Passion and the Prince (17 page)

She shuddered again and Marco listened, every word she uttered a fresh lash of anguished guilt against new emotions still raw from having the protective cover he
had used to smother them ripped from them. Whilst he had been clinging to his refusal to trust her she had been at the mercy of her tormentor.

Like a river dammed from its original course and now returning to it, feelings, emotions and awareness were starting to flow back over dry, parched land that was now struggling to cope with the flood, whilst the other course fought desperately to hold on to its supremacy. As always when his emotions seemed to threaten him, Marco took refuge in practical action, going to the cabinet in the sitting room and opening it, pouring Lily a small glass of brandy which he took back to her, instructing her, ‘Drink this.’ When she hesitated, he assured her, ‘You’re in shock and it will help you.’

Nodding her head, Lily tilted the glass to her lips. The fiery liquid burned its way down her throat, warming her stomach, leaving her feeling slightly light-headed.

Why had she told Marco what she had? She wished desperately that she hadn’t, but it was too late to deny her admission now. She stood up abruptly, ignoring the dizzy feeling that instantly seized her as she paced the floor at the end of the bed, lost, trapped in a world of fear and despair.

Marco felt the full weight of the enormity of what she had said to him. She was carrying a terrible burden of emotional pain. He could see that now. A burden of pain
he
had reinforced by his cruel misjudgement of her. Like a blind man trying to seek his way in unfamiliar territory he tried to understand what he should do—for her, not for himself, because it was her need that mattered to him now. Comforting her was far more important to him than protecting his own emotional distance. He wanted
to help her, he recognised. He wanted to comfort her, wanted to love her.
Love
her? He wanted to
love
her.

Quickly he pushed the admission away. There were things that Lily needed to say. Things she had kept locked away inside herself for a very long time, and he knew all about the darkness that could cause.

‘Tell me what happened, Lily,’ he urged her gently. ‘Tell me about him … Anton.’

Lily looked at him, as though properly registering his presence for the first time. ‘I can’t,’ she answered him. ‘You wouldn’t understand. You think I’m a liar.’

Her words struck like a blow against his conscience.

‘I
will
understand and I
will
believe you,’ he promised her, adding quietly, ‘You said it was your father who introduced you to him?’

‘Yes. Anton owns one of the magazines that used to commission my father. He used to come to my father’s studio.’

‘And that was where you met him?’

‘Yes. I didn’t like him right from the start. There was something about him.’ Lily closed her eyes, but she couldn’t blot out the memories and the images she didn’t want to see. ‘He knew that I didn’t like him. I could tell. It amused him. He enjoyed … he liked frightening me. And I
was
afraid of him. He made me afraid of him. Just by looking at me sometimes. I used to have nightmares about him looking at me.’

Marco swallowed down on the angry pity her words had produced.

‘What about your parents? Your mother …?’

‘My mother was dead by then, and my stepmother
had left my father, taking Rick with her. I was at boarding school, so most of the time I was … I didn’t have to see him. It was just during the school holidays, when I was staying with my father.’

‘Didn’t you tell him how you felt?’

‘I couldn’t. He wouldn’t have understood. My father … Well, you heard Melanie. He never really wanted children.’

Maybe not, but having had them surely he must have accepted that it was his duty as a father to protect his child? Marco thought grimly, but he didn’t want to upset Lily even more by saying so.

As though she sensed what he was thinking, and his criticism of her father, she told him quickly, ‘They were friends—and not just that. My father worked for Anton. As you know, my father was a photographer. He worked for several upmarket magazines, doing modelling shoots. He and the people he mixed with were very cutting edge. They lived a certain kind of lifestyle. I suppose the best way to sum it up is to say that it was a … a sex, drugs and rock and roll lifestyle.’

‘And Anton also lived that lifestyle?’

‘Yes. He was—still is, I suppose—a very wealthy man. A very important man in the fashion world. His magazine is hugely influential. Being commissioned to photograph fashion shoots for it was an accolade. It could make or break a photographer. My father lived for his work. It gave him the kind of high that other people get from drugs. He was very creative, a genius in his field, and he would get angry and impatient with people who got in the way of him fulfilling his talent.’

‘Meaning that he didn’t have much time for those close to him?’ Marco guessed.

‘My stepmother was better at dealing with him than my mother, but even she lost patience with him in the end. Rick, my half-brother, worships the memory of our father and wants to follow in his footsteps—but of course he never really knew him properly.’

‘Unlike you. So, Anton and your father were friends?’

‘Yes. I remember the summer I was fourteen he seemed to be at the studio all the time. When Dad wasn’t there he’d ask to take some … some nude shots of me, and I refused. I remember Dad being furious with me when I tried to tell him.’

‘Why? What did he say?’

‘He refused to believe me—accused me of attention-seeking. Being just like my mother. It was a horrible holiday. Dad refused to speak to me, and then just before I went back to school my stepmother told me that she was divorcing him. I liked her. I still do. She was kind to me—that’s why I feel I owe it to her to keep an eye on Rick, as well, of course, as because he’s my half-brother. She’s remarried now, and she lives in California. She’s always inviting me out to stay but I haven’t managed it as yet.

‘Rick always says that it isn’t fair that Dad taught me to use a camera but died before he could teach him. I couldn’t have
not
learned, really. Well, I couldn’t have had him for a father and not learned how to take a photograph. I always preferred to photograph things, though, not people. It felt safer, somehow. The camera catches things that the naked eye doesn’t always, you see. My
mother… . Well, in some of the last photographs of her I think you can see how desperate she was, how alone she felt. I wish I’d been able to help her.

‘Anyway, after that whenever I came home from school for the holidays Anton always seemed to be there, at the studio, and I noticed …’ She paused.

This was so difficult.

‘You noticed?’ Marco repeated, his voice so devoid of emotion that its calmness steadied her.

She still couldn’t look at him, though, so she went to stand in front of the window as she told him in a low voice, ‘I noticed that the models my father was being asked to photograph for Anton’s magazine were getting younger and younger. That wasn’t entirely unusual for the time. The modelling world was changing, and the demand was for younger girls. But Anton’s magazine seemed to use more of them than anyone else. There was one girl—Anna. She was so pretty, so very pretty, and young—only fifteen. I really liked her. She wasn’t like the other models. She was still at school, like me, but I was at boarding school in the country and she was at a London day-school. Her mother was a dancer and her parents were divorced too. Her father didn’t approve of her modelling. She told me that her agent said she thought she’d be doing a
Vogue
cover by the end of the year, only she didn’t.’

Her voice became suspended. ‘I’m sorry. I can’t … It was so awful, so horrible.’

‘What happened, Lily? ‘

Marco suspected he knew what she was going to say, and he was appalled.

‘It’s the reason I still hate going in helicoptors—because
we travelled to the shoot in one that day.’ She shuddered at the thought. ‘I still feel so guilty because I never said anything,’ she told him in a ragged voice, turning round from the window to look at him, her face ravaged by her emotions.

Marco knew all about guilt, and how it ate away at a person. He went to her, wanting to reach out and hold her, but he was held back by his own demons. They told him that if he held her now he would be making a commitment that would bind him to her for ever, and that was a risk he must not take.

He saw Lily’s shoulders lift as she breathed in, taking the kind of breath that someone facing an enormous physical challenge needed to take.

‘Anna said that Anton had raped her and she thought she was pregnant. She said that Anton had been coming to the studio to see her, and he’d sent my father away on some pretext so they’d be alone together. She cried when she told me. She said it had been awful and that she was afraid to tell her mother.’

Lily took another deep breath to steady herself.

‘That was the day before I was going back to school. I never saw her again. When I asked my father about her he said that Anton had told him she’d stopped modelling because she’d fallen down the stairs to her mother’s flat and broken her leg. I wrote to her, but she never wrote back to me. Her mother wrote instead, saying that Anna had gone to live with her father and her stepmother.’

Her voice broke, and Marco could only guess at what she was feeling.

‘That was at half-term,’ she told him. ‘At the start of the Christmas holiday Anton was still always there at
the studio.’ Her voice grew stronger. ‘And then one day, after he and my father had gone out to lunch together, Anton came back but my father didn’t.’

Lily swallowed hard.

‘It was everything I’d dreaded, but worse. He told me what he wanted to do to me—what he was going to make me do to him.’

Marco’s contempt for the other man turned to white-hot rage.

‘I told him I’d tell my father, but he just laughed at me. He told me that he had a thing about virgins—young virgins. It was horrible—sickening. I was so afraid that I ran out of the studio. I didn’t know what to do or where to go. I had a key to my father’s flat, but I was afraid to go there in case somehow he, Anton was there.’

Marco closed his eyes against the anger boiling up inside him—against the man who had wanted to abuse her, against her father, against the whole of his sex for being what it was, but most of all against himself for not recognising her fear and for not protecting her from it.

Marco was so silent, so unmoving. Why didn’t he say something? Didn’t he know how much she needed comfort from him? How much she needed
him?
Defenceless and drained, Lily could only hold out her arms to him in supplication and beg, ‘Hold me, Marco. Please hold me.’

Lily’s words shocked through Marco. Hold her? He couldn’t. Everything he had taught himself to be recoiled from the thought of such intimacy. He feared the private wounds within himself it might reveal, searing him just as her anguished plea had seared his emotions—those
emotions he had fought for so long to deny. If he touched her now he was afraid that he would take her to himself, crush her to himself, and never want to let her go.

Marco was turning away from her—no doubt filled with contempt for her and for her weakness, Lily recognised mutely, and her pent-up breath escaped on a sound that was humiliatingly close to a small sob.

Lily was crying? He had made her cry?

Marco turned round, and from doing that took a step towards her, ignoring the mental lashing of his brain that urged him to stop. How could he when his heart was aching with remorse and longing?

Lily watched him without speaking, and for a moment Marco thought that she was going to ignore him and walk away from him. Part of him hoped that she would. But then she made a suppressed sound of desperation and almost flung herself against him, wrapping her arms around him, resting her head on his chest, her body trembling against his.

Slowly, awkwardly, uncomfortably, he lifted his own arms and placed them round her. Defeat. Surrender. The giving in of his will to his emotions. It should have felt wrong.
She
should have felt wrong. But instead it felt—she felt. Marco understood as he held her close. It felt as though she completed him. He breathed in and then exhaled slowly and deeply, as though he was releasing a burden he had carried for far too long.

She felt so delicate within his hold, and holding her now, as a woman, Marco could only ache for the fragile, vulnerable girl she must have been. Olivia had never felt like this—but then he had never held her like this. He had never held her at all, really. On those rare occasions
when he had kissed her she had never aroused in him a hunger for her, as Lily had done, Marco recognised. Never made him want her and then want equally to reject that wanting because it made him feel vulnerable. Their relationship had been more one of brother and sister than two young people who would one day be husband and wife.

But it was Lily who needed to be the focus of his thoughts now, not Olivia, and most certainly not his own self-centred fear of losing face through his damaged pride.

‘And the rest of that Christmas holiday?’ he pressed her. ‘What happened?’

‘I went back to school,’ Lily told him, her voice muffled as she kept her face pressed to his shoulder, ‘I knew I’d be safe there. There were always some girls there who had to stay at school in the holidays. It was lovely. We had a proper Christmas dinner, and the teachers took us to the theatre and museums. It was like being part of a … a family, and I felt … I knew that I was safe.’

Just as she did now, here with Marco, Lily knew, lifting her head from his shoulder to look at him as she told him, ‘I’m so grateful to you for … for being here for me, and for helping me. Thank you.’

She leaned forward, intending to kiss his cheek, but he turned his head in such a swift recoil that her lips brushed his instead, causing him to recoil even further and step back from her.

Mortified, Lily apologised. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t intend … I shouldn’t have asked you to hold me. It was thoughtless of me when I know that what I told you
must have made you think of the girl you were going to marry.’