She cleared her throat, hoping her errant thoughts would take the hint. They didn’t. ‘I prefer to move about the principality without a security team unless it’s absolutely necessary.’ Her voice came out cool and clipped and formal while her insides glowed with heat like a ten-bar radiator. ‘It’s different when I travel abroad, but even then I try and play a low profile. It’s my sister everyone is interested in, not me.’
‘Does that bother you?’
Lottie chanced a glance at him to find him looking down at her with a studied expression on his face, his eyebrows drawn slightly together over his eyes. She completely lost her train of thought as her gaze meshed with that dark, suddenly serious one. She moved her eyes back and forth between each of his, transfixed by how deep a brown his were, so deep it was hard to tell where his pupils started and ended.
She let her gaze travel slowly down the length of his strong nose to his mouth…. Oh, that wickedly sexy mouth! She gulped back a tiny swallow as she followed the sculptured perfection of his lips. The lower one was much fuller than the top one, suggesting a powerful sensuality that threatened to melt her bones within the encasement of her skin. He needed a shave; his jaw was liberally peppered with dark stubble and her fingertips suddenly felt the inexplicable urge to see what it would feel like rasping against her skin. It had been so long since she had touched a man….
The pinging sound of the lift arriving at the penthouse floor jolted her out of her mesmerised state.
‘No, of course not.’ She elevated her chin. ‘I’ve never been one for the limelight.’
‘Is that why you dress the way you do?’
Her brows clanged together. ‘What’s wrong with the way I dress?’
He held back the doors of the lift for her with a strong forearm. ‘You dress like you’re going to a funeral of an elderly spinster great-aunt.’
Lottie glared at him. ‘I’ll have you know this dress is a bespoke design. It cost an absolute fortune. And just for the record, I don’t have a spinster great-aunt.’
‘That dress looks like it was designed for someone in their sixties. You’ve got great legs. Why not show them off?’
She stalked into the polished wood and mirrored cabin of the lift, turning to face him as the doors closed with a sigh and a hiss behind him. ‘Why on earth would I want to do that? My legs are my business. They’re not anyone else’s. Just because I’m a princess doesn’t mean everyone has to know what my legs look like. I don’t want people speculating on how much cellulite I have or don’t have or whether I’m fatter or thinner than my sister. Nor do I think it’s anyone’s business what I look like in a bathing suit or what I look like when I’m eating my breakfast or dinner or having a coffee with friends. I just want to be accepted for myself.’
The silence seemed to ring with the echo of her outburst.
Lottie looked at the floor, studying her toes in their conservative shoes with studious intent. For as long as she could remember she had always been compared, measured, against her sister.
Found wanting.
It had been unbearable in her teens; every photo call had been a form of torture for her. The press comments at times were brutal, especially to a young overly sensitive girl who hadn’t yet found her social feet.
But ever since she’d come back from Switzerland she had tried to keep her head below the paparazzi parapet. She deliberately dressed down, even dowdily on occasion. It was her way of thumbing her nose up at the fashion set who thought she wasn’t pretty or stylish enough.
She wasn’t a beautiful blue-eyed blonde. She wasn’t an extroverted butterfly that could work a crowd to her advantage, to make everyone love her in a heartbeat, to be dazzled by her and follow wherever she led.
She was a quiet mouse who liked to mull over things in solitude. To slip by unnoticed, to be in the background, to quietly get on with things that mattered without all the fuss and the fanfare.
‘Must be a tough gig playing second fiddle all the time.’
Lottie looked up at him to find his expression was still ruminative. ‘I wouldn’t want to be playing first even if I had been born to it. Madeleine loves the fact that she’ll eventually be queen. She’s good at giving orders. I’m rubbish at it.’
‘I don’t know about that.’ The corner of his mouth lifted in a wry smile. ‘So far you’ve been pretty good at snapping out orders to me.’
‘That’s different.’ Lottie stabbed at the ballroom-floor button with her index finger. ‘You don’t want my orders any more than I want to be giving them.’
He leaned against the wall of the lift, crossing one ankle over the other in an I’ve-got-all-the-time-in-the-world pose. ‘I know what you’re up to, you know.’
She hitched one of her shoulders in a guileless manner. ‘I haven’t the faintest idea of what you’re talking about.’
He gave one of his low deep laughs that made her insides stumble. ‘You’re going to drag me to every mind-numbing inspection or appointment you can think of until I walk off the job in boredom. But it won’t work.’
We’ll see about that, Lottie thought as she pressed the floor to the ballroom again. ‘What’s taking this lift so long?’
As if to spite her, the lift gave a shuddering jolt and then hissed to a halt.
Fear scuttled up her spine like the sticky legs of a spooked spider. She stabbed at the button again. Frantically. Manically. ‘Come on! Get moving, you stupid thing!’
‘Looks like we’re stuck.’ He didn’t sound too worried about it. In fact, his tone contained a hefty measure of amusement.
‘Stuck?’ Lottie rounded on him, her heart feeling as if it was beating inside her throat instead of her chest. ‘We can’t be stuck! I have things to do. People to see. A wedding to plan!’ I have to get out of here before I get into a claustrophobic meltdown!
He pushed himself away from the wall of the lift to inspect the computerised control panel. ‘We’ve stalled between floors.’
She glared at him crossly, trying to control her fear with anger instead of blind panic. ‘You don’t seem the least bit put out. This is your family’s hotel. Doesn’t it worry you that the lifts are faulty? That surely can’t be good for your reputation.’ She put her fingers up in quotation marks and put on a posh travel guide voice. ‘Come to the Chatsfield and get stuck in a lift for hours.’ She dropped her hands and arched a brow. ‘Not going to look too flash on the website, is it?’
‘Not all the lifts are faulty. Just this one.’ He leaned back against the wall again. ‘This is a private one to the penthouse suite. I reckon you confused it by stabbing at the button too hard. You should try a softly-softly approach next time. Trust me—’ his sleepy, half-lidded gaze slid over her like a caress ‘—you’ll get way better results.’
Lottie ground her teeth. ‘Thanks for the lesson in managing temperamental lifts, but don’t you think you should do something like call someone for help? We could be stuck in here for hours.’
‘What fun.’ His dark eyes glinted, his mouth lifting in a slant of a smile. ‘How do you propose we pass the time till help arrives?’
A tiny shiver raced over her skin. A different one this time, not of cold primal fear but hot primal attraction. The lift wasn’t small by any means, but with him looking at her with those devilishly sexy eyes, and that wickedly tempting mouth smiling in that incendiary way, it felt like the space had shrunk to the size of a cereal box.
She could smell the sharp clean citrus scent of his aftershave, a mix of lemon and lime and some other exotic spice that intoxicated her senses like