Page 20 of Stranded with His Runaway Bride

As something had broken for good inside him, Leo had stared at a blank strip of wall between two portraits of his most illustrious and pompous-looking forebears. He’d hated those portraits ever after and they were the first things he had consigned to some backwater of the palace the moment that study had become his.

Leo had never again tried to do anything to please his father. Quite the opposite. He’d embraced disobedience, courted disrepute. He would have been expelled from school but for the cachet his title had brought to the place. As the years had passed, and Leo had matured into a man, observers had been hard pressed to say who had cut the most scandalous swathe through the opposite sex. He or his mother. She was on husband number four. Leo had scores of conquests, most of whom he barely remembered. For a while he had been the undisputed wild child of Europe. Even Sebastien, with his title, good looks and easy charm, had been in second place. The aloof heir to the Grimentzian throne had been too much of a draw.

But Leo had never forgotten the scorn and the blame of his father’s verbal thrashing. Since that day he’d never allowed a moment’s true emotion to be on display. Perhaps that was why Francesca had eloped. Had he become too like his father?

Exploring that now wouldn’t help. He had the other girl to persuade to the altar instead.

Leo held the Nefertiti crown up to the light. His grandmother had kept her daughter’s most celebrated costume.

Giovanna’s departure had hurt Grand-Mère too. She’d become a pariah overnight. She had been denied all access to her only grandchild. He’d believed it when it was revealed she’d helped her daughter by allowing the lovers to meet in secret in Chateau Elisabetha. Leo had felt so betrayed he’d never forgiven her, even as an adult, when she’d written to him, explaining herself. She knew her daughter was selfish and spoiled but she loved her and wanted her to be happy, and she hoped maybe one day he would understand sacrificing something for love.

Never. He would never understand that. Love was such a fleeting unreliable emotion to hitch anything to. He’d never made the mistake of loving anything again.

Every summer an invite had arrived for him to visit her. He’d never even replied. She’d spent the rest of her year in France, close to the capital. All those times he’d been in Paris, he’d never once gone to see her, and she would have known he’d been there. He and Seb always made the headlines—for all the wrong reasons.

Still, a handwritten card and carefully chosen gift had arrived every birthday and Christmas, and when she’d died she’d left him this house.

With the bequest had come a brief message.

You were happy here once. Perhaps you could be again, if you try, my darling boy.

The old woman hadn’t deserved his treatment of her. She’d loved her daughter. Selfish, shallow, dazzling Giovanna.

But how did you punish a mother who didn’t care if you lived or died? You punished her kin.

‘I’m going to need your help getting out of my dress.’

Framed in the doorway stood another woman determined to get what she wanted no matter the cost to him.

His mother. Francesca. Now Violetta.

He shoved the Nefertiti headdress back with the rest of the costume and closed the door on it.

‘I thought we’d established you’d find my touch repellent?’ he drawled.

‘I’m only asking you to cut me out of my dress. I think I can cope with that.’

‘Cut you out? You’re sewn into it? Women still do that?’ he asked, surprised.

‘Women like me still have that done to them, I think you mean. What woman in her right mind wants to be stuck in something she can’t get out of without help? Why do you think I ran away in it?’

She turned on her heel.

Leo sighed and set off after her. He was going to be damp for a little longer.

Violetta felt those cool blue eyes burning a hole in her back as he followed her down the stairs to the room she had chosen to change in.

What had possessed her to challenge him in that way before? She’d chosen that cheerleader dress because she’d liked something in his expression, flirting? She was supposed to be repelled by him.

Now they struck another problem.

‘I thought it would just tear once I tugged at it. I didn’t even try back at the castle—there was no time. But I can’t even get the two tiny buttons on the neck undone, never mind the rest of it.’ She reached up to fiddle with the tiny silk-covered buttons. ‘See, nothing budges.’

She peered over her shoulder at him. ‘Have you anything to cut it with?’

‘On me? No, of course not.’

‘Don’t you have a Swiss army knife or something? I thought the Grimentzian Guard were famously prepared for anything.’

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