The Fall of Lucas Kendrick by Kay Hooper Page B

shatter. And sometimes they were much taller standing on solid ground.
    Kyle watched him across the room, barely hearing the conversations all around her. He looked almost unnervingly formal in the black tuxedo, but the slip of red cummerbund showing just above the button of his jacket looked piratical. His silvery hair gleamed in the bright light of the huge salon, where most of the guests had gathered after dinner. His handsome face was inclined politely as he listened to the woman clutching his arm.
    “That woman,” Raven murmured suddenly in Kyle’s ear, “is a piranha with a full set of teeth!”
    Kyle sipped her drink, then said, “Uh-huh. I saw Her Highness make a dead set at Josh, What’d you say to her? The venom in the lookshe sent you later would have killed ten cobras.”
    “What I said—”
    “What she said,” Josh said, interrupting smoothly as he appeared beside them, “was in Spanish, thank heaven. Since Rome looked blank, I gather he doesn’t understand the language.”
    Kyle shook her head. “He’s tone-deaf and says that makes it impossible for him to speak or understand anything but English. What
did
Raven say to her?”
    “You’re too young to hear it.” Josh looked reflective. “I’m too young, in fact.”
    “You speak Spanish?” Kyle asked him curiously.
    “He speaks it like a native,” Raven told her. “So do I. Her Highness, however, does not.”
    Mildly Josh said, “She claims to be a reincarnated member of the Aztec race, remember? Not necessarily Spanish in this life or familiar with the conquistadores in her previous one.”
    “But she understood you?” Kyle asked.
    “Oh, she understood,” Raven smiled gently. “It was very basic, gutter Spanish. And she responded in kind, but her retort was halting, mispronounced, and entirely too formally constructed. She’s had lessons—and recently.”
    Josh looked up to see Lucas and Princess Zamara approaching and murmured, “Darling, please restrain yourself, all right? We don’t want to get thrown out of here.”
    Raven slipped her arm through his and said softly, “Of course, darling. But if she starts stroking your lapel again, I’m going to draw blood.”
    Kyle nearly laughed, but her humor fled when she looked into malicious black eyes.
    “Princess” Zamara was a woman in her early thirties—perhaps. And there seemed little question that Latin blood of some kind ran in her veins. Apart from those reasonable assumptions, any certainty about her background and intentions was pretty much a matter for speculation.
    She was five-foot-nothing and teetering onsix-inch spike heels to make up for the lack of height, which gave her a dandy excuse to cling to the arm of any man she could latch on to—if she needed an excuse, which quite obviously she did not. Rome’s guests were dressed formally, and Zamara was showing off her best, which tonight was a glittering silver sheath with a neckline that plunged all the way to her navel and a slit up the front of the tight skirt that nearly met the neckline. Her black hair was dressed in a Gypsy-wild mass of long curls; she wore huge teardrop emeralds in her earlobes, while a third dangled between her voluptuous breasts; and silver bangles dressed each wrist in noisy profusion.
    There was an earthy sexuality about the woman, an aura of animal passion that was easily noticed even by the women in the room. While the men generally seemed to be attracted in varying degrees to Zamara, every one of the women was suspicious of an accent that came and went, and a nasty feline habit of stroking male lapels.
    Kyle, watching the supposed royal personage advancing toward her on Lucas’s arm, examined her own feelings and found no jealousy there. And she didn’t feel threatened by the other woman, except in a very basic way. She had the notion that Zamara was more dangerous to life and limb than to matters of the heart.
    She hadn’t had the doubtful pleasure of being introduced to the