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CHAPTER ONE
ALESSIABERRUTI’SHANDshook as she pressed ‘play’ on her phone. The scene, one which had already been viewed by over two million people since its upload four hours earlier, was a wedding reception. Hundreds of finely dressed people were celebrating in a stateroom in the castle where the royal family of Ceres lived. The camera zoomed in on two women. The loud music and waves of surrounding conversation faded.
‘Your brother looks smitten,’ the blonde lady in the video footage said. Her voice, although pitched low, was clearly audible.
‘He is.’ The tiny, chestnut-haired woman who answered looked over her shoulder. The camera perfectly captured the face of Princess Alessia Berruti.
The blonde’s voice dropped even lower. ‘I wonder how Dominic’s feeling right now, seeing his intended bride marry another man.’
‘Who gives a...’ A loud beep was dubbed over the princess’s scathing retort. ‘That man’s an obese, sweaty, disgusting monster.’
‘Don’t hold back,’ the blonde said with a laugh. ‘Say what you really think.’
The princess laughed too and drank some more champagne before saying, ‘Okay, what Ireallythink is that King Dominic of Monte Cleure should be locked behind bars and never allowed within three kilometres of any woman ever again.’
The footage ended the moment Alessia’s phone buzzed in her hand. It was her eldest brother, Amadeo.
‘My quarters,’ he said icily. ‘Now.’
Four days later, Alessia covered her flaming face and wished for the chair she was sitting on to plunge her into a deep pit.
What had she done?
Trying her hardest not to cry again, she lifted her stare to Amadeo. His features were as taut and uncompromising as she had ever seen them. To his right, their mother, her expression as unyielding as her eldest son’s. To their mother’s right, their father, the only person in this whole room with a smidgeon of sympathy. She couldn’t bring herself to look at the man sat on the other side of Amadeo, the final link in the human chain of disappointment and anger being aimed at her.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Alessia whispered for the third time. ‘I had no idea I was being filmed.’
It was an excuse that cut no ice, not even with her.
One unguarded moment. That’s all it had been. Unguarded or not, she should have known better. Shedidknow better. Her whole life had been spent having her basic human desires and reactions restrained so that she was always in total control of herself.
‘I’ll marry Dominic,’ she blurted into the silence. ‘I’m the one who’s got us into this mess, I’m the one who should be punished. Not you.’
That had been the king’s first demand in the Berrutis’ valiant efforts to make amends. Marriage to Princess Alessia. It would show the world, so he said, that she had been jesting and that the Berruti royal family respected him. That the world had already got wind that he’d once made overtures about marriage to the princess and been politely rebuffed mattered not a jot to him. King Dominic had thicker skin than a rhinoceros. He also had the vanity of a peacock and the cruelty of a medieval despot. So atrocious was his reputation that not a single eligible female member of any European royal family had agreed to a date, let alone marriage. Dominic’s desperation for a blue-blooded bride had seen him trick a very distant relation of the current British monarch to his principality and then hold her hostage until she agreed to marry him. His victim escaped barely an hour before her forced nuptials when Alessia’s other brother, Marcelo, rescued her to worldwide amazement and Dominic’s fury, and married her for himself. It was at Marcelo and Clara’s wedding reception that Alessia had opened her mouth and made the simmering relations between the two nations boil over.
‘Don’t think I’ve not been tempted,’ Amadeo said grimly at the same moment their father stated, ‘Out of the question.’
‘But why should Amadeo have to give up his whole life for something that’s my fault?’ she implored.
‘Because, sister,’ Amadeo answered, ‘tempting though it may be to insist you marry that man, I wouldn’t marry someone I hate to him never mind my own sister.’
A tear leaked out and rolled down her cheek. She wiped it away. ‘But this ismyfault. Surely there’s a way to make amends and bring peace to our countries without you having to do this?’
The man Alessia had been cursorily introduced to three days ago addressed her directly for the first time. ‘This is the one resolution satisfactory to both parties.’
Gabriel Serres. The ‘fixer’ brought in by her parents and brother to fix the mess and bring peace to Ceres and Monte Cleure, and the most handsome man she’d ever laid eyes on. She’d taken one look at him and, for a few short moments, all her troubles had blown out of her mind.
For three days Gabriel had flown back and forth between their Mediterranean island and the European principality, negotiating between the two parties. Alessia, in disgrace for pouring fuel over the simmering tensions between the two nations, had, to her immense frustration, been cut off from the negotiations. Until now. When the deal was done.
Done deal or not, that didn’t stop her arguing against it. ‘How can Amadeo marrying a complete stranger be satisfactory?’
‘The bride is the king’s cousin. Their marriage will unify the two nations, reopen diplomatic ties and prevent a costly trade war,’ Gabriel reminded the princess with deliberate indifference.
His indifference was usually effortless. A man did not reach the top of the diplomatic field by getting emotionally involved in the disputes he was paid to resolve, but he’d found himself having to work at maintaining his usual detachment since Alessia had entered the meeting room. Dressed in a pair of tight-fitted, cropped black trousers topped with a loose, white scooped top, her straight dark chestnut hair hung loose around her shoulders. A puffiness to her dark brown eyes suggested she’d been crying, and he could see she was battling to maintain her composure. Like her mother, Queen Isabella, the princess was tiny, more so in the flesh than in the constant ream of photographs the press so loved to publish of her. In the flesh, there was something about her that brought to mind the spinning ballerina in his sister’s old musical jewellery box.
Since their introduction three days ago, he’d found his mind wandering to her in ways that could not be classed as professional. The few times he’d spotted her in the distance had made him give double takes, and he’d had to consciously stop himself from staring at her. Yesterday, on a brief visit back to the castle, he’d been getting out of his car when she’d appeared, flanked by her bodyguards, clearly about to head off somewhere. Their eyes had caught and held. Just for a moment. But it had been moment enough for a frisson to race through his veins. It had been moment enough for him to see the mirroring flash of awareness in her eyes.
He supposed any red-blooded man would find the princess attractive but it was a rare occasion Gabriel found himself noticing someone’s desirability when working. Single-minded focus and a refusal to accept failure were traits that had helped make him one of the world’s leading negotiators. There was not a top agency in the world that hadn’t, at some point, called in his services. His services were simple—he acted as a bridge between warring peoples, be they businesses, government agencies or a division of the UN. His skills meant that disputes were resolved without either side losing face.
