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His side of the bed was empty.
Holding the bedsheets to her naked form, she sat up. ‘Gabriel?’
No response.
Climbing out of bed, she quickly yanked her pyjama bottoms off the floor—when hadtheybeen brought in from the balcony?—and pulled them on and padded to the bathroom. She knocked on the door. No answer. A quick look behind the door found it empty.
Slipping the pyjama vest top over her head and, trying hard to fight against the coldness filling her veins, Alessia left the bedroom calling out his name again.
The guest quarters Gabriel had been appointed, usually given to family members like her parents’ siblings, were nearly a mirror image of her own. Laid out like an apartment, it had a bedroom and adjoining bathroom, a guest room with its own bathroom, a dayroom, a dining room, a reception room and an unused kitchen. Gabriel was nowhere to be seen. Nor were his clothes.
The quarters being on the second floor, a set of iron steps ran off the balcony and led down to the private gardens. She hurried down the steps barefoot.
Although brimming with early-morning birdsong, the garden was empty of human life.
Her heart thumping, she checked each room of his quarters a second time and then a third, her calls of his name gradually weakening to a choked whisper. Back in the bedroom, she stared at the bed. It was the very first time she’d shared a bed with another human being. She could still smell Gabriel. Could still feel his touch on her skin.
In a daze, she stepped back onto the balcony and stared at the plump sofa she’d lost her virginity on. Limbs now feeling all watery, she somehow managed to climb over the balustrade and back onto her private abode. Inside, she called the family’s head of housekeeping, not even bothering to think of an excuse to explain why she was enquiring about the whereabouts of the negotiator who’d saved the Berrutis from almost certain destruction.
The answer, although expected, still landed as a blow.
Gabriel had gone.
He hadn’t even left her a note of goodbye.
Alessia closed her eyes and resisted pulling at her just-done hair. She felt sick. After a few minutes spent doing breathing exercises, she felt no better, and briefly considered calling her mother and telling her she felt too ill to attend Amadeo and Elsbeth’s pre-wedding party.
She couldn’t miss the party. A royal princess did not bow out of engagements from something as pathetic as illness, not unless she was at death’s door, which a bout of nausea did not class as. Not that it was a royal engagement as the public would recognise it. As far as the public were concerned, the party was a private affair although the carefully selected members of the press corps who’d be in attendance to document the evening—and it was a momentous occasion and not just because the heir to the throne would be showing off his new bride-to-be—would publish the usual photos and video clips to allow the public to feel a part of the event. So, a private event with as much privacy as the animals in London Zoo had. And Alessia had to smile and dance with that horrible monster King Dominic Fernandez of Monte Cleure to prove to the world that there was no bad feeling between them. She’d bet that was the cause of her nausea.
There was a knock on her bedroom door.
Opening her eyes, she stared at her reflection and brought her practised smile to her face before calling out, ‘Come in.’
Rather than a member of her domestic staff, her visitor was her new sister-in-law. Immediately, Alessia’s spirits lifted. Clara was the woman Marcelo had rescued from King Dominic’s evil clutches. It was that rescue, photographed and leaked to the world, which had started the diplomatic war between the two countries. The fallout from the rescue had compelled Marcelo to marry Clara himself and, as a result, Alessia had a brand-new sister-in-law. What made it even better was that Marcelo and Clara had fallen madly in love for real.
There was an acute pang in her chest as Alessia wondered if a man would ever look at her the way Marcelo looked at Clara, a pang made sharper as Gabriel Serres’s handsome face floated in her eyes. She willed the image away.
She’d not heard even a whisper from him since he’d snuck out of the bed they’d made love in.
For days she’d drifted around the palace in a fugue of disbelief. Disbelief that she’d fallen head over heels in lust with a man she barely knew, falling so hard and so fast that she’d given her virginity without any thought, too wrapped up in the moment to care about anything but the wonder of what they were sharing. Disbelief that Gabriel had left without a word of goodbye when they’d shared such an incredible night together. Disbelief at Gabriel’s subsequent silence.
And then she’d made the fatal mistake of making excuses for his silence. After three days of this fugue-like drifting, she’d convinced herself an emergency had taken him from their bed and that he’d left without waking her because he wanted her to have more sleep. She’d convinced herself too that the only reason he hadn’t called was because he didn’t have her personal number and that to ask her brother or parents or any of their staff for it would lead to too many questions. Gabriel was experienced enough in her world to know a man didn’t just casually ask for a princess’s personal number. And so she’d decided to put them both out of their misery—becausesurelyhe was in as big a flux as she was after what they’d shared—and call him, asking her private secretary to obtain his number for her.
It was a business number answered by an efficient-sounding woman. Alessia left a message. For days she’d waited on tenterhooks, her heart leaping every time her phone buzzed. There had been no call back.
Her pride wouldn’t let her ask her secretary to go one further and obtain his personal number, and even if it wasn’t out of the question for Alessia to obtain it from her parents or brother, she finally opened her eyes and let reality sink in. It simply wasn’t possible that Gabriel’s assistant hadn’t passed the message on. Gabriel had simply ignored it.
He’d deliberately crept out of their bed without waking her.
He hadn’t called her because he didn’t want to.
Despite everything they’d shared, he didn’t want to see her again and didn’t think her worthy of a two-minute call to tell her this.
Alessia had given her virginity to a man who was treating her like a worthless one-night stand. Now, just over two weeks on, she was well and truly done with hoping and moping.
Gabriel Serres could go to hell.
‘Hi, sis,’ Clara said chirpily, bounding over to the dressing table and bringing out the first smile on Alessia’s face in two weeks. ‘You look fantastic! That dress is amazing! Gosh, I am so envious.’
