‘I won,’ he said smugly.
‘You cheated.’
‘The royal decree is that I won.’
‘I’m royal, too,’ she told him. ‘And my royal decree is that you cheated.’
‘I’m more royal than you are.’
For answer she lifted a cushion-and tossed. The big, squishy cushion fell plump against his face.
He let it fall, then eyed her with caution. He took his hand away from his face and checked his fingers. The really very minor scratch had stopped bleeding.
‘I might live,’ he said grudgingly.
‘If you think you’re getting a sympathy victory, think again. Wuss.’
‘Wuss?’ He lifted a cushion. ‘You can’t call a prince of the blood a wuss.’
‘I can call a prince whinging about an infinitesimal scratch anything I want.’ She eyed the cushion he was raising with a certain amount of trepidation. ‘Don’t you dare.’
‘All’s fair,’ he said softly ‘in love and war.’
He tossed the cushion straight at her.
She lifted her hand to ward it off. Her hand was still holding the tiny, scratched and battered racing car. The car caught the side of the down-filled cushion-and it ripped.
Feathers flew from one end of the room to another.
She sneezed. She was laughing so much there were feathers going into her mouth. She was blinded by a sea of white down.
‘Where are you?’ Raoul was fighting feathers, pushing them away from him, laughing as much as she was. ‘Hell, woman, I can’t fight you if I can’t see you.’
He was reaching for her in the feathers.
‘There are more cushions where they came from,’ she managed, spluttering. ‘And you threw it.’
‘So I did.’
He reached for her.
She reached for a cushion.
She reached the cushion as he reached her. He seized her hands in his before she could lift it. He was gripping hard, trying to keep the cushion from smacking him in the face.
She was fighting him…fighting him…
‘Desist, woman,’ he spluttered.
And suddenly she wasn’t fighting him at all.
How it happened she could never after explain. One minute they were intent on killing each other with cushions. The next…
There was a patch in the carpet where there was no road, a looping curve with carpet in the centre. The rug was piled with feathers, and that was where they were.
He was holding her but he was no longer fighting. He was no longer defending himself from cushions.
He was pulling her against his chest, and she was sinking into him, still laughing but melting…melting into his arms as if everything that had happened in this night had been leading to this moment.
His mouth was claiming hers. His arms were holding her. He was laughing with her in a mixture of exasperation and laughter and tenderness, but the exasperation and the laughter were fading and the tenderness was growing. And with it…
With it an aching, surging need that had no hope of being denied. She was curving against his body as if she belonged, and that was how she felt.
For this moment-right now-this was her man. The vows she’d made… She’d made them as mock-vows-or she’d meant to make them as mock-vows-but her heart hadn’t caught up with her head, and her heart was screaming that she’d vowed to love and honour this man for the rest of her life.
As he’d vowed to love her. No wonder then that he was claiming her as his wife and there was no way she could gainsay him.
For she wanted him as much as he wanted her. More. He was the other half of her whole. They’d joined, loved, declared their commitment before God and man, and they’d been made one.
‘Raoul.’ Somehow she whispered his name. Somehow.
Raoul.
Her hands were under his shirt, feeling the raw strength of him, glorying in his masculinity. Her husband. Hers.
And he was claiming her. The last of the ties were being unfastened. Her bodice was falling away and she didn’t care.
Wrong. She did care. She wanted this. This man was her husband.
Her love.
A thought. A desperate little thought, made at the outer edges of her consciousness where only the last ragged shreds of sanity prevailed, surfaced and started screaming. No. But it had to be said.
‘Raoul, we can’t…’
He pulled away from her then. Just a little, and he was smiling in the firelight with such tenderness that he took her breath away.
‘Why can’t we-my wife?’
‘I… We don’t have protection. Raoul, I can’t…get pregnant.’
How had she found the strength to say it? She didn’t know but it was out. And she caught her breath in dismay.
She wanted him. Oh, she wanted him.
Where was the nearest convenience store to this place?
But there was no need. He was turning her in his arms, cradling her, holding her close but gesturing to something by the bedroom door.
On a hall stand there was a tiny bundle of things that looked like golden coins.
‘This is a bridal chamber,’ he told her, his voice husky with tenderness and with passion. ‘It comes supplied.’
She gasped. She tried to work up indignation.
She failed. ‘How…how…?’ she stammered. Then, ‘If they’ve been sitting there since the last marriage in this place-’
He silenced her with a kiss. When he drew back his eyes were even darker, more intense, loving her with his smile. ‘Henri told me he’d put them in here personally this afternoon,’ he told her. ‘Just in case.’
‘Well, good old Henri,’ she said-trying to make her voice dry. Trying not to let her voice crack with emotion.
‘He is good,’ Raoul told her, his dark eyes flaring with passion. ‘He’s wonderful. But he’s not as wonderful as you, my love.’ His voice lowered then, and it was suddenly husky with passion. ‘You know, I’ve never thought I could feel like I do now. All the decisions I made after Lisle’s death, that I couldn’t love anyone… Jess, I thought that I couldn’t love, because to love and lose again would break my heart. But I’m falling so hard for you. This love thing… Any minute I’m going to be so irrevocably tied that to lose you would tear me apart. I intend to hold you to me forever. Please God, forever.’
‘Oh, Raoul…’
It was too much. She was so close to tears, and all she could do was stare at him with eyes that were lost. Was he saying he loved her?
‘But you’ve lost, too, my love, and a child,’ he said softly and she knew he could see her pain. ‘And your loss is so much more recent-more raw than mine. The leap you’re making here now… I know how brave it is. For you to love me…’
What was he saying? ‘I don’t… I can’t…’
‘You do and you can,’ he said softly and he kissed her long and hard, so deeply that she knew his words were absolute truth. She loved him. Oh, yes, she loved him.
And did that love betray her love for Dominic?
She didn’t know. She couldn’t think straight. She couldn’t think at all. Not when he was smiling at her. Not when
