“It did not suit me.” She found that her hands were on her hips. “You were an ass.”
His lips curved. “I thought you sold Silvio photographs,” Luc said. “Compromising photographs from our honeymoon, to be precise.”
He spoke rather too mildly, Gabrielle thought with asperity. But then, he did not dispute the fact that he’d been an ass.
“I paid him for a tape of you and that Rosalinda—to prevent his selling it,” Gabrielle shot back. She frowned as his words penetrated. “Photographs of you and me?”
“You sound appalled,” Luc said.
“Of course I’m appalled!” Gabrielle retorted. “How could you believe such a thing? I would never sell photographs to anyone—I am the Crown Princess of Miravakia! I am not some second-rate starlet!”
“I know who you are,” he said, his eyes darkening.
“Clearly not!”
He cocked his head to the side and she stared back, her hands fisted on her hips. The air around them seemed to seethe with tension. Heat. Gabrielle’s eyes felt overbright, her cheeks were too warm, and she felt as if the room was spinning, whirling. All that she could see was Luc’s steady, addictive gray gaze.
“I know exactly who you are,” he said, his voice a low throb that seemed to echo in her chest, along her limbs, between her legs. “You haunt me.”
He looked like some kind of warrior, some avenging angel, his face resolute and fierce—and the most beautiful thing that Gabrielle had ever seen.
“I know your voice because I cannot escape it,” he told her in a savage tone. “I know your touch because I dream of it. I know your scent, your voice, your walk.” His voice faded away into almost nothing, the faintest whisper of sound. And yet he held himself away from her.
“Had you only talked to me about his accusations—” Gabrielle began, frowning at him even as her breath came quicker, in little pants, and her attention focused on his dangerous mouth.
“I could not,” Luc said fiercely. Such a proud, difficult man. His gaze turned almost defiant. “I did not know how. And it seems he knew how best to manipulate us both.”
If possible, she loved him more for the admission. She could feel the change in him, though she hardly dared dream what it might mean. He stood before her like some kind of Roman god, his chiseled torso gleaming, his dark hair thick and damp, his eyes so dark, like steel, and his cruel, delicious mouth pulled to the side in a sardonic smile.
“Why are you here?” Luc asked, his voice still and quiet, with the faintest hint of mockery. As if he knew already. “Did you hunt me down?”
“I will not grant you a divorce. I will fight an annulment. I’ll fight you,” she said, tilting her chin up.
“Why?” he asked. He moved closer, his glorious chest now within reach, his mouth a bare whisper above hers, his dark eyes boring into her, seeing into her—through her.
“Because I love you,” she said softly. “Why else?”
“Ah, love,” he said, hardly above a whisper. “Is that what it is? How do you know?”
“You have ruined me for other men,” she told him, tilting her head back, easing ever closer, not daring to touch him but almost—almost…
“Have you tested the theory?” he asked sardonically, but his eyes gleamed with amusement.
“And if I had?” she asked, teasing him. She was not sure where her sudden sense of daring came from. She only knew that she dared. She dared anything and everything if she could have him.
“Ah, Gabrielle,” he muttered, his voice thickening as he thrust a strong hand into her heavy hair, anchoring her head against his hot palm and drawing her up on her toes. “You will be the death of me.”
“You love me,” she said simply. She knew it deep inside, as much a fact as her need to breathe, as her own love for him.
There was a breathless, electric pause. Luc stared at her. She slid her hands around his strong neck and arched into him, pressing her aching breasts against him. He groaned, deep in his throat.
“I do, damn you,” he said in a low voice, his eyes nearly silver. “I do.”
His mouth covered hers, and Gabrielle surrendered herself to the kick and roll, the heat and wonder. He kissed her again and again, savage and tender, as if he could never get enough. It was an apology, and it was a covenant, and she could not tell where she ended and he began.
He bent slightly and swept her into his arms, never lifting his mouth from hers. Gabrielle had the faintest hectic impression of an elegantly appointed drawing room before he deposited her on the Oriental rug in front of a fireplace and followed her down—and then his hard chest crushed into her with delicious pressure.
Gabrielle groaned—and forgot about the room. She didn’t care where they were. She cared only that she was touching him—finally. His hands stroked her, moving to her hips and hiking up her skirt so she could wrap her legs around his waist.
She struggled with the zip of his trousers and he cursed slightly. He shifted and released himself with two quick jerks. She had only a dizzy moment to look at his manhood, jutting proudly before him, and then he was thrusting into her, deep and hard and wild, and she thought no more.
She came almost instantly, shuddering around him. Luc felt the dark sorcery of her taste, her touch, overwhelm him, and he followed, shouting out her name.
But it was not magic, he knew, as he slowly came back to himself. It was love.
No wonder he had cast it aside and run from it—just as she had done in the beginning. No wonder he had so quickly grasped any excuse to leave her.
“What I know of love is twisted,” he told her when her eyes fluttered open. He traced patterns along the sweat-slick skin of her thigh, still wrapped around him. “Sick.”
“Then it is not love,” she whispered, her sea-colored eyes calm as she regarded him.
“I do not believe in it,” he said. He kissed her brow, the tip of her nose, her cheek. “I don’t know how to believe in it.”
“It’s not in your head, but in your heart.” She placed one of her slender hands on his chest. He felt his heart kick beneath her touch. “I spent my whole life loving someone who cannot love me in return,” she said. “I think love is feeling free. Not hidden away, not afraid. But finally whole—together.”
She was wondrous. She was his wife. He felt a deep, primal surge of possession and emotion and knew she was right. He loved her.
Beyond rationale and reason, he was madly in love with her. Crazy with it. And the most insane part was that he no longer cared that he had lost his objectivity.
“I love you,” he said fiercely, testing it out, even as he hardened once more within her. He scowled at her. “And I do not think it will ever change. I do not think you will escape it.”
“Good,” she whispered, and began to move her hips against him.
It would always be this way, Gabrielle thought some time later. She was wrapped in his long shirt and in his arms, enjoying the glittering Rome night from his balcony. She leaned back into his embrace, smiling.
There would be no ordinary Thursdays in their marriage, there would be only Luc. He would not be easy, and perhaps she would not be either. But they would have this passion—this wild, sweet fire that burned them both into ash—again and again. She wanted him still—again. Always.
“I will get back what you paid that little toad,” Luc promised her suddenly. She could feel his voice rumble in his chest and through her. “He will not profit from my wife for a tape that does not exist. To the tune of ten thousand pounds, no less!”
“I don’t care about it,” Gabrielle murmured, tilting her head back to nestle against him. “I never even looked at it.”
“I care.” His voice was implacable. “It is the principle. He will no doubt turn it into another series of stories, but that is of no matter to me. Let him. But he will pay you back the money he extorted, this I promise you.”
Gabrielle smiled. If he no longer cared about the tabloids, then things really had changed
. What had started as a vain hope mixed with a deep resolve, and had bloomed during their impassioned lovemaking, now burst into light inside her.
They would make it. It would be all right. This was as it should be—finally.
“If you wish it,” she said.
“How can you love such a man as me?” he asked her, his tone deceptively light. When she turned to face him, his eyes were hard on hers. “One who abuses you so terribly, chases you and then abandons you, believes the worst of you, accuses you of every sin imaginable?”
Gabrielle reached over and laid her hand against his cheek, making both of them take a quick, startled breath in response to the electric heat that arced between them, as if they had not made love three times already. She traced the shape of his lean jaw, then curled her fingers around his neck.
She would love this man forever.
“Well, Luc,” she said, and smiled, letting him see all the light and hope and love she carried inside her. “See that it does not happen again.”
He muttered a soft curse, or perhaps it was her name, and crushed his mouth to hers.
And Gabrielle knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that they had both found their way home.
At last.
ISBN: 978-1-4268-4794-3
PURE PRINCESS, BARTERED BRIDE
First North American Publication 2010.
Copyright © 2009 by Caitlin Crews.
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