not mine,’ he said bitterly. ‘Get on with it.’
‘I’ve told you everything you need to know.’ She walked over to the top of the wardrobe to pull down a huge rucksack, which she threw on top of the bed. ‘Just console yourself with the fact that you won’t have to put up with me for much longer!’
‘What do you think you’re doing?’
‘What does it look like I’m doing? I’m leaving. I can’t stay here,’ she said, tugging open a drawer and pulling out a stack of T-shirts, which she began to layer haphazardly in the rucksack. ‘If I stay it’ll be too much hassle for you.’
‘Oh, please. Spare me the spin. I don’t imagine you’re leaving out of the goodness of your heart, are you, little Miss Princess?’
Sophie heard the venom in his voice and thought about the way he’d touched her last night. The way he’d made her feel so safe and protected. As if she was capable of anything. She remembered the way she’d trembled with delight as he’d explored her skin with his fingers and his mouth. The way she’d gasped with pleasure with each deep stroke he’d made. She had taken a long time to have sex for reasons which were complex and unique, but Rafe Carter had been the perfect lover—even if now he was looking at her as if she were something he’d found squashed beneath the sole of his shoe.
And surely what happened last night had been about more than sexual liberation. She had given herself to him freely—so didn’t that give her the right to treat him as an equal and be treated as an equal herself?
‘Is it fair to criticise me because I was born with a title?’ she said. ‘Something which is completely outside my control.’
‘Would you prefer that I criticised you for your deceit instead? For failing to tell me who you really were?’
‘But I couldn’t tell you,’ she said simply. ‘How could I? I couldn’t tell anyone—it would have made it impossible for me to stay here. Surely you can see that. It would have altered everything.’
‘And of course, if you’d told me, particularly the part about your lack of sexual experience...’ his eyes glinted ‘...then at least I would have had a choice about whether I wanted to be used as an experimental lover in your big round-the-world adventure.’
‘It wasn’t like that!’ she said fiercely.
‘No? You chose me because we’d forged a deep bond in less than a week of knowing one another?’
‘I actually wasn’t analysing it very much at all—I was just going with the flow. And aren’t you forgetting that there were two people involved in what happened?’ she questioned quietly. ‘Or just preferring to forget your part in it?’
‘So what was it? Did I tick all the right boxes, Sophie?’ He began to tap each one of his fingers in turn. ‘Rich, single, hot and therefore the perfect candidate to give the rejected royal her first taste of sexual pleasure?’
Flinging a belt on top of the T-shirts, Sophie lifted her head, grabbing at the streak of anger which flashed through her because surely anger was better than buckling under these sudden feelings of vulnerability and sadness which were bubbling up inside her. ‘You bastard,’ she whispered shakily, but Rafe Carter didn’t look in the least bit shocked by her first ever public use of a swear word. The only emotion she could see flickering in his hard grey eyes was bitter cynicism.
‘Yeah. For a while I was exactly that. A bastard,’ he drawled. ‘My father didn’t marry my mother until three days after I was born. As it turned out, they should never have bothered.’
His phone started to vibrate in his pocket and he slid it out to take the call, listening in silence as Sophie continued to pack the rucksack.
‘Where are you planning to go?’ he questioned, once the connection had been cut.
She didn’t look up, terrified now that her vulnerability would be impossible to hide. ‘I haven’t really thought about it.’
‘Well, start thinking!’ He felt a flicker of temper. ‘You’re not protected by your royal status now, Sophie. You’re out in the middle of Queensland with a limited choice of transport available, no matter how much money you’re suddenly able to produce. That was my assistant on the phone. He says your presence in my Outback home is generating a lot of interest on a quiet news day—not least because I’m just about to mount a bid for one of Malaysia’s biggest cell-phone networks and there’s been a lot of opposition to the deal.’ His mouth twisted. ‘So thanks very much for that.’
‘I’m sorry this has impacted on you because it was never intended to,’ she said. ‘But I’ll be out of your life soon, Rafe. You can put all this down to experience and forget it ever happened. Which is precisely what you wanted in the first place, isn’t it?’
She zipped up the rucksack and swept her tumbled hair away from flushed cheeks and Rafe was reminded of the way she’d moved over him the night before. He remembered the brush of her pubic hair as he’d tangled his fingers in it. The beat of her heart and how tight she’d felt. The way he’d kissed away her cries of pleasure. And damn it if he couldn’t feel the sudden debilitating jerk of sexual desire as he visualised pushing her down on that bed and ripping open the ugly cotton trousers and doing it to her all over again.
‘If only it was that easy,’ he growled. ‘What do you think it’s going to do for my reputation if I leave you here to fend for yourself among the rabble of newshounds who are due to arrive?’
‘Heaven forbid I might damage your reputation!’
‘You might not care about my reputation, sweetheart, but I do. And I’m not letting you go anywhere on your own.’
She tilted her chin in defiance. ‘That sounds awfully like an order to me.’
‘At least that’s something you’ve got right. Because if that’s what it takes to make you see sense, then it’s an order.’ His eyes bored into her. ‘What’s the matter, Little Princess? Not used to somebody else telling you what to do?’
She stared at the door behind him, as if planning to make a rush for it. ‘If you must know, I’ve spent my whole life being told what I can and can’t do and this is the first time I’ve ever been able to decide things on my terms. So please don’t trouble yourself with concerns about my personal safety, Rafe. I can have some Isolaverdian bodyguards sent out here to look after me.’
‘And how long is that going to take?’ he demanded. ‘Even if your rarefied palace protection people knew how to cope with life in the bush, which I doubt. The situation could dissolve into complete farce with people suffering from heatstroke or getting spooked by some animal they’ve never seen before, or worse. Is that what you want?’
Sophie bit her lip. She didn’t know what she wanted. Well, in a stupid way she did. She wanted to rewind time so that she was back in his arms. She wanted to feel like a normal woman again. And that was never going to happen.
‘I don’t know,’ she admitted, hating the sudden break in her voice.
Rafe stiffened as he steeled himself against that unexpected trace of vulnerability. Because it was all an act, he reminded himself grimly. Everything about her was false. And until her playboy fiancé had jumped ship, she’d presumably been given everything she wanted, no matter how much she might protest otherwise. Well, she was about to learn that around here he was the one who called the shots.
‘You’re going to have to come with me,’ he said, an idea slowly forming in his head. ‘And perhaps we can each do one another a favour at the same time.’
‘Come where?’ She narrowed her eyes suspiciously. ‘And what kind of a favour?’
Rafe stared down at the bulging rucksack as it occurred to him that this—like all bad situations—could be turned into an advantage. Couldn’t the unbearable prospect of having to face Sharla again be diluted by taking Sophie to his nephew’s christening? Because