The Price of Royal Duty Read online

  The bedroom area of the plane was in darkness and through the window Sophia could see Ash striding down the red carpet towards the plane accompanied by a uniformed steward. Her heart skipped a beat, tension filling her. She wanted to rush to meet him and beg him for help but he was frowning and looked impatient. Sophia looked towards the bathroom. What if she simply hid herself in there and waited until they had taken off before she revealed her presence to him? That way he would have no choice other than to help her.

  The bathroom was compact with a good-size shower and the usual facilities. Most of the spare floor space was taken up by her case so she had to perch on it after she had pulled the door to and taken the precaution of locking it. Presumably there was another lavatory off the main cabin of the jet for staff, so she should be safe in here until they had taken off.

  As soon as the jet’s door was locked behind him, enclosing him in its cabin, Ash removed his jacket and sat down at his desk, reaching for his laptop. He had work to do ahead of the meeting he was returning to Mumbai to attend. He had planned to speak with Sophia before he had left the ballroom. His deep-rooted sense of responsibility demanded that he at least tell her that her marriage need not be as bad as she obviously felt it would be, but he hadn’t been able to find her. And if he had found her? If she had pleaded with him yet again for his help? He pushed the laptop away and stood. He had no idea where it had come from, this persistent unwanted ache of what he refused to call anything but mere male lust, but he did know that neither it nor Sophia herself could have any place in his life.

  In her hiding place Sophia felt the plane start to move down the runway and then gather speed, before lifting into the sky. She had done it. She had left the island and it was too late to change her mind now. In the morning her family would know she had gone, and her father … Her father would be furious with her, but if he wouldn’t listen to her and let her tell him how she felt then she had no other way of showing him just how much she did not want this marriage.

  The plane levelled off. Sophia opened the bathroom door. The bedroom was still in darkness. She looked towards the door to the main cabin and the light showing underneath it. She went towards it and then stopped. She felt so vulnerable and alone. If she went to Ash now she was afraid that she might … That she might what? Throw herself at him and beg him to hold her, to comfort her, to keep her safe? That was ridiculous and it just showed how unlike her real self she was behaving to even think such a thing. It would be better though, wouldn’t it, for her to wait a little longer before she did see Ash in order to give herself time to feel less vulnerable.

  Ash didn’t much care for the new temporary steward who had been taken on while his usual man, Jamail, had gone home to look after his sick mother. The man hovered too much and too closely. There was something in his eyes that Ash didn’t like, although he told himself that he was probably being unfair to him as he shook his head, refusing the drink the steward had offered. He looked at his watch. Just gone 1:00 a.m. It was a six-hour flight to Mumbai at least and, with the time difference, it meant it would be 9:30 a.m. before they landed. He had arranged for his meeting to take place in his office in his penthouse apartment in the city, to save time and also to allow him to leave for Nailpur—the Rajasthan state of which he was the ruler and from which he derived his title—the following day to attend to his business there.

  A new message from Hassan caught his eye. In it his old friend was complaining that they hadn’t had a chance to catch up at the engagement party.

  It was true that Alex, Hassan and Ash didn’t get much opportunity to catch up with one another in person. They all had busy lives. Ruefully, he emailed back—Perhaps you should get engaged yourself, and throw another party—and then went back to concentrating on the key points he wanted to discuss with the consortium that was going to renovate one of Nailpur’s smaller palaces and turn it into an exclusive luxury hotel.

  Whilst he personally did not need the money this venture would bring in, the people of Nailpur did. Ash sat back again in his chair as he contemplated the problems he and the highly trained young managers he had hired were having persuading the people of the benefits of growing their crops in a more modern and cost-effective way. For the hotel and the other plans he had to bring tourists and money into the area, which needed to become more self-sufficient. They had the land and the climate with which to grow much of the food visitors would require, but the local farmers were afraid of committing to the new methods of agriculture Ash wanted to introduce. In order to get round that he was encouraging their sons—and daughters—to go to agricultural colleges so that hopefully they would come back and persuade their families to adapt to modern ideas.

  The door that led to the small kitchen beyond which lay the flight deck opened and the steward came out asking Ash if he would like anything to eat or drink.

  In the bedroom, sitting on the edge of the bed in the dim glow from the brilliantly star-lit sky outside—she hadn’t dared switch on the light in case it alerted Ash to the fact that she was here before she was ready to face him—Sophia took a deep breath. She couldn’t hide herself away in here forever. She got up, heading for the door into the main cabin, then stopped as she heard voices and realised that Ash was talking to someone.

  She couldn’t go in there now. She’d have to wait until he was alone. She went back to the bed and sat down on it, stifling a yawn as she did so. It had been a long and exhausting day and the bed looked very tempting. Too tempting to resist, Sophia admitted as she had to stifle another yawn.

  Two minutes later, having automatically removed her shoes and her dress, she was tucked up beneath the beautifully welcoming and expensive sheets, her eyes already closing.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  FOUR o’clock. Another couple of hours or so and they’d be touching down in Mumbai. He might as well get some sleep, Ash acknowledged as he closed down his laptop and then made his way to the jet’s bedroom, not bothering to turn on the light as he headed for the bathroom where he stripped off his clothes and then stepped into the shower. Emerging from it he dried himself and then pulled on one of the two thick towelling robes that hung on the inside of the bathroom door.

  This time he did switch on the bedroom light and then froze in disbelief as he saw what—or rather who—it revealed.

  ‘Sophia! What the …’

  The angry sound of Ash’s voice brought Sophia out of her shallow sleep to struggle into a sitting position as she clutched the bedclothes around her naked upper body, and wished that her heart was not hammering so fast.

  ‘I’m sorry, Ash,’ she apologised immediately. ‘I was going to come and tell you that I was here but you were talking to someone and then I was so tired that I must have fallen asleep.’

  This was the last thing he needed right now, Ash thought. In the intimacy of the cabin he could smell the scent of her skin, lush and warm, subtly demanding that his male senses respond to it as nature had designed them to do.

  ‘You’ve done this deliberately, haven’t you?’ he accused her. ‘Even though I told you that I couldn’t help you. I don’t like having my hand forced, Sophia.’

  Sophia bristled. How dare he accuse her of that kind of subterfuge and deceit. ‘You’re wrong,’ she snapped. ‘I’m not trying to force your hand. I came to the airport thinking I’d be able to get a scheduled flight to London but all the normal flights were cancelled because of the number of guests arriving for the party on their own private jets. When the girl at the airport said that yours would be the first to leave I just—’

  ‘You just got on board? Have you any idea of the diplomatic reverberations your behaviour is going to cause? And not just with your father. How do you think your husband-to-be is going to react to the news that you’ve disappeared with another man within hours of your engagement to him being announced?’

  ‘He will never be my husband. Never. I wish this was any plane but yours, Ash, I really do, but I had no choice. I will not let my father sacr
ifice me for his dynastic ambitions. All I want is to get to London. I’ve got my passport. After your plane puts down in Mumbai you need never have anything to do with me again. In fact, I don’t want you to. I thought you were someone special, Ash, a true hero, and someone I could turn to, but you aren’t. Stupid of me when I already knew the danger of putting my faith in you and then being rejected as a result.’

  He knew immediately what she was alluding to and her criticism stung.

  ‘You offered me your virginity and I refused it for your own sake as much as anything else. You were sixteen. To have taken your innocence from you would have been dishonourable.’

  They shouldn’t be having this conversation. It took him too close to a dangerous place he didn’t want to be.

  ‘All I want from you is a lift to Mumbai,’ Sophia told him. ‘No one need know that I left the island with you.’

  ‘You’re damned right they don’t because the truth is that you did not leave with me. And why London?’

  ‘I’ve got friends there.’

  She was avoiding looking at him, causing Ash to demand curtly, ‘Friends, or a man? A lover who—’

  ‘No!’ Sophia denied truthfully. Please don’t let Ash ask her if she was really sure those so-called friends would welcome her and help her, she prayed, because the honest answer was that she didn’t know.

  Now that the shock of being woken up by Ash’s angry voice was abating, another and far more dangerous awareness was spreading quickly through her body and that was the realisation that under that robe he had tied so carelessly Ash was probably completely naked. Why should that either concern or disturb her? She didn’t want him any more.

  And yet she couldn’t remove her gaze from where the robe gaped as he paced the cabin floor with angry strides. She could see the shadow where the dark line of hair that bisected his body started to broaden out after it had crossed the taut plain of his belly. Once and only once she had attempted to trace that line, but then she had only got as far as the waistband of the jeans he had been wearing. Now … She was suddenly finding it very difficult to swallow, Sophia realised, and even more difficult to drag her gaze away from Ash’s body.

  ‘By rights I ought to instruct my captain to turn this plane round and—’

  ‘No!’ So great was her panic that Sophia didn’t stop to think as she launched herself towards Ash, reaching out to grasp his arm, her eyes brilliant with fear and pleading as she looked up into his, totally oblivious to the fact that her anxious movement towards him had dragged down the bedding that had been protecting her nudity.

  Her breasts were everything he had known they would be, Ash thought, her waist every bit as narrow and her hips every bit as lusciously curved. The tiny bikini pants she was wearing were somehow more a provocation highlighting her sex than a means of covering it. Deep down inside him a truth that refused to be ignored was surging through him. Whether he liked it or not, he wanted her.

  In the soft light of the room her skin glowed, her tan contrasting with the white bedding, the lush sensual promise of her body emphasised by the almost monastic and starkness of the decor. Until now he hadn’t realised just how much the clinical decor reflected the emotional emptiness of his life. Now, though, the sight of Sophia’s near-naked body with its ripe readiness for sex had the effect on him of tightening an already-too-coiled spring of needs and desires that had tormented him all evening.

  The plane dropped several feet, catching Sophia off guard as she struggled to pull up the sheet to cover her nakedness, her breath escaping from her lungs in a soft gasp as the movement of the plane threw her towards the edge of the bed.

  Instinctively Ash reached out to stop her from falling. Instinctively, and disastrously, because it was her naked body he was now holding and his own was reacting to that fact. He had to let her go. He had to leave this cabin, but instead he was moving closer to her.

  This couldn’t be happening. It must not be happening, Sophia told herself. But it was too late. It was happening, and somehow it seemed that her treacherous body wanted it to happen even though that should have been impossible.

  He shouldn’t be doing this. He didn’t want to be doing this, Ash told himself, but he was, the lean darkness of his hand cupping one of her breasts whilst his lips feathered tiny tormenting kisses around the nipple of the other.

  She wanted to deny him, to stop him, to tell him that this must not happen, but like a sealed jar of sweetly potent honey-infused wine exposed to the sun’s heat, the seal on her emotions and needs melted beneath his touch, leaving the sweet wine of her own desire to spill hotly through her veins.

  Where did it come from, this instinct that was pure and intense? After all, she had no past experience of this kind of intimacy, no matter what others might think. But now, it had her reaching out to clasp Ash’s head between her hands to hold him to her breast whilst her body arched, her head thrown back in an agonised delirium of a desire she wanted to reject but couldn’t. A wild febrile urgency possessed her.

  Her nipples, sensitised by his touch, and the shockingly fierce tug of his mouth, were sending almost violent spasms of erotic raw need to every part of her body, but most of all to the trembling aching heart of her sex. The pulse that sprung up there was growing more insistent, more urgent, more demanding, with every touch of Ash’s hands and mouth. It was as though, deep within her, the womanhood she had told herself she had guarded so assiduously for the man who would love her and take away the pain Ash’s rejection had caused her was pushing against the bonds of her virginity, swelling and softening, pulsing with its female need for the man arousing it so intensely.

  Ash groaned. She was everything he had never allowed himself to imagine that she would be and more. Now, with the iron denial he had been trying all evening to forge around his desire for her to seal himself off from it, broken apart by the strength of that desire, he had no need to imagine what it would be like to give in to the lure of her, because he was already doing it.

  She smelled of vanilla and almonds, her flesh dew-damp from her own arousal, the dark crowns of her nipples hard eager tellers of female need. He parted her thighs with his hand, caressing their sensitive inner flesh, his own body responding to her shudder of reaction and soft moan of impatient need. He was hard and ready, the head of his erection swollen and taut. Her briefs had bows at the sides which he unfastened with a tug. Her sex was bare to his gaze and touch, her Brazilian wax revealing its delicate shape. He was just reaching out to part its neatly folded outer lips when there was a knock on the cabin door and it started to open.

  There was barely time for him to thrust the sheet over Sophia’s nakedness and conceal his own body with the robe he was still wearing before the steward was in the room, his eyes widening as he apologised and started to back out, telling him that the captain wanted him to know that strong head winds meant that their flight would be delayed by fifteen minutes or so.

  An icy cold revulsion every bit as all-consuming as his desire had been earlier gripped him. How could he have behaved as he had?

  ‘You’d better get dressed,’ he told Sophia without looking at her as he started to move away from her. They dressed in silence before moving out into the cabin.

  What on earth had possessed her? Sophia felt sick with shock and disbelief, unable to say a word.

  Eventually the captain announced that they were coming in to land. Ash hadn’t spoken to her once since they had left the bedroom, and Sophia hadn’t wanted him to. She was still in shock and bitterly angry with herself for her own behaviour.

  His curt warning, ‘Seat belt,’ broke the silence between them, and had her fumbling with the straps, the colour crawling up under her skin as she caught the look that the hovering steward was giving her. He might not have seen her naked body thanks to Ash’s prompt action but he knew exactly what had been happening; his look told her that.

  In the past when men had given her that lustful knowing look she had been protected from it by the truth
that only she knew—namely that no man had ever touched her intimately or shared her bed—but now thanks to her own betrayal of herself she had no defence against it. And there was no one to protect her from the pride-savaging pain of that. No one. For the rest of her life now she would know and remember how she had let herself down by succumbing to a … a need she had believed she had conquered years ago, Sophia acknowledged as the plane came in to land.

  It would be a long flight to London, and she hoped that she wouldn’t have to wait too long at the airport before beginning it.

  She looked at her watch. At home people would be waking up, and her maid would be discovering that her room was empty and that her bed hadn’t been slept in. Her stomach churned, but now more than ever she knew that she could not marry the Spanish prince her father had chosen for her.

  Ash was unfastening his seat belt and standing. Automatically Sophia did the same.

  ‘My case …’ she began when Ash headed towards the door that the steward was just beginning to open for them.

  ‘Leave it,’ Ash told her curtly as he indicated that she was to precede him to the now-open door. ‘The steward will attend to it.’

  ‘But I want to get on the first flight I can …’ Sophia began, only to come to an abrupt halt, her face paling as she looked out of the door of the plane and saw the camera crews and photographers jostling for position at the bottom of the steps. Paparazzi.

  Obviously irritated by the fact that she wasn’t moving Ash came up behind her and then stopped himself, cursing under his breath as he saw the press waiting for them below.

  ‘I suppose this was your idea. Run away in secret and then let the world know what you’ve done,’ he told her angrily.

  ‘No. It’s got nothing to do with me,’ Sophia defended herself, but she could see from the look Ash was giving her that he didn’t believe her.