Ayoola_vta2_4

'Oh, don't worry, ' Massimo said, with a disdainful curl of his lips.
'I haven't come here for sex. '


'Oh? Then why have you come here?'

Toyin tilted her chin in a defiant gesture and suddenly Massimo wondered how he could have been so dense. Of course she was someone.... A diamond in the rough ~ that had been his initial reaction on seeing her, and he had been right. 

And when he stopped to think about it her high-born status had been apparent in every gesture she made. It had been there in the way she moved and the way she walked. In her flawless skin and heart-shaped face and in the thick, lustrous bounce of her hair. 

She was a princess. A runaway virgin princess who had chosen him as her first lover.

' I'm still trying to get my head around what happened last night, ' he said.

VIRGIN PRINCESS AND THE BILLIONAIRE: friends with benefits

A setting designed to show the palace at its most splen-

did. Old gold and cream roses were massed into

glittering crystal vases and tall gold candles flickered

all the way along the centre of the table. It felt like a

jolt to be back amid all this lavish and very obvious

luxury again and Toyin tried to shake off the feeling

of being on show. She was next to Drake, who she

could tell was making a big effort to be nice to her.

She kept expecting him to berate her for her impetu-

osity in running away, but instead he asked her about

life at Poonbarra- and it was all she could do to keep

the wistfulness from her voice. And she detected an

undeniable sense of relief in his attitude towards her.

Was the King glad that his troublesome little sister

was soon to be off his hands at last passed from the

care of one powerful man to another?

Massimo was seated next to Ruth with the Antiochda Prime Minister on the other side. Toyin

watched as he charmed both her little sister and the

high-ranking politician who had recently approved

an extension to the country's world-famous oceano-

graphic museum. Who knew Massimo was such an expert

on marine science, or that he'd once scuba-dived in

the Galapagos? She sat and listened as he made her

sister giggle. Over the top of her golden goblet she

saw him smile at something the premier had said and

Toyin's heart began to pound beneath the delicate

material of her silk-satin dress.

sitting there, but she thought he also seemed...distant.

There were no meaningful Jokes slanted at her from

across the wide expanse of the table.

sImile. And whose fault was that? Had he noticed her

lack of response earlier, or had he been so caught up in his own passion that he hadn't noticed?

She wondered if she should have faked an orgasm, yet some-

thing deep inside her bulked at the thought of doing

that-because wasn't this relationship of theirs sup-

Except it didn't feel so honest right then. It felt

as if she was hiding stuff away from him. As if she

knew it would appall him to realise the direction of

It was no better when the evening broke up and

they were each assigned a servant to take them to

their separate suites. Massimo gave her only the briefest

of kisses before they parted but what else could he

do in front of all those silent, watching faces?

She slid between the cool sheets, wondering if he

would steal through the vast palace to find her, so

that they could try to make right that awkward one-

sided coupling of earlier. She stared up at the ceil-

ing, realising that this was the first night they'd spent

apart since that moonlit seduction in the swimming

pool. Were these cold and gilded walls responsible for

deadening her physical response to her lover, or was

it that a lifetime of conditioning was hard to throw

Eventually she fell into a fitful sleep, thinking

about the sparkling engagement ring which Massimo

would slide on her finger on the first day of the new

And she couldn't shake off the thought that it

Chapter Twenty eight