The Wedding Party And Holiday Escapes Ultimate Collection. Кейт Хьюит
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weigh down the lightness of the moment.
And, she knew, she was a coward.
They had lunch out on the private beach in front of the house, although Liana’s body clock was insisting it was some impossible, other time. She stretched her legs out on the sun-warmed sand and gazed out at the Pacific, started to fall halfway asleep.
Or maybe it was all the way asleep, because she startled to wakefulness when Sandro scooped her up in his arms.
‘Time for bed, I think,’ he murmured, and carried her across the sand and into the house. She sank onto the silk sheets of his king-size bed and felt the mattress dip as Sandro lay next to her, his arm still around her.
He drew her against him so her head rested on his shoulder, the steady thud of his heart under her cheek. Liana let out a little breathy sigh of contentment. How had she gone without this all of her life?
She must have fallen asleep, because she awoke in the middle of the night, the room drenched in darkness save for a sliver of moonlight that bisected the floor. The space in the bed next to her yawned emptily.
Liana shook her hair out of her face and glanced around the bedroom, but Sandro was nowhere to be seen. On bare feet she padded through the upstairs looking for him, wondering where he’d gone—and why he’d left her in the middle of the night.
She finally found him downstairs in his study, dressed only in a pair of black silk pyjama bottoms, just as he had been on their wedding night. He had his laptop in front of him and papers were scattered across his desk. He worked so hard, she thought with a twist of guilty regret. She’d accused him of neglecting his royal duty, of being someone she couldn’t respect, but she was beginning to see just how far from the truth that accusation had been.
‘Can’t sleep?’ she asked softly and he glanced up, the frown that had settled between his brows smoothed away for a moment.
‘My body clock is completely out of sync. I thought I might as well get some work done.’
‘What are you working on?’
‘Just tying up some loose ends with DT.’
‘DT?’
‘Diomedi Technology.’
She came into the room, driven by a new and deeper curiosity to know this man. To understand him. ‘You founded it, didn’t you? When you...moved?’
The smile he gave her was twisted, a little bitter. ‘You mean when I abandoned my royal duty to pursue my own pleasures?’
She winced. ‘Don’t, Sandro.’
‘It’s true, though.’
‘I’m not sure it is.’
‘And how do you figure that, Liana?’ His voice held a hard edge but she had a feeling for once it wasn’t for her. He was angry with himself for leaving, for somehow failing. She knew because she understood that feeling too well. The churning guilt and regret for doing the wrong thing or, in her case, nothing at all.
Briefly she closed her eyes, willed the memory of Chiara’s desperate gaze away, at least for this moment. Her sister’s face, she knew, would haunt her for the rest of her life.
‘I think there’s always more to the story than there first appears,’ she said quietly, coming to perch on the edge of his desk. ‘You told me leaving felt necessary at the time, but you didn’t tell me why.’
He glanced down at the papers on his desk. ‘I didn’t think we had that sort of relationship.’
Her breath hitched and she willed it to even out again. ‘We didn’t. But—but maybe we do now. Or at least, we’re trying to.’
He glanced up at her then, everything about him inscrutable. Fathomless. ‘Are we?’
Liana stared back at him, words on her lips and fear in her heart. This was the moment when she should show her hand, she knew. Her heart. Tell him that in the few days since they’d been married she’d started to change. He’d changed her, and now she wanted things she’d never let herself want. Affection. Friendship. Love.
The words were there and they trembled on her lips but then the fear of exposing so much want and need made her swallow them and offer a rather watery smile instead.
‘You tell me.’
Wrong answer, she knew. A coward’s answer. Sandro looked away. ‘I don’t know, Liana. I don’t know what secrets you’re hiding, or why you’ve, as you said yourself, experienced so little of life. It’s almost as if you’ve kept yourself from it, from enjoying or feeling anything, and I won’t know why or understand you until you tell me.’ He glanced back at her then, his expression settled into resolute lines. ‘But I’m not even sure you really want that. You told me you married me because of the opportunities being queen would give this charity of yours. Has that changed?’
She swallowed. ‘No, not exactly.’ Sandro’s expression tightened and he started shuffling his papers into piles. ‘But I’ve changed, Sandro, at least a little. I want to get to know you. And I hope you want to know me.’ And that, Liana thought with a weary wryness, was about as honest as she could make herself be right now.
Sandro gazed at her thoughtfully. ‘And how do you propose we do that?’
‘Get to know one another, you mean?’ She licked her lips, saw Sandro’s gaze drop to her mouth, and felt warmth curling low in her belly. ‘Well...as we have been doing. Talking. Spending time with one another.’
‘We can talk all you like, but until you tell me whatever it is you’re keeping from me, I don’t think much is going to change.’
‘But I told you I’ve already changed,’ she said quietly. ‘A little, at least. You’ve changed me.’
‘Have I?’ Sandro asked softly. He was still staring at her mouth and Liana felt a heavy languor begin to steal through her veins, making her feel almost drunk, reckless in a way she so rarely was. ‘I can think of another way we could get to know one another,’ she whispered.
He arched an eyebrow, heat flaring in his eyes, turning them to molten silver. ‘And what would that be?’
‘This.’ She leaned forward, her heart thudding hard, and brushed her lips across his.
His mouth was cool and soft, his lips only barely parted, and he didn’t respond as she’d expected him to, pulling her in his arms and taking control. No, he was waiting to see what she would do. How far she would go.
Emboldened, Liana touched her tongue to the corner of Sandro’s mouth, heard his groan, felt it in the soft rush of breath against her own lips. Desire bit deeper, and she brought her hands up to his shoulders, steadying herself on the edge of his desk as she kissed him again, slid her tongue into his mouth with a surge of pure sexual excitement she thrilled to feel.
‘Liana...’ Sandro’s hands tangled in her hair as he fastened his mouth more securely on hers, taking the kiss from her and making it his. Theirs.
And what a kiss it was. Liana could easily count the number of times she’d been kissed, half of them by Sandro, but this kiss was something else entirely. This kiss was shared, a giving and a taking and most of all an admission. A spilling of secrets, a confession of desire.
It felt like the most honest thing she’d ever done.
And then it was more than a kiss as Sandro swept all his papers aside and hauled her across the desk. She came willingly, sliding onto his lap, her legs on either side of him as she felt the hard, insistent press of his arousal against her and pleasure spiked deep inside.
Sandro deepened the kiss, his hands moving over her, cupping her breasts, the thin cotton of her sundress already too much between them. In that moment she wasn’t afraid of her own feelings, the strength of her own desire—and his. She just wanted more.
Recklessly Liana pulled the dress