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Instinctively, she placed her hand on her midriff, even though she was sure she couldn’t be pregnant. But she hadn’t had the chance to take a test yet. She hadn’t even thought about it, because she had been too busy dealing with the emotional repercussions of his latest desertion.
‘We can have that conversation here, in front of the Queen and her husband, or we can have it in Mermaid Cay in private. Up to you.’
Both Isabelle and Travis protested, but Mel knew that Rene wasn’t giving her a choice. She couldn’t talk about the intimate details of their misguided relationship in front of her friend, and she didn’t want to involve the couple any more—because this was her problem to solve.
She would have to accept Rene’s invitation. And his protection. Even go along with his lie about an engagement and travel with him to a private island on the other side of the world, where she would be completely at the mercy of desires and passions she had never been able to control around him…
All because she’d made a stupid mistake, and then compounded it by lying.
It took her a good ten minutes to cut through Travis’s protests and Isabelle’s concern, while Rene remained silent. Eventually, though, she managed to persuade them to let her go with him.
Half an hour later, with a hastily packed bag at her feet and Rene, who had barely exchanged a word with her once she’d agreed to accompany him, sitting stiffly beside her as the noisy helicopter lifted off, Mel stared down at the crowd of photographers and reporters still parked outside the Palace gates. She brushed away an errant tear with her fist, feeling trapped but determined not to let him see how vulnerable she felt.
The helicopter journey across the Alps to Saltzaland took over an hour, but mercifully the noise in the cabin was too loud to have a conversation, which gave Mel some precious time to gather her shattered emotions. And think.
By the time the chopper settled in the courtyard at the back of Gaultiere Castle she had managed to get enough of a grip to formulate a plan of sorts.
A sleek black limousine was parked on the other side of the helipad, dwarfed by the Castle’s imposing three-hundred-foot façade. As Rene spoke to one of his advisers in hushed tones and a parade of footmen arrived to take her one bag to the vehicle, which was transporting them to the airport, Mel stared, transfixed by Rene’s home. Even in the daylight, the dark brickwork and grandiose mix of Gothic and Byzantine architecture made Gaultiere Castle look much less welcoming than the White Palace where she had spent so much of her childhood. Isabelle’s home had a similar six-hundred-year-old history, but the white limestone and fanciful turrets made Androvia’s Palace seem like a fairytale in comparison to this, which was more like the castle of an evil king straight out of childhood nightmares.
The forbidding architecture fitted her mood, though—and Rene’s, it seemed, from the scowl on his face—when he took her arm again, as he had done in Isabelle’s study, to escort her to the limousine like an errant child.
She allowed herself to be led, determined not to speak too soon or lose her temper. She needed privacy for what she had to say.
As soon as they were cocooned in the back seat of the luxury car, though, and the door had been closed by one of his many footmen, a tinted screen shielding their conversation from the driver, she broke her silence.
‘Rene, this is unnecessary. We don’t need to fly all the way to the Caribbean to have a private conversation,’ she said, trying for reasonable.
He barely glanced her way. ‘Put your belt on.’
The echo of the dictatorial way he had treated her the last time they’d been in a car together made her temper spike. She forced herself not to react, though, and snapped on the belt.
She hated having to appease him, but she couldn’t gauge his mood. He’d always been a forceful man but the emotions swirling in his eyes now seemed more volatile than any she had ever seen before. Plus, she had put herself in this situation by lying to him about their first night in the cabin, so she did have some explaining to do.
‘How long is the drive to the airport?’ she asked.
‘Thirty minutes,’ he said, all his attention on the view through the window of snow-covered pines.
He’s sulking. Just say sorry and make him see reason.
She took a careful breath and tried to remain calm, despite the lungful of his scent—bergamot and cedarwood and man—which triggered memories she did not need.
The good news was that half an hour should be more than enough time to apologise for her white lie and then put his mind at rest about any lingering ‘repercussions’. The bad news was that she needed to find a way to defuse his temper first, which had never been her forte. Especially when her own temper was threatening to erupt.
She cleared her throat, struggling to find the right words, the right tone, which would allow her to keep her pride while also de-escalating the tension making her stomach hurt.
‘Look, I’m sorry I lied when you asked me about that night…’ she began.
His head swung around, but what she saw in his eyes shocked her. Not anger but raw emotion, reminding her of the look in his eyes when she’d asked him about his nightmares.
‘Why did you?’ he demanded, his tone hollow as his gaze raked over her.
She shrugged, trying not to overreact. But why did he look so upset…in the grip of emotions she didn’t understand? If she didn’t know better, she could have sworn she’d seen fear in his eyes.
‘I guess… I don’t really know,’ she said, struggling to remember exactly why she’d been so determined to cover up that brief misguided interlude. ‘It just seemed like a mistake that we shouldn’t dwell on. And talking about it would give it more significance than it deserved.’
Instead of placating him, her clumsy explanation only seemed to upset him more.
He leant across the car and cradled her cheek in his palm. She jolted, the sudden touch, the tender, tortured look in his eyes as he searched her expression like a lightning strike to all those emotions she was trying to keep under strict control.