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CHAPTER TWO
FORTHEFIRSTtime since he’d appeared at her window, Marcelo looked nonplussed. ‘I beg your pardon?’ he said. ‘You’re a virgin?’
‘Yep,’ she answered cheerfully. Clara was not in the least embarrassed about her virgin state. ‘Apparently a virgin is more of a guarantee that any child will be his. Because, obviously, once a woman’s experienced sex she turns into a raging nymphomaniac and has to have it with any man within a ten-mile radius and is so overtaken by lust she forgets to use contraception, especially when she’s out there having her wicked way with all those men who aren’t her husband.’
Marcelo just stared at her. She became aware that the men who’d hauled them onto the helicopter were staring at her from their seats on the bench too. They all appeared dumbfounded.
‘What’s wrong?’ she asked, looking from one to the other. ‘You’re not married and now worried your wives are out there shacking up with your nearest neighbour, are you? Honestly, that was just Dominic’s tiny, paranoid mind coming into play. I mean, I don’t know, maybe your wives are having affairs but if they are, I assure you, it’s not because they’re nymphomaniacs but because they’re unhappy in your marriage so my advice would be to fix any unhappiness. Women like to feel loved and appreciated. And wanted. Flowers are always appreciated too but I wouldn’t recommend using them as a form of apology—if you need to apologise and show how remorseful you are, a grovelling apology on bended knee works a treat.’
‘Does it?’ Marcelo asked faintly.
Her face scrunched as she shrugged. ‘Well, that’s what I’d prefer if my husband upset me but I don’t suppose I can speak for other women, and it’s all a bit moot because I’m never going to get married. I’d quite like a man to get on bended knee and produce a grovelling apology though.’
‘For what?’
Clara considered the question. ‘My father for not protecting me? My brother for selling me to a pig? Yes. Those things warrant grovelling apologies. But it’s not quite the same thing, is it?’ She considered it some more. ‘No, on second thoughts, grovelling on bended knee to your daughter or sister feels a bit wrong. Those kind of grovels should be left for lovers to do. And my father’s dead so I’m going to have to wait until I join him in hell before I get any apology off him, and Andrew wouldn’t know an apology if it slapped him in the face.’
The stupid thing was that until she’d received her brother’s beautifully written letter—Andrew was a traditionalist—inviting her to dinner, Clara hadn’t cared that she was estranged from him...or, more truthfully, that he was estranged from her. Older than her by two decades, Andrew had always treated her with disdain, like she was a nuisance to be tolerated, even when he’d been her legal guardian. He’d resented her as a child for being the catalyst of his parents’ divorce, their father leaving his mother for Clara’s mother, and as she’d grown older she’d grown into an embarrassment to him. Before that dinner invitation arrived, she hadn’t seen him in the four years since he’d turned up at her flat on her eighteenth birthday, not with a present for her but with details of a savings account her mother had set up for her when she’d been born. The last deposit had been made when Clara was four. There was enough in it for her to replace her sagging fourth-hand sofa with a less sagging second-hand one, little enough money for Clara to know her father had kept his second wife’s spending tightly controlled.
She hadn’t realised until she’d received Andrew’s letter and her heart had felt fit to burst that she’d nestled a secret hope her pompous brother could look past the circumstances of her birth and the personality traits he found so insufferable, and want a relationship with her. She guessed that’s why it hadn’t occurred to her that what she’d taken to be his attempt at a reproachment between them had a malevolent ulterior motive.
Andrew’s loathing of her ran deeper than she’d known.
Something flickered in Marcelo’s ice-blue eyes. ‘You think your brother sold you to Dominic?’
‘I don’t know in what form he was paid for it—he doesn’t need the money as he’s loaded, so probably wants the cachet of being brother-in-law to a king—but yes, he sold me to him.’ Andrew had tricked her and sold her to a monster. Feeling her belly roil and churn, she squashed the pointless pain down and gave her attention to something much worthier: Marcelo’s hair, which he was currently running his fingers through.
It was nice hair, Clara decided. And much nicer to focus on than allowing her brain to think about her brother. It hurt much less too. Almost black in contrast to those ice-blue eyes—mind you, the ring around the iris was as black as the pupils, adding a different dimension to them—Marcelo’s hair was long at the front and currently flopping over his forehead thanks to being ravaged by the wind. Marcelo Berruti had the look of someone who took great pride in his personal grooming, the black beard covering the square jaw just the right side of designer stubble. She wondered if it was soft to the touch or bristly and then thought that that was a thought she’d never pondered before. Interesting...
Marcelo Berruti was interesting. Physically. If interesting was a substitute for drop-dead gorgeous. Because that’s what he was. Drop-dead gorgeous. Even his mouth was sexy, all full yet firm. And wide. She wondered what those lips would feel like against hers, which was also interesting as Clara had never wondered that about any man before. Now that the shock of being airlifted onto a helicopter had abated, she could admit that it had felt very nice being held against his solid body.
‘Have you got a girlfriend?’ she asked on impulse.
The kissable lips parted then closed. He blinked then gave a short shake of his head. ‘Are you for real?’
‘Of course.’ She held an arm out to him. ‘See? Touch me. I’m as real as you are.’
He looked from her extended arm to her face and gave another short shake of his head. ‘Do you have a filter for your mouth?’
‘No, but I probably need one. Dominic did threaten to gag me a number of times.’
‘What stopped him?’
‘He was scared I would bite him.’
If Marcelo shook his head again he would give himself whiplash. This woman though...
He’d known she was a handful. Alessia had told him that much, how the teachers at their strict school had grown so exasperated at having to continually sanction her that Clara had been placed in a bedroom with Alessia in the hope his sister, a year older than her, would be a good influence. That arrangement had lasted until Clara’s expulsion. Alessia had confided in him, ‘There were so many rumours flying around about the expulsion being to do with a fire alarm going off in an exam but that didn’t make sense to me and nothing was confirmed. Whatever it was, she was a complete handful and drove the teachers nuts but, for me, there was something inherently loveable about her that made you want to protect her from herself.’
He didn’t think he’d met a woman in less need of protection in his life. She might have the looks of someone who’d just stepped out of a Botticelli painting but that runaway mouth would drive a saint to losing its patience. And he’d only known her an hour!
‘He would never have controlled you,’ he murmured.
She sighed and rubbed her fingers through Bob’s fur. ‘He would have used this little one to control me. He really had done his homework on me, but between you and me...and them...’ She indicated his two paratrooper friends who’d come along to help and were clearly listening, agog, to their conversation. ‘I think he’d run out of options. He took the throne a couple of years ago and needed to start breeding, but every eligible princess or duchess or whatever in Europe turned him down. I personally think he was a bit desperate when he decided I was the perfect woman to be his queen.’
Marcelo’s own sister had been one of the eligible princesses to turn the King down. The refusal had come from their mother, who, earlier that year, received an official request from Dominic for a meeting about Princess Alessia. Knowing exactly what the meeting would be about, she’d diplomatically refused. Like the rest of the Berrutis, the Queen abhorred the King of Monte Cleure. Not only would she never take it on herself to arrange her children’s marriages, she would rather lose her throne than sanction her daughter’s marriage to a man who had absolute power in his principality and treated women as playthings and those of his family as second-class citizens. There had been many unconfirmed rumours that he used to hit his own sister before she fled to America.
If Clara was speaking the truth, and judging from the blunt, unfiltered way she spoke he had no reason to doubt her, her brother had sold her to that very man. He didn’t know what was more disturbing—the idea that a man could treat his own sister in such a cruel manner or the way she relayed it so matter-of-factly and then moved straight on to another subject as if her brother selling her wasn’t something that needed to be dwelt on.
