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‘Thank you so much.’ When his dark brows lifted, she realised she might have overdone the insincerity. At least while she was being rude, she wasn’t saying anything stupid.

No, she was just feeling stupid things.

Crazy, insane, she thought painfully, aware of the hot liquid pulse in her pelvis.

She was not this person—if this was an identity crisis she was not enjoying it. She didn’t even have the excuse of ignorance; she was not blind to the fact that he was everything she had contempt for. An overindulged, oversexed, hedonistic idiot…well, maybe not an idiot, and the carnal mouth and the body were not an illusion. She wafted a hand in front of her face and lowered her gaze.

The idiot here is me, she decided, feeling a swell of self-disgust in her chest.

It was ironic, considering she had always secretly dreamt about meeting someone who could make her lose her self-control and now she had—the wrong someone.

Just who was the idiot here?

Not him.

Maybe she should just enjoy it.

Shocked by the maverick thought, her gaze lifted and connected head-on with the polished mahogany of the stare of the man now standing beside his chair, just feet away.

Elsie felt a stab of resentment. She hadn’t had a plan as such, but she had taken comfort from the fact that being aware of his animal magnetism gave her an advantage of sorts. He might be gorgeous and sexy, she had told herself, but he was also not very bright.

That comfort had been snatched away the moment their eyes had connected. Oh, how much simpler this would have been if he was just a pretty face!

* * *

‘You really do look…’ He paused, leaning across to fill his own glass and then hers, his eyes drifting over the soft contours of her face as he did so, an element of compulsion in the action.

Any objective observer would consider the cut-glass clarity of her features beautiful, as he had with the buffer zone of four years. In the room, there was no buffer, she was flesh and blood up close, and any claim to objectivity had vanished, replaced by a gut-squeezing visceral slug of lust.

There had been two questions to answer before she’d walked in. Now she was here, only one remained. The pool incident had not been a one-off. That left: which twin was she? Were they meeting for the first time? The answer in his head involved nothing more scientific than his gut—this was his pool Princess.

‘Warm.’

Her teeth dug into her plump bottom lip as her tongue flickered, licking off the pink gloss, her breath perceptibly quickened but her gaze stayed stubbornly steady on his.

The fire inside him flared as he watched the drenched blue almost swallowed up by her expanded pupils. There was nothing unilateral about the sexual charge between them. He lifted the glass to his lips but didn’t break eye contact.

The truth was, he didn’t want to look and admire, he wanted to touch and taste… Leandro had a healthy libido, he’d experienced the odd eyes-across-a-crowded-room moment, but he could not recall ever having such an instant primal reaction to any other woman.

Of course, he had been celibate for coming up to twelve months now; he’d not had sex since his father’s death. He’d not been counting; this information had been supplied by the enterprising journalist—some might prefer stalker—who had shoved a camera in his face while enquiring about his feelings.

What passed for a private life had been put into cold storage, first the funeral, followed by the state-regulated mourning period before the Coronation. He assumed that the next public event would be his marriage, but hopefully he would not have to wait until then to address the celibacy situation.

‘To the future.’ Which was suddenly looking interesting.

The glasses chinked but she did not swallow, she shivered.

‘Are you cold?’

* * *

Elsie forced a smile and struggled to keep her voice neutral. ‘No, it’s fine. This is a very beautiful room,’ she added, breaking free of his stare and sucking in oxygen. She looked around the room, trying to summon the sort of polite interest her twin was so good at.

She was not her sister and she wasn’t good at small talk.

She just sounded, well…desperate, which she realised, with a sinking awareness, was justified.

‘This doesn’t have to be awkward.’