Humiliation and annoyance prickled along her skin, chased up her spine. He made what she had with Anders sound so trite. So cheap. ‘Yes, it is.’
Leo shoved his hands in his pockets and strolled to the window, gazing out at the plaza in front of Amarnes’s royal palace. It was a brilliant summer morning, the sky blue with faint wisps of cloud, the jagged, violet mountains a stunning backdrop to the capital city of Njardvik’s cluster of buildings, the bronze statues of Amarnes’s twin eagles—the country’s emblem—glinting in the sun. ‘How long have you known my cousin?’ he finally asked and Phoebe shifted her bag to her other shoulder.
‘Ten days.’
He turned around, one eyebrow arched, his hands still in his pockets. His silence was eloquent, and Phoebe felt a blush stain her throat and rise to her cheeks. Ten days. It wasn’t much; it sounded ridiculous. And yet she knew. She knew when Anders looked at her…and yet now this man was looking at her, his amber gaze sleepy and yet so sardonic, so knowing. Ten days. Ten days was nothing. And judging by the contemptuous curl of Leo’s lip, he thought so too. Phoebe straightened. What did she care what Leo Christensen, the Playboy Prince of Amarnes, thought of her? He was a man given over to pleasure, vice. Yet, standing in front of him now, she was conscious of a darker streak in him, something more alarming and dangerous than the antics of a mere playboy. An emotion emanated from him, something dark and unknowable, yet a force to be reckoned with…if only she knew what it was.
‘And you think ten days is long enough to know someone?’ Leo asked in that honeyed voice that wound around Phoebe like a spell even as alarm prickled along her spine. ‘To love him?’ he pressed, his voice so soft, so seductively mild, yet still with that thread of darkness that Phoebe didn’t understand. Didn’t want to.
She shrugged, determined to stay defiant. She wasn’t going to defend what she felt for Anders, or what he felt for her. She knew it would sound contrived, as trite and silly as Leo was determined to make it.
‘You realise,’ Leo continued in that same soft voice that made the hairs on the nape of Phoebe’s neck prickle, ‘that if he stays with you—marries you, as he has suggested—you will be queen? Something this country is not prepared to allow.’
‘They won’t have to,’ Phoebe returned. The idea of her becoming queen was utterly terrifying. ‘Anders told me he will abdicate.’
Leo’s eyes narrowed, his body stilling. ‘Abdicate?’ he said softly. ‘He said that?’
Phoebe jutted her chin. ‘Yes.’
Leo’s eyes met hers and he held her gaze with unrelenting hardness. ‘Then he will never become king.’
She would not let this man make her feel guilty. ‘He doesn’t even want to be king—’
Leo let out a bark of disbelieving laughter. ‘Doesn’t want to be king? When it’s all he’s ever known?’
‘He told me—’
He shrugged in derisive dismissal. ‘Anders,’ he said, cutting her off, ‘rarely knows what he wants.’
‘Well, he does now,’ Phoebe returned with more determination than she felt at the moment. Somehow, as the target of Leo’s incredulous scorn, she found her determination—her faith—trickling away. ‘He wants me,’ she said, and it came out sounding childish.
Leo stared at her for a moment, his expression turning thoughtful, then blank, ominously, dangerously neutral. He could be thinking anything. Planning anything. He cocked his head. ‘And you…want…him?’
‘Of course I do.’ Phoebe fidgeted again; the reception room with its heavy drapes and furniture felt oppressive. A gilded prison. Would she be allowed to walk out of here? She was conscious of her uncertain status as a foreigner in a small and fiercely independent country, and she was even more conscious of the man in front of her, a man with power and authority and clearly no compunction in using both for his own ends.
And where, oh, where was Anders? Did he know she’d been sent for? Why wasn’t he looking for her? Since he’d announced their relationship to the royal family he’d been absent, and she now felt a treacherous flicker of doubt.
‘You know him?’ Leo pressed. ‘Enough to live a life of exile?’
‘Exile from a family that doesn’t accept or love him,’ Phoebe returned. ‘Anders has never wanted this, Mr—Your Grace.’ She swept an arm to encompass the room and the entire palace with its endless expectations.
‘Oh, hasn’t he?’ Leo laughed once, a sharp, unpleasant sound. He moved back to the window, his back to her, seeming lost in thought. Phoebe waited, impatience and worse—fear—starting to fray her hope. Her faith.
‘Would ten thousand dollars, American, do it?’ Leo asked, his back to her, his voice musing. ‘Or more like fifty?’
Phoebe straightened, glad for the renewed wave of outrage that poured through her, replacing the fear and doubt. ‘I told you, no amount—’
‘Phoebe.’ Leo turned around, and the way he said her name sounded strangely gentle, although his eyes were hard, his expression remote. ‘Do you honestly think a man like Anders can make you happy?’
‘And how could a man like you possibly know?’ Phoebe flung back, annoyed and angry that he was making her feel this way. Making her wonder.
Leo stiffened, his face blanking once more. ‘A man like me?’ he enquired with stiff politeness.
‘Anders has told me about you,’ Phoebe said, both the fear and the anger spiking her words, making them hurt, making her want to hurt him—although how could you hurt a man like Leo Christensen? A man who had seen it all, done it all and cared about nothing? Or so the newspapers said, Anders said, and the man in front of her with his sardonic smile and cold voice seemed to confirm every awful thing she’d ever heard. ‘You know nothing about love or loyalty,’ she continued. ‘You care only about your own pleasure—and I suppose I’m a little inconvenience to that—’
‘That you are,’ Leo cut her off. For a second Phoebe wondered if she’d hurt him with her words. No, impossible. He was actually smiling, his mouth curving in a way that was really most unpleasant. Frightening. ‘Quite an inconvenience, Miss Wells. You have no idea just how much.’ As if drawing a mask over the first one, Leo’s expression changed. It became sleepy, speculative, his smile turning seductive. He took a step closer to her. ‘What would have happened, do you suppose,’ he asked in that soft, bedroom voice, ‘if you’d met me first?’
‘Nothing,’ Phoebe snapped, but even so her heart rate kicked up a notch as Leo kept walking towards her with languorous, knowing ease, stopping only a hairsbreadth away. She could feel his heat, smell the faint woodsy tang of his aftershave. She stared determinedly at his shirt, refusing to be intimidated, to show how afraid—how affected—she was. Yet even so, her gaze helplessly moved upwards from the buttons of his fine silk shirt to where they were undone, to that brown column of his throat where a pulse leaped and jerked, and Phoebe felt an answering response deep inside, a tug in her belly that could only be called yearning. Desire.
She flushed in shame.
Leo gave a low chuckle. He raised one hand to brush a wayward curl from her forehead, and Phoebe jerked instinctively in response, felt the heat of his fingers against her skin.
‘Are you so sure about that?’ he queried softly.
‘Yes…’
Yet at that moment she wasn’t, and they both knew it. Heard it in her ragged breathing, saw it in how she almost swayed towards him. Horrible man, Phoebe thought savagely, yet she condemned herself as well. She shouldn’t let him affect her like this, not if she loved Anders, which she did.
Didn’t she?
‘So sure,’ Leo whispered, his voice a soft sneer, and his hand dropped from her forehead