Princess in the Iron Mask - By Victoria Parker Page 0,12

stand tall, she inhaled a lung full of fortifying air, lifted her chin, raised her hand to knock once, twice...and walked through Ryan Tate’s door.

‘Claudia, my girl. Good news, aye?’

After years of honing her brave face, Claudia slipped behind her iron mask and smiled.

* * *

Sweat pierced the base of his spine as Lucas stalked the lab, focusing on breathing and formulating a new plan. As long as it involved getting out of this white box he’d be slightly mollified. Claudia might prefer her small hideaway, but he required vast open space to feel alive.

It hadn’t escaped him that when the prickly Princess had been in the room he’d been less aware of the enclosure. Probably because you only had eyes for her. Lucas growled, satisfying himself that it was more a case of distraction.

Was she pleading with Tate to give her more time to find the money elsewhere? Dios she was the most awkward, feisty, self-centred, gorgeous woman he’d ever met.

She also despised him with a passion. The disgust in her eyes had almost floored him. Only a fool would have walked in here without the necessary weapons at his disposal. God knew he’d have preferred to reach some kind of compromise, but she was recklessly tenacious and ignoble at best.

Yet as soon as he’d revealed his tactical strategy his stomach had ached as if she’d punched him in the guts. How did she manage to unearth emotion from him? He knew she selfishly pursued her own agenda. Knew she’d given him no choice but to push her. It was bewildering. Unnerving. Inappropriate and unwelcome. For Lucas had buried his emotions twenty years ago, and that, he thought, hardening his heart, was the way they must stay.

Glancing down at his hands, he curled his fingers into his palms. He could still feel her; he’d swear it. Warm, toned, yet lusciously soft. And her scent—Dios, she smelled of summer. Warm notes of vanilla blossom and honey. Up close she was impossibly more beautiful, and as he’d held her he’d willed her to open her eyes. But the hate had still been there and she could not bear to look at him. Which was good—great, fantastic. Being likable was not in his job description. Getting her home, however, was.

‘Why are you still here?’

His stomach flinched but he managed to become fixated on her fascinating collection of test tubes. It was her voice: snippily sexy beyond belief. Why a schoolmarm tone should flick his switch he’d never know. He’d never had a teacher in his life. Children from the slums were not afforded such privileges. No books, no paper nor pens to draw with. Only walls stained with tobacco, bloodied fists and a penknife beyond decay.

‘A trip to hell was unappealing,’ he replied thickly, knowingly. He’d been there plenty of times, after all. ‘And, with the greatest will in the world, I cannot deliver a package I do not have in my possession.’

‘Quite.’

Lucas swivelled on his heels in time to see her arch one dark brow, her eyes firing with newfound determination. And his chest seized with such force his lungs pinched with deprivation.

‘You knew I’d come back, didn’t you?’ she asked.

‘Let’s just say I had faith you would come to your senses.’ While she’d virtually admitted that she used her work as a shield to hide from her parents, he believed she loved her job. If he could admire her for anything, it was the strength of her dedication. What he struggled to comprehend was why she couldn’t extend that devotion to her role in Arunthia. He wanted to ask her, to try to understand. But the longer he stood here, skirting quicksand, the more entrenched he became.

Pouting her luscious lips, she canted her head like an inquisitive meerkat. ‘I can’t work out whether you’re extremely diplomatic or downright arrogant.’

‘I shall leave that for you to decide.’

She walked farther into the room, snatched a pair of spectacles from a plastic tub on the bench, and pushed them up her pert nose. With steel in her spine, her head high in a model-type pose, Lucas was smacked with a vision: Claudia Verbault, strutting down a catwalk, wearing a ruffled blouse and a tweed skirt, sucking on a pencil. Seductively intellectual.

Blood pooled in his groin and his mouth turned as dry as Arunthian dirt. He had to drench his lips with moisture in order to speak.

‘I have a jet on stand-by. We’ll leave the country within two hours.’ Lucas could have her home