Pure Princess, Bartered Bride

by Caitlin Crews

  She would hunt him down, explain to him that he had no other option, and take him to bed.

  And when she thought about it in those terms she could hardly wait.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  ROME was hot and Luc was surly.

  He skirted a group of Spanish-speaking tourists taking pictures of themselves in front of the Fontana del Nettuno at the northern end of the Piazza Navone, barely restraining himself from berating them simply for being in his way.

  He was in a foul mood, and had been for weeks. He could not pretend he did not know why.

  He had left Gabrielle in London, but her ghost followed him everywhere he went. First he had gone to Paris, where his business was headquartered. Work was his raison d’être. It had saved him when his parents died. It had defined his existence since. And yet he’d found himself unable to concentrate. He’d looked at contracts and thought of her mysterious smile, the one he had never decoded. He’d sat in meetings and imagined he was back in bed with her, wrapped up in her arms, their mouths and bodies fused together. He felt her—felt her hands upon his skin, felt the ways in which she had changed him—and he despaired that this was permanent, this emotional mess that he’d become.

  He thought he might be going mad. Or, worse, was already mad.

  He had removed himself to his home in Rome, a penthouse apartment steps from the Piazza Navona. This was where he came to recharge his batteries. Though his mother’s family maintained a villa on the Appian Way that had come to him upon her death, he had always preferred the bustle and endless motion of the city center.

  Except for now. Rome, haunted by the ghosts of thousands of years, all of them indistinguishable beneath the Italian sky, now seemed haunted exclusively by the one woman Luc could not seem to escape. He saw her everywhere. He heard the music of her laughter on the breeze, glimpsed her face in every crowd and around every corner, and reached for her in his sleep only to wake, alone and furious.

  No woman had ever gotten under his skin in this way.

  No woman had ever gotten to him at all.

  “I do not know when I will return,” Luc growled into his mobile now, scowling at the usual frenzied scene spread out before him across the piazza. So many tourists and natives in the sun, enjoying the ease and flow of Roman life. And he, meanwhile, could not escape a woman he refused to allow himself to want any longer. She hung over Rome, the city of his heart and his youth, like a smog. She invaded him, altered him, and she was not even there.

  “Capisco bene,” Alessandro said over the phone. Too carefully. Too calmly. “I am capable of taking care of things at the office, Luc. You must take as much time as you need.”

  Luc realized that his second-in-command believed him to be nursing some kind of melodramatic romantic ailment, and let out a short laugh. How could he tell Alessandro that Gabrielle had managed to prise off the lid he had clamped down on emotions he had always denied he could ever feel? There was nothing melodramatic about it—it was all too inescapably mundane. And it was killing him.

  “I am not lovesick, like a child, Alessandro,” he snapped.

  “Of course not,” the other man replied. Obviously placating him.

  It was enraging—yet Luc could do nothing but end the call.

  He looked up as he approached his building, his scowl sharpening as he recognized the figure lurking near the haphazardly parked cars in front. The grizzled face and matted curls could belong to only one person: Silvio Domenico.

  Exactly who Luc least wanted to see—ever, and certainly not in his current mood.

  “Ah, Luc!” Silvio called, his voice heavy with mockery. “Such a beautiful day, is it not? Too bad you must spend it alone!”

  As he spoke he lifted his camera and fired off a series of shots. Luc did not alter his stride as he approached—just as he did not alter his expression. The other man grinned at the sight—and not nicely.

  “The strong, silent type today, eh?” he jeered. “No punches? No swearing? I am disappointed.”

  Luc closed the distance between them. He wanted to crush Silvio. He wanted to wrap his hands around the other man’s throat, tear apart his limbs and throw them into the gutter for the dogs. But he did none of those things. He stopped, instead, when he was only a few feet away, and regarded the other man for a long, cool moment.

  “I have yet to see my intimate life on the evening news,” he said. “You disappoint me, Silvio.”

  “It’s only a matter of time,” the other man boasted. “There is nowhere you can go that I can’t follow. Nothing you do that I won’t record. No matter how rich and powerful you get, you still can’t control me.”

  Luc waited for the usual wave of fury to crash through him, but it did not come. He thought instead of Gabrielle. He thought of the fact that no pictures had appeared anywhere—there were not even any rumors that embarrassing pictures existed, as there should have been. There was no whisper of any impropriety either in his marriage or concerning his wife. It dawned on Luc—slowly and inexorably—that there never would be.

  That there had never been any photographs. There had only been Silvio, playing games, and Luc’s immediate assumption that Gabrielle had betrayed him. Because everyone else had. He remembered with perfect, cutting clarity the way she had looked at him on that last evening—her eyes so wide, so dark, so filled with tears.

  I love you. He heard her as clearly as if she stood behind him and whispered in his ear. I love you.

  “Cat got your tongue?” Silvio taunted him, his lips curled.

  “How tedious you are,” Luc replied at length, when he was certain his voice would remain even. He eyed Silvio like the cockroach he was. “What an empty life you have made for yourself. I will endeavor to travel to more interesting places to give you a change of scenery, shall I?”

  Silvio shot another round of pictures, sneering.

  “Garnier, abandoned by wife, succumbs to drink and drug binge,” he murmured. “Once-feared multimillionare Garnier laid low by love—licks wounds in raunchy Roman orgy.”

  Luc arched an eyebrow. “I never realized until this moment how obsessed you are with me,” he murmured, feeling more like himself than he had in ages. “How sad.”

  “You should never have hit me!” Silvio snarled, with enough rage that Luc might have thought he referred to something that had occurred in the past decade, had he not known better.

  “You should never have thrust your camera into a moment of private grief,” Luc returned coolly. “Much less called my mother a whore.”

  “They say men marry their mothers,” Silvio said, flashing a smile filled with yellow teeth and malice.

  Luc’s first urge was to plant his fist in Silvio’s face—again. But that was reflex. When he thought about it for a moment, he nearly smiled. I am not your mother, Gabrielle had said. And indeed she was not. He realized now that she never had been.

  “Are you calling my wife a whore?” he asked softly. He found he could not even feel the rage he ought to feel—because it was so patently absurd. Of course Gabrielle was an innocent. Luc was the only man who had ever touched her—he had taught her how to kiss!

  “The Princess? I suppose not,” Silvio murmured. “But she was so distraught at the idea of a sex tape of you and La Rosalinda that she paid me ten thousand pounds to destroy it.” Silvio laughed. “As if I would turn over such a thing for so little, when it could make ten times that!”

  Luc looked at him for a long moment. Could he blame Silvio? Or was it his fault for jumping to the conclusion that had supported his worst fears? She had not planned to embarrass him. There was no resemblance between Gabrielle and the others. No connection between her and the toad who stood before him. None.

  “This is your revenge?” he asked at last.

  “I don’t need revenge,” Silvio scoffed. “I have ten thousand pounds. Will you hit me again?” And now Silvio taunted him. “A broken nose this time, maybe? I wonder how much I can sue you for? A man can never have enough mone
y.”

  Luc let out a laugh then. “There would be no point,” he replied. He stepped around the little pig of a man and moved toward the front door of his building. “It is too absurd. By all means print that. Make a fool of yourself in front of all of Europe. With my compliments.”

  Silvio swore at him as he walked away, but Luc did not respond. He didn’t care. It was as if Silvio had finally, after all these years of hunting him, ceased to exist.

  He was far more focused on the fact that he’d called Gabrielle my wife. With no past tense.

  Gabrielle arrived in Rome awash with memories.

  It seemed like another person who had run to Rome from Miravakia in the wake of her own wedding—run from everything she knew and the man she most assuredly did not know.

  How had so much changed in so little time? She was now bound and determined to fight for the man she had run from before. Her love for him seemed to burn inside her, bright and fierce and true, and it had nothing to do with how angry she was at the way he’d treated her. How had she changed so much—so much she hardly recognized herself?

  Rome was the same. The boisterous, ebullient city surged around her as she rode in a taxi from the airport—unchanged and yet always changing, ancient and new, flexing its more than two thousand years of history and beauty in the Mediterranean sun. It had not taken too much work on her part to figure out where Luc had gone. He had told her himself that he preferred Rome above all other cities, though he only went there alone, and to unwind. Meaning he visited far less than he wished.

  Gabrielle held tight to the fact that he was not in Paris, working—his second-in-command had told her so himself. Surely if she meant as little to Luc as he had claimed he would barely have noticed her absence? What was she to him, after all, but another in a long line of women? She could hardly expect to have dominated his world as he did hers—and his going back to work as if she had never existed would have been confirmation of that.

  But the fact that he was not in France—that he did not even seem to be working—had to be a good thing, she told herself. It reminded her of something he’d told her during that lazy trip up the California coast.

  They had been in Big Sur, awed by the giant trees and the craggy coastline. The Pacific Ocean had pounded against the rocks, swelling and retreating, churning up foam, far below the little cliffside path where they’d strolled.

  “I will always prefer Rome to all other cities,” he had said. “It is the place I am most at home.”

  “Why do you not go there more often?” she had asked. Hadn’t he just said he spent little time there?

  “My offices are in Paris,” Luc had said matter-of-factly, shrugging, a faint frown between his eyes. As if he did not understand the question. As if there was nothing else that mattered but work.

  Gabrielle remembered wondering why there was such a split in him—work and home forever on different sides of the divide. She had longed, then, to comfort him somehow—though she had sensed that he would not welcome it. Now she wondered why it had never occurred to her that he worked so hard, was so driven, because he knew nothing else. He did not even know he needed comfort.

  She glanced down at her left hand, at the two rings that sat on her finger. The diamond he’d given her burst into flame and rainbow in the afternoon sun, reminding her of the night he’d presented it to her. He had been so stiff, so formal. So remote. Even then she had sensed his vulnerability—had known that even a man so powerful as Luc was uncertain. Was that when she had known that he must care for her, little though he might be able to show it?

  Of course he could not trust her. He could not trust anyone. He had never had anyone to trust.

  His parents had abandoned him—first to play their histrionic relationship games, then in dying so young. He had never allowed anyone else near. He’d had no reason not to believe it when Silvio made up lies about her—and if Gabrielle thought about what Luc had said, the references to pictures, she could imagine the form those lies had taken. She could not be surprised that Luc had felt so betrayed. A month or so of love could not cancel out the lifetime of distrust and suspicion that had preceded it.

  It only made her more determined.

  She would love him whether he wanted her to or not. She wouldn’t stop just because he struck out at her, cast her aside. She loved him enough to know that she must never give up—she must break through, somehow, to that vulnerable part of him he kept hidden away. So that they could both be free—together.

  Luc stood on the terrace of his penthouse, looking out over the rooftops of Rome. He had never brought one of his women to this place—the most private of his homes—and had had no specific intention to bring Gabrielle here, either, though he had married her.

  Yet he couldn’t seem to stop thinking of how much she would have loved to see the sun set over the city, creeping across the domes and steeples, the light orange and gold.

  I love you.

  He had called her my wife. Not my ex-wife. He had demanded that his lawyers draw up the necessary papers and then avoided their calls ever since. Today he had realized what he should have known all along—she had not betrayed him. That Silvio had played him for a fool, even played him against Gabrielle, and because he was a fool he had run with it. Embraced it. Had some part of him wanted to believe she was capable of such treachery? Had he wanted her to be his mother all over again? To confirm his darkest fears?

  He couldn’t seem to come to terms with what all of that meant. He who was famous for his decisiveness, his boldness.

  He put his glass of wine down on the table and moved to the railing, restless. He remembered when he was younger, how he had stood in this same place and plotted the many ways he planned to increase his holdings, conquer his rivals, cut low his enemies. All of which he had done—in spades.

  Now all he could think of was the mesmerizing curve of her hip, the small, pleading noise she made when she was close to her climax. Her serene, elegant smoothness and the wildness contained within it.

  He was infatuated. Obsessed.

  Even Rome seemed empty without her.

  Luc was forced to admit defeat. It was a new and oddly uncomfortable experience.

  But it seemed he could not live without her.

  Had he already suspected as much in London? Was that why he’d been so quick to walk out on her? Had he been running for his life—the empty, emotionless life he had crafted so carefully and that she had destroyed forever?

  He walked back into the flat from the terrace, scowling as he worked to come to terms with this new information. If he could not live without her, that meant that he had to get her back. It meant that, and it also meant a great many things he was not certain he wished to look at directly.

  He turned when he heard the low chime of the elevator doors, opening inside his private foyer.

  “I am so sorry, Mr. Garnier,” the bellboy cried out immediately. “I know you ask that we announce all visitors, but this—”

  “Hello, Luc,” Gabrielle said quietly as she stepped from the elevator car.

  Dio, but she was beautiful. She went straight to his head, standing there so composed and pretty, in a delicate blue jacket and skirt that he longed to rip from her body right there, tumbling them both to the marble floor.

  “Gabrielle.” He tasted the syllables of her name. Had he conjured her up? Had wanting her made her appear, like some genie from a childhood fairy tale?

  He had showered after his run-in with Silvio, scrubbing the encounter off his skin. He’d thrown a button-down shirt on over his trousers, but neglected to fasten it—an impulse he was glad of as he watched the way her eyes caressed his chest and abdomen before they returned to his.

  “I believe you forgot something,” she said in her calm, soothing voice, her gaze intent on his as she stepped toward him. The elevator—dismissed with a wave of Luc’s hand—closed behind her. “In your haste to get away.”

  He remembered his own words, delivered so differentl
y, so angrily, a world away. He felt something like a smile curve his mouth.

  “Did I?” he asked softly, drinking her in. “And what is that?”

  She tossed her head back. Defiant, bold. She was different than he remembered—more vibrant, more sure. She looked him in the eye. She was not afraid.

  She was glorious.

  “Your wife,” she said.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  “I LOVE you,” she told him, marching across the marble foyer and stopping when she was only inches from his hard, beloved face. “Even though you broke my heart in London. I love you, and I refuse to accept that our marriage is over.”

  “You have grown claws, it seems,” Luc murmured in that silky way of his. “I see my absence has suited you.”

  She couldn’t read his expression. There was something new in the way he looked at her—but it was not cold, or vicious. Hope unfurled inside her chest and mingled with the determination that had already guided her here.

  “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.