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Her blood ran cold. “There are other ways to make this work.”
“I’m afraid there aren’t.” His beautiful mouth tipped up on one side. “Think of it this way. There is now no limit to how many times we can have each other. In fact, the more the better. A spare to the throne is clearly ideal. We can work out the rest of that explosive chemistry of ours.”
His hard thighs burned into her bottom. The memory of what they’d done in exactly this position in the back of the Bentley sent a heated flush to every inch of her skin. She pushed a hand against his chest. “You have lost your mind.”
A wry smile curved his mouth. “Surprisingly, I think I’ve kept it over the past few weeks. And believe me, Sofi´a, it was no mean feat.”
She stopped fighting. Her breath jammed in her lungs as her brain caught up with what was happening. “You set this up. You told me we were going to talk at home so I’d get in the car and you could get me on this plane and my will would be taken away from me.”
“So smart,” he mocked, lifting a hand in an indolent gesture. “And so right.”
She called him the filthiest name she could think of.
His smile grew. “I’m a king, Sofi´a. I do what I have to do.”
CHAPTER FOUR
SOFÍA PACED THE palace library, oblivious to the stunning, chandelier-accented glory of the gold-and-mahogany-hued room. She wished she knew where among the exquisite first editions and precious bound volumes she could find a thesaurus. It might help her to put a label on her current set of emotions toward Nik, because fury seemed too little a word.
Anger, rage, wrath—they couldn’t come close to encompassing the tempestuous feelings enveloping her in waves. How dare Nik trick her into coming here. How dare he assume she would give up her life in New York and marry him, just because she was having his child. Yes, she was carrying the heir to the Akathinian throne, but she wasn’t Akathinian. She had a business in Manhattan to run. A business that meant everything to her.
Her insides roiled, sending the heat in her cheeks even higher. And then there was the utterly inconceivable accusation he’d thrown at her. That she’d planned the pregnancy. That she’d wanted to trick him into marriage. She knew Nik was cynical in the extreme, hardened from his life in the spotlight and those who would have used him had he allowed it, but to accuse her of all people of that? It was ludicrous.
Her fury and anxiety at being so helpless, so far from home, so out of control of this situation had her breath coming fast and furious. Throwing herself into one of the leather chairs near the windows, she forced herself to take deep breaths, to calm down as she watched the million-dollar yachts bobbing in the harbor.
She might not be able to change the fact that she was here, but she could tell Nik how unreasonable he was being when he returned from his meeting with the Agieros, where he was attempting to avoid a diplomatic crisis as he broke off his engagement, given the results of the blood test had proved conclusively the child she carried was his. That giving up her business, uprooting her life and moving here to a little island in the middle of the Mediterranean to become his queen was a crazy, untenable idea.
They would talk, she could get out of here before his mother and sister returned from a charitable engagement in Athens and all would be good.
No need to meet his family when the idea of marrying Nik was preposterous.
* * *
Nik’s meeting with the Agieros did not go well. In fact, it went far worse than he’d anticipated. Clearly the family could be expected to be disappointed at the loss of the opportunity to marry into the royal family and the power and prestige that came with it, but he had not been prepared for the overt antagonism Maurizio Agiero, the head of the family, had displayed upon hearing the news Nik would wed an American and not the Countess of Agiero.
He suspected it was Maurizio’s deep political ambitions that lay behind the animosity. Yes, the media was abuzz with speculation surrounding an announcement of an engagement, but Vittoria had seemed to take it in her stride, cool as usual, when he’d taken her aside to personally apologize, only raising an eyebrow when he’d referred to what was an “unexpected” turn of events.
Pulling his car to a halt in front of the white Maltese stone Akathinian royal palace that stood set back from the harbor on a rolling hill that overlooked the Ionian Sea, he handed the keys to a palace staffer, then took the steps of the wide, sweeping stairwell two by two. The Agiero alliance eliminated, there was only one other partnership that would give his family the power it needed to fund a war, and it involved his arch nemesis, Akathinian billionaire Aristos Nicolades.
