Page 57 of Stranded with His Runaway Bride

The ravening beast in him roared in disappointment. He wanted her again but it wasn’t going to happen. She was turning him down.

‘So be it,’ he said and started for the door.

‘Leo, no,’ she blurted. ‘I’ll take it. I’ll take tonight.’

She made a little gasping sob when he reached the door and thought she was too late and he was leaving. Then another of wild relief when he locked it and turned back and crossed the floor to her.

His own sense of relief nearly brought him to his knees.

He flung his towel away, tore the robe from her body and scooped her up, took them both down to the bed.

‘Take comfort in the fact that tonight I need you,’ he growled, then claimed her mouth in a savage kiss. Her hands clamped around his skull. She kissed him back. Hard. Sucked his lower lip between her teeth. Bit down. Not painful but enough to send lust surging through him.

He snatched his mouth free of hers, took her wrists and pinned them with a hand above her head. He kissed her throat, trailed his lips over her delicate collarbone, went lower to those sweet small breasts, and sucked on a distended nipple, growling in carnal satisfaction when she groaned and bucked beneath him.

Then he parted her thighs.

Desire, need, whatever the thing driving him was called, he let it take him. Wanting this scorching consummation to burn everything to the ground so by morning there’d be nothing left but dying embers and he’d be free again.

He went down on her, wrenching climax after climax from her with his mouth. Showing her no mercy.

Or himself. Would he ever forget the taste of her?

At first, she moaned into her pillow, then dug her hands into her hair. When she was drenched in sweat, her eyes unfocused and mad with lust, he crawled back up the bed and gathered her in his arms.

Violetta shuddered as he sank into her. Enough for only the merest of the most intimate contact between them. Enough to drive them both wild. He flicked his hips again and again...waiting...waiting. Until her body jackknifed against him as a final, powerful orgasm ripped through her.

Leo buried his face in her neck and thrust into her fully, allowing himself to be lost in her for this final time. Her fractured cries, the hot wet clench of her intimate muscles around him, until there was nothing left of his grip on reality but one word. Repeated over and over.

Violetta, Violetta, Violetta...

It was a perfect summer’s morning. The country that the previous forty-eight hours had devastated was bathed in glorious sunshine from a cloudless sky. But for all the damage around them you could almost imagine it had been a dream.

Luisa had arrived at seven, peeking cautiously around the door. Violetta would be grateful for ever that she’d asked no questions but just quietly got on getting her mistress ready to leave the very rooms that under different circumstances would have been hers.

What if she went to him now? Told him she’d changed her mind, that she’d marry him after all. For a brief, glorious moment Violetta imagined the world where the two of them could be together. But then she saw the von Frohburg coat of arms, fluttering high over the castle, higher than anything around them. A clear signal of who was the master here. If she went to him on his terms her duchy would be his by the law of San Nicolo, and she couldn’t and wouldn’t give it up, not to any man.

‘The cars are here,’ Luisa said. The luggage had already been taken downstairs. All there was left to do was leave herself.

Violetta walked across the room. Refusing to look again at the beautiful decor, the elegant furniture, the door to the bathroom, the vast bed, now made as if no one had slept there at all. As if she hadn’t shared her last night here with the owner of this castle.

He only came to her when she stood on the castle forecourt. His car was there, at his insistence, ready to take her on the short ride to the helipad to the north of the city. Where a waiting helicopter—also his—would fly her safely back to San Nicolo.

So much care but the fact remained he was letting her go, with no further discussion about it.

He looked tired and strained as he joined her. Coming straight from a meeting with foreign dignitaries before he headed back out to help with relief efforts. For now he was dressed in an immaculate charcoal suit and grey silk tie. The antithesis of the mud-splattered jeans and shirt she’d stripped from his body last night.

He was the prince again, the monarch who’d strode into Chateau Elisabetha in full royal regalia. Not the man she’d got to know once that uniform was off. Who was she saying goodbye to? It was brutal either way, but Violetta steeled herself to it.

‘I have a gift for you,’ he said. ‘It was tucked away in the royal collection and I thought you might like it. As a remembrance from someone you met during your stay here.’

He took her hand and placed a small velvet-covered box in her palm.

‘Under other circumstances I might have felt less sanguine about you putting this in my hand.’ She made a joke to hide the fact that her heart was breaking. She blinked back the moisture filling her eyes and busied herself with opening the card beneath the ribbon securing the box, but glanced up when she read it.

‘From Antonio and Hildegard?’

‘They didn’t want you to forget them. So they thought they’d give you something to remind you of our time together. All four of us, at the chateau.’

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