LITMIR.BIZ

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going to see as much of it as we can,’ Marco told her as he started the car, ‘and my royal duties will just have to wait.’

      Whatever else the future held for Marco’s child, she was glad that it wouldn’t be the dark shadow of duty that fell across Marco’s life, Emily decided emotionally. The little boy might have to grow up not knowing his father, but he would be free of the burden Marco carried, and she was passionately grateful for that. Though, at the same time, almost overwhelmed by the intensity of her love for Marco, she reflected as he turned the car off the main road into a much narrower lane that ran close to the high, rocky coastline where cliffs plunged down into the sea.

      ‘This was one of my favourite places when I was a boy,’ Marco confided as he stopped the car.

      Emily could understand why. There was an elemental wildness about it; in some ways, the landscape matched the man.

      ‘Come on, let’s get out of the car.’

      Emily wasn’t sure she wanted to. The height of the cliffs gave her an uncomfortable feeling of vertigo. But she could see that Marco was determined and she didn’t want to have to explain to him how she felt.

      ‘I used to come here and gaze out to sea, and promise myself that one day I’d get away from here and from my grandfather. But, of course, even then I knew that ultimately I would have to come back,’ Marco confessed, once they were standing a few feet back from the edge of the cliff-top. He bent down and picked up a handful of the thin, stony soil that lay at the roots of the weather-beaten gorse bushes that grew in such abundance along this part of the coast, and flung it as far out to sea as he could.

      Watching him, Emily knew that this was a re-enactment of something he had done many times as a boy—as a way of releasing the anger inside him? It was an emotion he had partially dissipated by leaving the island and making a life for himself. But it would never really leave him so long as he and his grandfather struggled for supremacy one over the other. And whilst they were embroiled in that struggle, others would suffer. She could not allow her child to be one of them.

      All of a sudden it hit her: she had to tell Marco that she intended to leave. She couldn’t stop herself from reaching out to touch him and placed her hand on his bare forearm. Immediately he turned towards her.

      ‘Marco,’ she began tentatively, and then stopped. Unexpectedly he reached for her and took her in his arms, kissing her with such fiercely sweet passion that it made her eyes sting with tears.

      Why was he doing this? Marco asked himself. He knew that it couldn’t go on. Already, deep down inside, he knew he was becoming too dependent on her, and she was becoming too important to him. That couldn’t be allowed to happen. There was no room in his life for that kind of relationship with her. He was Niroli’s future king and he intended to devote every ounce of his mental and physical energy to his country and its people. He would break down the restrictions that centuries of royal rule had placed, he would open the door for Niroli’s population to walk freely into the new century. There was no legitimate place in his life for the kind of relationship he had with Emily. He was reeling at the way he felt about her now, the intensity that was being demanded of him. It was only recently he had started to feel like this, to recognise there was within him this dangerous need to have her close, a need that went far beyond any kind of sexual desire. But such emotion could not be allowed to exist, it could not be given a name, or a place in his life.

      He started to pull away from her and then stopped, smothering a savage groan before he tightened his hold on her and kissed her again.

      Emily’s mouth felt soft and giving beneath his own, her body warm, and he longed to possess her and fill her and lose himself in her and know the passion of loving her.

      ‘Marco!’ Emily objected, somehow managing to stem her own longing and drag her mouth from beneath his. She was trembling from head to foot, afraid not of him but of herself and the intensity of her feelings, and stumbling over the words in her desperation.

      ‘There’s no easy way to say this, but the truth is that I should never have come here. Niroli is different from London, and my role in your life has changed. I can’t live like this, Marco, a semi-secret mistress, despised and ignored by the court, and forced to live in the shadows. I’m going back to the UK just as soon as it can be arranged. It will be best for both of us.’

      She was only saying what he already knew to be true, and yet he felt as shocked as though his guts had been splintered with ice picks. She couldn’t do this! He wasn’t ready to let her go. He needed her here with him. He should, he knew, be feeling relieved, but instead he felt more as though he had suffered a mortal blow. Pain rolled over him in mind-numbing waves, crashing through him and drowning out reason, spreading its unbearable agony to every part of him. He could hardly think for it, do anything other than try somehow to survive its rapacious teeth as it savaged him and tormented him. How could this have happened? How could he be experiencing this? The thoughts and feelings that filled him were so new and unfamiliar that they made him feel as though he was suddenly a stranger to him-self. He felt like a man possessed by…by what? He shook his head, unable to allow the word pulsing in his heart to form. He had wanted it to happen, he had wanted her to leave. But not like this. He’d wanted to be the one to tell her to go. But how? That he didn’t want her here because he was afraid that she would come between him and his duty? His whole body shuddered as the pain savaged it once more.

      Why didn’t Marco say something, anything? Emily worried anxiously.

      What could she say without risking betraying the truth?

      ‘I loved the life we shared together in London, Marco. But things are different here. The time we’re sharing together is borrowed time, stolen time, perhaps,’ she told him sadly. ‘It’s better that I go now.’

      Marco could feel the heavy drum of his heartbeat thudding out a requiem for their relationship as he heard the finality in her voice.

      ‘There’ll never be anyone else in my life like you, Marco, nor a relationship to match the one we’ve shared.’

      The words felt as though they were being ripped from her like a layer of her skin, but she couldn’t hold them back; they were after all the truth, even though she knew she was a fool for having said them.

      But it didn’t matter now that she was compounding that error by lifting her hand to his face, tears burning at the backs of her eyes as she felt the familiar texture that was hard with the beginnings of his beard against the softness of her palm.

      ‘Emily.’

      He had caught hold of her hand before she could stop him, lifting it to his lips and then dropping it when he felt her tremble, to pull her bodily into his arms and then plunder her mouth with his own. Not that she made any attempt to resist him. Instead, she gave him the sweetness he was demanding whilst she clung helplessly to him.

      Few people visited this part of the island, and Marco realised that an irresistible need was flooding through him to know the intimacy of sex on this wild headland. He couldn’t let her go without this one last time, a final memory he would have to make last a lifetime of days and nights once he was without her. There had been many many times when their pleasure had been more sensual and more sustained, when he had deliberately set himself the task of pleasing her. But no time had ever been more intense than this, or more emotional. Because this was the last time that finally he could give to himself what he had previously so rigidly denied, and that was the right to feel with his emotions what he was feeling with his flesh.

      This was too much, Emily told herself. She just wasn’t strong enough to endure this kind of passion. It was as though Marco had wrenched away, with his clothes, the barrier she had always sensed he kept raised against her.

      As they lay together on the lavender-scented turf, the sun warming their naked bodies, the kisses he lavished on her body were hot and fierce with a desire that went beyond the merely physical. As though by shared consent, neither of them spoke. What words were there to say, after all? Emily wondered, with dry-eyed hurt. Words would only be lies, or, worse, create wounds. It was better this way, that their last memory of one another

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