Passion and the Prince Read Online Free PDF Page A

what she was going to do—as little as she liked being put in a position where she had to explain herself to him.
    ‘I wasn’t working—as such. I was simply doing a favour for … for a friend, and standing in for them at the last minute.’ It was the truth, after all.
    Marco felt his anger against her grow and burn even more hotly. She was playing with words, using those that suited her and discarding those that did not. Just as sheplayed with the vulnerable young lives of silly young fools like his nephew. ‘So the trust doesn’t know?’
    ‘There is nothing for them
to
know. I did a favour for … for someone, and—’
    ‘A favour? Is that what you call it? I have a very different name for what you were doing.’
    How could this woman, this Dr Lillian Wrightington, be the same woman he had caught trying to bribe his nephew into modelling for her?
    It seemed impossible … but it wasn’t. Quite plainly Dr Wrightington was a woman who lived two very separate lives. What could possibly motivate a woman highly qualified and presumably able to command a respectable salary to involve herself in such sleaze? The anger and pain he had felt over Olivia’s death surged through him. He could taste it in his mouth, feel it burning his emotions.
    They had been childhood friends, expected by their families to marry one day. Theirs would have been a platonic union, a business arrangement, and Olivia had assured him that she wanted the same thing, too. Only she’d been leading a secret life, duped into chasing fame as a model, and it cut deep to think that the girl he’d thought he knew had been deceiving him all that time.
    Olivia had never found that fame. Drugs and ultimately prostitution had dragged her into the gutter and from there to her death, and her journey there had been facilitated by a woman like the one standing in front of him now. A woman who bought beautiful young flesh for those with a taste for it, and who deceived those whopossessed that beautiful young flesh with promises of fame and fortune.
    He had trusted both Olivia herself and that woman, but they had both lied to him about their intentions. That knowledge had left a raw wound within him that his pride could not allow to heal. They’d given him their word, their promise, they’d taken his trust and destroyed it. He’d have to be a complete fool—a weak, easily manipulated fool—to trust another woman now. His cynicism burned inside him like vitriol.
    ‘Why do you do it?’ he asked grimly.
    Lily could feel the icy-cold blast of his contempt like a burn against her skin. It made her want to shrink into herself in anguished pain. What had she ever done to warrant his harshness towards her? Nothing. And yet the knowledge that he felt contempt for her pierced her. What was it about him that made her own emotions react so deeply to him? As though somehow she was hypersensitive to him—as though some kind of magnetic link existed between them, enclosing her and making her acutely vulnerable to the force-field of his personality, no matter how hard she struggled to resist the effect he was having on her.
    ‘Why do I do what?’
    ‘Don’t pretend not to understand me. You know perfectly well what I mean—that seedy studio, the manner in which you approached my nephew.’
    His words brought a guilty flush of colour to her skin, even though she had nothing to feel guilty about.
    ‘I’ve already told you I was simply doing someone else a favour.’
    Far from placating him, her explanation served only to add to his biting contempt.
    ‘I can imagine the kind of
favour
you were attempting to do,’ he told her brutally, the fury inside him spilling over. ‘Tell me something,’ he demanded. ‘Does what you’re doing never worry you? Do you ever give any thought to the damage and destruction you and your kind cause?’
    Lily’s heart had started to thump heavily and uncomfortably. She was beginning to feel panicked by his attack. He was advancing