CHAPTER TWO
LOTTIE STORMED INTO her sister’s suite of rooms a few minutes later. ‘You cannot be serious. That man is insufferable! He’s quite possibly the rudest, most uncouth man I’ve ever met. What can you be thinking to bring him here? I won’t work with him. I won’t! I won’t! I won’t!’
Madeleine slowly turned on the velvet-covered stool in front of the antique dressing table where she had been experimenting with a new eye shadow. ‘You will. You will. You will. I want my reception at the Chatsfield Hotel. We’ve talked about it since we were children. I am not going to let a little personality clash ruin my fairytale wedding.’
Lottie loved her sister but she hated the streak of bossiness in Madeleine’s nature. There were only three years’ difference in their ages but once her older sister’s mind was made up it was virtually impossible to change it.
But she was going to have a damn good try.
‘Personality clash, you call it? I’d call it a personality collision! That man is nothing but trouble. He came swaggering in as if I was a housemaid instead of a princess. He called me sweetheart!’
Madeleine giggled. ‘Did he?’
Lottie glowered. ‘Not only that, he held my hand far too long.’ She didn’t mention the blown kiss. She was still too furious about that to put the words together. The audacity of the man was unbelievable. The effrontery of him made her blood boil. How dare he treat her like one of his shallow little strumpets?
‘He’s rather gorgeous, isn’t he?’ Madeleine swivelled back to apply dove-grey eye shadow to her left eyelid with a slim-handled sable brush. ‘If I wasn’t already taken I’d make a play for him myself. He’s got that wild, bad-boy thing going on. That element of totally unapologetic outrageous wickedness that makes a girl go weak at the knees.’
Lottie locked her knees together just in case they took it upon themselves to be influenced by her sister’s comments. Not that they hadn’t already been influenced, not by comments about the man, but by the man himself. As soon as Lucca Chatsfield had taken her proffered hand something had ignited inside her body like a match struck against dried-up tinder. It had raced like a runaway flame right to the centre of her being and had sizzled there in secret ever since. His glinting dark brown eyes had roved over her like a minesweeper, taking in every nuance of her appearance. The mockery in his gaze had infuriated her. She knew she wasn’t the beauty of the family, but did he have to rub her nose in it?
Schoolmarm indeed!
He was here to make trouble for her and she had to get rid of him as quickly as she possibly could. Her plans for a perfect wedding for her sister would be sabotaged if he got any say in it. He was an outright playboy. He didn’t date women. He slept with them and then left them before they had time to put his number in their phone. The press was full of his wild-partying, hooking-up lifestyle. He hadn’t had a single relationship that lasted more than twenty-four hours. He was a one-night-stand man. It was practically his brand, for God’s sake. What possible interest would he have in planning a wedding? She would be made a fool of and the whole world would be watching to see it. Argh!
‘You know he’s not going to do a minute’s work while he’s here,’ Lottie said, jutting her chin as she looked at her sister. ‘He’s only here for show. He’s using it as some sort of layabout holiday. He was disgustingly blatant about it. That shows how unprincipled he is.’
Madeleine picked up her bronzing brush and swept it artfully across each of her regal cheekbones in turn. ‘Then perhaps you should take him on as a project. Put him to work. Get his nose to the grindstone and his shoulder to the wheel or whatever the saying is.’
I’d like to get his back to the wall, Lottie thought with venom. I’d like to scratch his eyes out. I’d like to slap his arrogant face. I’d like to—
Madeleine smiled at her in the mirror. ‘Well, look at you, Lottie, love. I’ve never seen you so fired up. He really has got under your skin, hasn’t he?’
Lottie quickly refashioned her features into her customary ice-princess mask, although inside she was still seething like a kettle left too long on the boil. ‘I can handle him. He’s just a little boy who hasn’t grown up.’
‘He looks all grown up to me.’ Madeleine gave a twinkling smile and waggled her neatly groomed eyebrows as she added, ‘Or at least he did judging by that spread we saw of him in that London tabloid.’
Lottie flickered her eyelids in disdain and swung away. ‘I do not want to be reminded of what that man gets up to in his spare time.’
‘Then make sure he doesn’t have any,’ Madeleine said. ‘Keep him busy with errands. You could do with a bit of practice at delegating. You know you have a tendency to overcontrol things.’
‘That’s because I’ve always found if I want a good job done I have to do it myself,’ Lottie said. ‘Every time I’ve trusted someone to do the right thing they let me down and I’m the one who ends up with egg dripping off my face.’
Madeleine made a little moue with her lips. ‘You’re not including me in that statement, are you, ma petite?’
There was no point arguing the point. Madeleine liked to think she was the model older sister. Nothing she ever did was wrong. Their parents never criticised her because she had always done well at school and didn’t have to study for hours to get facts and figures to stay in her head long enough to recall them for an exam. The press never found fault with her. She never wore the wrong thing or said the wrong thing or frowned at the wrong time. She didn’t bite her nails when she was nervous. She hadn’t caused a scandal the first time she had been let loose at finishing school. She hadn’t been taken in by false charm and imagined herself in love with a boy who had only slept with her because she was a royal.
No.
Madeleine was perfect.
Lottie let out a long-winded breath. ‘No, of course not.’
Her sister turned around again on the stool. ‘Don’t you think it’s time you loosened up a bit? Got out a bit more, let your hair down? It’s been years since—’
‘Don’t.’
‘You need to get over yourself. It’s been—what?—five years since Switzerland? You won’t even talk about it. Don’t you think it’s time—?’
‘That’s because it’s in the past and I want it to stay there.’ Lottie gave her sister a cautioning look.
‘Every time the word Switzerland is mentioned you flinch. There, you just did it again.’
Lottie pointedly opened the wedding planning folder. ‘The last dress fitting is the week before the wedding. It’s at 10:00 a.m. sharp.’
‘But you haven’t had a date since.’ Madeleine was like a dog with a serious bone addiction. ‘You can’t lock yourself away for ever, you know. One bad love affair doesn’t have to ruin your life. You’re twenty-three years old, for pity’s sake. You should be out partying and having a good time. You’re missing out on the best years of your life.’
‘I’m not missing out on anything.’ Lottie said the words with what conviction she could summon. Although she had never been as outgoing as her sister, she hadn’t been a shrinking violet either...more of a daisy that faded once the sun went down. But her first sexual relationship when she was eighteen had taught her a valuable lesson in trust. Finding pictures of her most intimate moments with her boyfriend on his phone that he had shared with his friends had bludgeoned her innocence to an aching pulp. Fortunately her father had been able to block any further circulation of the images but she had never been intimate with anyone since.
She told herself she didn’t miss it. The sensual glide of flesh touching flesh, the heat and passion of mouth against mouth, the erotic glide of tongue against tongue and the release of pent-up primal urges were things she no longer allowed herself to think about. Passion was too overpowering. It took away rational thought and self-control.
The sensual part of her had shrivelled up and died from neglect...or so she had thought until this afternoon when Lucca Chatsfield’s large masculine hand had encased hers. Trapped hers. Shivers of awareness had cascaded in showers down her spine like the dance of champagne bubbles poured into a crystal glass. She could still feel the stirring of her blood, the way it moved through her veins as if powered by high-octane fuel.
She gave herself a hard mental slap. The very last man on earth she would ever get involved with was a promiscuous playboy with fewer morals than a back-alley tomcat.
No. No. No. A thousand million, squillion, gazillion times no.
She would put him to work instead.
* * *
Lucca was sipping a martini—shaken, not stirred—when he heard a sharp businesslike rap on the door of his penthouse suite. He slipped his feet off the ottoman, stood, gave a full-body stretch and sauntered over to the door. ‘Well, hello there, little princess. And bang on time too.’
The look he got from those green eyes would have felled a three-hundred-year-old elm tree at thirty paces. Her chin came up and her chest inflated on a deeply indrawn breath as if she were calling upon some inner reserve to confront him. He found her feistiness strangely endearing given her tightly controlled temperament. So buttoned up and yet positively steaming on the inside.
She was cute. Unique.
She had the sort of looks that grew on you. Not in-your-face beauty like her sister, but an underplayed elegance that was quite captivating the more he saw of her. She was wearing a different pair of glasses this time. A silver metal frame that was not as thick as the tortoiseshell ones, but they still made her look bookish.
‘We have work to do,’ she said without preamble.
‘We do?’
Her mouth was tightly set as if she was holding an arsenal of stinging retorts behind the barrier of her lips and only just managing to keep them there. ‘You are not here to party. You are here to help me. So help me you will.’
He leaned one shoulder idly against the doorjamb. ‘Would you like a drink?’
Her eyebrows snapped together. ‘Mr Chatsfield, I am not here on a social visit. I’m here to assign you specific tasks to do with the wedding.’
‘Humour me.’ He closed the door and smiled down at her lopsidedly. ‘I never do business with a clear head.’
Her eyes pulsed and flickered with such loathing he fully expected the lenses of her glasses to steam up right then and there. Or explode out of the frames. Her dislike of him was so intense and so palpable it made his scalp prickle and the base of his backbone tingle.
This was going to be much more fun than he’d thought.
She was full of passion and fire and yet she was so tightly wound up it made him all the more determined to press her buttons to see if she would explode like a firecracker. Was there a little bedroom firebrand behind that ice-princess thing she had going on?
She pushed the frames of her glasses back up her nose with a jerky movement of her hand. ‘I never do business without one.’
‘Then we’re a perfect match, don’t you think?’ He took a sip of his martini and watched as her eyes narrowed even further in disgust. Little did she know it but she was fulfilling every schoolmistress fantasy he’d ever possessed. She made no effort to disguise her disapproval of his lifestyle and his personality. What would it take to get that tightly compressed mouth to smile at him or to yield to him in a kiss?
He couldn’t stop himself assessing her trim little body with his eyes. She was wearing a classic knee-length beige linen dress with a thin black patent leather belt around her waist, and a matching black three-quarter-sleeved cardigan and low-heeled black court shoes. Although reasonably stylish, the clothes were the wrong colour for her and made her look like a child who had raided her grandmother’s wardrobe for a dressing-up game. She had a simple string of pearls around her neck and pearl studs in her ears, and her hair was still pulled back in that unflattering way, but it exposed her slim elegant neck where he could see a pulse beating like the heart of a hummingbird.
She turned swiftly and marched farther into the suite, stopping near the entertainment centre to face him again, her expression so frosty he was sure the temperature of the room went down ten degrees. ‘Have you been to a wedding recently?’
‘Nope. I generally try to avoid them.’
‘What about your twin brother’s?’ Her brows drew together again. ‘He’s married, isn’t he?’
‘Separated.’ Lucca took another sip of his drink and held it in his mouth for a moment. Orsino’s relationship with Poppy Graham had always been a little complicated. He suspected there was some unfinished business between his twin and his estranged wife but he didn’t like to cause any angst by asking too many questions. Although he was close to his twin, they lived quite different lives. ‘They had a quickie ceremony five years ago. You might’ve read something about it in the press. It got quite a lot of coverage at the time.’
‘I don’t make a habit of reading such unedifying rubbish.’
He gave a little laugh. ‘Nothing but the classics then, eh? Tolstoy? Hardy? Dickens? Dostoyevsky?’
Her eyes fired another round of loathing at him. ‘What about your other siblings? Are any of them married?’
‘No, none of us has been lucky—or unlucky, depending on your take on it—to meet their soul mate. Mind you, given the example our parents set for us it’s no wonder we’re all a little gun-shy in the marriage mart.’
There was a pregnant pause.
Lucca wished he hadn’t revealed quite so much about his background, not that she couldn’t read all about it online or in the gossip magazines if it took her fancy. People were still speculating on the whereabouts of his mother, who had finally walked out on the family soon after his youngest sister, Cara, had been born, leaving signed divorce papers on his father’s desk. No one had seen or heard from her since.
The train wreck of his parents’ marriage had affected all of his siblings in various ways. He liked to think he was the least affected but he knew it wouldn’t take too many sessions with a therapist to see his inability to connect emotionally with people was a hoofmark of his childhood. He didn’t talk about it. To anyone. He didn’t even think about it. The bewildered little boy who had cried night after night for his mother was long gone.
Lucca’s philosophy in life was to have fun. The only feelings he wanted were pleasurable ones, physical ones. He was a sybarite, through and through. He didn’t deny it and nor did he apologise for it. He had been born to enormous wealth and privilege and he made the most of it. Exploited it. He didn’t believe in working to live or living to work.
He lived to party.
He treated all his relationships as transitory things. Just like a party. He showed up for an hour or two, had a good time and then he left to move on to the next one. His relationships were simply casual hook-ups that had a common goal of pleasure, not permanency. He didn’t set out to deliberately hurt people—he wasn’t wired that way. He had suffered too much hurt in his childhood to make it his life’s mission to do the same to others. He used them certainly, but he always did it with lashings of his signature charm so no feelings were damaged. He got in and out of relationships so adroitly the women he dated hardly noticed they were being dispensed with. The closest he got to commitment was keeping someone’s number in his phone in case he ever fancied a booty call.
But as if the uptight little princess sensed his family background was a painful subject, or perhaps didn’t feel comfortable offering a sympathy she didn’t feel, she brusquely announced, ‘I would like to inspect the hotel ballroom. I would like you to accompany me.’
It was the very last thing she would like, Lucca thought, which made him wonder why she had suddenly changed her mind about including him in the wedding arrangements when she had been so vehemently opposed to it initially. Had her sister put the hard word on her? He knew Princess Madeleine was determined to have a glamorous wedding with all the trimmings and there was no better place than a Chatsfield hotel to put on a party to remember.
Was little Princess Charlotte playing him at his own game? Making him tag along to every tedious meeting or boring inspection of crockery or cutlery until he got so thoroughly sick of it he walked off the job?
He wasn’t going to let her trick him out of what was rightfully his. If he had to tag along, then he would, but he would make sure he had plenty of fun while doing it.
‘Sure.’ He put down his drink and gave her a winsome smile. ‘I’m all yours.’
* * *
Lottie kept her back straight as a ruler as she led the way to the hotel lift outside the penthouse. She knew Lucca Chatsfield’s dark brown eyes were following her every move. She could feel the lazy heat of his gaze sliding over her with every step she took. The man was a dissolute rake and she had no business in being even vaguely interested in his childhood with its tragic circumstances of a disappearing mother. What did it matter to her if he and his twin had been lost lonely little boys being brought up by their older siblings and a father who was known for his affairs and his heavy bouts of drinking?
Lucca Chatsfield was here for all the wrong reasons and she had to get rid of him by fair means or foul. She didn’t want anything or anyone to jeopardise her meticulous planning of Madeleine’s wedding. This was the most important month of her life. This was her chance to show not just her family—most especially her sister—but also the entire world she was not just the spare heir.
‘Aren’t you supposed to have bodyguards or something?’ Lucca reached past her to press the call button just as she put her hand out for it.
Lottie snatched her hand back but not before it brushed briefly against his. She felt the tingle and sizzle of his touch travel straight to the centre of her being, pooling there in a hot liquid mass that seemed to take on a life of its own. She felt it moving through her blood, swirling, swelling, hot and urgent like a tide that was threatening to break its banks.
Everything about Lucca Chatsfield unsettled her. His easy smile, that knowing glint in his laughing, mocking eyes and his laid-back, couldn’t-give-a-damn-what-you-think-of-me stance that was such a stark contrast to her straitlaced and serious demeanour.
He was a self-serving playboy, a time waster, a shallow sensualist with nothing better to do than swan around the globe from one holiday destination to the other. As far as she knew he had never held down a proper job and—unlike his twin brother, who contributed to charity through his thrill-seeking sporting activities—did nothing for anyone other than himself.
Lottie stared fixedly at the illuminated lights above the lift as it climbed from the lower floors, conscious of the scent of him, the energy of him, the sheer male overpowering presence of him. His potency seemed to reach out with an invisible hand and stroke her: her hair, making it restless at the roots; her breasts, making them tingle inside their lace cups; her belly, making it quiver as if he had traced its softness with a slow-moving fingertip right down to that secret place between her....
She cleared her throat, hoping her errant thoughts would take the hint. They didn’t. ‘I prefer to move about the principality without a security team unless it’s absolutely necessary.’ Her voice came out cool and clipped and formal while her insides glowed with heat like a ten-bar radiator. ‘It’s different when I travel abroad, but even then I try and play a low profile. It’s my sister everyone is interested in, not me.’
‘Does that bother you?’
Lottie chanced a glance at him to find him looking down at her with a studied expression on his face, his eyebrows drawn slightly together over his eyes. She completely lost her train of thought as her gaze meshed with that dark, suddenly serious one. She moved her eyes back and forth between each of his, transfixed by how deep a brown his were, so deep it was hard to tell where his pupils started and ended.
She let her gaze travel slowly down the length of his strong nose to his mouth.... Oh, that wickedly sexy mouth! She gulped back a tiny swallow as she followed the sculptured perfection of his lips. The lower one was much fuller than the top one, suggesting a powerful sensuality that threatened to melt her bones within the encasement of her skin. He needed a shave; his jaw was liberally peppered with dark stubble and her fingertips suddenly felt the inexplicable urge to see what it would feel like rasping against her skin. It had been so long since she had touched a man....
The pinging sound of the lift arriving at the penthouse floor jolted her out of her mesmerised state.
‘No, of course not.’ She elevated her chin. ‘I’ve never been one for the limelight.’
‘Is that why you dress the way you do?’
Her brows clanged together. ‘What’s wrong with the way I dress?’
He held back the doors of the lift for her with a strong forearm. ‘You dress like you’re going to a funeral of an elderly spinster great-aunt.’
Lottie glared at him. ‘I’ll have you know this dress is a bespoke design. It cost an absolute fortune. And just for the record, I don’t have a spinster great-aunt.’
‘That dress looks like it was designed for someone in their sixties. You’ve got great legs. Why not show them off?’
She stalked into the polished wood and mirrored cabin of the lift, turning to face him as the doors closed with a sigh and a hiss behind him. ‘Why on earth would I want to do that? My legs are my business. They’re not anyone else’s. Just because I’m a princess doesn’t mean everyone has to know what my legs look like. I don’t want people speculating on how much cellulite I have or don’t have or whether I’m fatter or thinner than my sister. Nor do I think it’s anyone’s business what I look like in a bathing suit or what I look like when I’m eating my breakfast or dinner or having a coffee with friends. I just want to be accepted for myself.’
The silence seemed to ring with the echo of her outburst.
Lottie looked at the floor, studying her toes in their conservative shoes with studious intent. For as long as she could remember she had always been compared, measured, against her sister.
Found wanting.
It had been unbearable in her teens; every photo call had been a form of torture for her. The press comments at times were brutal, especially to a young overly sensitive girl who hadn’t yet found her social feet.
But ever since she’d come back from Switzerland she had tried to keep her head below the paparazzi parapet. She deliberately dressed down, even dowdily on occasion. It was her way of thumbing her nose up at the fashion set who thought she wasn’t pretty or stylish enough.
She wasn’t a beautiful blue-eyed blonde. She wasn’t an extroverted butterfly that could work a crowd to her advantage, to make everyone love her in a heartbeat, to be dazzled by her and follow wherever she led.
She was a quiet mouse who liked to mull over things in solitude. To slip by unnoticed, to be in the background, to quietly get on with things that mattered without all the fuss and the fanfare.
‘Must be a tough gig playing second fiddle all the time.’
Lottie looked up at him to find his expression was still ruminative. ‘I wouldn’t want to be playing first even if I had been born to it. Madeleine loves the fact that she’ll eventually be queen. She’s good at giving orders. I’m rubbish at it.’
‘I don’t know about that.’ The corner of his mouth lifted in a wry smile. ‘So far you’ve been pretty good at snapping out orders to me.’
‘That’s different.’ Lottie stabbed at the ballroom-floor button with her index finger. ‘You don’t want my orders any more than I want to be giving them.’
He leaned against the wall of the lift, crossing one ankle over the other in an I’ve-got-all-the-time-in-the-world pose. ‘I know what you’re up to, you know.’
She hitched one of her shoulders in a guileless manner. ‘I haven’t the faintest idea of what you’re talking about.’
He gave one of his low deep laughs that made her insides stumble. ‘You’re going to drag me to every mind-numbing inspection or appointment you can think of until I walk off the job in boredom. But it won’t work.’
We’ll see about that, Lottie thought as she pressed the floor to the ballroom again. ‘What’s taking this lift so long?’
As if to spite her, the lift gave a shuddering jolt and then hissed to a halt.
Fear scuttled up her spine like the sticky legs of a spooked spider. She stabbed at the button again. Frantically. Manically. ‘Come on! Get moving, you stupid thing!’
‘Looks like we’re stuck.’ He didn’t sound too worried about it. In fact, his tone contained a hefty measure of amusement.
‘Stuck?’ Lottie rounded on him, her heart feeling as if it was beating inside her throat instead of her chest. ‘We can’t be stuck! I have things to do. People to see. A wedding to plan!’ I have to get out of here before I get into a claustrophobic meltdown!
He pushed himself away from the wall of the lift to inspect the computerised control panel. ‘We’ve stalled between floors.’
She glared at him crossly, trying to control her fear with anger instead of blind panic. ‘You don’t seem the least bit put out. This is your family’s hotel. Doesn’t it worry you that the lifts are faulty? That surely can’t be good for your reputation.’ She put her fingers up in quotation marks and put on a posh travel guide voice. ‘Come to the Chatsfield and get stuck in a lift for hours.’ She dropped her hands and arched a brow. ‘Not going to look too flash on the website, is it?’
‘Not all the lifts are faulty. Just this one.’ He leaned back against the wall again. ‘This is a private one to the penthouse suite. I reckon you confused it by stabbing at the button too hard. You should try a softly-softly approach next time. Trust me—’ his sleepy, half-lidded gaze slid over her like a caress ‘—you’ll get way better results.’
Lottie ground her teeth. ‘Thanks for the lesson in managing temperamental lifts, but don’t you think you should do something like call someone for help? We could be stuck in here for hours.’
‘What fun.’ His dark eyes glinted, his mouth lifting in a slant of a smile. ‘How do you propose we pass the time till help arrives?’
A tiny shiver raced over her skin. A different one this time, not of cold primal fear but hot primal attraction. The lift wasn’t small by any means, but with him looking at her with those devilishly sexy eyes, and that wickedly tempting mouth smiling in that incendiary way, it felt like the space had shrunk to the size of a cereal box.
She could smell the sharp clean citrus scent of his aftershave, a mix of lemon and lime and some other exotic spice that intoxicated her senses like a potent drug.
She couldn’t seem to drag her gaze away from his mouth. It was quite possibly the most attractive male mouth she had ever laid eyes on. The laughter lines either side of it only added to its knee-wobbling gorgeousness. Was that why women in their hundreds fell over like drunk dominoes whenever he beamed that bad-boy smile their way? He represented everything that was sinful and tempting, wicked and hedonistic.
Lottie swung around and stabbed wildly at the button again. ‘I need to get out.’ Right now.
He stepped up close behind her and covered her hand with the broad span of his. Her heart did a crazy somersault as those long strong fingers touched hers, sending a current of high-voltage electricity through her entire body. ‘Don’t stab at it so savagely.’ His breath teased the hair around her ears in a warm minty-and-martini-scented caress as he took her fingertip between his index finger and thumb and guided it to the button pad. ‘Press softly. There, just like that.’
Lottie could feel the tall lean frame of him behind her from her cheeks of her bottom to her wings of her shoulder blades. She hadn’t been so close to a man since...since for ever.
Her boyfriend in Switzerland had been a boy.
Lucca Chatsfield was unmistakably A Man.
Her senses were not just intoxicated—they were sloshed, smashed, stoned. His hand felt so strong around hers, it made hers feel small and dainty and feminine. His body was so male. She could feel its latent strength in his light hold and in the way his hard and leanly muscled thighs brushed hers from behind.
She could not get her brain to work. It was a swirling mess of jumbled thoughts. Wanton thoughts. Wicked thoughts. Tempting thoughts.
Was he going to turn her around and kiss her? Her heart banged against her breastbone at the thought of that sensual mouth touching hers.
Should she stop him or should she just go with it to see what happened? What would it hurt to have one little kiss? She hadn’t been kissed in years. She had practically forgotten what a man’s mouth felt like. Would his kiss be hard or soft? Rough or smooth? Would it be passionate or beguilingly slow and tempting? Would he taste sweet or salty? Warm or cool?
Yikes! He hadn’t even turned her around and she could already feel the earth moving beneath her feet....
But then she realised it was the lift.
Lucca stepped back with a lazy smile as the lift doors glided open on the ballroom floor. ‘What did I tell you, little princess? Softly-softly works like a charm every single time.’