Castiglione's Pregnant Princess. Lynne Graham

      ‘Look, don’t go all girlie on me. I don’t expect that from you,’ Vitale countered crushingly. ‘I only want the answer to one question.’

      Jazz tried to unfreeze a little and look normal, or as normal as she could feel being confronted by Vitale when she was wearing only a towel. ‘OK.’

      ‘Why is a virgin on birth control?’ he asked gravely.

      ‘I don’t really think that’s any of your business. It was for...well, medical reasons,’ she told him obliquely, unwilling to discuss her menstrual cycle with him, her colour heightening until she felt like a beetroot being roasted and wanted to slap him for it.

      ‘It will be very much my business if you get pregnant,’ Vitale breathed witheringly.

      ‘It’s so like you to look on the dark side and expect the very worst,’ Jazz replied equally witheringly. ‘It’s not going to happen, Vitale. Relax and go back to bed and please forget this ever happened for both our sakes.’

      ‘Is that what you want?’ Vitale wanted to rip off the towel and continue even though he knew she was in no condition to satisfy him again. It had nothing whatsoever to do with his brain. It was pretty much as if his body had developed an agenda all of its own and he couldn’t control it.

      ‘We just had a sleazy encounter on a kitchen table in the middle of the night. What do you think?’ Jazz enquired saccharine sweet.

      Vitale was receiving a strong impression that anything he said would be taken down and held against him. Sleazy? That single descriptive word outraged him. He swung on his heel, his lean, powerful body taut, and left the room and just as quickly Jazz wanted to kick him for giving up on her so easily. Her thoughts were a turbulent sea of conflict and confusion and self-loathing, sending her seesawing from one extreme to the other. No sooner was he gone than she wanted him back and she flung off the towel and climbed into bed, hating herself. It was so typical of Vitale to worry about the fact that he hadn’t used contraception. Now he would be waiting on that axe to fall and that was a humiliating prospect, even though it also reminded her that she hadn’t yet taken her daily pill. She dug into her bag and took it before switching off the light.

      What was done was done and it had been amazing, she thought ruefully, but it was better not to think about that imprudent sudden intimacy that had changed everything between them. Now she was no longer thinking about Vitale as the boy he had once been, but Vitale, very much a man in the present and that switch in outlook disturbed her, made her fear that somewhere deep down inside her there was still a tiny kernel of the fourteen-year-old who had believed the sun rose and set on Prince Vitale Castiglione...