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Before she could pull away, he pressed an overly courteous kiss to the back of her hand, his gaze holding hers. Despite the animosity and antagonism that radiated from his big body, a vivid, detailed image of the intimacy with which those finely chiseled lips had traveled over her body leaped into her head. Her cheeks grew hot and she mentally cursed her fair complexion, because in his eyes flared awareness—he knew exactly what she was thinking.
Then his lips compressed into a thin line as he straightened abruptly. “And be ready to answer my questions this time, Princess.”
Elizabeth paced the suite nervously as the clock struck seven the following evening. The Prince of Thortonburg! She still couldn’t believe it.
As children, she and her sisters had made fun of the stern Grand Duke. She could still remember Serena swaggering across the playroom, doing a deadly accurate imitation of the man, boasting about his eldest son’s educational achievements in England and America, that had had Katherine and her in stitches. Even Alexandra, whose over-developed sense of responsibility and position as the eldest had often made her seem stuffy to the younger girls, had laughed until the tears ran.
When the girls grew old enough to be presented at court and began to attend the balls and royal functions of the kingdom, they’d speculated about the invisible Thortonburg heir. Thoug
h he wasn’t that much older than Alexandra, none of her sisters had ever seen him. He’d been away at Eton and Oxford for years, then to the States to Harvard, she’d heard, and not long after that there had been rumors of a quarrel between the Grand Duke and his elder son. If it weren’t for Roland, the personable younger son of the Grand Duke, who vouched for his brother’s existence, she would have thought Raphael was a hoax. When he hadn’t even shown up for Roland’s twenty-first birthday party, it had only fueled the fires of her sisters’ curiosity.
Well, he existed, all right. She rested a hand on the slight swell of her belly, hidden beneath the loose, floating gauze of the dress she’d chosen to wear this evening. She could guarantee that he existed.
The worries of the present receded beneath a wave of memories that could still make her blush. She remembered the first time she’d seen him. He’d been wearing severe black evening dress, which had made him look impossibly tall and broad-shouldered compared to every other man in the room, as indeed he was. His only concession to the masquerade ball had been a small black silk mask that concealed the upper half of his face.
She’d been standing across the ballroom, dressed in the costume of a medieval princess, when their eyes had met. Within minutes, he’d cut a decisive path through the crowd to reach her side.
“Good evening, fair lady. Might I have the pleasure of your company in this dance?”
Up close, he was so much larger than she that he could have been intimidating. But as she allowed him to take her gloved hand, his eyes glowed a warm blue through the slits in the mask, and she had felt the oddest sense of security surround her. He drew her into a very correct ballroom position for the waltz that followed, and silently they danced. He didn’t even ask her name. Enjoying the game, she preserved the pretense of two strangers, but as the evening progressed, he gently urged her closer to him until she could feel his big hand splayed across her back, his long fingers nearly caressing the upper swell of her bottom, the strength of his muscled thighs pressing against her through the light gown she wore.
They’d danced like that for hours, until every nerve in her body quivered with desire. Her fingers had explored the heavy muscles of his arms and shoulders, slid up into his hair, and she felt his big body shudder against hers.
He brushed a kiss over her ear. “Let’s get out of here.”
A jolt of need surged through her. Had she ever felt like this before? The answer was so clear—none of the polished suitors who came sniffing around the royal residence had ever made her feel so much as a fraction of what she felt for this man.
She lifted her face to his, studying his thick-lashed eyes through the mask, the clean line of his jaw and the slight curve of chiseled lips. His gaze held hers, demanding her answer, and, as suddenly as that, she knew this was the man with whom she wanted to spend the rest of her life. She’d lifted herself on tiptoe and brazenly brushed her lips over his, then reached back and unlinked his hands from behind her back.
“Just let me visit the powder room,” she said. “I’ll meet you on the terrace.”
But as she turned away, he caught her by the wrist and lifted a big hand to her face, caressing the soft flesh along her cheek with one long finger. “Don’t be long,” he said in a deep voice that sent shivers of excitement racing through her, and her body contracted in an uncontrollable sexual response.
Turning her head, she kissed his finger as she slipped away. “I won’t be,” she promised.
And she wasn’t. It took her mere moments to locate Serena, flirting cheerfully and shamelessly with a crowd of young men, and she unapologetically drew her aside. “Cover for me tonight. I met someone.”
“Who?” Serena’s green eyes went wide with anticipation.
But Elizabeth shook her head. “I’ll tell you tomorrow. Just cover for me, okay?”
“Okay.”
Since they’d been children, the two of them had shared a longing for freedom from the ever-present bodyguards who shadowed their every move. Alexandra, immersed in correctness, and dear, quiet Katherine never seemed to mind the oppressive atmosphere, but she had longed for freedom, as had Serena. It had been a great game to elude the guards, and often, one of them would murmur, “Cover for me,” just before committing some daring vanishing act, invariably sending the guards into frantic scurrying which the hidden sister watched with glee.
It wasn’t particularly difficult to shake her observers. The royal bodyguards took their work seriously, but they were no match for a young woman who’d had years of practice in evading them.
Slipping out a side door into the garden, she approached the terrace from the lawn, her heart thumping heavily as she recognized her handsome dance partner standing on the other side of the low stone wall of the terrace.
“Hello, there,” she murmured.
He turned, immediately picking her out of the darkness and strolling to the edge of the wall. “Hello, beautiful,” he said. And in one powerful, lightning-swift move, he vaulted over the wall and dropped to the ground beside her.
She pressed a startled hand to her mouth, then released a nervous laugh. “Some people use the steps,” she pointed out, gesturing to the marble stairs at the center of the terrace.
“But you weren’t near the stairs,” he replied in a perfectly reasonable voice.
She smiled. “No, I wasn’t, was I?”
