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But the wind must have carried the word away—either that or she was just ignoring it—for she continued to wade into the sea. ‘Get rid of that damned helicopter!’ he demanded, and as the driver barked instructions into a handset the aircraft began to move back through the sky towards the palace.
Shaking his head as his bodyguard attempted to accompany him, Casimiro began to scramble down the rocky steps—and never had a journey seemed to take so long. Only when he was almost at the bottom did he shout out her name again.
‘Melissa!’
In the water, Melissa stilled as a new sound disturbed the silence of the day. A shout which sounded louder even than the helicopter which had been circling overhead but which had now flown away. A shout she would never have recognised if she hadn’t turned around and seen the tall, dark figure of her husband descending the steep stone stairs which led down to the beach. She narrowed her eyes—wondering if the bright sunshine had conjured up some sort of illusion.
Casimiro?
He was in wall-to-wall meetings followed by a trip to the naval base, wasn’t he? But no, the renewed shout was louder still and it was definitely no illusion, for now he had reached the beach and was tearing off his jacket while running across on the sand towards her with the grace and speed of a natural athlete.
Casimiro? She stood stock-still and watched him.
Kicking off his shoes, he moved fast. So fast that Melissa barely realised what he was doing until he had plunged half dressed into the sea and started wading and then swimming. All she was aware of was his hard, honed body ploughing through the azure water towards her.
‘Casimiro!’ she croaked.
But by then he had reached her, had caught hold of her—effortlessly half lifting her from the water against the water-plastered silk of his chest—his dark face a series of stark and shifting emotions: fear and anger and anguish. So that for a moment it didn’t look like Casimiro at all.
‘Che cazzo staifacendo?’ he demanded fiercely, and then when he saw her blank expression, pulled her closer still—his amber eyes burning like flames as they engulfed her in their angry blaze. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
MELISSA stared into her husband’s angry face and met the hot challenge in his eyes full on, her heart crashing against her ribcage in bewilderment. ‘I…I was going swimming, of course! Wh-what did you think I was doing?’
Casimiro let out a strangled sort of sigh, which seemed to have been dragged from some dark place deep inside him. ‘How should I
know?’ he exclaimed. ‘How the hell should I know?’
And suddenly Melissa saw the fear which underpinned his outward fury. The way his aristocratic features looked knife-sharp beneath the blanched colour of his olive skin. ‘You didn’t think…’ Confused thoughts crowded into her head. ‘You didn’t think I was walking out to sea—about to end it all because we’d had a row?’ Now the thoughts became more focused. And her own fury rose up to match his. ‘When I have a beautiful little son waiting for me back there at the palace? Do you really think I place so little value on him, Casimiro—or on me?’
He stared down into her green eyes and shook his head, feeling the mad race of his heart against his sodden shirt. ‘I wasn’t thinking at all,’ he said, in a raw voice. ‘I was acting on pure instinct.’ Some primitive instinct which had made him want to run straight into the sea and haul her into the safety of his arms.
‘And instinct demanded that you rush fully clothed into the sea, did it?’ she questioned, trying to pull away from him, but he wasn’t having any of it, his grip like an iron clamp around her waist.
He gave an odd kind of laugh. ‘Just what would you expect me to do, Melissa? When one of your staff burst into my meeting and told me they couldn’t find you. That you were gone—only nobody knew where. And that you hadn’t even taken a bodyguard with you. This is unprecedented behaviour for the monarch’s consort—how was I to know what had happened?’
She heard the unfamiliar tremor which shook his deep voice and for the first time Melissa realised that her need to escape had been completely thoughtless. That it had fed the well-founded fears of a powerful man who had always lived his life in the shadow of danger.
‘It was never my intention to alarm you,’ she said woodenly. ‘I’m sorry.’
His fingers bit into her flesh as he held her tighter. ‘So what did happen, Melissa? Why did you take off without warning? Was it to punish me?’
‘To punish you?’
He stared at her. Could he have blamed her for wanting to punish him? And wasn’t he now forced to confront the truth—no matter how painful that truth might be? ‘For my high-handedness,’ he said bitterly. ‘For treating you as a possession instead of as a partner. For failing to talk to you properly, or listen to you.’
Her heart began to pound. Was this the prelude to making some kind of unexpected announcement—for telling her that it was never going to work and that he was going to give her back the freedom she so obviously craved? Had her brief flirtation with rebellion backfired spectacularly on her—had he given into the ultimatum he’d accused her of issuing?
Suddenly she caught the blinding flash of light from higher up and realised that they were being watched. And that whatever Casimiro had to tell her, she would accept it with dignity. She had to—for hadn’t she already tried harder than most women would have done in a doomed attempt to make their relationship deeper than it could ever be? But with the best will in the world, even she didn’t think she could accept the end of her marriage being played out in front of an audience.
‘You do realise that your security people have got binoculars trained on us? And that we’re standing half submerged in water—you dressed only in a shirt and a pair of trousers. And maybe we shouldn’t be having this discussion here.’
Glancing upwards, he scowled. ‘Maybe you’re right,’ he said, and then, without warning, he bent and lifted her into his arms and began to carry her towards the shore.
‘Casimiro, please. This is crazy—’
‘Damned right it is,’ he said grimly.
