Taming the Prince (7 page)

Shane stifled an inward groan and squeezed his eyes shut tight.

“I say, I do feel a bit better for having slept,” he heard Sara say in that refined, reckless—sexy—voice.

Well, that makes one of us,
he thought.

“Did you manage to get any yourself?” she added.

Did he get any? Oh, now
there
was a loaded question.

“Sleep, I mean.”

Oh, that. Not in this lifetime or any other.

“You’d feel better if you could.”

And I’d feel even better if I…and you…could—Enough, Cordello!

He forced his eyes open again, but alas, Sara Wallington still looked way too sexy for his comfort. Worse than that, she was gazing back at him as if she expected him to do something. Something like, oh… Shane didn’t know. Maybe crawl over to her side of the cramped space and pull her into his arms and cover her mouth with his and—

“Did you hear the Black Knights say anything while I was sleeping?” she asked. “Did they do anything I should know about?”

Oh, excellent, he thought. Way to go, Sara. Talking about their current predicament was as successful as having a bucket of ice water tossed in his face—or elsewhere—in cooling his ardor.

He shook his head. “Nada,” he told her, still trying not to notice that unbuttoned button. “I haven’t heard a thing. No movement, no talking, nothing. They might as well be sleeping themselves.”

She studied him intently for a moment. “I suppose they do need to sleep, as well, don’t they?”

“Yeah, but it’s not likely they’ll do it while they’re on
watch. And anyway, I figure it’s probably afternoon now, local time.”

“Yes, it is,” she said readily.

Her quick agreement surprised him. “How can you tell?”

She shrugged. “I just can, that’s all. As you said, though,” she hastily backtracked, “none of them would be sleeping on watch, regardless of the time, would they? Still…”

Her voice trailed off, as if she were thinking about something, though Shane was pretty sure her thoughts didn’t run along the same lines his had been running along. His suspicion was confirmed when she added softly, “We’ll have to figure out some way to escape, of course.”

He expelled an incredulous sound at that. “And how are we supposed to do that? Not only do they outnumber us, but they’re armed. They’re also the ones with the keys to the doors and the car. Not to mention we have no idea where we are, and are therefore at a slight disadvantage. I mean, hell, even if we get out of the house—which isn’t likely—how do we know which way is the right way? We could end up in an even worse situation than this. And what if we don’t speak the language? How are we supposed to get someone to help us?”

“I speak the language, regardless of what it is,” she assured him. “Have no fear there.” Her voice hardened and her expression grew grave as she added, “And trust me, Mr. Cordello, when I tell you that a worse situation than this probably isn’t possible.”

For a long time, he only gazed at her in silence, wondering what she knew that he didn’t know, and how she could know it so well. Then, softly, “Shane,” he finally said.

She narrowed her eyes at him curiously. “I beg your pardon?”

“Enough of the ‘Mr. Cordello’ stuff. My name is Shane.
You’ve called me that once. There’s no reason for you to go back to formalities.”

Except, he thought, that formalities might be a good idea, considering how
in
formal his thoughts about her were becoming.

“Fine,” she replied. “And, of course, you must call me Sara.”

“Is that an order, General Wallington?”

She smiled. “Yes, I suppose it is.”

Neither seemed to know what to say after that, leading to a long silence that seemed to want to stretch on to forever. Before it could get too awkward, Shane said the first thing that came into his head. “So how did you become so militant, anyway? Is your father in the Penwyck Royal Navy or something?”

She smiled cryptically…and, he thought, a little sadly for some reason. “He
was
in something like that, yes.”

“Army?” Shane said.

“Not exactly.”

“Air force?”

“No.”

“Marines?”

“Afraid not.”

“Then what?”

She turned away, her smile now seeming nervous somehow. “My father worked for the government,” she said evasively.

“And you’re following in his footsteps?”

“You could say that.”

“Ambassador?”

“Of sorts.”

Shane gritted his teeth. “Why don’t you like to talk about yourself? What are you trying to hide?”

She shrugged, steering her gaze at some point behind Shane, but there was nothing casual in her posture at all. “I’m not trying to hide anything,” she told him. “There’s
just nothing to tell, that’s all. I’ve led a very boring life, I assure you.”

“I bet there’s plenty to tell,” Shane countered. “I bet your life has been fascinating.”

“Well, you’d lose both bets. My life has been utterly uneventful.”

“Until now,” he pointed out.

This time, when she replied, she looked him square in the eye. “Until now, yes.”

“So how did you get to this point, hmm?” he asked.

“Probably the same way you did. Wrong place, wrong time.”

Shane shook his head decisively. “No. Something tells me you were right where you were supposed to be, at exactly the right time. There’s something going on here that you’re not telling me, but I’m damned if I know what. Something you’re involved in that you don’t want me to know about for some reason.”

She expelled another one of those anxious chuckles. “What a vivid imagination you’ve got.”

He grinned knowingly. “Yeah, haven’t I, though?”

Hastily, she changed the subject. “How about you, Mr. Cordello?”

“Shane,” he corrected her.

“Yes, of course. How about you?”

He noticed she didn’t speak his given name. Again. Apparently, she couldn’t do that when the situation was less volatile. Or maybe when the situation was more intimate. Interesting, that. “What about me?”

“What’s brought you to this point?”

“A hijacking,” he replied succinctly.

“You know what I meant,” she countered.

“Not really,” he said. He smiled again, surprised to realize that it felt like the flirtatious one he only used with women he was trying to lure into bed. Okay, so maybe that wasn’t so surprising, after all, all things considered. “Not unless you’re just trying to get to know me better.”

She shrugged. “Well, it’s not like we have anything better to do with our time, is it?”

And, oh, put like that, didn’t it sound as if she was just
so
interested in getting to know him better? Shane thought wryly.

“We could play Twenty Questions,” he suggested. Suggestively, he hoped, because on top of all the other erratic—erotic—thoughts he’d been having about Miss Sara Wallington, he hadn’t quite been able to banish the memory of how she had been looking at him just before they were hijacked and kidnapped. “We never did get to play our game before. We were rather rudely interrupted.”

“Mmm,” she replied noncommittally. “Strangely, this isn’t normally how things turn out when I meet a man for the first time.”

“You don’t say,” Shane replied, feeling surprisingly playful now. “What does normally happen when you meet a man for the first time?”

She lifted one shoulder and let it drop, an action that made her blouse gape open a bit more, enough for Shane to get more of a maddening glimpse of the lacy bra and soft skin beneath. He bit back a groan and tried very, very hard not to notice. Honest, he did. Really.

“We usually go to dinner and a movie,” she said. “Or, if I like a man very much, we go dancing.”

“And then?”

“And then I let him walk me home.”

“And then?”

“And then what?” she asked, looking genuinely puzzled.

“Do you invite him in?”

She gaped softly. “Of course not. Not on the first date.”

“Not even for a nightcap?”

“Certainly not,” she answered crisply.

“Like to play hard to get, do you?”

She leveled a steady gaze on him. “I assure you, Mr. Cordello, there is no playing involved. I
am
hard to get.”

“Shane,” he said again. “You’re supposed to call me Shane.”

And of course she was hard to get, he thought. That was what was going to make having her all the more fun, once he caught her. Because he knew in that moment that he
was
going to catch Sara Wallington. Better still, he was going to
have
her. Eventually. Once they got out of this predicament. And they
would
get out of this predicament, he thought further. Eventually.

“Ah, yes,” she said, bringing him back to the present. “So I am.”

But so she wasn’t, he couldn’t help noting. Again. “It’s interesting that you keep forgetting to call me by my first name,” he said.

“Is it?”

“I think so.”

“Mmm,” she said again. But she offered no further clarification.

Another one of those awkward silences threatened to follow, so Shane hastily tried again. “So,” he said, “you want to try again?”

“Try what again?”

“Twenty Questions. Because I’m thinking of something
really
good right now.” He tried really hard not to leer as he added, “And I bet you could guess what it is in a lot less than twenty questions.”

S
ara shook her head in response to Shane’s suggestive suggestion. “I’d much rather hear about you and your brother, Marcus,” she told him. “One of you may, after all, be the next reigning king of my homeland. It isn’t every day a woman is presented with an opportunity like this.”

And oh, wasn’t
that
just the biggest understatement she had ever uttered in her life, Sara thought as she studied him more resolutely. He looked like hell, all scruffy and unshaven and exhausted. His blue eyes were smudged by shadows beneath, and his shaggy brown hair was shaggier than ever, falling over his forehead and nearly into his eyes, giving him the appearance of some menacing highwayman.

At some point, he’d torn a hole in his jeans, a straight slash across the right leg that left his knee exposed when he bent it to make himself more comfortable. His white T-shirt was looking a bit rumpled beneath his jean jacket, but it still hugged his lean, muscular frame like a lover’s embrace. And he had a hole in one sock, she further noted
with a smile, something that made him incredibly endearing somehow, as if he needed someone to take care of him, because he couldn’t even manage his socks.

Not that she saw
herself
as a candidate for caretaker, mind you. Sara had no desire to care for anyone except herself. And not that Shane Cordello needed to be made any more endearing to her than he was already. Because even looking like hell, he was somehow infinitely more appealing to her than any man she had ever met. Too appealing, she realized. Because ever since waking from her nap, she’d been
much
too aware of his presence. Worse, he was present in a way that men simply were not present with her. Certainly not this soon after meeting one. In fact, she couldn’t think of a single man of her acquaintance who had captivated her as quickly and as thoroughly as Shane had.

Oh, dear. This
really
wasn’t a good time for that.

“Tell you what,” he said, scattering her thoughts. “I’ll answer your questions about me and Marcus if you’ll answer my questions about you. Ten questions each,” he added. “That’ll be twenty questions.”

“All right,” she told him. “Sounds fair.”

“You go first,” he said.

She eyed him intently as her questions about him tumbled through her brain—for truly, it was Shane she most wanted to learn about, and not his brother, Marcus—and she tried to decide which one to ask first. Finally, what she settled on was “Where did you go to college?”

“UCLA,” he replied promptly.

“And what was your major?”

He grinned cockily. “Girls.”

She muttered a soft
tsk
before pointing out, “That’s not a major.”

“Not an officially sanctioned one, maybe, but it
is
a major. And with
a lot
of college guys, too.”

“And did you earn your degree in this major?” Sara asked saucily.

“Whoa, yeah,” he replied with a chuckle that bordered on arrogant.

Sara couldn’t help laughing, too. “What was your minor then?”

“Goofing off,” he said. “Aced that one, too,” he added proudly.

“And what was your paper degree in?” she asked more pointedly. “Can you even remember?”

“That one I had a little trouble earning,” Shane said without a trace of apology. “Never did get it.”

“Why not?”

He shrugged. “I wasn’t the college type.”

“But why not?” she asked again.

Another shrug. “I didn’t take well to sitting in classes all day. I wanted to be outside. Wanted to be
doing
something.”

“You don’t think studying is doing?”

“For some people it is,” he conceded. “But not for me. I like working with my hands. And I like fresh air.”

“So you dropped out?”

He nodded. “In my third year. I got a job pouring cement on a construction site and, after a while, I worked my way up to foreman. I like what I do,” he added adamantly, as if it were very important that she understand that. “I’m proud of my work.” Then, “That’s ten questions,” he told her. “My turn.”

“That wasn’t ten,” she immediately contradicted him.

“Yeah, it was.”

“No, it wasn’t.”

He held up one hand as he began to enumerate. “Where’d I go to college, my major, my minor, my paper degree and a bunch of ‘Why nots’ and stuff in between. Ten total.”

“You can’t count the ‘why nots,”’ Sara told him.

“Why not?”

“Because they’re not real questions.”

“They have question marks at the end.”

“Yes, but—”

“That makes them questions.”

“But—”

“So now it’s my turn, and here’s my first question for you.” He pointed a finger toward her abdomen as he asked, “Did you know your shirt’s unbuttoned?”

It took a few moments for Sara to realize a few things. Number one, that he had turned the tables on her so smoothly and so completely. Number two, that he had, in fact, asked the question that he had asked. And number three, whether or not he had been serious in asking the question. That in itself branched off into a couple of other moments, as she first had to glance down at the garment he indicated to see if the question actually applied—it did, unfortunately—and then she had to decide whether or not the question was an appropriate one for him
to
ask. It wasn’t, not for mixed company. Of course, their present situation being a bit, oh, bizarre, she supposed it was all right to make allowances.

But still.

When her brain
finally
stopped buzzing with all its strange musings, Sara hastily lifted a hand to her blouse and fastened not just the button to which Shane had referred, but every other button, as well, until her collar nearly strangled her in its closeness. She heard him chuckling as she completed the action, and she supposed it
was
a bit late for modesty at this point, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to undo what she had done. All she could do was glance up again to see him sitting on the other side of the room, his elbow propped on one bent knee, his fingers curled loosely over his mouth, laughing at her.

“Is there something you find humorous, Mr. Cordello?” she asked.

He dropped his hand from his mouth, but still folded it arrogantly over his knee, and grinned devilishly. “You know, I don’t have to answer that question, because it’s number eleven.”

“I’ve stopped playing,” she said crisply.

“Have you? Really?”

“That’s three questions you’ve asked now,” she pointed out before she could stop herself.

He laughed again. “So you
are
still playing,” he said smugly. “Thanks for answering my questions, even if I had to infer your answers, because you didn’t really answer, and even if you did, it was really only one answer for two questions, which means, if I wanted to, I could disqualify those answers—and therefore those questions—and ask you another question or two instead. But I won’t do that,” he told her magnanimously. “Because, hey, that’s just the kind of guy I am.”

In response to his assertion—or whatever all those words strung together had been—all Sara could manage was an impatient expulsion of air, followed by a softly muttered “Oh, please.”

Shane didn’t seem put off by her reply, however, because his pompous expression grew even more arrogant. For a moment, he only gazed at her in silence. Then he must have been struck by something, because he heaved himself over onto all fours and began to crawl slowly—intently—across the few feet of flooring that separated them.

For some reason, watching him approach her in such a way made Sara feel as if she had become some small prey who was caught in the hypnotic glower of a fierce predator. Try as she might to make herself move—or even to make herself look away, to break that hypnosis—she couldn’t budge. Not that there was anywhere for her to go, she reminded herself. But she didn’t have to just sit there, gazing back at him, as if she were completely under his spell, did she? She wasn’t defenseless, after all. Well, not normally. With Shane drawing nearer, however, she suddenly felt as if she hadn’t a grain of self-preservation left inside her.

And then he was right beside her, seating himself as close to her as he could without actually touching her. And although the last thing she needed or wanted at that moment
was to be touched by Shane, she was oddly disappointed that he left even an infinitesimal amount of space between them. Until he leaned forward, very nearly touching her, the heat of his body mingling with her own. Until, with his mouth dangerously close to her ear, he murmured, very softly, “Please what?”

The words were warm and damp against her face, and an equally warm, damp sensation meandered through Sara at hearing them. “I…I…I don’t know…what you…what you mean,” she stammered, her own voice a scant whisper.

He didn’t move an inch, neither forward nor back, and his breath was torrid against her neck when he replied, as softly as before, “You said, ‘Oh, please.’ And I was wondering what you were saying ‘please’ for. I mean, if you’re asking what I think you are, believe me, Sara, you don’t have to ask politely. You don’t have to say, ‘please.’ In fact,” he continued in that same sweltering, seductive voice, leaning so close now that she fancied she could actually feel his mouth caressing her ear oh so very softly, “in fact, you don’t have to ask at all.”

What little air was left in her lungs suddenly left her in a quick, quiet
whoosh.
Her mouth went dry, her throat constricted and every cell in her body flared with a need and a hunger unlike any she had ever known.
Need,
she then mimicked to herself.
Hunger.
What common little words those were for what she was feeling in that moment.
Urgency
was more like it. Or
craving.
Because suddenly Sara felt as if she couldn’t make it through another moment of her life without having Shane touch her. Pull her close. Kiss her. Make love to her.

Her response made no sense. Sara had never felt a need or a hunger for any man, and certainly not an urgency or craving. It was why she was still untutored in the actual mechanics of lovemaking. Oh, she knew what went on between a man and a woman when they wanted each other, to be sure. But she’d never felt compelled to explore the activity herself. She had no moral or social objection to
premarital sex—she’d simply never met a man who’d made her
want
to have sex, any more than she’d met a man who’d made her entertain the possibility of marriage. Simply put, Sara didn’t want to be married at this point in her life, and she didn’t want to be sexually involved. So she wasn’t. And she was far too pragmatic a person to offer herself up to the likeliest candidate for her deflowering just because she was old enough, or mature enough, or whatever enough, to do it.

Besides, her studies had always come first. As did planning for her career that would follow. She’d had boyfriends in the past, certainly. But none of them had meant enough to her to make her feel as if she wanted to surrender—everything—to them.

Shane Cordello did, though.

In one scant instant, just by his nearness and a few softly uttered words, he made her want to give him all of those things that she had kept to herself for so long now. He made her want to abandon everything except him and the way he made her feel, made her want to forget all about her studies, her career, her family, their current state of captivity…

Oh, God, their current state of captivity! How in heaven’s name could she have forgotten
that?

Hastily, she pushed herself sideways, away from Shane, until a good foot of space separated them. Only then was she able to breathe again. Only then was she able to think clearly again. Only then could she remind herself that this was
not
the place to fall in love, and Shane was
not
the kind of man to fall in—

Oh, no, no, no, no, no, Sara,
she halted herself frantically.
Watch how you choose your words.

Love
had nothing to do with any of this. What she was experiencing was a simple by-product of a stressful, threatening situation. Every instinct she had was on overdrive due to her present circumstances, her sexual ones right up there with her survival ones. Her response to Shane was
purely physical, she told herself. Utterly chemical. There was nothing emotional about it. Nothing.

She heard him chuckle low again, and snapped her head around to look at him. “What’s so funny?” she asked.

But he only chuckled harder in response. “You know, you really don’t play this game fairly at all,” he said. “Because you keep asking questions, even though your turn was up a long time ago.”

Sara bit back a growl. “Fine,” she bit off roughly. “Then ask your bloody questions so I can have a turn again. You have six left.”

He opened his mouth as if he intended to contradict her, but something in her expression must have made him reconsider, because he only grinned that maddeningly smug grin again and nodded. “Okay,” he said, “number five.” He hesitated before asking it, however, eyeing her with much speculation, evidently giving the question much thought before speaking it. Finally, though, he asked, “What’s your major?”

“Well, it isn’t boys,” she replied coolly.

“That I could tell.”

“Not that I couldn’t graduate with highest honors there if I wanted to,” she felt compelled to add. Probably because of the bland expression on his face that seemed to challenge her for some reason.

“Hey, I don’t doubt that for a moment,” he assured her.

She strove for a jesting smile that somehow didn’t feel any more convincing than it probably looked. “Actually, if I tell you my major, I’ll have to kill you,” she quipped.

Shane glanced first left, and then right, then met her gaze levelly once again. “Gee, forgive me if I don’t take the threat all that seriously. You might have noticed that I’m already kind of in dire straits here.”

Sara expelled a soft sound of resolution. She might as well tell him the truth. It wasn’t any big secret, really, not her studies. Someday the career she intended to undertake would be very hush-hush and mysterious, but there were
no hard-and-fast rules about her university studies. Besides, there was still a good chance neither of them would make it out of this thing alive, making anything they said or did to each other completely irrelevant. At least to outward appearances.