Princess in the Iron Mask by Victoria Parker Page A

book.
    Did I do it right?
    Lucas scrubbed his hands over his face. Trust Claudia to pour every ounce of delectable effort into her first kiss and succeed in blowing his mind.
    What the hell had he been thinking, kissing her in the first place? He hadn’t been thinking. Not with the correct head anyway. With one forbidden touch he’d lost control. Dios, he should never have laid a finger on her. But she’d been aching, hurting. The pain in her eyes had thrown him.
    Practically across the corridor.
    Holding her—her scent a warm shroud, her flesh heating his blood, her touch a sensual deluge—resistance had become futile.
    And if he thought Claudia had been lost in the moment she’d soon murdered the notion, squashing his ego like a bug underfoot. No, no, no —she’d just wanted to try it! Madre de Dios, what was he? One of her experiments? And his kiss apparently was fine. She’d used the most insipid word in the universe. To describe him. While he’d sunk deeper into the abyss with every tentative stroke of her tongue.
    If one kiss could devour his body and mind, what kind of destruction could she cause with her clothes off? He was a man who preferred a predictable low-level and controllable response to a woman. Yet he was hard just thinking about sinking into her sensational body—as ludicrous and impossible as it was.
    Jacket discarded, she still wore the fawn silk shirt and figure-hugging trousers of earlier, and he swallowed around a bullet-clogged barrel. His hands were imprinted with her flesh, firm and lush, and his eyes dipped to her breasts, remembering the heavy weight of their perfection.
    Catching a groan halfway up his throat, Lucas tore his eyes away, tension building in his chest as he became more resentful of her powerful allure. Not only was she his current mission, he lived his life free of encumbrance and always would. To be in thrall to his desires, to any kind of emotion, was like begging for an assassin’s bullet: it made you weak. So he worked, he fought for everything he believed in—justice, honour, duty—the only way he knew how. Hollow to the core.
    Claudia—any woman, for that matter—deserved far more than an empty shell of a man.
    Lost in thought, he mechanically ate lunch. Claudia declined anything bar a glass of sparkling water, and the silence stretched to breaking point.
    Until the smack and skid of a glossy magazine on the table in front of him broke through the lull.
    ‘What...?’ She took a deep breath. ‘What is this, Lucas?’
    Hands flat to the table, Claudia leaned forward, and he ordered his eyes not to dip to the gaping V of her shirt and the heaving swell of smooth golden skin. Skin he could kiss and lick and suck for hours, until the woman forgot her own name and begged him to—
    ‘A magazine,’ he said, as fierce as the erection pushing against his zipper.
    ‘Funny how you’ve never bothered to tell me the real reason my parents want me back.’
    He shifted slightly, grateful for the mention of her parents. His promise. Her duty. ‘They wish to see you. That is the true reason.’
    ‘No. They want to showcase their perfect family to the world for the event of the decade.’ Her trembling fingers curled into fists in front of him, and a quiver seeped through her voice. ‘A party, Lucas?’
    ‘What is so bad about a party?’
    ‘They want a princess and I’m no longer that person. I can’t be what they want. You told me—’
    ‘You can be anyone you want to be. I have seen enough versions of Claudia in the past twenty-four hours to convince me of that.’
    The ice maiden, the seductive intellectual, a Mother Teresa, and glimpses of a vulnerability that cut him to the core. Not forgetting the scientist who wanted scoring on a kiss. Dios, little wonder he didn’t know what he was about in her company. She did not make sense.
    His stomach dipped in time with the plane. ‘Buckle up, Princess.’
    She scrambled onto the seat beside him, her fraying