Castiglione's Pregnant Princess. Lynne Graham

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СКАЧАТЬ of carefully handpicked female guests...’

      Faint colour illuminated Vitale’s rigid high cheekbones and he ground his even white teeth. ‘Queen Sofia enjoys trying to organise my life but I have no current plans to marry.’

      ‘But it would be a hell of a lot easier to keep all those women at bay if you turned up with a partner of your own,’ Zac pointed out without skipping a beat, as if he knew by some mysterious osmosis how much pressure Vitale’s royal parent invariably put on her only child’s shoulders. ‘So, this is the bet... I bet you that you couldn’t transform an ordinary woman into a convincing socialite for the evening and pass her off as the real thing. If you manage that feat, I’ll give you my rarest vehicle but naturally I’ll expect an invitation to the ball. If your lady fails the test, you hand over your most precious car.’

      Vitale almost rolled his eyes at that outrageously juvenile challenge. Obviously he didn’t do bets. He raked his black glossy hair back from his brow in a gesture of impatience. ‘I’m not Pygmalion and I don’t know any ordinary women,’ he admitted truthfully.

      ‘Who’s Pygmalion?’ Zac asked with a genuine frown. ‘And how can you not know any ordinary women? You live in the same world I do.’

      ‘Not quite.’ Vitale’s affairs were always very discreet and he avoided the sort of tacky, celebrity-chasing women likely to boast of him as a conquest, while Zac seemed to view any attractive woman as fair game. Vitale, however, didn’t want to run the risk of any tabloid exposés containing the kind of sexual revelations that would dishonour the Lerovian throne.

      In addition, he was an investment banker and CEO of the very conservative and respectable Bank of Lerovia, thus expected to live a very staid life: bankers who led rackety lives made investors unprofitably nervous. Lerovia was, after all, a tax shelter of international repute. It was a small country, hemmed in by much larger, more powerful countries, and Vitale’s grandfather had built Lerovia’s wealth and stability on a secure financial base. Vitale had had few career options open to him. His mother had wanted him to simply be the Crown Prince, her heir in waiting, but Vitale had needed a greater purpose, not to mention the freedom to become a man in his own right, something his autocratic mother would never have willingly given him.

      He had fought for his right to have a career just as he now fought for his continuing freedom of choice as a single man. At only twenty-eight, he wasn’t ready for the responsibility of a wife or, even more depressingly, the demands of a baby. His stomach sank at the prospect of a crying, clinging child looking to him for support. He also knew better than anyone how difficult it would be for any woman to enter the Lerovian royal family and be forced to deal with his domineering mother, the current Queen. His unfortunate bride would need balls of steel to hold her own.

      At that point in Vitale’s brooding reflections, Angel reappeared, looking abnormally subdued, and Vitale sprang upright with a question in his eyes.

      ‘Your turn,’ his older brother told him very drily without making any attempt to respond to Vitale’s unspoken question for greater clarification.

      Angel was visibly on edge, Vitale acknowledged in surprise, wondering what sensitive subject Charles Russell had broached with his eldest son. And then Vitale made a very good guess and he winced for his brother, because possibly their father had discovered that Angel had an illegitimate daughter he had yet to meet. That was Angel’s biggest darkest secret, one he had shared only with Vitale, and it was likely to be an inflammatory topic for a man as family-orientated as their parent. It wasn’t, however, a mistake that Vitale would ever make, Vitale thought with blazing confidence, because he never ever took risks in the birth-control department. He knew too well how narrow his options would be in that scenario if anything went wrong. Either he would have to face up to a colossal scandal or he would have to marry the woman concerned. Since the prospect of either option chilled him to the bone, he always played safe.

      A still-handsome middle-aged man with greying hair, Charles Russell strode forward to give his taller son an enthusiastic hug. ‘Sorry to have kept you waiting so long.’

      ‘Not a problem,’ Vitale said smoothly, refusing to admit that he had enraged his mother with his insistence on travelling to London rather than attending yet another court ceremonial function. Even so, his lean muscular length still stiffened in the circle of the older man’s arms because while he was warmed by that open affection he was challenged to respond to it. Deep down somewhere inside him he was still the shrinking little boy whose mother had pushed him away with distaste at the age of two, telling him firmly that it was babyish and bad to still seek such attention.

      ‘I need a favour and I thought you could deal with this thorny issue better than I could,’ Charles admitted stiffly. ‘Do you remember the housekeeper I employed at Chimneys?’

      Vitale’s eloquent dark eyes widened a little in disconcertion, lush black gold-tipped lashes framing his shrewd questioning gaze. He and Angel had spent countless school vacations at their father’s country house on the Welsh border and Vitale had cherished every one of those holidays liberated from the stuffy traditions and formality of the Lerovian court. At Chimneys, an Elizabethan manor house, Vitale had been free as a bird, free to be a grubby little boy, a moody difficult adolescent, free to be whatever he wanted to be without the stress of constantly striving to meet arbitrary expectations.

      ‘Not particularly. I don’t really remember the staff.’

      His father frowned, seemingly disappointed by that response. ‘Her name was Peggy. She worked for me for years. She was married to the gardener, Robert Dickens.’

      A sliver of recollection pierced Vitale’s bemused gaze, a bubble of memory about an old scandal finally rising to the surface. ‘Red-haired woman, ran off with a toy boy,’ he slotted in sardonically.

      His tone made his father frown. ‘Yes, that’s the one. He was one of the trainee gardeners, shifty sort with a silver tongue,’ he supplied. ‘I always felt responsible for that mess.’

      Vitale, who could not imagine getting involved or even being interested in an employee’s private life, looked at the older man in frank astonishment. ‘Why?’

      ‘I saw bruises on Peggy on several occasions,’ Charles admitted uncomfortably. ‘I suspected Dickens of domestic abuse but I did nothing. I asked her several times if she was all right and she always assured me that she was. I should’ve done more.’

      ‘I don’t see what you could have done if she wasn’t willing to make a complaint on her own behalf,’ Vitale said dismissively, wondering where on earth this strange conversation could be leading while marvelling that his father could show visible distress when discussing the past life of a former servant. ‘You weren’t responsible.’

      ‘Right and wrong isn’t always that black and white,’ Charles Russell replied grimly. ‘If I’d been more supportive, more encouraging, possibly she might have given me her trust and told me the truth and I could have got her the help she and her daughter needed. Instead I was polite and distant and then she ran off with that smarmy little bastard.’

      ‘I don’t see what else you could have done. One should respect boundaries, particularly with staff,’ Vitale declared, stiffening at the reference to Peggy’s daughter but striving to conceal that reality. He had only the dimmest memory of Peggy Dickens but he remembered her daughter, Jazmine, well but probably only because Jazz figured in one of his own most embarrassing youthful recollections. He had little taste for looking back to the days before he had learned tact and discretion.

      ‘No, you have to take a more human approach, Vitale. Staff are people too and sometimes they need help СКАЧАТЬ