Princess in the Iron Mask - By Victoria Parker Page 0,7

as violently as her voice. Please just go.

‘You ask me the impossible, Your Royal Highness,’ he replied in that delicious tone that licked at her senses like a hungry cat. Which only made her hate him even more.

She slapped the paper atop the stainless steel and braced her arms on the squared edge.

Trust her parents to send in the big guns. Lucas Garcia was proving to be as immovable as Big Ben, and she could hear the tick, tick of the clock. Don’t be ridiculous. They’ve sent for you before. You can get rid of this guy just as easily.

Their last threat had been the abolition of her living funds. ‘Go ahead,’ she’d told them, and promptly moved out of her swanky three-bedroom apartment on the banks of the River Thames. The bluff had backfired spectacularly, because the vast space lay empty to this day. But she loved her kitsch one-bed studio because it was hers alone, flying the flag of her hard-won independence.

Stiffening her spine, she turned in time to see Lucas finger his over-long hair back from his forehead and her insides liquefied. Must be a chemical reaction linked to irate frustration.

‘And please don’t call me, Your Royal whatever. I know perfectly well what you’re doing. Your tactics won’t work with me.’

‘Regardless of your preference, that is your title,’ he said, his voice toughened like steel, brow etched with exasperation. ‘When will you acknowledge the fact and behave accordingly?’

‘Behave? I’ve always been the upstanding daughter, Mr Garcia. I work hard and, more importantly, I make no ripples that will reach Arunthian shores to embarrass or disgrace.’ An implausible feat for Claudia, but he didn’t need to know that.

The dark glower he fired her way said he was far from impressed.

‘And I have two sisters,’ she said, suppressing any girlhood nostalgia and focusing instead on the little she’d gleaned of them by searching their names on the internet. Just to see if they were well...happy. If the thousands of glamorous photographs and articles were anything to go by they were more than well. They were true royalty in every way. ‘My parents don’t need me.’ Which was just as well because the mere notion of life at the palace, evermore in the public eye, made her skin crawl as if the venom of a scorpion pulsed through her veins.

‘Good grief, I’m as far away from being a princess as you are from being Prince Charming!’

Lucas coughed around a closed fist, then uncurled his long fingers to stroke his jaw. ‘I’ve noticed,’ he said, searching her face as if looking for an answer to the question hovering in the air.

Why? Let him come to his own conclusions, she mused. Claudia owed him nothing.

In thinking mode his face almost softened, and for the first time she noticed beautiful long thick lashes surrounded eyes so dark, so intense, they glittered like sapphires.

‘Then how would you like to be addressed?’ he asked.

Claudia frowned, blinking over and over, scrolling through the past few minutes of conversation, slightly disturbed by his silky intonation.

‘Just Claudia is fine,’ she said warily.

‘Very well, Just Claudia.’

Oh. My. Giddy. Aunt. Something hot and sultry splashed through her midsection. His accent thickened when he said her name. His full mouth formed a perfect O as if he’d kissed it past his lips: Cllowtia.

Kissed it past his lips?

She gave her head a quick shake. Twenty minutes in his company and she’d lost hundreds of brain cells, waxing poetical. This was what happened when a romance novel thrust itself into her hands during a spontaneous visit to the charity bookshop at St Andrews.

Claudia preferred to base her life on facts and scientific evidence.

And the fact was Lucas Garcia wouldn’t give her a second glance if he passed her in the street. The idea of mutual attraction was laughable. She wasn’t only socially inept but also the strangest-looking creature on earth. They were quite literally worlds apart. Or they would be as soon as she got rid of him.

From the way his long blunt fingers trailed down the lapel of his charcoal single-breasted jacket and deftly unpopped the button, it didn’t look as if he felt the need to go any time soon.

Mid-exasperated sigh, the air locked in her throat as he rolled his broad shoulders, revealing a wide panel of crisp white shirt stretched taut over his rock-solid physique, and strolled over to where her qualifications hung on the wall, filling the white expanse.

‘I understand you are a biochemist?’

Claudia’s eyes narrowed on his