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thought it was all complete and utter nonsense. In his opinion people were people. Rich or poor. Royal or common.
    She pressed her lips together so tightly as if she were trying to hold an invisible piece of paper between them steady. He wasn’t sure if it was out of annoyance or a gesture of nervousness or shyness, but it drew his gaze like starving eyes to a feast. She had a bee-stung mouth, full lipped and rosy pink without the adornment of lipstick or even a layer of clear lip gloss. It was a mouth that looked capable of intense passion but it seemed somewhat at odds with the rest of her downplayed and rather starchily set features.
    A feather of intrigue tickled Lucca’s interest. Did she have a wild side behind those frumpy clothes and that frosty facade?
    Maybe his exile here wouldn’t be a complete waste of time, after all....
    She stepped back from him like someone does in front of a suddenly too-hot fire. She squared her slim shoulders and crossed her hands over the front of her body, cupping her elbows with the opposite hands. ‘I believe you have been appointed as my assistant.’
    Lucca was seriously getting off on her priggish hauteur. It was so different from the way women usually responded to him. There was no simpering and batting of eyelashes. No breathy coos and whispers. No coy come-hither looks or pouting lips and delectable cleavages on show.
    No, sirree.
    She was buttoned up to the neck and spoke to him in clipped formal sentences and looked at him down the length of her retroussé nose as if he was something unpleasant stuck to her sole of her sensible shoe.
    ‘That’s correct.’ He gave her a mocking at-your-service bow.
    Her chin came up a little higher and those striking eyes flashed like green-tinged lightning behind those conservative spectacle frames. ‘I think you should know that your appointment is both unnecessary and expressly against my wishes.’
    Wow. Now that was some attitude.
    He’d had every intention of leaving her to it but something about her stiff unfriendliness irked him. He wasn’t used to being dismissed as if he was nothing more than a lowly ranked servant who had failed to come up to scratch. He was an heir of one of the richest families in England. He decided to dig his heels in. He wasn’t going to let some hoity-toity little princess rob him of his allowance by dismissing him before he put in a day’s ‘work.’ He would play the game for the sake of appearances and keep everybody at home happy.
    ‘Your sister’s wedding cannot go ahead without my family’s cooperation,’ he said. ‘The Chatsfield Hotel is the only venue large and modern enough in Preitalle to accommodate a royal wedding reception.’
    She gave him a defiant stare. ‘We can have it here at the palace ballroom. It’s what I proposed to my sister in the first place.’
    ‘But that’s not what your sister wants,’ he countered neatly. It felt like a verbal fencing match and just as stimulating. He could feel the stirring of his blood, like a tapping beat picking up its tempo, taking heat to his groin like a spreading fire. ‘The hotel is closer to the cathedral and she wants the neutral ground of Chatsfield to show how forward-thinking the royal house of Preitalle is becoming, does she not?’
    Her lips compressed again. He could almost hear the cogs of her smart little brain ticking over. She was planning a counterattack. He could see the flickering behind her eyes as if she was mentally shuffling through her storehouse of comments to choose the most waspish one to send his way. ‘I fail to see how a man who spends his life frittering away his time and his family’s money on a profligate lifestyle such as yours could have anything to offer me in terms of services.’
    Lucca smiled a satirical smile. ‘ Au contraire , little princess. I think I have just the services you need to get this place rocking into the twenty-first century.’
    Her cheeks blushed a fiery red but her mouth was