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The man she was kissing wasn’t Matias.
It was Rafael.
Rafael, who generated so many confusing and tortured emotions inside her.
Rafael, who she desired so much it made her ache.
Rafael, who now seemed to assume that his wasn’t the only bedroom she’d visited.
Normally when her feelings got the better of her, she went out for a walk in the palace gardens, but she couldn’t do that now. She was trapped in a car with him. Trapped in the wild flood of her own emotions. All the unrequited passion and fear. All the choking rage that she had nowhere to direct but at him.
Lia lunged across the space between them before she could stop herself, no thought in her head but lash out at the most convenient target.
He seemed to be expecting it, however. Before she could land any kind of blow, he grabbed her wrists with insulting ease and hauled her on to his lap, her skirts bunched between them and flowing over the black leather seats of the limo.
Lia found herself staring into his eyes, the muscular heat of his body surrounding her, and abruptly she was trembling yet again, her body recognising his, her anger alchemising into something much hotter.
‘I had to know,princesa,’ Rafael said now in his hard, dark voice, his gaze blazing into hers, reading her mind as easily as if she was a book spread open before him. ‘You cannot blame me for that. Especially when you didn’t tell me.’
Lia shivered ‘I... I thought it was Matias. I went to his room. I thought it was him in the bed...’
Rafael’s gaze went molten as it raked over her. Then his expression twisted in what looked like a snarl and she found herself pushed hard away, deposited back firmly in the seat opposite him.
He pressed a button in the seat arm next to him and said something harsh and guttural in Spanish.
Lia’s hands were cold and so were her toes. Shock, probably.
She didn’t know what to do with herself. This morning when she’d woken up, she was the bride-to-be for Santa Castelia’s Crown Prince and now...
You failed. You failed your fiancé. Your country. Your parents. And you failedhim,too.
Her throat closed and she turned her head away from the fierce gaze of the man opposite, staring blindly out the window. The streets and buildings of Santa Castelia’s capital were lost under a cloud of white. It was snowing and snowing hard, as if the snow was a living embodiment of Rafael’s cold fury.
‘I went to Matias’s room, because I was trying to forget about you,’ she said thickly, because she owed him an explanation and he had to know that it hadn’t been—it hadneverbeen—Matias that she’d really wanted. ‘I thought that being with him would...help me.’ No point telling him that she’d been angry with him, too, not when that would possibly only inflame things.
‘I see.’ Rafael’s voice was wiped clean of expression. ‘And when did you realise you weren’t, in fact, in Matias’s room? Before or after your first orgasm?’
Anger licked up once again through the shame crowding in her throat, and she turned her head. ‘Do you really think I wouldn’t know who was touching me?’
He didn’t look away. ‘It was dark. And you clearly had no idea where Matias’s rooms were. You could have walked into anyone’s.’
‘And I would have left the second I realised I was with just anyone,’ she shot back. ‘But I wasn’t. I was with you.’
‘Would you have stayed if it hadn’t been? If it had been Matias in the bed instead of me?’
She shouldn’t challenge him, not now, not here. Yet she couldn’t help herself. Her emotions were all over the place, as they had been ever since she’d met him, and even more now she was pregnant. ‘Do you really want to know the answer to that?’
Rafael’s features were as uncompromising as his stare. ‘I wouldn’t have asked otherwise.’
She wanted to say ‘yes, I would have stayed’, because part of her wanted to hurt him. To get back at him for the situation she’d found herself in, for the months of mental anguish she’d gone through after finding out she was pregnant, for how he’d stopped coming to see her without explanation, for all the confusing emotions she felt whenever she was around him. Emotions she shouldn’t be having about a man who’d never been hers and wasn’t supposed to be.
But shehadto control herself. Everything was too close to the surface already and Rafael had always been the spark to her dry tinder. He made her catch alight, made her burn. He got under her skin and she couldn’t allow it.
The future she’d always thought she’d have might have been torn from her after today, but that was no excuse to let herself slip back into old patterns.
If the last three months had taught her anything, it was that she couldnotgive in to her own wants and desires. That was selfish.
But why not? What does it matter? Who do you have to perform for now?
