Off-Limits to the Crown Prince Read online

  No, he’d been playing hide-and-seek with Stefano in places he should not be, when he’d sneaked into the forbidden throne room. Seen his father, with a woman bent over the arm of the throne. Alessio’s stride faltered. Hannah almost crashed into him but pulled up close. He knew. He could almost feel her enticing warmth. He turned to the window overlooking a garden.

  ‘I thought you might enjoy the view. Stefano’s ancestors designed the garden in the formal Italian style. I’m sure he’d like to tell you about it.’

  Any more quizzical looks from his best friend and Stefano’s brows would end with a permanent home in his hairline. Alessio allowed him to tell the story of the famous garden with its clipped hedges and fountains. He stood back, letting the chatter wash over him. Taking slow breaths. ‘You will not tell your mother. This is our secret.’ Both his father’s cold eyes and the glassy ones of the woman had been on him that day. He could barely understand why his father’s hands twisted into her hair as if it had to hurt, though the look on her face spoke nothing of pain, even to his young brain. He hadn’t known why their clothes were in disarray, or why his father’s free hand had seemed to be in places it shouldn’t on a woman, or so he’d thought as a child.

  All he knew was that what he was seeing was wrong. He’d come to realise later what had been going on in the throne room. How his father had been defiling it. Each day he felt tainted by the creeping guilt at keeping his father’s dirty secrets, because the man had made him party to more than one young boy should know. It was as if he’d been trying to mould Alessio into his own, dissolute image to spite his mother.

  Lost in his own thoughts, Alessio had failed to realise Stefano and Hannah were now silent.

  ‘Enough of gardens?’ he asked, trying to sound suitably composed and regal. He hadn’t been assailed by that memory for years and couldn’t fathom why it would creep out of its dark, muddy hole to ambush him now.

  ‘It’s very beautiful and...ordered.’

  ‘That’s the way I like it.’ His own thoughts right now were a messy jumble of memories that should never have seen daylight again.

  ‘Do you ever walk in it? Take time to, I don’t know, smell the flowers?’

  ‘I... There are no flowers.’ Where was all this uncertainty coming from? His role and what was required of him was all about certainty. He straightened, remembered exactly who he was. ‘As for aimless wandering, I don’t have time.’

  Stefano had stepped back to his position three paces behind, but Hannah stood right next to him. Looking up with her entrancing green eyes. Lips slightly parted as though there was something always on the tip of her tongue to say.

  He had no doubt she’d say it.

  ‘Important prince and all, I know. That’s something I need to talk to you about. The time you’ve allowed for me.’

  He’d asked Stefano to schedule the barest minimum for formal sittings. She was following him about like a shadow for the next fourteen days. What more did she need?

  ‘I’m a busy man.’

  ‘Places to be. Country to run. I’ve seen your diary, but I need more. And I’m talking hours, not minutes.’

  They neared the door of her rooms and the adjoining parlour which he had thought would be the perfect place for her to work. Like her studio in England. He’d searched the palace for somewhere with the same alignment. A similar light to fill the room, although here the sun streamed in a bit more brightly than in her own studio. There was no rambling garden outside, but the view was pleasant enough, he supposed. He never really looked any more, too occupied with briefings from his government to gaze at the horizon and contemplate the landscape.

  ‘I can find more, if it’s what you require. Perhaps you could accompany His Highness on some...unofficial engagements.’ Stefano this time. It was as if both were conspiring against him. ‘There’s a hospital visit, to see children.’

  Those visits were private, never made for accolades. ‘The children aren’t some circus where you watch them perform.’

  Hannah frowned. ‘I’d never treat sick children that way. But I need to see all aspects of you, not just the official ones. That’s what will make my portrait the best.’

  Before he could protest, she turned to Stefano and smiled. Wide, warm, generous. The type of smile which sent a lick of heat right to his core. One you could bask in. It had no agenda or artifice at all to add a chill to the edges of it. ‘Thank you. Any extra time you can find me would help my work.’

  Better her smile be for his friend than him. There was no place for it in his ordered, planned life. One where everything was cool and clinical. That was the way he preferred things to be. Like the hedge garden, clipped and precise. Even though he now felt inclined to take to the palace gym and hit a punching bag, hours earlier than his normal training session, rather than speak to the finance minister about fiscal policy and Lasserno’s deficit.

  The doors of the room where Hannah would live loomed large. ‘Stefano will show you where everything is. I’ll leave you to him.’

  A gracious host would escort his personal guest in, ensure she was settled. That she was happy with everything, so she’d gift him some genuine smiles which chased away the cold. Instead Alessio strode down the corridor away from Stefano and Hannah, protocol and graciousness be damned. The temptation snapped at him like a whip and he never gave in to temptation.

  Smiles like Hannah’s were dangerous, because they chased away common sense.

  CHAPTER THREE

  HANNAH STOOD IN what was best described as an expansive parlour, in the suite of her rooms. It was if she had been dropped into a fairy tale, except she didn’t feel like a princess, but an impostor.

  Everything here was too magnificent to touch. Her canopied bed with its silks and embroidery in the palest cerulean blues. Magnificent tapestries of pastoral scenes with shepherdesses and frolicking lambs adorning the golden walls. The deepest of carpets she stood on and wiggled her toes into, as if she were walking on a cloud. It reminded her of how threadbare her life back in England seemed to have become, because there was never a time here that anything would be hard or cold. In this palace, nothing would deign to be anything other than perfect. As perfect as the man who ruled here.

  The man she was now waiting for, because her equipment had been unpacked and set up in this room to catch the best light. She’d only brought the bare necessities to Lasserno, pencils and charcoal so she could study and sketch, learn about the Prince who would be taking up her next few months of waking thought. She’d set up what she needed on a small side table next to a chair, ready for when His Highness deigned to grace her with his lofty presence.

  A sickening knot tightened in her stomach. As if she needed to run rather than be faced with a blank canvas, her empty sketchbook. Hannah ground her teeth against the rising queasiness. She usually loved the challenge of getting to know a new subject. Finding the key to a person, the one that unlocked every brushstroke she’d put down in the time it took to perfect the essence of them on a canvas. But a lot was riding on this commission. Her future. Her home. It wasn’t that she was afraid of doing a job she knew so well, afraid of the thrill of knowing a person, of finding the man Alessio hid. Not at all. It was what she stood to lose if she couldn’t fulfil it.

  She checked the time on her phone. For a man who wanted his portrait painted, he really didn’t want to spend much time anywhere near her. Most people enjoyed their sessions, or so she’d been told. She did. She loved learning someone’s nuances, the privilege of being allowed to glimpse a private part of a person that many never saw. Alessio seemed to think she could paint him from memory alone. He probably believed that he was unforgettable, so one glance would be all she needed.

  He might not be entirely wrong about that.

  Enough. She grabbed her sketch pad and watercolour pencils. There was a pretty desk with a view from large windows, overlooking fields of gr
apes and olives out towards Lasserno’s capital. In a copse of ancient olives there peeked a small, domed structure. Like a chapel, or perhaps a folly, although Hannah didn’t think Alessio would allow anything so whimsical as that on the palace grounds. The whole scene shimmered with the warmth of a Mediterranean summer. She sat at the fragile-looking desk and sketched, losing herself in perfecting the cobalt blue of the sky, the ochres, umbers and greens of the landscape glowing in the sunshine.

  The muffled noise of a well-oiled door handle and hinges made her turn, spring from her chair as if the seat burned her.

  Alessio strode into the room, all of him pressed into hard lines with a flawlessly cut suit and pristine white shirt. A tie of carmine sat at his throat with its fat knot, looking tight enough to strangle. Except she was the one who couldn’t get any air, as if he’d sucked it all from the room. He glanced at the gleaming gold watch at his wrist then to her as she wobbled in an uncertain half-dip because she wasn’t sure of the protocol if she was going to see him multiple times a day. He flicked his hand in a dismissive kind of way.

  ‘No curtseying unless we are in public.’

  ‘We sort of are, since your secretary’s here.’ She gave Stefano a little wave. He smiled back in his own handsome kind of way, though it was nothing like the glowering magnificence of his imposing boss.

  Alessio looked at her, then to Stefano, and his eyes narrowed. ‘You don’t strike me as someone who’s obtuse, Signorina Barrington.’

  ‘I’m not. You’re the one who sent me a volume of rules to follow.’

  ‘So you’re prepared.’

  ‘They make me nervous I’m going to get something wrong.’ Everything about this made her nervous, particularly him. It was as if all common sense and the need for self-preservation fled in his presence. ‘I’m painting your portrait, not stepping out as your significant other. Will you give your princess the same sort of list?’

  ‘No, because, being a princess, she’ll know the rules already.’

  ‘Rigidity and protocol don’t fit in well with my work. How about we throw away the rules when we’re in here?’

  He raised one dark, imperious brow. Tugged at the cuffs of his shirt. Checked the time again.

  ‘Who am I to stop you, since it appears you already have?’ Alessio stalked towards her where she stood frozen in front of the spindly, gilded desk. She had that sensation again, that she was an insect under a magnifying glass. Alessio loomed close. He wasn’t threatening at all. It’s that he had a presence. An aura that crammed the space full, till there was no room for anything else. Especially not sensible thought.

  ‘What are you doing there?’ He motioned over the sketch she’d started, of the view outside.

  ‘In nine years I’ve barely gone a day without my art.’ There’d been only a few. The anniversaries, where sometimes the grief would steal upon her with a more vicious attack than usual. Sapping her will to do anything but curl up in bed and weep. ‘In the last week, I’ve missed three with all the planning and preparing and I needed to do something. It helps me—’

  ‘Relax. I’m like it with horse-riding, yet I rarely get a chance any more.’ She froze. The freedom of the ride. Soaring over the jumps in partnership with her horse. She used to revel in that joy too, until the day it represented everything she’d lost. She hadn’t ridden since.

  Alessio wasn’t looking at her unfinished artwork right now, but out of the window, his eyes distant and unfocused. That small offering of something private about himself was a gift and she doubted he realised he’d given it to her. Then the distance in his eyes faded, and they narrowed. As if he’d come back to himself, was pulling himself into reality rather than some faded memories. The whole of him stiffened, and he became the ruler of Lasserno again, rather than a simple man.

  ‘You’re drawing with coloured pencils? It seems beneath your reported talents.’

  She let out a slow breath, the precious moment lost. ‘I use these because they’re a challenge for me. Watch.’

  She dipped a brush into a small glass of water which was probably crystal and not designed for this task. Alessio didn’t seem to mind. He’d probably drunk from crystal since birth. Nothing as common as plain glass would deign to touch his perfect lips. She took the brush and swiped it gently over a part of the sketched scene. The pencil bled to paint in a wash of colour.

  ‘Magic,’ he said.

  ‘Oil paints are forgiving. These, not so much. They’re unpredictable, and it’s harder to cover up your mistakes.’

  ‘Like life,’ Alessio murmured, or at least that was what she thought he said as he moved closer, leaning over the picture. She was sure there was something in that fat instruction booklet about not standing too near him, but for the life of her she couldn’t remember what it might have said. Not with all the proximity. His height, his magnetic presence. The teasing scent of him, something masculine and fresh like the aftermath of a summer’s storm. The warmth he radiated, almost better than morning sunshine. She wanted to lean into it and bask. But she was here to do a job. Having poetic thoughts about unattainable princes was not part of it.

  She stood back. Put a respectable distance between them. Likewise, he seemed to shake himself out of the fascination for her simple artwork. He straightened, adjusted his tie. Checked his watch again.

  ‘I have limited time. We should start. What do you need from me?’

  She needed him to stop being so...him. Instead she pointed to a chair she’d manhandled into better light. He looked at it, at the scuffed carpet where she’d half dragged it across the room. Frowned, but said nothing, instead unbuttoning his jacket and lowering himself into the armchair. Watching her as his secretary watched them both.

  ‘I need fewer people in the room. I can’t concentrate like this.’

  There were too many eyes on her. She took a slow breath to try and ease the weight of expectation in their stares.

  ‘Stefano stays.’

  So imperious. Hannah blew out a huff of breath, grabbed a fresh sketch pad and some sharp-as-a-needle pencils, then sat opposite him. His rich brown eyes fixed on her. There was something addictive about all that focus, as if she were the only person on earth.

  Yet even though he sat in a comfortable armchair, he didn’t look comfortable. There was nothing relaxed about him, as if he were on edge. Waiting for something to happen. Which seemed strange because the man ruled a country. She assumed anything that happened to him was entirely his choice and at his whim. Yet, for all the breathtaking perfection of him, he was still a human and she reminded herself that not all the people she painted were relaxed in the beginning.

  ‘Today, I’ll be doing a few sketches. All for reference.’ He nodded as she opened her sketchbook. Alessio sat upright, not even his legs crossed. Impossibly formal. She didn’t want to focus on his face, nor on those eyes which seemed to barely blink. The rest of him was stitched tight into his suit. But his hands... Veins and tendons corded under his golden skin.

  She began to lightly sketch the shape. The elegant, blunt-cut nails. Ignored the slight dusting of dark hair over his metacarpals, hinting around the wrist from under the pure and flawless white cuffs of his shirt. She’d leave those details till later, but for now she marvelled in his long, strong fingers, curled tight over the arms of the chair.

  ‘What have you been doing today?’ she asked. The sun streamed through the mullioned windows, brightening the room. A light breeze drifted through one she’d opened earlier.

  His jaw tightened. ‘Ruling my country.’

  ‘And that involves?’

  ‘Making many important decisions.’

  Which was no kind of answer at all. She snorted, looked up at him. His fingers flexed a little. Relaxed, but still not enough. ‘Okay, you’ve been very...princely. Let’s take a step back. What time did you get out of bed?’

  ‘Four.’
/>   ‘A morning person, then.’

  His eyes narrowed the merest fraction. ‘I’m a busy person.’

  ‘No rest for the wicked?’

  A muscle in his strong, square jaw ticked. ‘You’ll have to ask my father about that maxim.’

  She hesitated for a second, the pencil no longer slipping so easily over the paper. When researching Alessio, as she did with every client, she’d read about his father. The man who’d abdicated under the cloud of some scandal. It was all a bit murky. As for the man in front of her, apart from his official website and carefully curated online presence, there was really nothing. Alessio Arcuri presented to the world like the perfect prince.

  The press wondered whether Alessio was like his father, and only hid it better.

  ‘Can you take a deep breath in and let it out slowly?’

  The tips of Alessio’s fingers seemed a little whiter on the arms of the chair, his fingertips denting the fine fabric.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re asking of me.’

  ‘You seem a bit...’ she waved her left hand with the pencil in it, as if drawing in thin air ‘...rigid.’

  ‘Signorina Barrington, I learned protocol and deportment in classes from the time I could speak.’

  He leaned forward, his voice low and cool. Eyes flashing tiger-gold in something like a warning. His forearms now resting on his knees, hands in front. Such a compelling picture. She held her breath and waited for more.

  ‘From the age of five, I could sit perfectly still and silent for well over an hour. Never once moving. If I did move, my tutor’s dog had a habit of nipping my ankles. I didn’t like getting bitten. So this is how I sit.’

  She started another sketch of his hands now, with fingers clasped before him as if in some kind of fervent prayer.

  ‘You can’t position yourself like that all the time. What about when you’re relaxing? Men, they slouch in a...manly kind of way. Lounging with intent.’

  Not that she really had much experience in the way men sat, other than those whose portraits she’d painted, but at least they’d looked at home in the chair she’d placed them in. Alessio’s secretary seemed to have relaxation down to an art, having perfected a kind of indolence in the back corner of the room. Or her father, who had always looked comfortable in front of the television with her mother, holding hands. She blinked away the tears her memory wrought. All she knew was that the Prince before her looked as if he were about to order someone’s execution.