her of. The wolf had emerged from the shadows, and he was stronger, prouder and even more compelling.

  After the games Tomás lit a fire and Valentina cooked sausages and steaks while Luciana played with baby Gracia. One of the tents had been set up as a bar and kitchen, and Matheus, Luciana’s favourite bodyguard, made her a cola float which he embellished with a tiny pink paper umbrella and presented to her with a flourish. He’d also brought an iPod, and as the sun changed from primrose yellow to deep blush pink music filled the warm evening and Luis opened champagne.

  Instinctively Emily had kept a distance from him, but suddenly he was standing in front of her, holding out a slim glass. Their eyes locked as she took it from him, her stomach disappearing with longing as their fingers touched.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Thank you ,’ he said ironically. ‘This is all your idea.’

  ‘But this is more than I ever could have dreamed up…’ She waved her glass in an arc that took in the tents, the deserted beach, the rose-petal sun sliding down towards the glittering sea. ‘You’ve taken my idea and made it magical. Luciana’s having the time of her life.’

  His face was very still, and very, very beautiful, as he looked out across the ocean. ‘I hope so,’ he said, and his voice was low and raw.

  Behind them someone turned up the music and Luciana was calling her name. Reluctantly tearing her gaze from his she turned round.

  ‘Emily, listen!’ Luciana squealed, ‘Matheus has the music for our dance! Let’s do it! Let’s do it now!’

  Sure enough the Waltz of the Flowers from The Nutcracker , with its associations of home and Christmas, was floating incongruously over the tropical white sand. Smiling, Emily took a mouthful of champagne and then handed her glass back to Luis before knotting her faded checked shirt over her midriff and going to join Luciana.

  Luciana’s face was set in a frown of concentration as she went through her carefully rehearsed routine, and Emily danced around her, the silken sand flying from her bare feet with each fouetté. At the end everyone clapped madly, and Luciana glowed with pride.

  ‘Now you,’ she begged Emily. ‘Do yours!’

  ‘No, no.’ Laughing, Emily dropped a kiss on her head and went back over to Luis to reclaim her champagne. ‘This is a party—we should all dance. Matheus, do you have any party music?’

  ‘Of course!’ A moment later the low pulsing beat of the samba filled the warm evening, and Matheus went back to Luciana and took both her hands. ‘I show Your Highness,’ he joked. ‘And then you can teach Senhora Balfour how we dance in Santosa.’

  ‘Uh-uh,’ said Luis, very close to her ear. ‘That’s definitely going to be my privilege.’

  Elena and Paloma had been claimed by their bodyguards, and Tomás was drawing a laughing, protesting Valentina forwards. The music was insistent, infectious, and Emily couldn’t have resisted its persuasive beat, even if it hadn’t been for Luis’s hands on her waist.

  He was, she discovered with a debilitating kick of desire, a brilliant dancer. Pushing his fingers into the back pockets of her tight denim shorts he pulled her hips close to his so that they were swaying and undulating in unison, their upper bodies almost motionless, their gazes locked smokily together. For a long time they danced like that as the sun flamed lower, a blood orange dripping into the sea, turning his bare chest to beaten bronze, his eyes to liquid gold.

  ‘You’re a natural samba dancer,’ Luis murmured, his voice warm and husky with approval.

  ‘Perhaps I’ve found my niche.’ She smiled straight into his eyes. ‘I’m rubbish at ballet these days. No precision. No control.’

  ‘I love your lack of control.’

  Instantly her smile faded and her body turned fluid with desire.

  ‘Luis, I—’

  ‘Shhh.’ His eyes were hooded as he placed a finger on her lips. ‘Not here. Not now.’ Around them the party continued, and he let her go and took a step back. ‘I think I should go and dance with the birthday girl for a little while, don’t you?’

  Emily nodded mutely, half relieved at the respite from the exhausting onslaught of desire, half desolate at his abrupt withdrawal. She should be used to it by now, she told herself despairingly, watching him go over to Luciana. She should be used to wanting him—all of him—and having him always elude her.

  Because that was the great flaw in the centre of her joy. He had awoken her, introduced her to pleasure and excitement she had never even previously imagined, and she had opened herself up to him completely, heart and mind and body and soul. While he…he remained as distant and unknowable as the moon.

  Luciana’s delighted laughter rose into the soft apricot evening as Luis picked her up and twirled her round, her hands small on his muscular shoulders. Emily swallowed the lump in her throat, trying to summon a smile, like everyone else. Even though she’d just realised she was in love with the Crown Prince of Santosa and there wasn’t a chance that he loved her back.

  Meaningless sex, that’s all it was for him.

  Gorgeous, mind-blowing, life altering. But not enough.

  Later, after Luciana’s birthday candles and the orange glow of the sun had both been extinguished and the dancing had given way to stories around the campfire, a yawning Luciana was put to bed in her silken-draped tent. Ducking through the doorway, Luis went in to say goodnight to her. She was almost asleep, and as he bent down beside the little camp bed he was hit by a rush of emotion so powerful it made it hard to breathe for a second.

  Guilt. Always guilt, but now so much more.

  ‘Thank you for a lo
vely party,’ she whispered, the soft glow of the lantern beside her reflected in her shining eyes.

  He smiled. ‘It’s my pleasure. Did you have a nice birthday?’

  ‘The best,’ she said fiercely. ‘The best birthday ever. ’

  Her answer, and the emphasis with which she spoke, took him by surprise. ‘Good,’ he said quietly, straightening up. ‘I’m glad.’

  For a moment he hovered, the pressure of things he wanted to say but didn’t know how swelling in his throat, and then there was a rustle of canvas as Emily came in. She looked at him. In the cool, clear pools of her eyes he felt all his troubles could be washed away, and as she came towards the bed she brushed his arm with her fingertips and his throat closed and words deserted him anyway.

  With a last smile at Luciana he went out. Everyone was sitting around the campfire a little distance away from the tents, but Luis didn’t go over. Picking up a bottle of beer he headed instead in the other direction, towards the cliffs at the far end of the cove. Ever since they arrived he had been aware of their dark bulk and had tried to ignore it, but he knew now that he could put it off no longer. He had to go down there, today of all days. Luciana’s birthday.

  Her best birthday ever, he thought with a fresh burst of surprise. He was ashamed to remember how in previous years the date hadn’t really meant much to him, but he’d assumed that Rico and Christiana would have done something to make it special. But then maybe he didn’t know his brother as well as he’d thought. He’d always been in awe of Rico for his absolute dedication to duty, but maybe that had been incompatible with being a hands-on, loving father.

  Without thinking he had headed down to the water’s edge, walking along the hard sand with the lacy edges of the waves flapping gently over the tops of his feet. Ahead of him the cliffs rose up, huge and black and menacing. As he got closer to them the air got distinctly cooler, as if Rico’s restless spirit was lurking there.

  Taking a mouthful of beer he turned away from the sea and headed up the beach, his feet sinking into the powdery sand as his eyes scanned the gloom for the huge mound of rock that he had privately marked out as Rico’s monument. Locating it he made his way towards it and lowered himself down onto the sand at its foot.

  It was surprisingly warm against his bare back. He took another swig of beer from the bottle and looked back along the darkening beach. The glow of the campfire seemed a long, long way away, the figures around it just indistinguishable shapes, but inevitably he found himself automatically searching for Emily amongst them.

  Emily. Just saying her name inside his head made his pulse quicken and his body harden. Deus , it was like being under some kind of spell. She had got inside him, and if he had found it hard to resist her before, now he had touched and tasted and possessed her it was almost impossible.

  What had started as a relationship he had been ordered to fake for the sake of his public image had become something that was fundamental to the most private, personal part of himself. That was why he wanted to keep it secret, in some kind of attempt to protect it. And her. Because the moment anyone suspected that it was genuine, it would be over. As vividly as if she had been there, whispering it to him in the gathering gloom, he recalled Josefina’s comment about his private life It’s now a political matter rather than simply a personal one.

  A movement a little distance away caught his eye. Someone was walking along the sand through the veils of milky twilight towards him, and he turned away facing out to sea, resentment and bitterness sweeping through him. It would be Tomás or one of the bodyguards, come to find him in their constant quest to protect him from bands of drug-crazed terrorists, rabid republicans, mentally unstable fanatics. What they couldn’t seem to grasp was that he wasn’t remotely bothered about any of those, but what terrified him was the very real danger of being locked into a lifetime of lies and emptiness.

  ‘Luis?’

  Emily’s voice—soft, tentative and so sexy it hurt. He turned his head. She was standing a few yards away, her long bare legs in the tiny denim shorts silhouetted against the glow of the fire in the distance, her face indistinguishable in the shadows.

  ‘Yes, I’m here.’ His voice sounded rusty and cracked.

  ‘Do you want to be alone? I wondered where you were, but if you’d rather be—’

  ‘No.’ That’s exactly what he’d come down here for, what he thought he wanted, but now he knew he’d much rather be with her. Hell, what was happening to him lately? He didn’t even know himself any more.

  ‘Actually,’ he said sardonically, ‘I came down here to be with Rico. This is the place where his helicopter came down, almost exactly a year ago, so I thought I ought to come and have a drink with him.’

  He raised his half-empty bottle. A second later another one clinked against it in the half-light and he realised that she was carrying one too. ‘Can I join you both?’ she asked quietly.

  ‘I’d like that.’

  She sat down on the sand beside him, not close enough to be touching, but just her presence seemed to enfold him in an odd sense of calm. For a moment neither of them spoke, and the only sound was the rhythmic breaking of the waves, and beneath that the gentler sigh of their breathing. In and out. Together.

  ‘Tell me about him,’ she murmured after a while. ‘Tell me what Rico was like.’

  ‘What was he like?’ Luis echoed, his grip tightening around the bottle in his hand. ‘Nothing like me, is the short answer. He was…always the same .’ He spoke slowly and with difficulty, realizing that it was an odd way to describe his brother yet suddenly understanding that this was significant. ‘All the time, whoever he was with. There was no difference between the man he was in private and the persona he presented to the world. Everything about who he was came naturally to him.’

  ‘Who he was? You mean the heir?’

  ‘Yes, just like everything about being the spare came naturally to me…’ Acrid self-loathing rose up inside him, dripping from every word and almost choking him. ‘Taking the privilege without taking any responsibility, enjoying the deference of my title without doing anything to earn it. But Rico was the opposite.’

  ‘But you’re taking that responsibility now.’ It was a statement, not a question, and she made it with a serene certainty that was infinitely soothing. Until he remembered what he’d done and the doors of his private prison slammed shut again.

  ‘On the surface, yes. But everything in me rebels against it. I’ll never be able to do it wholeheartedly.’

  Not like she would. Whatever she does she does passionately, with her whole heart and soul. It seemed like a lifetime ago that he’d had that conversation with Oscar, and yet every word was still etched indelibly onto his memory. Whether he wanted it there or not.

  His stomach clenched with helpless desire as he watched her raise the beer bottle to her lips, close them around it and take a mouthful. ‘Do you have to do it at all, then?’ she asked softly. ‘Can’t you—’

  ‘Walk away?’ His short laugh rang with icy despair. ‘Not an option. I just have to accept the stage management and the manipulation of the truth and the blatant bloody lies the palace press office spin in the name of my “image”.’

  ‘But why?’ She had moved while he was talking, rising up so she was half kneeling beside his outstretched legs, facing him. She still had her shirt knotted beneath her breasts from when they’d danced earlier. ‘Why can’t you just be yourself?’

  ‘Because the real me isn’t up to the job, I’m afraid.’ With difficulty he wrenched his gaze away from her flat, smooth midriff and gave a twisted smile. ‘Being royal is essentially like being a character in a fairy tale—you only exist as long as people believe in you. So you have to make sure they believe, and in the age of mobile-phone cameras and the Internet that’s pretty impossible because there are people lurking round every corner waiting to show how human you are.’ He took a mouthful of beer, and added with a weary attempt at humour, ‘Let’s face it, even you had given up believin
g in fairy tales.’

  ‘Ah, but I believe again now,’ she said softly. ‘Thanks to you—the real you.’ Without getting up she shifted her position so that in one neat movement she was on her knees straddling his outstretched legs. ‘You’re wrong, you know, about not being up to it. You might not be the same kind of king as your father was and your brother would have been, but if you do it your way you’ll be brilliant. You’ll make everyone believe, like me.’

  Luis stiffened, trying to suppress the lust that surged though him. He turned his head, away from her searchlight gaze, and gave a rueful, mocking laugh. ‘I can’t sleep with everyone.’

  Her smile widened and she trailed a languid finger down his chest. ‘That’s not what you would have said when I first met you…’

  ‘No,’ he said tersely. ‘But everything’s changed since then. I’m not like that any more.’

  ‘Because you’re taking on the responsibility of—’

  ‘No.’ The word sounded like a curse in the velvet twilight. Heart hammering, adrenaline stinging through him, Luis pulled his legs from beneath her and got to his feet. ‘Because it was my fault ,’ he ground out through gritted teeth, raking his fingers through his hair. ‘What happened was my fault, and that’s something I have to live with every day for the rest of my hollow sham of a double life.’

  She had got up and was beside him, reaching out to him. ‘What do you mean?’

  He shrugged her off. ‘I was supposed to go to the award ceremony that Rico and Christiana attended that night. It was in my schedule. My engagement. But so was judging the Miss Santosa contest earlier that day.’ Disgust rang through every word and he turned to face her, needing to see the reaction on her face. ‘The winner was exceptionally pretty and exceptionally grateful. I rang Rico from the Jacuzzi of the honeymoon suite and asked him to do the award ceremony in my place.’

  ‘Oh, Luis…’