Page 22 of In Bed with Her Billionaire Bodyguard

‘You’re offering me a drink in my own home?’ She stared at him as if it were the greatest breach of etiquette she’d ever seen.

‘I know I could do with one,’ he bit out under his breath as he crossed to the kitchen. Hope’s apartment was exactly as he had imagined—not that it was hard, having reviewed the floor plans and the original sales brochure. He probably knew more about her apartment than she did. He bent down to the wine fridge and scanned the labels. What he really wanted was to know what Martin had said to her. Instinctively, Luca knew it was important. Really important.

‘I don’t know what you think you saw tonight—’

‘What I saw,’ he interrupted as he pulled a very decent white from the fridge, ‘was a vile, objectionable man using social pressure to keep you in your place while he tried to emotionally manipulate you.’

He reached for two wine glasses from the shelf above the countertop, liking the ergonomic feel of the apartment; everything was in reach where it should be, or was expected to be.

‘Did he do that while you were together?’ he asked, trying to keep the dangerous anger simmering beneath his skin at bay.

He felt the breath she held, the fury she tried to contain as if it were a living presence between them. He waited out her silence as he poured the pale wine into each glass. He looked to where Hope stood in the middle of her apartment, waiting until she gave up the fight.

She placed her bag and wrap on the arm of the sofa and came to stand with the breakfast bar between them. He slid the glass of wine across the gleaming marble and she took a sip before answering.

‘No,’ she said, putting the glass back down on the bar. ‘No,’ she said, shaking her head again. ‘He was many things, but he doesn’t have the intellect for that kind of emotional manipulation. But he was very good at hiding his true nature. I had absolutely no idea,’ she admitted. ‘And I should have,’ she said, as if admonishing herself.

‘We were twelve when our parents died and my grandfather became our guardian. He decided that boarding school was the best place for us and sent my brother to Eton, and me to St Saviour’s.’ The words became thick on her tongue. ‘It was the first time I’d spent even a night away from my brother. As twins, we’d been unusually inseparable and suddenly my parents were gone, my life was upside down and I was alone.’

She turned to the window, perhaps unseeing of the illuminated London nightscape beyond the glass.

‘It was...an adjustment. Because of my parents’ death, the publicity, the tragedy, the family notoriety, everyone in the school knew who I was. It counted among its number the daughters of dignitaries, ambassadors and even princesses, but I wasfamous,’ she said, smiling bitterly.

‘I didn’t quite realise what that meant until a picture of me trying alcohol for the first time, in a desperate attempt to fit in and find a place in the schoolgirl hierarchy, found its way onto the front page of a daily rag. After that, it was a photo of me getting changed after gym.’

She shrugged, trying to hide how much it had hurt, how much it still hurt, but he could see it. Could tell how much it cost her to remember, to open this up for him, because he’d demanded it. Hope was describing exactly the kind of invasive press attention that his mother had told him she’d been trying to avoid. But with one difference—his mother had only been trying to protect herself. It sounded as if there had been no one to protect Hope. Until it was too late. It struck him then that they each lived on opposite sides of public life—him in the shadows and her in the glare of the spotlight.

‘So you’d have thought I’d have learned my lesson by the time I met Martin, but apparently not. At university, things were easier. I was as anonymous as I’d ever been and I let my guard down. I waswooedby him and fell for his lies, hook, line and sinker.

‘I thought myself in love,’ she said, the cynicism dripping from her tone like acid that would only ever harm herself. ‘And I would have married him, had my brother not realised he was only after my money.’

Luca didn’t miss the way she had tripped over those words and his chest ached, not from anger but with understanding. He could easily imagine the kind of hurt she had felt.

‘I overheard them talking. Nate confronted Martin about a month before our wedding, at a family event in Tunbridge Wells. And, to this day, they don’t know I heard them.’

Luca’s glass paused midway to his mouth.

‘Nate wanted to pay Martin to leave me, but I broke it off before he could. Martin must have hated that. To not have got a penny out of us. I think that’s why he threw his lot in with Simon. And that’s how I became the “The Cold-Hearted Harcourt”, dumping her fiancé weeks before the wedding.’

‘Hope—’

‘Better that than to be left by the bastard,’ she bit out through clenched teeth.

How her brother had ever thought her weak was beyond Luca. He shook his head.

‘So now you know,’ she said, her eyes shining. ‘And now you can leave,’ she ordered regally.

He didn’t want to leave her alone, but he couldn’t be sure that his reasons were purely professional any more. And that alone was enough to tell him that he should. He left his half-drunk wine on the bar and Hope followed him to the door.

He turned. He wanted to say something but the look in her eyes, powerful, angry and determined, warned him against it and only then did he feel it was okay to leave.

On Sunday evening Luca received a message from Elise, letting him know that Hope was working from home the next day. And the day after that. During that time, the press made Martin’s approach to Hope at the opera into a secret assignation, a fight between jealous ex-lovers, and everything but a plot to dethrone the King. His mother’s film also grossed millions at the Hollywood box office and there was something jarring about seeing both of their names in the same newspaper that put Luca in the foulest of moods.

And that was before he received the email about Austria. He picked up his phone and pressed the dial button before he’d even finished reading it.

‘What’s in Austria?’ he demanded.

‘Sun, ski andaprès-ski,’ Elise replied dreamily, unconcerned by the growl in his voice.

---