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‘Fortunately I don’t bruise easily.’
Frustration bubbled through him. He knew what she was doing. Like any good defender, she was keeping him from an easy, direct goal. Had he thought saying sorry would actually be enough? ‘I didn’t want to hurt you.’
She lifted her chin another notch. ‘Like I said, you didn’t.’
‘You know that’s not what I mean.’ She said nothing, but he sensed her tension, felt it in himself. He felt his heart race the way it had when he was seconds away from a goal. ‘I…I care about you, Natalia.’
She stilled, but her expression didn’t change. ‘Thank you,’ she finally said, and Ben nearly had to keep his jaw from dropping in furious disbelief. Thank you? Definitely not the response he’d been going for. Hoping for. He felt like he did on the football pitch in an offside trap. He’d moved too far forward to attempt a goal and she’d moved back, leaving him offside and out of play. Useless. Vulnerable.
‘I didn’t expect to,’ he continued, still trying to explain, to somehow redeem this conversation. ‘I didn’t want to.’
‘That,’ Natalia said coolly, ‘is glaringly apparent.’ She raised her eyebrows. ‘Is that all you had to discuss? For as I said before, my guests will be arriving at any moment.’
Ben felt a slower anger start to burn inside him. All right, maybe it didn’t sound like much, but he’d confessed more to this woman than he had to anyone else. He’d told her he cared and she’d said thank you.
He drew himself up, fury pounding like a pulse inside him. ‘Yes,’ he told her coldly, ‘that’s all.’ And he strode out of the room without looking back.
* * *
Natalia stood very still as she listened to Ben’s footsteps echo on the marble floor of the palazzo’s foyer. If she moved, she felt she might break. Shatter. It had taken all her self-control, all her experience in acting the haughty, aloof princess, to play that role. To act like she didn’t care.
And even now part of her wanted to wrench open the door and follow him through the palazzo, panting about how she cared too. And maybe even more than that.
No. She would not humiliate herself that way. She wouldn’t take the paltry scraps Ben was offering. The realisation had grown in her as he’d stumbled through his awful nondeclaration. This was not what she wanted. It was not enough. If she was going to risk herself, all her vulnerabilities, then she wanted more. She wanted to be known, accepted, loved. The realisation stunned her even as it felt achingly, unbearably right. Yet Ben had barely been able to form the word care. And then those qualifiers: I didn’t expect to. I didn’t want to. Had he actually thought he was saying something she wanted to hear?
She let out a shuddering breath and slowly drew herself up, shoulders back, head tilted. A princess. And a woman, she knew now, who wanted love after all, in all of its fearful beauty and wondrous glory. Not someone who reluctantly, resentfully cared.
Not, Natalia reminded herself, that she would get either. She was about to meet the ambassador of Qadirah, a small island principality in the Arabian Sea, with a thirty-year-old bachelor sheikh and heir to the throne. A possible husband, and she’d never even met him. She didn’t want to.
Walking stiffly, still aching, Natalia turned from the room.
The next day when Natalia arrived at the stadium the camp was in full swing, with Ben at its centre, working hard. She watched him run defense for Roberto, the boy he’d taken on as a young protegé. He was shouting instructions, sweat running down his face in rivulets. He looked amazing, but also angry. At least he had the football pitch to work out his frustrations. She’d had an interminable dinner with more veiled and not-so-veiled references to her salacious past, as well as a private conversation with the ambassador from Qadirah that had included a list of the sheikh’s expectations for a bride. Submissiveness and discretion had figured prominently, not two of her best-known qualities. Natalia had barely slept all night, and her body still ached from yesterday’s pummeling as goalie. Today was not going to be a good day.
Her fears were proved true just half an hour later, when a sudden cry sounded from the far side of the pitch and Natalia looked up to see a small knot of children and volunteers gathered around a fallen form. Her heart seemed to leap straight into her throat as she recognised the slight, scruffy figure. Roberto. Ben was bent over him, his face drawn and pale. Natalia knew immediately something very bad had happened.
