His to Command: the Housekeeper. Sharon Kendrick
a better price?’ he returned, golden eyes lancing into her.
For a moment the room seemed to sway and Cathy felt sick. ‘To negotiate a better price?’ she echoed in disbelief. Surely—oh, please, no—surely he wasn’t implying that she was selling herself. She swallowed down the acrid taste in her throat. ‘A better price for what?’
‘For the hotel, of course,’ he snapped.
There was an odd, debilitating kind of silence. A moment when it seemed to her that everything which was dark in the world had formed itself into a horrible, tight little ball and been hurled, hard—at her stomach. ‘For the hotel?’ she whispered.
There was a pause. ‘He hasn’t told you?’
‘Told…told me what?’
‘That he’s selling?’ His eyes narrowed as he saw her face blanch. ‘No, clearly he hasn’t.’
‘To…you?’
Xaviero gave a grim kind of smile. ‘Of course to me.’
Through the series of befuddled impressions which began ricocheting through her mind, Cathy’s overriding thought was that she would have to leave now. She would have to. Prince Xaviero as her boss? How could she bear it? But then she met the cold, metallic gleam of his golden eyes and wondered who on earth she thought she was kidding. As if a man who had made his contempt for her so apparent would ever keep her on the payroll.
But something didn’t make sense to her. She knew that princes in modern times had ‘normal’ careers—but this? She tried to imagine him doing a stocktake of the cellar—or taking the chef to task when he had one of his periodical tantrums.
‘You mean…you’re going to be a hotelier?’ she questioned, mystified.
There was a moment of stunned silence before Xaviero gave an arrogant laugh, knowing that he should have been outraged at her suggestion and yet, in a way, didn’t it make walking away from her not just easy—but necessary? Because her ridiculous question had simply confirmed that he could not have picked a more unsuitable lover if he had searched to the ends of the earth to find one.
‘You can see me—running a hotel such as this?’ he mocked.
Now he came to mention it, no, she couldn’t—but something in his contemptuous attitude stabbed even harder at Cathy’s heart. It might not have been the most fashionable hotel in the country, but it was the only real job she’d ever had—and she felt a certain kind of loyalty towards it.
‘Not really, no,’ she said. Because some modicum of politeness and charm were necessary if you wanted to make a place a real success—and, unless he was actually trying to get a woman to kiss him, the arrogant Prince Xaviero seemed badly lacking in both. ‘So why are you buying it, then?’
‘Because I want a retreat—a beautiful, English country home, which this has the potential to be. Something with history which can be brought up to date with a little care and money injected into it. Somewhere that’s close enough to London and the international airports—near enough to my polo club but far away enough to escape from it. Somewhere big enough to site a helicopter pad—and which will satisfy my security people. This place seems to fulfil most of the criteria—though obviously it needs extensive work before it can be made habitable.’ He began to laugh softly. ‘Me? A hotelier? Can you imagine?’
Cathy stared at him. In a way, she had thought the worst thing that could happen was the Prince taking over the hotel—but now she saw that there was a far worse scenario. That soon there would be no hotel at all—it would revert to being a private home and not just she but all the other people who worked there would be out of a job. Dismissed as if they were of no consequence by a spoilt and selfish prince who thought of nobody but himself!
‘No, now I come to think of it, I can’t—it was a riridiculous thing to say,’ she agreed, her voice shaking with rage and hurt. ‘I don’t think you’ve got the people skills to run a hotel.’
There was a stunned silence, while he stared at her in a slow-burning disbelief. ‘What did you just say?’
Don’t let him intimidate you, thought Cathy fiercely—because now indignation was taking over from the terrible hurt which seemed to have turned her body into a block of ice. Had she done something awful in a past life which meant that men felt they had a right to trample over her feelings like a herd of cows in a meadow? He had just taken her virginity and then turned on her as if she were nothing more than a cheap con-artist.
‘I think you heard me.’
‘How dare you?’ he bit out dangerously.
‘Why?’ She didn’t flinch under his accusing stare. ‘Does the truth make you angry, Your Highness?’
Xaviero’s eyes narrowed as her impudence almost took his breath away. ‘This is completely unacceptable!’ he hissed.
Didn’t what they had just been doing give her at least some rights? Clearly not. Clutching the silken coverlet even tighter, Cathy thought that if someone had spoken to him like that more often in the past, then he might not be so overbearingly arrogant. ‘Well, if you’ll let me leave—then I won’t need to bother you any more, will I?’
Still reeling from her insubordination, he paused to study her flushed face and the aquamarine eyes which were unexpectedly sparking blue fire at him. And even while her sudden defiance began to turn him on he remembered something else, too. Something which might account for her spiky rebelliousness.
‘I’m not stopping you from leaving,’ he said softly.
She stared at him—as a hungry mouse might stare at a piece of cheese while wondering what the glint of metal behind it could possibly be. ‘You…you aren’t?’
‘Of course not.’ He smiled, feeling himself grow exquisitely hard beneath his robe. ‘Go. Go on, if that’s what you want.’
Cathy swallowed, knowing that she could not move an inch while those eyes were melting into her like molten gold. ‘Then…then would you mind turning your back?’
His lips curved into a mocking smile. ‘Yes, I would, actually.’ He reached out and hooked his finger inside the silk-satin rim of the coverlet which concealed the trembling rise and fall of her breasts. ‘Isn’t it a little late in the day for modesty?’
Her breathing was coming in short little bursts. ‘N-no. I don’t th-think it is.’
The finger slipped a little further down and sank into the cushioned flesh. ‘Sure?’
‘Q-quite sure,’ she breathed, wanting—no, praying that he wouldn’t stop touching her even while part of her despised herself for letting him. Push him away, she told herself. Push him away and he will let you go. Because despite the dark look of predatory intent which had made his features grow tense, some deep-rooted instinct told her that he would stop immediately if she wanted him to.
‘You see, what just happened was not the best initiation into sex you could have had, mia cara,’ he murmured as his finger dipped down and began to tease at one tightly aroused nipple.
Cathy’s grip on the coverlet loosened. ‘It…wasn’t?’
‘No.’ His palm now captured the entire heavy mound of her breast and he felt the coverlet slither down uselessly to her waist. Leaning over, he bent his lips to one rosy tip, feeling a convulsive shudder rack her tiny frame as he flicked his tongue against it. ‘If I had known…’ If he had known, he would have run a million miles away from her blue-eyed enchantment. But perhaps this wasn’t the best time in the world to say so. ‘Then I should have taken things more…slowly.’
Cathy’s eyes fluttered to a close as she felt his tongue now slide its way down towards her belly, and an unbearable flame of desire shot through her. ‘Oh,’ she breathed as he slid a slow, moist trail over her skin