Chapter Four
Orazio ground Zia down on his throbbing erection and inwardly cursed himself for the action.
He was literally struggling to get a grip on himself, barely able to comprehend how he was behaving in a public place.
His hands were cupping her superb breasts, thumbs stroking the engorged points through the fine fabric shielding her from him and nothing, absolutely nothing that he had ever experienced, had excited him to such an extent.
He was shocked at his reaction to her and he didn’t need the sound of a door opening at the top of the stairs to remind him that they were not enjoying perfect privacy.
‘Are you all right, sir?’ one of his security team called down.
‘Thanks. I’m fine. I’ll be finished soon,’ he intoned as levelly as he could manage. It helped to lift Zia off his spread thighs and rise from the marble seat he had come down on and settle her carefully back into the softly lapping water.
‘If you say sorry, I’ll slap you!’ Zia warned him, bristling like a cat suddenly plunged into an unwelcome bath, violet eyes huge in her flushed face as she stood up straight and turned away. ‘We had a moment, that’s all. No need for a post-mortem. We’re both adults.’
Orazio didn’t feel remotely like an adult in that instant.
He felt like an overexcited teenager, which was very much her effect on him and a shatteringly original experience for him.
There was nothing controlled or cautious or practical or sensible about those sensations.
Those urges had simply overpowered him. We had a moment.
He was tempted to say something in disagreement but resisted the urge, aware that she was ready to let her quick temper blow.
He would’ve once said that she was much more volatile than him but, considering his own behaviour, he didn’t believe that that was a fair assumption any longer.
As she had reminded him, they were both adults and nothing more needed to be said.
He watched her disappear round the corner, leaking angry attitude from the set of her slight shoulders to the swagger of her truly phenomenal derrière.
She had turned him inside out and upside down and she wasn’t even aware of the fact.
He dropped down into the water to kill his lingering arousal and then grabbed a towel to mount the stairs.
‘I was alone down there,’ he told his security team. ‘You saw no one else.’
‘Of course we didn’t, sir.’
Zia went straight to her room and took an unnecessary shower in the vague hope that that would silence the pulsating hum at the centre of her body.
That hum she had waited to feel with other men and had failed to find, that hum that signified a true physical connection.
Wasn’t it just her luck that Orazio should have provided that elusive spur of sexual awakening?
That reality infuriated her. Orazio, who didn’t want a relationship or anything else with her!
Orazio, who was gloriously single and still enjoying his freedom?
Nothing was likely to alter Orazio’s priorities or his outlook overnight and change him into a potential partner.
She slid into her very comfortable bed and gazed up at the canopy overhead.
She was alone with these new urges, alone as she had always been and she had to bury those reactions, forget she had ever felt them and with whom.
Orazio was the wrong focus. She needed him as a friend, her sole ally in a strange, unfamiliar world, and the last thing she wanted to do was turn him into an enemy who might seek to avoid her.
No, she would remain impervious to his obvious attractions and indifferent to his charm because she wasn’t a silly girl and had never had the freedom to be anything but sensible.
Dwelling on what his mouth and his hands had felt like on her body would be downright foolish and she refused to go down that path with a male who had already made his position clear.
No, she wasn’t the type to long for a guy from afar, comparing every other male to his detriment.
She was strong, practical and she would bounce into breakfast the next morning like a woman without a single care in the world.
A cautious note sounded in the depths of her brain as she recalled that she still had to tell Orazio about that theft accusation in London.
She groaned out loud and squirmed at that challenge that still lay ahead.
She wished she had Sausage to cuddle for comfort and missed him with a deep, pained ache because Sausage mightn’t be the brightest little animal, but he was endlessly cuddly and affectionate.
For a long time, that tiny dog had been her closest friend.
Alina had never been someone she could confide in. Their worst problems had been too much of a challenge for Alina and, increasingly aware of her nursemaid’s growing mental and physical frailty, Zia had protected the older woman as best she could.
Orazio tensed as Zia walked out onto the terrace for breakfast, paused to admire the fabulous view of the mountains and then turned with her natural smile to greet everyone at the table.
She looked like a teenager in a flowing cotton sundress the same colour as the blue sky above them, her black hair drawn up in a ponytail, her tiny feet shod in trainers.
‘Do you have a swimsuit on underneath?’ Allie asked her helpfully.
‘Yes. I have an entire collection of them now,’ Zia remarked with quiet pride.
Something clenched in Orazio’s chest at the renewed awareness that she had gone without for so long.
Ignored and forgotten about by both governments but fished back out of obscurity to play the role they now needed her to fulfil in the reunification.
He wondered what she would choose to do, where she would go, when her six months in Mandovia were up.
Would she stay on? Pursue her studies in her birth country or return to London?
‘She’ll get married, nothing surer,’ Fiero forecast at his elbow in an undertone as though Orazio had shared his thoughts out loud.
‘Six months spent meeting every eligible family heir and top businessman in Mandovia at all the fancy soirées ahead of her? She’s beautiful and she’ll be very much in demand.
A huge number of men would like to bring a princess into the family. ’
‘For all you know she might be looking for another princess to keep her company, not a man!’ Allie interposed in a sarcastic aside to her fiancé as Zia was ushered into a seat at the head of the table, facing Orazio.
Orazio shrugged both shoulders, deflecting further comment on Zia’s prospects but hugely unsettled by his best friend’s forecast. She would be a hell of a catch for the right guy, he acknowledged belatedly.
Beautiful, brainy, able to speak several languages.
Such a woman would bring gloss and opportunity to any family keen to raise their social status and there was a huge number of pretentious people in the upper echelons of both countries.
‘So, what’s on the itinerary today?’ Zia asked cheerfully as she shredded a croissant and proceeded to heap blueberry jam onto every piece.
Their little moment in the spa pool had left her untouched, Orazio conceded in surprise.
But what did he really know about her? The shy brush of her lips meeting his might have seemed relatively unpractised but what did he know about her past?
Not that he was interested or cared or was even judgemental, he assured himself swiftly.
He had sufficient experience of his own not to be negative about others who decided to enjoy the freedom of being an adult while they were able to do so.
Fiero chattered like a tour guide and Orazio noticed then that Zia’s violet-blue gaze slanted past him at every opportunity.
A tinge of satisfaction touched him then.
He was being blanked and he knew that he deserved to be after what he had done.
He owed her an apology for pretty much grabbing her, for taking advantage of their isolation and then taking off afterwards as though the hounds of hell were on his heels.
As their party left the hotel, he reached for her hand and squeezed it, looking down at her with brilliant green eyes. ‘I’m sorry about last night. I was in the wrong—’
And then there was a yell and their security team was taking off in pursuit of a man who had apparently been concealed in the bushes by the hotel entrance.
‘Well, there goes the neighbourhood,’ Fiero groaned, hurrying them all into the sanctuary of the car. ‘He got a photo of you holding her hand too! That’s going to make the two of you look very friendly—’
‘I thought we’d be safe here,’ Orazio lamented, abruptly releasing her fingers as if they had burnt him.
‘You’re not safe anywhere, particularly with all the rumours currently doing the rounds about the lost Princess coming home to Mandovia,’ Allie chipped in wryly. ‘Why on earth were you holding her hand?’
‘I stumbled. He was trying to steady me,’ Zia fibbed, but with hot pink cheeks that would’ve fooled no one.
‘Perhaps we won’t be identified,’ Orazio suggested.
‘You’re one of the most eligible bachelors in Europe. Of course, you’ll be recognised!’ Fiero told him impatiently.
Good-natured wrangling on that point filled the car, Allie claiming that a baseball hat and an unshaven jaw did little to conceal Orazio’s famous features.
Her own face still burning, Zia concentrated instead on looking out at the passing countryside and she was the first out of the car when they arrived at Hierapolis, the last of the ancient city ruins on their trip.