Modern Romance Collection: July Books 5 - 8. Natalie Anderson
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not a challenge to their authority? Chloe knew that, the Duchess knew that, yet Sabrina had just stuck out her chin. Did she think he needed a champion? Did she think he couldn’t look after himself?
He’d seen her shaking, whether from anger or fear he’d been unable to tell, but she’d been pretty damned magnificent. An idiot, but a beautiful, brave idiot!
* * *
Sabrina went to get herself a wrap before she ventured out into the gardens. She had not reached the rose garden when Luis appeared on the path ahead.
‘I didn’t actually find the rose gardens. I got a bit lost.’
‘That’s fine, it’s over that way, beyond the tennis courts, but we really don’t have to go that far. Here is fine, unless you are really that interested in the roses? Or am I making an assumption?’
Luis lowered his gaze from her direct look. ‘No, you’re not,’ he admitted, dragging a hand through his fairish hair. He had inherited his mother’s colouring.
She tried to visualise him in ten, twenty years’ time and found she couldn’t, though oddly she could see Sebastian. Perhaps a few more lines around his eyes, a little more cynicism in their depths, maybe a strand of grey or two, but his incredible bone structure virtually guaranteed that he would look essentially the same.
You are about to be proposed to by one brother and you’re thinking about the other, Sabrina.
‘We’ve never...’ She stopped, realising she couldn’t ask him to kiss her so she could forget being kissed by his brother. ‘Can I ask you to do something for me?’
She watched a look of caution drift across his face.
‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to ask you to say you love me.’ His flush suggested she had correctly interpreted his alarm, but this wasn’t about love. She didn’t love either of the Zorzi brothers.
With Sebastian it was simply sex, or it would be, and with Luis it was respect. Respect lasted longer and was, she told herself, a much sounder basis for marriage.
‘Sorry, I’ve never been proposed to before and I’m—Oh, no—look you don’t have to—’ She stopped because Luis had already dropped to his knees.
‘Will you do me the honour of—?’
‘For God’s sake, yes—get up, please! Sorry, I—’ On his feet, Luis held out a ring in a velvet-lined box. The diamond looked bigger than most continents as it flashed in the moonlight. ‘Wow, how...very...large. I’m—’ She stopped as the ring was slid onto her finger. ‘I suppose as it’s already there I should say...well... I suppose...yes.’
Not exactly a ringing endorsement but her husband-to-be looked satisfied, or that might have been relief that it was all over. ‘That’s great. We can make this work, can’t we, Sabrina?’
She met his earnest gaze, noticed the beads of moisture along his upper lip. ‘Everyone needs to work at marriage.’
‘That’s true,’ he said, acting as though her clenched response were actually wisdom and not desperation. ‘Would you like to come with me while I tell my father?’
‘I’ll wait here.’ She caught his arm as he turned to go. ‘Aren’t you forgetting something?’
He looked bemused.
‘A kiss?’ She had been half joking but Luis’s expression became serious.
‘Of course.’ He took her shoulders and leaned in.
Sabrina closed her eyes and held her breath. The brush of his lips across her mouth hardly constituted a kiss. She opened her eyes and endured an awkward pause.
‘We really should go and tell the families together, present a united front.’
‘You go ahead. I’ll... I’ll just take a moment.’ A moment to appreciate that she was marrying a man whose kiss had had absolutely no effect on her—unlike the response a kiss from his brother had drawn. She expelled a long sigh, her glance drifting to the ring on her finger.
Her dark eyes flickered wide as the full implication of its presence there sank in, or rather seeped out from the pit of her stomach until her entire body was ice cold.
Now it was just a matter of waiting for someone to realise how not up to the task she was.
She stood there breathing through the moment of sheer panic, willing calmness to flow through her body.
Then her chin lifted. ‘Time to step up, Sabrina.’
* * *
‘For a woman who is about to live every little girl’s dream, you don’t sound very happy.’
He was here, of course he was here. She must have done something very bad in a previous life and she was paying for it now.
Heart thudding heavily, she turned around just as Sebastian appeared, a dark shadow surrounded by the darker shadow of the undergrowth.
‘Happiness is not a right and I am not a little girl.’
He stopped being shadow and stepped forward into the light.
At some point since he’d left the table he had discarded his jacket, his unfastened tie hung around his neck and the top three buttons of his shirt were open. She could see the faint shadow of dark chest hair and it made her insides quiver.
Stop, she told herself firmly. There was no point wanting something you couldn’t have. And she should be glad of it; he’d have used her as he used all women, except, maybe she wanted to be used?
Unwilling to deal with the sight of him standing there, the sheer physicality of his presence, she took refuge in spitting anger.
‘How long have you been standing there?’ If he had seen the awful, miserable proposal she would die.
‘Relax,’ he drawled. ‘It’s not like I saw you making mad, passionate love in the shrubbery.’ His eyes drifted over her head to the stone wall with clematis clinging to it. ‘Or up against the wall.’
The suggestive rasp in his voice sent a deep shudder through Sabrina’s body. ‘How dare you spy on me?’ she squeaked, making the mistake of telling herself she wouldn’t think about the wall. So obviously that was all she could think of...being pressed up against it, his hands on her body, on her skin.
‘Spy? I almost drifted off. How was I to know my brother would not bother to go more than two steps from the back door to propose?’ The indents between his eyebrows deepened as his dark brows drew together in a straight line above his heavy-lidded eyes. ‘If that actually constituted a proposal!’
His flaying scorn at least threw cold water on the fantasy images in her head.
‘Your brother is worth ten of you!’
‘Oh, more, angel, much, much more.’
‘And just because he treats me with some respect and doesn’t grope me.’
‘If memory serves, you groped me right back.’
She compressed her lips. ‘Go to hell!’
‘Language...’
‘What can I say? I was taught by nuns.’
‘They must be very proud of how you’ve turned out. Actually, hell is a bit warm for me at this time of year. I thought Paris, you know what they say, Paris in the springtime...though it’s bit late for that.’
His contemptuous attitude stung. ‘I wouldn’t expect you to understand the concept of duty. I wouldn’t expect you to understand anything except your own selfish—’ Breathing hard, she broke off. ‘I have no idea why I’m even trying. Have you ever in your life done anything that wasn’t selfish?’
‘My lifestyle is not the issue. It’s the thought of yours that is scaring you. You