If he’d been anything other than breathtakingly gentle, Sophie might have found the resolve to call a halt to it, but his tenderness unbuttoned her defenses. It stole away her shame and her anger, and left her with only a sense of inevitability and calm, and the weary ache of a satisfied lover. He stroked her hair, and soothed her with whispered, incomprehensible words. She strained to catch them, but they floated away from her on the coat tails of sleep. All except for one.

Princess.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Lucien sat in the chair beside the bed and watched Sophie sleep. She’d been out for the count for a couple of hours, and downstairs the club had come alive. He’d walked the floor beneath an hour back and found himself satisfied by the number of people flooding through the doors, every one of them bold-eyed and expectant. He loved their lack of inhibition, their courage to shun social boundaries and to be whoever the hell they wanted in this place that he’d created.

The Gateway Club was precisely what it said above the door. A gateway to sexual freedom for anyone brave enough to enter.

He looked back at Sophie again. She’d frustrated the hell out of him from the moment she’d sashayed into his office in heels she could barely stand up in, and she’d stunned him when she’d turned around and forced words out of her mouth that clearly mortified her. Her embarrassment had lost the battle with her pluck, and it impressed him. The girl was eighty percent kitten and twenty percent lioness, and he considered it his mission to make her roar. Sexual potential shone out of her like a beacon, and her insistence otherwise only made him want to prove her wrong even more.

Besides, there was the small matter of her husband. If there was one thing that really made Lucien’s skin crawl, it was men who treated women badly. His investigator had dug around and turned up evidence to prove that Dan’s other woman had been a permanent fixture in Sophie’s marriage for some considerable time.

How could the man do it? How could he tell barefaced lies to the woman he professed to love?

Darkness settled over Lucien’s heart as long-buried memories of his mother’s heartache swam through his head. Her only crime had been to love his father too much, and she’d died for her cause. Alone, save for a bottle of pills and a scrunched up photograph of her husband. She’d lived her life in the shadows of Lucien’s father’s deception, and for the most part she’d conned herself that she was happy. Right up until the day she couldn’t ignore it any more because it was shoved rudely in her face when she’d visited him at work and found him astride his secretary on the desk.

She’d been faced with the truth in all its ugliness, and it had broken her.

Lucien had been too young back then to save his mother, but he was going to make damn sure that Sophie didn’t get sucked down into that same cycle of destruction. She was teetering right on the verge of confronting her husband, and Lucien intended to tool her up for the fight.

In a small hotel room in Crete, Dan slumped in a similar chair next to a similar bed and watched another woman sleeping. What was he doing? This was the first time he’d spent more than twenty-four solid hours in Maria’s company, and the reality of being with someone other than Sophie around the clock had hit home hard. Meetings with Maria for clandestine dinners and afternoon sex sessions had become pleasurable fixtures in his life over the last eighteen months. From the moment they’d met at a work party, she’d made no secret of the fact that she fancied him. She was flirty. Sexy. She was fun, and she didn’t care if he forgot to put the bins out or left his washing on the bedroom floor. She was exciting in her unfamiliarity, and she wanted him. It took no effort at all to separate her in his mind from his marriage vows.

If anything, he told himself, screwing Maria helped his marriage. Maria did things that Sophie wouldn’t dare. He was a satisfied man, and in every other area than the bedroom his relationship with Sophie was ideal.

He’d compartmentalised his life in his head perfectly.

Sophie, his wife and best friend.

Maria, his twice a week lover.

It had been the ideal set up, until now.

Until this week.

Maria had been making noises about getting away together for months but he’d managed to dodge it. She knew his situation. He was a married man. But then events had conspired against him, and he’d found himself unable to get out of it this time. Maria hadn’t exactly said that she’d tell Sophie about their affair, but she’d intimated as much, and the threat alone was enough to have him packing his suitcase and telling his biggest lie yet.

Maria had met him at the airport, and from there on in, he’d known with utter conviction that it was wrong. He didn’t want to browse duty free with her, because buying Sophie a new bottle of scent was part of their usual holiday ritual. Being with Maria twenty-four seven had highlighted all of the differences between the two women in his life that he’d never taken the time to think about. Sure, Maria might not grumble about bins or dirty washing as yet, but the minutiae of temporarily living with her had exposed their incompatibilities more than their strengths. Or maybe he was being unfair. It probably shouldn’t matter that Maria slept on the wrong side of the bed, or that she preferred tea to coffee in the morning. It really shouldn’t faze him that she was the sightseeing type rather than a bake on the beach girl, or that she had no clue how to play poker on the balcony late at night.

But the fact was, all these things did bother him, because they rammed home the fact that she just wasn’t Sophie. She wasn’t the woman he loved, the woman who knew him inside out.

Did Sophie know about Maria? How could she not?

Christ, he hoped not.

He dropped his head in his hands, feeling trapped. He wanted to go home.

CHAPTER NINE

Sophie opened her eyes. Warm, subdued lamps lit the room, and she was incredibly comfortable. Fragment by fragment, the memory of the past few hours clicked back into place as she woke, and a glance under the covers confirmed her fears. She was naked. She hadn’t dreamt it. She really had let Lucien do those things to her.

Where was he? She sat up in bed, the sheet clutched against her nude body. He must have heard her movements, because a second later he appeared in the doorway.

“I’ll take it as a compliment that you slept so well.” He leaned against the doorframe with his arms folded across his chest. Sophie frowned, wrong-footed by the fact that he’d changed his clothes. She hadn’t seen him in anything other than business dress, but right now, in soft, battered jeans and a faded black t-shirt that clung to his well-defined body, he was a brand new kind of gorgeous.