Page 12 of Twelve Nights In The Prince's Bed

Paparazzi engulfed her until she reached her car, parked on the narrow street of Stomland’s capital that she’d called home ever since moving out of the palace to attend university. Her parents had left her an inheritance and on her eighteenth birthday it had matured, enabling her to buy the charming, historic townhouse in a little mews location. While the King and Queen hadn’t wanted Poppy to move out, it had felt important to Poppy to repay their generosity with a sign of independence.

Or was it that, deep down, she’d been afraid to wear out her welcome?

They’d always made her feel like a part of the family, but she wasn’t, not really, and that idea kept scrolling through her mind as she slipped into the driver’s seat and started the engine.

Still the photographers snapped away and she couldn’t help wondering why. Surely they had whatever image they would need by now?

With a look of exasperation, she pulled out from the kerb and began to drive to the home she knew Adrastos lived in, but had never personally been to, with a growing sense of trepidation and disbelief. Was she really going to ask him to do this?

When Nicholas had died, Adrastos had wanted, more than anything, to find a way to turn time backwards, to go back into the past and see Nicholas again, to be able firstly to fix him, and, failing that, to be able totellhim everything he felt, everything he thought. As boys, they’d been competitive: separated by only thirteen months, one the heir, the other a backup, they’d been pitted against each other without their realising it at first.

It didn’t help that Adrastos had been bigger and stronger. He’d walked from a younger age than Nicholas had, he’d run, jumped, talked younger. He’d been faster. More confident and charming, and, though he hadn’t been consciously aware of it, Adrastos had enjoyed the competition, for he’d always won.

But when Nicholas had died, Adrastos had regretted having competed with him. He’d regretted taking every opportunity to show his superiority. He’d wanted to rewind his life and do it differently, better. A complex, heavy thought for a teenager to have, nonetheless, it had been clear as anything in Adrastos’s mind.

And now, staring at the front page of the newspaper, he felt that same desperate, foolish longing. He wanted to go back in time and undo it all. What the hell had he been thinking?

She’d propositioned him, sure, but he was older, wiser, clearly more experienced. So why the hell hadn’t he just flat out refused? Why had he gone outside with her? Breathed her in? Kissed her. Held her body against his?

He groaned, dropping his head forward with a sinking feeling in his gut.

Nobody dared question his lifestyle choices publicly. He was aware of his parents’ feelings, aware of the headache it gave the courtiers who ran—or attempted to run—their lives, but no one had been brave, or stupid, enough to directly criticise him for his almost pathological need to enjoy a woman’s company.

That, he suspected, was about to change. Poppy was no ordinary woman. There was no way his parents would let this infraction go without some dialogue.

And worse, what would it do to their family?

It was almost Christmas, a time of year when they came together and ate around the tableen famille, Poppy included. Were they all to ignore the elephant in the room?

Not for the first time, he fantasised about not going, but even Adrastos couldn’t do that. Not to his parents, who had buried their oldest child, who existed in a strange half-life, here in the present even as they were simply going through the motions, waiting to be joined with Nicholas again.

Adrastos grunted, stood, paced his living room then paused as a noise alerted him to something beyond his door.

The paparazzi scrum outside her own apartment was nothing compared to the assembly of photographers waiting at Adrastos’s. However, at least there was a security presence here to keep them at bay. Adrastos had four military guards on his front steps, as well as a dozen security cameras set up on the façade of his beautiful residence. Poppy hadn’t been able to park anywhere near his home, so she walked the last of the way, on the opposite side of the street until the last possible moment to avoid the attention of the paparazzi and then, with her head down, across the street and straight into the lion’s den.

It was fortunate for Poppy that one of the security guards saw her first, putting an arm around her shoulders and leading her up the steps and to the front door before shepherding her inside swiftly, but not before the clicking of cameras had almost deafened her.

She looked around just as Adrastos stalked into the tiled, double-height foyer, and the logical, calm-sounding explanation she’d concocted on the drive across town burst into flames on the periphery of her mind as everything went blank except the sheer euphoria and electrical charge of seeing him again.

Her pulse went crazy, her mouth dry, her fingers began to tingle and her stomach twisted and tightened until she could hardly breathe.

‘Adrastos.’ His name was barely audible, a throaty, emotional noise from the depths of her gut.

‘You shouldn’t have come,’ he grunted, evidently feeling none of the temptation at seeing Poppy again that she was managing being confronted by Adrastos.

She tried to control her nerves, to calm her rapidly firing pulse, but she was awash with sensation. It was about a thousand times worse than her first trial, when she’d had to stand up and argue in front of a judge.

‘We have to talk.’

His jaw moved as though he were grinding his teeth. Contemplating rejecting her?

‘It’s important.’

‘I have not changed my mind about last night, Poppy. It was a mistake. One of the worst of my life. Talking about it will not alter that.’

She flinched. Okay, she hadn’t expected him to be jumping for joy about it all, but to refer to it in such bald terms made something in the region of her heart ache unbearably.

‘I don’t want to talk about last night,’ she answered after a brief, painful pause.

---