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‘Do you? I’m glad to hear it, since you’ll leave today. Within the hour. I’ll have your things sent to you. My jet—’
She shook her head. Let go of the armchair’s support. She needed none. She’d lived on her own terms almost since the day her parents had died. She’d do it again. As for now, she needed to get away from him, from his life and the trappings of it. Get back to the comfort and safety of her home and her relative anonymity. She didn’t want sorrowful looks from royal flight attendants as she wept into a cup of tea.
Because she’d cry, but not in front of him.
‘I’ll fly on some airline.’
He shook his head. ‘You think the press in Lasserno are bad? They’re kittens compared to what you’re walking into. How will you drive home, on narrow country roads being chased by motorcycles? Cars? I think not.’
If he were concerned he might have looked stricken, but that wasn’t what was happening here. He didn’t care about her. He never really had. His reputation was his only interest and everything else was peripheral. But there was one thing they needed to address: what she was being paid to do, since she was just an employee now.
‘Your portrait.’
Something about him changed then. Alessio seemed to straighten, stand taller. Even if you didn’t know it, seeing him in this moment you’d realise he was ruler of all he surveyed. Uncompromising and absolute.
‘I want no portrait. Every time anyone looks at the painting, they’ll speculate about whatyousaw and exactly how much. It canneverbe what I wanted it to be, a statement of intent. I’ll find someone else. But don’t fear. You’ll be paid for your time.’
There was the final blow, his words like a kick to the stomach. It was as if for a second time her world had been taken from her. All of this, here, had been for nothing.
If she weren’t made of stronger stuff, she might bend in two. But she’d survived the death of her parents and her horse, the rejection of her boyfriend, the dishonesty of her uncle. She could survive Alessio Arcuri. And she’d show him.
‘You’ll pay me...for mytime.My...services rendered. What a fine way to make a woman feel cheap.’ She took a deep breath, looked him straight in the eye so he could see how strong she really was, and just how much he’d meant to her until this. ‘I don’t want to be paid. I want nothing from you. So go and find your perfect princess. I hear royal weddings and babies are big news. They’ll erase any rumours about me from your life.’
She turned her back on him, needing to get out and get away. Wanting to run but carrying herself with all the dignity she deserved, because she wasn’t at fault, even though this whole place seemed intent on blaming her. Instead, she injected steel into her spine and walked to the door with her head held high. Walked away from him. As she reached out for the door handle, she hesitated. Not turning, because she didn’t want to see Alessio ever again. Seeing him might remind her of what she’d lost. What she never really had in the first place.
‘Thank you, Your Highness, for making our parting so much easier.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
ALESSIOSTAREDATthe broken-apart travelling crate. The wood was scattered about the floor of his office after he’d cracked it apart with the crowbar he’d asked his staff to deliver here. That infernal wooden case had taunted him from the moment it had been delivered a few days before. No note, no explanation. A return address for Ms Hannah Barrington the only suggestion of what it contained.
A portrait. One he didn’t want, but one he got anyway.
Andthisportrait. He stood back. This wasn’t a painting to be hung in a throne room. It was deeply, achingly personal and he had no idea what to do with it. Because as he looked at the picture, what he saw was not the man he stared at in the mirror every morning but another self. Real. A better version of him.
There was no elegant quality to the brushstrokes. They slashed across the canvas with a terrifying brutality.Hewas the sole focus of the artist’s gaze. Sitting side-on, with his head turned to the painter. White shirt slightly unkempt, open at the neck. Hair unruly as if he’d rolled out of bed and raked his hands through it, sat in a chair and looked at the person holding the brush. Hannah. His fingers were steepled, contemplating her. Eyes intense and focused, fixed on one woman, as if he would never look away. Corners of his lips tilted in the merest of smiles in a moment where it seemed some secret had been told, which only the painter and the subject knew.
This was a picture for a private space, for a bedroom, where the intimacies it spoke of could be understood only by the people who saw it each day.
From the packing had also fallen two small spiral sketchbooks, those she’d carried around with her. He flicked through them. There was the small landscape in watercolour pencil she’d done when she’d first arrived. The view from her window. The rest were sketches of him. His hands, his eyes. Lips. Rough outlines of him stalking the floor. Smiling. Naked in bed on Stefano’s yacht. His life, the man, in black, white and grey. In the beginning, he recognised the person in those pictures. Cold, aloof. Remote from everything around him. As they progressed, Hannah had seen him in ways he no longer saw himself, seen the tiny glimpses of happiness. And then those when they were together, alone. In them, he was unrecognisable.
A man changed.
He glanced at the desk, where a folder lay: his shortlist of princesses. They were everything he’d asked for. Bright, beautiful, intelligent women from royalty who understood the job they’d be asked to do. He’d been to dinner with a few and each time he had, every part of him rebelled. Spending even a second with a woman who was not Hannah felt like a betrayal.
Because no matter how he’d tried to forget her, he couldn’t. Work didn’t help. Riding Apollo didn’t help. Nothing did. Her touch, her laugh, the scent of her like autumn apples...all embedded in his memory. And now he had the portrait, which hinted at something he dared not name because of what he’d done to her.
He loathed how she’d looked at him on her last day here. As if he’d warped something perfect, to make it ugly. Taking his fears and frustrations out on her, when she was the victim. Because she wasn’t the perpetrator, of that he was sure. He had all the power. She was the one with everything to lose. A rumoured affair with his artist had risen as a moment of brief interest in a world of many such events and faded away. All the while she’d maintained a dignified silence. His father might have laughed at the evidence of his son’s human failings, though to Alessio those taunts were now meaningless. All he’d been obsessed by was its effect on her, trawling her name in the daily international press, but she was a secondary character in a story already forgotten by everyone except him.
The door of his palace office opened, and Stefano walked in. Hesitated beside the picture still half in its packing case. Nudged the crowbar discarded on the carpet beside it with the toe of his shoe.
‘I thought you’d send it back or put it away without looking at it.’
He’d wanted to. The sheer terror of what Hannah might have painted had stopped him breaking open the picture for days. But he’d needed to exorcise her, and he thought, by finally confronting the portrait, that he would. He hadn’t, and in fact it had made things worse.
‘It’s only a painting.’ The lie stuck in his throat. It was more than that. So much more. A mirror to possibilities he’d rejected in a way that couldn’t easily be repaired.
‘If you say so.’
