Realising after a lengthening silence that the comment hadn’t been rhetorical and he expected her to respond, Sabrina tipped her head. ‘Yes,’ she agreed. Tired hardly came close to describing the bone-deep weariness she felt.
‘You should go up.’ His eyes moved beyond her and a woman appeared, as if by magic, smartly dressed in a blouse and tweed skirt. She dipped her head deferentially towards Sabrina.
‘Mrs Reid will show you to your room if you need anything...? I will join you presently.’
Her liquid dark brown eyes flickered wider at the statement, alarm bleeping briefly through the horrible flatness of her emotions. Then it was gone and so was he, moving towards the waiting group. She could see that he had already dismissed her from his mind.
Simultaneously recognising the tightness in her chest as hurt, utterly irrational given their circumstances, she asked herself if she’d prefer he acted a part? Yes, actually she would. She was all for pretence if it stopped someone feeling wretched.
‘I hope you like your rooms. His Highness usually has the West Wing suite when he stays with us. He said it would be fine.’
‘What?’ Sabrina paused, the light-headed feeling made her wonder if she had eaten anything today. The woman with her paused too, as had the group in the hall. Her husband was the only one not watching their progress.
What were they all thinking?
Were they asking themselves what sort of marriage this was where the husband needed to be reminded that his wife was there? She experienced a sudden flash of anger.
He could, with a minimum of effort, have made this day slightly less awful.
She hadn’t been expecting him to serenade her or carry her over the threshold, even. But would it be too much to ask that he acknowledged her existence, show some degree of basic courtesy instead of behaving with the charm and charisma of an adolescent being forced to attend a family function when he would rather hang out with his friends? Of course, Sebastian was not an adolescent and the friends he probably wished he were hanging out with were six-foot blondes in tiny bikinis, but essentially the situation was the same. He was clearly, ‘Sulking.’
She could almost hear her elocution teacher, the poor man who had been brought in by her parents when her first attempt at public speaking had not only brought her out in hives but been inaudible, applauding her projection.
Her stomach clenched in horror, the rest of her froze, as thanks to the excellent acoustics the angry accusation echoed once, twice, three times before fading away.
In the hall you could hear in the pin-drop silence Sebastian’s voice sounding tersely impatient. ‘So does anyone have the financial projections I asked for?’
In her head Sabrina could hear her mother’s voice as she coaxed her out from the cupboard she had retreated to after she’d admitted to her best friend that she fancied the captain of the football team, unaware that she was standing close enough to the live mic to have the entire assembled school hear her.
‘You have two choices when you make a public faux pas, Brina—you can either make a joke of it or act as though it never happened.’
Sabrina went for the latter and turned to the woman who was escorting her, comforting herself with the fact her new husband had the sort of attention span that meant unless you were six feet and blonde—and she was five six and fairish—he had pretty much deleted you from memory five seconds after you went out of his line of vision.
She lifted her chin. She would not vie for his attention but she would not be treated as though she were invisible either.
She produced a smile that said she was actually interested. ‘I’m sure the rooms will be perfect, thank you. This is a beautiful house.’
She’d said the right thing. The housekeeper was very proud of her employers’ historic home. She went on to regale Sabrina with a history that revolved mostly around the famous and infamous figures who had stayed there over the centuries.
THEY RESPONDED TO his question in a respectful way, even though they had just given the said information to him ten seconds earlier. Still, the respect was as yet only skin deep. He was perfectly well aware that he had yet to earn this. They, and in fact the world, were still waiting and maybe, in some cases, hoping that the day would come when he’d roll up for a scheduled conference late, hungover or possibly both.
Sometimes their doubts, never voiced, felt like a shout, but he knew that he could not allow self-doubt to creep in, so the extra hours he put in were not to prove anything to the doubters, but to himself.
‘This could wait until the morning if you prefer, Highness,’ said Ramon, the accountant.
‘You have somewhere else you’d prefer to be, Ramon?’
The man adopted an expression that suggested he wanted nothing more than to discuss a report on the financial benefits to be gained from amalgamating the tourist boards of both sides of the reunified island!
‘Fine, I believe there is coffee provided for us in the study.’
Sebastian could feel their resentment as they filed past him. They all had places they would prefer to be, whereas he had a place he did not want to be.
Keeping his libido on a leash around her was driving him closer to the edge on the occasions when he was unable to avoid contact, but as hard as it was, as much as he wanted her, his guilt—or was that his pride?—would not allow him to act on it.
He didn’t want her available or willing or dutiful. Sebastian wanted her mad, crazy, hungry for him. In his dreams she begged him to come to her and he would wake up bathed in sweat and aching.
Sebastian’s jaw clenched as he lost his battle not to look towards the staircase in time to see her vanish from view.
* * *
‘Highness, is there anything I can get you?’
The form of address dragged Sabrina’s wandering thoughts back from the dark place they had drifted to. She was barely aware that they had reached the suite of rooms that they had been allocated. The woman walked her through them, opening the doors to two en-suite bedrooms that opened off a large, comfortable central sitting room.
‘Would you like a fire lit?’
Sabrina’s eyes went to the fireplace. ‘No, that’s fine, thank you,’ she murmured, waiting until the woman had left before leaning against the closed door.
She stood there, eyes closed for a few moments, before levering herself away from the surface and giving herself a mental shake before she looked around the room. Even without an audience she found herself feigning an interest she was far from feeling, a lifetime’s training kicking in.
They were only scheduled to spend one night here but someone had gone to a lot of trouble. Or more likely an army of ‘someones’ had. There were the welcoming touches, like the flower arrangements, the iced champagne. Opening one of the doors that led off the sitting room, Sabrina stared at the neatly turned down four-poster that took centre stage. The bed in the second, equally grand bedroom was turned down too. Not letting her mind go there, she continued to deal with the moment and not think beyond it, preferring to deal with each situation as it arose before moving on to the next hurdle.
Hurdle—was that what her married life was going to be?
She frowned. If you started thinking of yourself as some sort of helpless victim, inevitably you became one. She turned her back on the bed and opened one of the numerous fitted cupboards that lined one wall, where she found a selection of her own clothes hanging neatly on hangers, along with a row of shoes.
It wasn’t until she opened it fully