Victoria Parker – Princess in the Iron Mask (страница 8)

‘Delaying the inevitable is not only a foolhardy display of awkwardness on your part but a waste of time.’

‘Not for me. I need to go back to my apartment and pack. I have a personal matter to attend to, and most of all I need time to think,’ she said, tucking a wayward curl around the delicate shell of her ear.

‘Think?’ What did she need to think about? How many lab coats to pack? ‘I have no time to spare.’ Lucas blinked. Wait a minute … Personal matter? Dios, he’d never thought of that. And why did it make him feel like punching the wall?

‘Tough. Find time. Because I’m not going anywhere today.’ There it was again—that surge of heat when she used that sexy, stern voice.

And there she was, being selfish again. Why did he keep forgetting what kind of person she was? ‘Claudia, I cannot stay in London. I have to work.’

‘Oh, really?’ she said, yanking the case off the table and almost toppling over as it fell to the floor with a thud. ‘Well, now you know how I feel. I’m being dragged away from mine for three weeks. I’m sure you can afford to take three days.’

His nostrils flared. ‘My terms—’

‘Lucas,’ she said, attempting to disguise her rude interruption with an untried honeyed tone that made his skin prickle, ‘you will quickly come to realise I forget nothing. Your terms are—and I quote—three weeks’ leave, effective from nine this morning. Coupled with my return to Arunthia. On no occasion did you state a day of departure.’

Dios! Lucas seethed. She was impossible. ‘It is almost noon. You have eight hours.’ Let it not be said that he couldn’t compromise.

Arms crossed tight, her full breasts were pushed upwards to stretch the stiff cotton and she canted her hip in a sexy pose. The ten-bell alarm siren going off in his head almost rendered him deaf. Almost.

‘Two days,’ she bartered.

Lucas ground his jaw. ‘Twenty-four hours. Final offer.’ He was crazy. Certifiable. A day of Claudia would tip him over the edge of reason to plummet headlong into insanity. He did not negotiate. Ever. People obeyed him. Always.

She smiled. It might have been small and somewhat triumphant, but she actually smiled at him.

Lucas felt his eye twitch.

‘Done,’ she said, all smug sweetness.

God help him if she ever put her heart and soul into it. Because Lucas had an uneasy feeling it would be him that would be ‘done’.

‘Fine,’ he snapped, his abnormal behaviour pushing his soaring anger levels from dangerous to critical.

He only prayed her apartment on the Thames had separate floors. Or at least a fifty-foot distance between bedrooms. Fighting with bloodthirsty night demons would be child’s play in comparison to the blistering temptation that would be down the hall.

Lucas didn’t look happy, Claudia mused. Waves of dark fury poured from his tight shoulders, much like the rain streaming in rivulets down the black bodywork of his Aston Martin Vanquish.

The engine of his Aston Martin Vanquish roared like a sleek panther as he revved his displeasure, and she wiggled on the cream cowhide in an attempt to cover her quivering reaction. She’d never thought of a car as arousing before. Well, she’d never thought of anything as arousing before. Today seemed to be a day for firsts. Even the heady smell of leather and damp clothing couldn’t douse the warm, woodsy scent of Lucas lingering in the air.

With the exception of his barking request for her to enter her address into the sat nav, their drive to her apartment had been deadly silent. Now, parked at the kerb, she was desperate to be away from his fiercely primal aura. She was so tired she no longer had the strength to argue, and her legs throbbed so viciously she’d be lucky if she made it inside the building, let alone up the stairs.

‘Erm…thanks for the lift, Mr Garcia. Unless the gods grace me with a reprieve, I’ll see you tomorrow.’ Without further ado, she yanked hard on the door handle. After a third kerthunk, she surrendered, directing her voice to be sweet. ‘Could you open the door, pleeease?’

‘Claudia,’ he growled, nostrils flaring, his chest heaving with barely suppressed anger. Staring out of his window at the three-storey townhouse where she lived on the second floor, he twisted his long fingers around the dark wood steering wheel. Maybe he was imagining it was her neck. ‘Have you ever once acknowledged who you actually are?’

‘Who I am?’ she asked wearily, not entirely sure what he was getting at and unable to summon the energy to care.

‘Yes, Claudia,’ he said slowly, as if speaking to a child. ‘A member of the Arunthian Royal Family.’

Never. ‘Not really. Can I go now?’ She gave the handle another tug. Kerthunk. A long sigh poured from her lungs.

‘How long have you lived in this…this place?’ The way he said place, as if the word was rat poison on his tongue, was like taking a grater to her nerves. Without bothering to look out of the window, her mind’s eye recalled a picture of the tired frontage of this Victorian townhouse on a less than stellar street. What was he getting into a funk about? He didn’t have to live here.

Claudia bit her tongue and thumped her head off the rest. ‘Oh, about eighteen months, I think.’ She slept most nights in the lab—more for convenience than because of the emptiness that shrouded her body when she lay between cold damp sheets, she was sure—but she kept that titbit to herself.

Lucas continued to fume, steam blowing from his nose as he stared out of the front windscreen. ‘You could’ve been abducted fifty times over,’ he growled, and she lifted her head from the buttery soft leather to see him scrub his face with rough hands. ‘Burgled, raped, assaulted,’ he went on. ‘What the hell were you thinking, Claudia?’

Pushing down on the froth of fury bubbling up her throat, she pursed her lips. He’d turned from blackmailer to over-protective bore!

‘You’re overreacting, Mr Garcia,’ she said calmly. ‘This is a decent area and I have an excellent alarm system. Anyway, who would look at…?’ The words died on her tongue as she realised how pitiful she would sound if she said me. She knew she wasn’t pretty, and she’d given up wishing she looked like one of her famed-for-their-beauty sisters long ago. Right now, faced with the most astoundingly handsome man she’d ever seen, she couldn’t face the prospect of his sympathy or his averment.

‘Who would look at what?’

For the first time in thirty minutes he turned to look at her. The intensity in his sapphire blues acted like a laser beam and, as if locked on target, she couldn’t tear her gaze away.

Choosing her words carefully, she said, ‘Who would look twice at a normal person? The problems start when people appear moneyed and pampered. I bring no attention to myself. No one would give me a second glance.’

Jaw dropping open, Lucas slowly shook his head incredulously. ‘And what if your cover was blown?’

‘I would move. Can I go now?’

‘No. You cannot go now,’ he said fiercely, and her hackles prickled. ‘Why are you not living in the security-enhanced apartment on the Thames?’

Claudia stiffened and finally managed to wrench her gaze away. ‘How do you know about—?’ She held up her hand in a stop sign. ‘Forget I said that. I needed to be closer to work.’ A half-truth, but that was all he was getting. It was seriously unnerving to know someone had files detailing her life events. She imagined it read like a chronological disaster essay.

‘You gave it up?’ he asked, his brows almost hitting his hairline. ‘To live here?’

For some reason she actually followed his finger, which unsurprisingly pointed to her flat. ‘Yes,’ she said simply.

‘Dios, Claudia!’ His hands lifted as if pleading for patience from the heavens. ‘How can an intelligent woman be so unthinking?’

A ball of fury began to swirl in her stomach, and no matter how hard she sucked in air the motion picked up pace like a cyclone. ‘Now, just wait a minute—’

‘You have no regard for your safety. None,’ he said with a slash of his hands. ‘I have seen safer streets in the slums. Well, I will tell you this right now. We are not staying here. Comprende?’

Her mouth shaping for a scathing retort along the lines of It’s none of your damn business, she felt his words loop round her skull like a broken record. Her hand crept up to her throat, where her pulse jumped erratically. ‘What do you mean, we?’

‘From the time you agreed to the terms to the time we arrive at the Arunthian palace you are under my protection,’ he grated, seemingly not entirely happy with the prospect.

Well, neither was she!

‘Next time you barter with me, Claudia, you’d better think twice about the consequences. For the next twenty-four hours we are stuck together. Whether you like it or not.’

Oh, God. As Shakespeare might say, she’d been hoist with her own petard.

‘Clearly you don’t,’ she said. She felt sick. She felt dizzy. Was it physically possible to strangle yourself?

‘I have better things to do than babysit a self-centred, senseless, se … Arrrrggh.’ With a frustrated roar, he pushed open the car door and launched himself from the bucket seat. Before he’d even slammed it shut she yanked on the handle to follow him. And finally the rotten thing worked!