The Ice Prince (2 page)

He had not bothered shaving; he had taken time only to shower and dress in faded jeans and a pale blue shirt with the sleeves rolled to his elbows, the top button undone. He wore an old, eminently comfortable pair of mocs and, on his wrist, the first thing he’d bought himself after he’d made his first million euros—a Patek Phillipe watch for no better reason than the first own he’d owned he had stolen and, in a fit of teenage guilt, had a day later tossed into the Tiber.

In other words he was casually but expensively dressed. A woman wearing an Armani suit would know that. He’d
reserved two costly seats, not one. Add everything together and she would peg him as a man with lots of money, lots of time on his hands and no real purpose in life, while she was a captain of industry, or whatever was the female equivalent.

“Do you see why the seat is so important to me?”

Draco nodded. “Fully,” he said with a tight smile. “It’s important to you because you want it.”

The woman rolled her eyes. “My God, what’s the difference? The seat is empty.”

“It isn’t empty.”

“Damnit, will someone be sitting in it or not?”

“Or not,” he said, and waited.

She hesitated. It was the first time she had done so since she’d approached him. It made her seem suddenly vulnerable, more like a woman than an automaton.

Draco felt himself hesitate, too.

He had booked two seats for privacy. No one to disturb his thoughts as he worked through how to handle what lay ahead. No one with whom he’d have to go through the usual
Hello, how are you, don’t you hate night flights like this one?

He was not in the mood for any of it; if truth be told, he was rarely in the mood for sharing his space with others.

Still, he could manage.

He didn’t like the woman, but so what? She had a problem. He had the solution. He could say,
Va bene, signorina. You may have the seat beside mine.

“You know,” she said, her voice low and filled with rage, “there’s something really disgusting about a man who thinks he’s better than everyone else.”

The hostess, by now standing almost a foot away, made a sound that was close to a moan.

Draco felt every muscle in his body tighten.
If only you were a man,
he thought, and for one quick moment imagined the pleasure of a punch straight to that uptilted chin ….

But she wasn’t a man, and so he did the only thing he could, which was to get the hell out of there before he did something he would regret.

Carefully he bent to the table where his laptop lay, turned it off, put it in its case, zipped the case closed, slung the strap over his shoulder. Then he took a step forward; the woman took a step back. Her face had gone pale.

She was afraid of him now. She’d realized she had gone too far.

Good,
he thought grimly, even though part of him knew this was overkill.

“You could have approached me quietly,” he said in a tone of voice that had brought business opponents to their knees. “You could have said, ‘I have a problem and I would be grateful for your help.’”

The color in her face came back, sweeping over her high cheekbones like crimson flags.

“That’s exactly what I did.”

“No. You did not. You told me what you wanted. Then you told me what
I
was going to do about it.” His mouth thinned. “Unfortunately for you,
signorina,
that was the wrong approach. I don’t give a damn what you want, and you will not sit in that seat.”

Her mouth dropped open.

Hell. Why wouldn’t it? Had he really just said something so foolish and petty? Had she reduced him to that?

Get moving, Valenti,
he told himself, and he would have …

But she laughed. Laughed! Her fear had given way to laughter.

His face burned with humiliation.

There was only one way to retaliate and he took it.

He closed the last inch of space between them. She must have seen something bright and icy-hot glowing in his
eyes, because she stopped laughing and took another quick step back.

Too late.

Draco reached out. Ran the tip of one finger over her lips.

“Perhaps,” he said softly, “perhaps if you had offered me something interesting in trade …”

He put his arms around her, lifted her into the leanly muscled length of his body and took her mouth as if it were his to take, as if he were a Roman prince in a century when Rome ruled the world.

He heard the woman’s muffled cry. Heard the hostess gasp.

Then he heard nothing but the thunder of his blood as it coursed through his veins, tasted nothing but her mouth, her mouth, her sweet, hot mouth …

She hit him. Hard. A surprisingly solid blow to the ribs. The sting of her small fist was worth the rage he saw in her eyes when he lifted his head.

“Have a pleasant flight,
signorina,
” he said, and he brushed past her, leaving Anna Orsini standing right where he’d left her, staring at the lounge door as it swung shut behind him while she wished to hell she’d had the brains to slug the sexist bastard not in the side but right where he lived.

Where all men lived, she thought grimly as she snatched up her carry-on and briefcase that had somehow ended up on the floor.

In the balls.

A
NNA
stalked through the crowded terminal, so furious she could hardly see straight.

That insufferable pig! That supermacho idiot!

Punching him hadn’t been enough.

She should have called the cops. Had him arrested. Charged him with—with sexual assault ….

Okay.

A kiss was not sexual assault. It was a kiss. Unwanted, which could maybe make it a misdemeanor …

Not that anyone would call what had landed on her lips
just
a kiss.

That firm, warm mouth. That hard, long body. That arm, taut with muscle, wrapped around her as if she were something to be claimed …

Or branded.

A little shudder of rage went through her. It
was
rage, wasn’t it?

Damned right it was.

Absolutely, she should have done something more than slug him.

Where was the gate? Her shoulders ached from the weight of her carry-on and briefcase. Her feet hurt from the stilettos. Why in hell hadn’t she had the sense to change to flats? She’d worn the stilettos to court. Deliberately. It had become
her uniform. The tailored suit coupled with the spike heels. It was a look she’d learned worked against some of the high and mighty prosecutors who obviously thought a female defense counsel, especially one named Orsini, would be easy to read.

Nothing about her was easy to read, thank you very much, and Anna wanted to keep it that way.

But the shoes were wrong for hurrying through an airport. Where on earth was that gate?

Back in the other direction, was where.

Anna groaned, turned and ran.

By the time she reached the right gate, the plane was already boarding. She fell in at the end of the line of passengers shuffling slowly forward. Her hair had come mostly out of the tortoiseshell clip that held it; wild strands hung in her face and clung to her sweat-dampened skin.

Anna shifted her carry-on, dug into its front pocket, took out her boarding pass. Her seat was far back in the plane and, according to the annoyingly perky voice coming over the loudspeaker, that section had already boarded.

Perfect.

She was late enough so that the most convenient overhead bins would surely be full by the time she reached them.

Thank you, Mr. Macho.

The line, and Anna, moved forward at the speed of cold molasses dripping from a spoon.

He, of course, would have no such problem. First-class passengers had lots of overhead storage room. By now he probably had a glass of wine in his hand, brought by an attentive flight attendant who’d do everything but drool over her good-looking passenger, because there were lots of women who’d drool over a man who looked like that.

Tall. Dark. Thickly lashed dark eyes. A strong jaw. A face, a body that might have belonged to a Roman emperor.

And the attitude to go with it.

That was why he would have access to a computer outlet, and she would not ….

Anna took a breath. No. Absolutely not. She was not going there!

Concentrate,
she told herself. Try to remember what it said on those yellowed, zillion-year-old documents her father had given her.

Hey, it wasn’t as if she hadn’t read them ….

Okay. She hadn’t read them. Not exactly. She’d looked through them prior to scanning them into her computer, but the oldest ones were mostly handwritten. In Italian. And her Italian was pretty much confined to
ciao, va bene
and a handful of words she’d learned as a kid that wouldn’t get you very far in polite company.

The endless queue drew nearer to the gate.

If only she’d had more time, not just to read those notes but to arrange for this flight. She’d have flown first class instead of coach, let her father pay for her ticket because Cesare was the only reason she was on this fool’s errand.

Cesare could afford whatever ridiculous amount of money first class cost.

She certainly couldn’t. You didn’t fly in comfort on what you earned representing mostly indigent clients.

And comfort was what first class was all about. She’d flown that way once, after she’d passed her bar exams and her brothers had given her a two-week trip to Paris as a gift.

“You’re all crazy,” she’d said, blubbering happily as she bestowed tears and kisses on Rafe and Dante, Falco and Nicolo.

Plus, she’d flown on the private jet her brothers owned. Man, talk about flying in comfort …

“Boarding pass, please.”

Anna handed hers over.

“Thank you,” the gate attendant said. In, naturally, a perky voice.

Anna glowered.

Seven hours jammed into an aluminum can like an anchovy was not something to be perky about.

Not that she disliked flying coach. It was what real people did, and she had spent her life, all twenty-six years of it, being as real as possible.

Which wasn’t easy, when your old man was a
la famiglia
don.

It was just that coach had its drawbacks, she thought as she trudged down the ramp toward the plane. No computer outlets, sure, but other things, too.

Like that flight to D.C. when the guy next to her must have bathed in garlic. Or the one to Chicago, when she’d been sandwiched between a mom with a screaming infant on one side and a dad with a screaming two-year-old on the other.

“You guys want to sit next to each other?” Anna had chirruped helpfully.

No. They didn’t. They weren’t together, it turned out, and why would any sane human being want to double the pleasure of screaming kids trying their best to drive everyone within earshot to infanticide?

One of the flight attendants had taken pity on her and switched her to a vacant seat. To the
only
vacant seat.

Unfortunately, it was right near the lavatories.

By the time the plane touched down, Anna had smelled like whatever it was they piped into those coffin-sized closets.

Or maybe worse.

In essence, flying coach was like life. It wasn’t always pretty, but you did what you had to do.

And what she had to do right now, Anna told herself briskly, was find a way to review her notes in whatever time her cranky old laptop would give her.

At last. The door to the plane was just ahead. She stepped through and somehow managed not to snarl when a flight attendant greeted her with a smiling
“Buona notte.”

It wasn’t the girl’s fault she looked as if she’d just stepped out of a magazine ad. Anna, on the other hand, knew she looked as if she had not slept or fixed her hair or her makeup in days.

Come to think of it, she hadn’t.

Her father had dumped his problem on her twenty-four hours ago and she had not slowed her pace since then. A long-scheduled speech to a class of would-be lawyers at Columbia University, her alma mater. Two endless meetings. A court appearance, a desperate juggling of her schedule followed by a taxi ride to the airport through rush-hour Manhattan traffic, only to learn that her flight was delayed and that no, she could not upgrade her seat even though she’d realized during the taxi ride that she had to do so if she wasn’t going to walk into the meeting in Rome without a useful idea in her head.

And on top of everything, that—that inane confrontation with that man …

There he was.

The plane was an older one, which meant the peasants had to shuffle through first and business class to get to coach. It gave her the wonderful opportunity to see him in seat 5A—all, what, six foot two, six foot three of him sitting in 5A, arms folded, long legs outstretched, with 5B conspicuously, infuriatingly empty.

Her jaw knotted.

She wanted to say something to him. Something that would show him what she thought of him, of men like him who thought they owned the world, thought women were meant to fall at their feet along with everybody else, but she’d already tried that and look where it had gotten her.

And, almost as if he’d heard her thoughts, he turned his head and looked right at her.

His eyes darkened. The thick lashes fell. Rose. His eyes got even darker. Darker, and focused on her face.

On her mouth.

His lips curved in a slow, knowing smile.
Remember me?
that smile said.
Remember that kiss?

Anna felt her cheeks turn hot.

His smile tilted, became an arrogant, blatantly male grin.

She wanted to wipe it from his face.

But she wouldn’t.

She wouldn’t.

She wouldn’t, she told herself, and she tore her gaze from his and marched past him, through first class, through business class, into the confines of coach where the queue ground to a halt as people ahead searched for space in the crowded overhead bins and stepped on toes as they shoehorned themselves into their designated seats.

“Excuse me,” Anna said, “sorry, coming through, if I could just get past you, sir …”

At last she found her row and found, too, with no great surprise, that there was no room in the overhead bin for her carry-on. Which was worse? That she had to go four more seats to the rear before she found a place where she could jam it into a bin, or that she had to fight her way back like a salmon swimming upstream?

Or that the guy in the window seat bore a scary resemblance to Hannibal the cannibal, and the woman on the aisle was humming. No discernible melody. Just a steady, low humming. Like a bee.

Anna took a deep breath.

“Excuse me,” she said brightly, and she squeezed past the hummer’s knees, tried not to notice that part of Hannibal’s
thigh was going to be sharing her space, shoved her bulging briefcase under the seat in front of her and folded her hands in her lap.

It was going to be a very long night.

At 30,000 feet, after the usual announcement that it was okay to use electronic devices, she hoisted the briefcase into her lap, opened it, took out her laptop, put down the foldout tray, plunked the machine on it and tapped the power button.

The computer hummed.

Or maybe it was the woman on the aisle. It was hard to tell.

The computer booted. The screen came alive. Wasting no time, Anna searched for and found the file she needed. Clicked on it and, hallelujah, there it was, the most recent document, a letter from Prince Draco Marcellus Valenti to her father.

The name made her snort.

So did the letter.

It was as stiffly formal as that ridiculous name and title, wreathed in the kind of hyperbole that would have made a seventeenth-century scribe proud.

One reading, and she knew what the prince would be like.

Old. Not just old. Ancient. White hair growing from a pink scalp. Probably growing out of his ears, too. She could almost envision his liver-spotted hands clutching an elaborate cane. No, not a cane. He’d never call it that. A walking stick.

In other words, a man out of touch with life, with reality, with the modern world.

Anna smiled. This might turn out to be interesting. Anna Versus the Aristocrat. Heck, it sounded like a movie—

Blip.

Her computer screen went dark.

“No,” she whispered, “no …”

“Yup,” Hannibal said cheerfully. “You’re outta juice, little lady.”

Hell. Little lady? Anna glared at him. What she was, was out of patience with the male of the species … but Hannibal was only stating the obvious.

Why dump her anger on him?

Sure, she was ticked off by what had happened in the lounge, but her mood had been sour even before that.

It had all started on Sunday, after dinner at the Orsini mansion in Little Italy. Anna’s mother had phoned the previous week to invite her.

“I can’t come, Mom,” Anna had said. “I have an appointment.”

“You have not been here in weeks.” Sofia’s tone of reprimand had taken Anna straight back to childhood. “Always, you have an excuse.”

It was true. So Anna had sighed and agreed to show up. After the meal her father had insisted on walking her to the front door, but when they were about to pass his study, he’d stopped, jerked his head to indicate that Freddo, his
capo
and ever-present shadow, should step aside.

“A word with you alone,
mia figlia,
” he’d said to Anna.

Reluctantly she’d let Cesare lead her into the study. He’d sat down behind his massive oak desk, motioned her to take a seat, looked at her for a long moment and then cleared his throat.

“I need a favor of you, Anna.”

“What kind of favor?” she’d said warily.

“A very important one.”

Anna had stared at him. A favor? For the father she pretended to respect for the sake of her mother but, in reality, despised? He was a crime boss. Don of the feared East Coast
famiglia.

Cesare had no idea she knew that about him, that she and her sister, Isabella, had figured it out when Izzy was thirteen and Anna was a year older.

Neither could remember exactly how it had happened. Maybe they’d read a newspaper article. Maybe the whispers of the girls at school had suddenly started to make sense.

Or maybe it was their realization that their big brothers, Rafe, Dante, Falco and Nick, had struck out on their own as soon as they could and treated Cesare with cold disdain whenever they visited the mansion and thought the girls and their mother were out of earshot.

Anna and Izzy only knew that one day they’d suddenly realized their father was not the head of a waste management company.

He was a crook.

Because of their mother, they hadn’t let on that they knew the truth. Lately, though, that was becoming more and more difficult. Anna, especially, was finding it hard to pretend her father’s hands were not dirty, even bloody.

Do a favor, for a man like him?

No, she’d thought. No, she wouldn’t do it.

“I’m afraid I’m incredibly busy, Father. I have a lot on my plate just now, and—”

He’d cut her off with an imperious wave of his hand.

“Let us be honest for once, Anna. I know what you think of me. I have known it for a very long time. You can fool your mama and your brothers, but not me.”

Anna had risen to her feet.

“Then you also know,” she’d said coolly, “that you’re asking the wrong person for a favor.”