Weight of the Crown (15 page)

Then without warning she was woken from her beautiful dream. A tiny sound had begun, far out in the desert. It grew faster than the daybreak, careering towards their happiness. Lysander was the first to realise what it was. While Alyssa was still wondering, he stiffened and pushed her gently away from him. The cold morning air flooded the space between them. Needing his closeness, she followed as he went to stand with his hands on the coping stones of the castle wall.

He was intent on something far out across the sands. A vehicle was hurtling at breakneck speed over the hard-packed desert. With growing horror, Alyssa saw that their paradise was about to be wrecked. Suddenly
Lysander strode away from her, back down the steps the way they had come. She ran to catch up, breathless with fear now, rather than expectation.

‘What is it, Lysander?’

‘For someone to be heading this way so fast, it must be a message from the palace.’

His words were terse and businesslike. Alyssa stopped. Lysander didn’t notice, and certainly didn’t wait for her. His mind was miles away, already centred on his work. This realisation sent her powering after him again. She knew what it was like to be driven, and wanted to share the responsibility with him.

‘What can I do?’ she called, but it was no good. He was completely absorbed by the arrival of a big new four-by-four in the blue and gold palace livery.

The vehicle skidded to a halt in the courtyard and the driver jumped out. Hustling the man out of her earshot, Lysander began an animated exchange with him. Alyssa could only stand by and watch. They spoke in Rosari, so she had no hope of understanding more than a fraction of what they were saying. From the speed at which the message was delivered, she guessed it was bad news. When the messenger jumped back into the vehicle and started gunning the engine, Lysander strode back to where she waited for an explanation.

It didn’t come.

‘I’m sorry about this.’

‘You have to go,’ she said, her voice as flat as the plain that isolated them from real life.

‘Yes.’

‘But you’ll come back to me?’

He stared at her as though she were the one speaking
a foreign language. Then he lifted his gaze to look at the sky. She couldn’t help wondering if it was for inspiration.

The rising sun was now high enough to light his face. Reaching out, he took her by the shoulders.

‘I must get straight back to the palace now. I’ll try to call on you later.’

His words pushed all the air out of her lungs. Logically, she knew that their time together was only fleeting, but somehow she had expected the pleasure to last a little longer than this before the pain kicked in.

‘Are you expecting me to count the minutes?’ she said in a bitter undertone as he turned his back on her.

It was one tiny act of defiance, a kick against the tomorrow she could not avoid. She didn’t expect him to either hear, or care. When he turned and pierced her with a look, she froze. She could do nothing but watch as he prowled back across the courtyard towards her. Her thudding heart counted down the seconds until he was towering over her, his eyes brilliant with something she had never seen in them before. Ice ran through her veins as he leaned close … and then closer still. The warmth of his breath rippling over the delicate skin of her face and neck caressed an unwilling excitement over her body. A flush suffused the pale skin of her cleavage as she became aware that he was awakening her nipples to hard peaks all over again. Dimly aware of his hand moving past the corner of her eye, she tensed. Extending one lean, tanned finger, he pushed a stray skein of hair back from her brow. From there,
his finger traced a leisurely path around the curve of her cheek. When he reached her chin, he lifted it so she was compelled to meet his eyes again. ‘Yes.’

L
YSANDER’S
voice was low and rough, but this time he studied her lips with cool, professional interest. Alyssa held her breath. Her heart pounded on. She wondered if he could hear it, amplified as it was by the powerful surge of desire thundering through her body. As he brought his head nearer and nearer to her, she watched until she was dizzy with desire. Then her eyes closed. She waited one … two seconds, but the kiss she was aching for never came. Instead she felt him take her hand. Her eyes flew open again. She saw his dark head bent over her fingers at the moment his lips brushed her skin in the lightest of formal gestures. Alyssa was so aroused, a little moan of longing escaped from her lips. A heat far more powerful than all the strength of the sun turned her body to a molten mass. It was frightening—almost as frightening as his smouldering gaze.

The memory of everything they had shared brought her straight back into the present. All that pleasure had been swept from his face and his manner, and now he was preparing for business as usual. He looked every inch the king. Alyssa couldn’t imagine what had possessed her to tell him to concentrate on Ra’id rather than his own chances for the crown of Rosara.

‘Yes … you must go, Lysander,’ she told him, but the meaning in her voice was far more powerful than her words.

He let her hand slip from his grasp. As his expressive dark eyes held her captive he placed one finger on the soft cushion of her lips. Tracing their outline with a touch as light as thistledown, he watched her fight the temptation to reach out and start caressing him again. She still wanted him, and her attraction grew like a flower. She might try to hide it, but her unsteady breathing and dilated pupils told Lysander everything. His own perfectly sculpted mouth fluctuated into a smile.

‘I’m sorry,’ he drawled. ‘Duty must come first.’

Kiss me!
Alyssa’s body sobbed silently.

She reached up, wanting to ruffle her fingers through his soft dark curls once more before he left. He responded by pulling her close, moulding her body against his own so she could feel how much he wanted her, how much his body would like to stay.

‘Take care, my love,’ she whispered.

His hands had been running over her back, shoulders and hair. When she said that, he stopped and drew back. His eyes were now filled with a watchful look that frightened her.

‘I’m always careful. Very careful.’

Cupping her shoulders with his hands, he interrogated her with a long, cool look. Alyssa returned it with a smile. She knew he could read her mind, but this time his expression was closed to her.

‘Lysander? What is it?’ She put her hands up to his
face again, but was too slow. He had already broken contact with her and was turning towards the car.

‘Nothing. I hope.’

He dived into the four-by-four and rapped on the dashboard as a signal to the driver. In a crash of gears, Lysander was swept away from her in a squeal of burning rubber.

Alyssa waved as the vehicle became a comet at the head of a dust cloud, but he never once looked back.

A bleak, black mood enveloped Lysander. He was used to playing dangerous games, but now he had been ambushed into doing something unforgivable. He had planned the perfect seduction to cure his gnawing need for Alyssa. Instead, raw emotion had overwhelmed them both and made the situation much, much worse. Alyssa’s silent, hidden vulnerability touched him. Her tears had been an unexpected tidal wave, washing away all his defences. What else could he have done, but take her in his arms and make everything all right again in the only way he knew how?

He watched her image in the nearside wing mirror. It shrank until it was hidden by the swirling dust thrown up by his vehicle. He could only hope she was every inch the woman he believed her to be. She was so unlike all the others … she was bound to understand, wasn’t she? Like him, she knew from hard, horrible experience that long-term relationships were impossible.

They were both free spirits. That would help. When she had burst into tears last night, it had been only a simple mistake on her part—he had put that right and solved his own problem, too. The last thing he should
have done was start to feel genuinely sorry for her. That was his mistake, but it was understandable.

When he thought about it like that, his lapse didn’t feel quite so bad. He dropped his hand onto his thigh and relaxed his shoulders. All he had intended was a quick tumble in a beautiful place. Offering Alyssa sympathy had been delicious, but he had never wanted to get in so deep. Sex was supposed to be fun, not serious. That was why this call back to the palace was such a godsend.

Uneasily, he realised abandoning Alyssa this morning for anything less would have been impossible. That made things tricky. An affair wouldn’t be right for either of them. Lysander was certain of that, in the same way he knew he would have to get Alyssa right out of his life as soon as possible—to save his sanity.

Alyssa ran back up the steps to the lookout point on top of the castle walls. From there she could watch Lysander’s car and its thread of dust fade from sight across the plain. When it had disappeared into the low jumble of buildings making up the palace, she turned and headed for the spa. There, she stripped off and slipped beneath the warm waters. Her spirits soared up to the clear blue sky, exhilarating, yet terrifying. She had wasted so much time mourning her broken engagement, it had blinded her.

It was far more than simply desire she felt for Lysander.

When Lysander got back to the palace he blazed his way through the corridors of power.
I should never
have abandoned my work. I should have come straight back here last night,
he told himself, but it was hopeless to deny the attraction that had held him prisoner at The Queen’s Retreat for so long. He had been bedding Ra’id’s nanny when he should have been putting his country first. Now his past and future were on a collision course. A rowdy faction of hill tribes was on its way to the palace, ready to proclaim their own King of Rosara, rather than wait for his nephew to grow up.

Lysander’s word was already law to them. He was confident that he could control the situation, but that didn’t make it any easier. When Alyssa got to hear of this, she was bound to be scared. He already knew how good she was at hiding her feelings, but he had just spent a whole night breaking down her resistance. This situation meant he had to focus. It was time to let her go, like all the others.

But she wasn’t like them. And what if Ra’id picked up on the atmosphere this was bound to create? How would
that
affect their working relationship? If they still had one … His veins ran with ice water as he remembered how Alyssa had mentioned the L word—love. He knew what that meant. Seduction might not have slaked his thirst for her, but when a woman used words like that it had to mean the end of everything. There was no question about it. When love came in the door, common sense flew out of the window. He had too much experience of that, and it was a painful experience. It had condemned his mother to death, and broken his brother’s heart. Lysander had to prove he was bigger than either of them. There was only one way to do it—make
a clean break from Alyssa while he worked things out in his mind.

He would double the guard on Ra’id and go to intercept the rebels on their own ground. He was interested in results for Rosara, not in honour for himself. Alyssa would understand that. He could tell that the country was beginning to hold almost the same importance for her as it did for him … Suddenly, he realised it wasn’t going to be easy to prise his thoughts away from her. If her voluptuous image could haunt him while he was preparing for a council of war, he didn’t know how it could be exorcised. He had to send her away.

The Queen’s Retreat was a beautiful place to idle away her day off, but Alyssa soon got restless. After Lysander’s lovemaking, everything else was second best. Life felt almost impossible without him now. Lounging in a swing seat beneath the rose arbour, she hummed to herself. A billow of single pink daisies flounced around the trellis. Picking one as she rocked gently to and fro, she began pulling off the narrow petals one by one.

‘He loves me, he loves me not …’

Going through the old rhyme felt deliciously wicked. Princes weren’t supposed to carry their staff away into the desert. Nannies ought to concentrate on the next generation, not fool around with men of their own age.

She went on reciting the rhyme until there were only six petals left.

‘He loves me …’

A commotion far away in the palace’s gatehouse
made her stop. She listened, and then suddenly a guard was running across the courtyard, calling to her. She couldn’t understand what he was saying, but recognised the sound of her own name.

Whatever the news, it wasn’t good. She looked down at the flower in her hand, with its half-dozen remaining petals.

‘Miss Dene! You are recalled to the palace!’ the man called to her in broken English. ‘Prince Lysander insisted that you were sent for. Your day off is cancelled! You must take the child back to England immediately!’

‘Isn’t Prince Lysander coming back to fetch me himself?’

‘No, he’s far too busy!’ The guard sounded shocked, as if Alyssa was the last thing on the Prince Regent’s mind. She tensed.

‘Why? What’s happened?’

‘The time has come. Prince Lysander is going to confront the rebels and Prince Ra’id’s household is all going back to England, where they’ll be safe.’

Alyssa took the news like a blow to the stomach. The queen’s garden was suddenly full of people. They swarmed around her like ants, emptying the observatory of all the lovely things she had enjoyed with Lysander. She stood in the eye of the storm, her mind already a maelstrom. Opening her hand, she looked down at the daisy that had been giving her so much innocent pleasure.

A quick calculation told her everything she didn’t want to know. She pinched five petals together and pulled them off. That left only one.

He loves me not …
So there it was. Not even a child’s game worked in her favour any more. She couldn’t manage to keep that final, fragile petal, either. It was snatched out of her fingers by a chill breeze rippling across the garden.

For a moment, all the birds fell silent.