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‘Would you do me a favour?’ he said, lowering his voice as he leaned in closer, and she got a debilitating hit of clean soap and male musk.

‘I won’t know until I hear what the favour is.’

‘Will you try and act nervous and insecure, not an easy ask for you, I know, but can you give the impression not to take things in your stride. Act like you need some support, and not like some frigid goddess.’

She blinked and wondered at what point the roles had got reversed—she was the one mad with him, and with justification!

‘What the hell are you talking about?’

A hissing sound of frustration left his white clenched teeth. ‘I only got my mother this far by telling her you needed her support.’

‘Support…? You told your mother I was some sort of shrinking violet? Are you trying to insult me?’

‘Calm down!’

‘I am perfectly calm and you… Why would you say that to her?’

‘She was digging in her heels and refusing to come. I thought it might persuade her. My mother is a kind woman and a sob story—’

‘You made me a sob story!’

‘In a manner of speaking,’ he admitted, showing no discernible sign of shame.

‘How was I supposed to know this, exactly?’

‘I am sorry. I should have told you.’

‘You think?’

‘I would have told you, but I genuinely didn’t think she’d come. I really thought she’d be a no-show. My mother has been back to Santagostino a handful of times over the years and then just for state occasions. She didn’t even stay overnight for my father’s state funeral or my coronation. The place holds a lot of bad memories for her, and I want to change that.’

‘She hated him that much?’

‘If only.’ He dragged a frustrated hand back and forth hard across his dark head, making his hair stand in sexy spikes. ‘No, my mother loved the bastard.’

He watched Elsie’s expression freeze in open-mouthed shock that after a moment she tried to hide.

‘I know, my father was not a loveable guy, that’s the problem. She could never see it; even when he stamped all over her heart and humiliated her, she loved him. Love, as they say, is blind.’ Leandro was grateful he had excellent eyesight, twenty-twenty vision.

‘I wouldn’t know,’ she countered, feeling lucky and not deprived.

‘We have that much in common.’

‘So, for her to walk away…it was a big thing. What was the trigger?’

He held her gaze but his body language, it seemed to Elsie, became more guarded. Maybe she was seeing things that weren’t there; his shrug was negligent enough.

‘Who knows…the accumulation of years of humiliation?’

He sounded careless enough, but Elsie wasn’t totally buying the explanation.

‘They never divorced?’ Everything she had read had skirted around the issue.

‘He was King, she his Queen. Divorce was never an option.’

Elsie made a frantic effort not to allow the alarm and guilt she felt show on her face. The way he was looking at her made her doubt her success, but that might just be her guilty conscience talking.

‘You mean traditionally it isn’t done? There isn’t a law or anything…? Obviously not,’ she tacked on, nervously answering her own question.