Excerpt

Prince Alessio Marchetti strode out of his private apartments in the Sedovian palace. Six feet four inches tall, he had a shock of unruly long black hair that brushed his shoulders and bright green eyes set into a lean, sculpted face. A tiny gold hoop gleamed in one ear while the hint of a tattoo showed below the edge of a pristine shirt cuff. Impeccably dressed though he was, in a Brioni suit complete with monogrammed cufflinks, there were hints that he was not as conservative as he might appear at first glance.

Alessio slid fluidly into the luxury car awaiting him in the courtyard. His security team, all of them in a dour mood at the prospect of policing him in a public place, where anything might happen, swung into two far less noticeable vehicles to follow him down the hill into the city of Severino.

It was a sunny, early summer day and the air was crisp and clean. Alessio braked to avoid the morning parade ground activities of the household guard out front before angling the car deftly over the bridge that led down into the town. Picturesque as any postcard with colourful window boxes and quaint, narrow buildings with steep roofs, the streets were busy. Tourist numbers were down though, because many of their country’s visitors had picked their holiday dates to coincide with Alessio’s wedding and its accompanying festivities, which were due to take place in two weeks’ time. The wedding would soon be followed by an equally grand coronation at which Alessio would ascend the throne, alongside his future consort, Princess Graziana of Eboltz, an island nation off the coast of Sedovia.

Alessio, meanwhile, was dreading the wedding with every fibre of his being. He was almost twenty-eight years old and he had always known he would have to marry young. He could not become king until he was married and in a position to provide an heir. It was just Graziana…a perfectly nice woman, he reminded himself, who he had known since he was ten, although they had not met that often during their childhood and neither of them had sought each other out as adults.

Sadly, Graziana had no sense of humour, he reflected uneasily. She was also short-tempered with the staff and given to childish tantrums if challenged, but he could handle that, he hastily assured himself. It would be a modern-day marriage of convenience. Just like his parents, they would marry, eventually produce a royal heir and then discreetly go their separate ways, duty done. It had worked for his parents, although they had pretty much hated each other and had not been much keener on their single offspring, no matter how hard Alessio had tried to impress and please.

A vague memory of gathering flowers for his mother assailed him. She had thrust them away in absolute horror lest the pollen from the stamens stain her dress. He had been punished for that gift, just as he had been punished for sneaking into his father’s study to tell him that he had won a prize in mathematics only to discover that his parent was entertaining a half-naked woman in there.

No, neither of his parents had liked him much. He had been both a necessity and an inconvenience to them. Neither of them had enjoyed the intrusion of a noisy little boy in their sophisticated, separate households. And they hadn’t warmed to him any better when he’d tried to be quiet and studious instead. That he had gone off the rails as a teenager had been almost inevitable. Hence the long hair, the tattoos, the earring, the ultra-defiance of the adolescent years. His reputation as an international playboy had, for a handful of years, been equally stellar. His mother had rolled her eyes in bored disgust, his father had laughed and advised him to visit exclusive brothels where the women were rather more discreet.

Alessio had learned the hard way that he wasn’t and never would be a loved son. And that was why he wanted a family of his own—because he had never had a family as such. He would create a family with Graziana and love them and her. He had to learn how to love her to make the family unit secure and happy. It had disappointed him when Graziana had laughed at the idea that love could eventually grow between them.

‘Don’t be naïve,’ she had quipped with sneering amusement. ‘People like us aren’t expected to experience feelings like that.’

He drove down the street and double-parked under the combined gaze of a flock of tourists and the whirring, clicking cameras of the waiting paparazzi. Before he could climb out of the car, his newspaper arrived courtesy of a curvaceous blonde. Accepting it, he thanked her, deftly ignoring the card she gave him with the paper. At his final stop, he just about made it out of the car to collect his coffee from the beautiful brunette already awaiting him on the pavement. He had only once made it into the café to buy his own but that had been embarrassing because in spite of his protests everyone in the queue had been neglected while he’d been served ahead of them.

Unfortunately, Alessio’s PR team ruled his schedule. Despite his regular participation in red-carpet ceremonial and charitable events, the team had decided that he was not being sufficiently visible to the general populace, hence his now well-known coffee and paper trips into town once a week. He hoped that they had already worked out that his future consort would never agree to do something so beneath her dignity. Graziana was very conscious of her lofty royal birthright and status. Even so, she would have to learn to take a genuine interest in their people. Above all, the small country of Sedovia on the edge of the Mediterranean was known as a friendly, relaxed place and Alessio was proud of that reputation.

* * *

‘Catch you later!’ Rosy told her sister, Vittoria, who was freshening up the floral arrangements on the veranda that fronted the hotel. Vittoria’s husband, Patrick, was up a ladder repairing a shutter. With the royal wedding approaching and a bunch of guests due to arrive, it was all hands on deck to ensure that the hotel was spruced up to perfection.

‘Have a good day,’ her sibling shouted cheerfully as Rosy set off on her ancient bike to work.

As Rosy filtered into the busy traffic, she was thinking of how very gutsy Vittoria and Patrick were. They had dealt with their financial problems and now, relieved that their finances appeared to finally be on the road to recovery, they were working round the clock and making the best of every moment of their move to Sedovia. The Cathedral View Hotel—Vista Cattedrale in Italian—was unsurprisingly an eighteenth-century building directly opposite the cathedral where the royal wedding was to take place in a couple of weeks. The previous year, Vittoria and Patrick had bought the aging hotel at a knockdown price online and had spent a small fortune renovating it to a very high level of comfort.

Unfortunately, Vittoria and Patrick had required a big bank loan to finance the improvements and, over the winter, when they had fallen behind on the payments, the bank had threatened to repossess the hotel. Only the truth that the hotel had been fully booked since the spring had staved the bank off and had ensured that the regular repayments continued without any further problems. But it was still a precarious way to live, Rosy reflected ruefully, and wholly dependent on the number of guests keen to have a bird’s-eye view of the stupid royal wedding from the balconies attached to their rooms. Heavens, right now the wedding was all anyone could talk about and it had been like that for months!

Perhaps the problem was that Rosy wasn’t quite as patriotic and royalist about Sedovia as the locals. She had grown up in London with her Sedovian father, Franco Castelli, and her half-sister, Vittoria. Italian had been her first language and, while she had always hoped to visit Sedovia, she hadn’t ever planned to actually make her home there. No, that had long been her sister’s dream, not Rosy’s.

Even so, there was nothing that Rosy wouldn’t do to make Vittoria happy. Over twenty years her senior, Vittoria had virtually raised Rosy from birth. Poor Vittoria hadn’t had much choice about that with a workshy drunk of a father and a stepmother, Heather, who, having decided that motherhood and possibly Franco Castelli were not for her, had abandoned Rosy at the hospital.

Vittoria had stepped into the breach like the trooper she was and to all intents and purposes, as she’d taken on the role of a single parent, she had become the only mother that Rosy had ever known. And she was a terrific mum, not just to Rosy but to her own twin teenaged sons, Matteo and Elio. Rosy had been loved and supported through every year of her childhood, by both Vittoria and her brother-in-law, Patrick, who called her the daughter that he would never have, she recalled fondly, for the couple had recently given up hope of ever having another child of their own.

As the traffic ground to a halt, Rosy looked ahead and groaned out loud before uttering a very rude word below her breath. It was that idiot prince snarling up the morning traffic again, utterly ignoring the fact that most people were trying to get to work. Why on earth did His Royal Highness Prince Alessio Marchetti insist on causing a traffic jam at least once a week by fetching himself a coffee and a newspaper from town? As if he couldn’t have both brought to him at his palace on the hill by one of his many minions! Good heavens, the guy had a staff of hundreds who would go to any lengths to ensure his comfort. The palace staff adored their prince and the entire palace revolved around him. Rosy knew all about it because she worked at the palace too.

Aware her tetchy boss, Lucy Ragusa, would be hugely irritated if she was late, Rosy broke the Sedovian traffic rules and began to cut through the lanes of cars on her bike. She did so well that she managed to steer along the back of the locals and tourists vying to get a better view of their prince. Then, out of the crush and free, she stood up on her pedals and began to push up the steep hill to the palace, perspiration beading her brow below her sun hat because it demanded considerable physical effort.

* * *

Alessio swung onto the bridge and saw her and immediately hit the brakes. An irreverent grin slashed his lean, darkly handsome features. The best legs in the kingdom of Sedovia, potentially even the best female rear view in history, he reflected with wry amusement. She was clad in her usual denim shorts and vest top, standing up to steer her bone-rattler of a bike uphill. Sometimes she ducked the challenge and walked up the narrow footway wheeling the bike. He admired her persistence though, even if her efforts and slow progress slowed the Bugatti to a complete crawl. But then she never ever got out of his way and he liked that too; loved that she never looked back, never noticed him.

He had first noticed her about three months earlier and she seemed to arrive at the palace every morning around the same time. Obviously, she was a member of staff but he didn’t know who she was or what she did and he wouldn’t enquire because it would be inappropriate. She could be a gardener, a kitchen helper or a maid. Or an electrician, a mechanic or a plumber. The palace staff was gargantuan and covered every eventuality. Her job, however, was none of his business. He only knew that she wasn’t one of his administrative staff or a member of the PR department.

And then even as he was watching a delivery van rounded the corner too fast and swung out, catching her bike with its bumper, and both bike and woman went flying, before landing in a sudden heap. Alessio swore and braked so hard that only his seat belt saved him from hitting the windscreen. He vaulted out of the car to go to her assistance without even thinking about it. Behind him a police siren went off, signifying an incident and only because he was present. Ignoring it and the security men hastening to his side, Alessio approached the fallen woman.

She sat up in the roadway, groaning in pain and swearing in English with admirable ferocity. En­glish? Blood streaked her legs and one arm. Hair like a gorgeous crimson and copper sunset tumbled in pre-Raphaelite curling locks in a mass around her delicate, pointed face. He was staring, he knew he was staring, but he had never seen her face before or her hair and, stooping, he retrieved her sun hat and extended it to her.

‘Let me get you out of here,’ Alessio urged, aware that the paparazzi would be on them within minutes. A television helicopter was already circling noisily overhead. He turned to the security man next to him and said, ‘Retrieve her bike so that the traffic can get moving again.’

A police officer was already interviewing the shaken van driver.

‘Did you hit your head?’

‘No,’ she mumbled, scrubbing at the blood on one knee and wincing when it hurt before looking up at him, squinting in the sun.

Alessio saw the sunglasses that had fallen off her nose and lifted them to offer them back to her. Madonna mia, she was gorgeous, he thought abstractedly. Eyes with the depth and colour of amethysts set in a heart-shaped face, a soft pillowy pink mouth and skin as velvety smooth as a creamy lily petal.

* * *

Rosy was staring and she just kept on staring because she couldn’t believe her eyes. She accepted the sunglasses even though one of the lenses had smashed. She could hardly put them on again like that and crammed them into a pocket instead. She breathed in slow and deep, striving to steady herself and accept that Alessio Marchetti, the Crown Prince, well, the only Prince of Sedovia, was crouching down beside her acting like a good Samaritan. The intensity of the emerald-green eyes locked to hers left her feeling oddly dizzy.

‘Can you walk?’ he asked as the hubbub around them grew and cameras began to show in a sea of surrounding obtrusiveness.

‘Of course, I can,’ Rosy told him, grudgingly accepting the hand he extended and beginning to rise with his help, only to stiffen and flinch as her ankle sent a jolt of pain running up her leg. ‘I think I must’ve turned my ankle when I fell.’

Alessio stooped to lift her into his arms and slotted her with care into the passenger seat of his car while phone cameras operated and questions were hurled by breathless journalists, who had raced up from around the corner. He dropped her sun hat back onto her head and she crammed it low, not wanting to look at anyone, not wanting to be identified in such company. She was too well aware that everything Alessio did and everyone he interacted with was of interest to his loyal public and of even greater interest to the media.

The policeman approached the car and spoke to Alessio, who said that he would give a witness statement to the police later in the day, and at that news the policeman retreated and stopped the traffic, making some vehicles reverse while his companion cleared the road so that Alessio could drive across the bridge into the palace.

‘What on earth are you doing?’ she demanded. ‘Where are you taking me?’

‘Into the palace for treatment.’

‘I use the employees’ entrance.’

‘Right now you can’t walk and my office is within easier reach,’ Alessio countered.

Rosy compressed her lips and gritted her teeth at having to respect that tone of authority. Ultimately, he was her employer, she reminded herself in exasperation. She might never have met him before but arguing wasn’t a good idea.

‘What’s your name?’ he enquired smoothly.

‘Rosy… Rosy Castelli,’ she said. ‘Rosy short for Rosalia.’