Wanted: Royal Wife and Mother

‘And Matty?’ she whispered. For five years… every minute of every day he’d stayed in her heart. What had been happening to him?

But Rafael was smiling. Matty had the three slices even now, but there’d been a few crumbs scattered in the process. He was carefully collecting them, neatening the plates before he presented his offering to the adults.

‘Matty’s been luckier than he might have been,’ Rafael told her. ‘Kass couldn’t be bothered with him and abandoned him to the nursery. My mother had been in the US with me for the few weeks while you were at the castle—she knew nothing about you, and as far as she was concerned the reports about you were true—but when she returned there was a new baby. He had no mother and a father who didn’t care. My mother loves him to bits. Every summer when Kass closed the palace and disappeared to the gambling dens in Monaco or the South of France, she brought him to New York to stay with me. Kass didn’t care.’ He smiled. ‘My mother cares, though. Which is where I come into the picture.’

There were too many people. There was too much information. ‘My head hurts,’ she managed.

‘I imagine it must,’ he said and smiled again, a gentle smile of sympathy that, had she not been too winded to think past Matty, might have given her pause. It was some smile.

‘My mother took Kass’s word for what sort of woman you were,’ he said. ‘We knew Kass had married to disoblige his father and that he’d married a…well, that he’d married someone really unsuitable seemed entirely probable. When Kass told the world how appalling you were he was believed—simply because to marry someone appalling was what he’d declared he’d do. You disappeared. The lie remained. Then, when Kass died, his secretary finally told me what really happened.

‘Crater…’

‘You remember Crater?’

‘Yes.’ All too well. An elderly palace official— the Secretary of State—with an armful of official documents, clearly spelling out her future. He’d sounded sympathetic but implacable. Telling her she had no rights to her son. Showing her the wording of the documents she’d signed in a romantic haze, never believing there could be any cause to act on. Telling her she had no recourse but to leave.

‘He’s felt appalling for five years,’ Rafael told her. ‘He said that six years ago Kass left the castle, furious with his father, and met you working on site on an archaeological dig. He said you were pretty and shy and Kass almost literally swept you off your feet. He could be the most charming man alive, my cousin Kass. Anyway, as far as Kass was concerned you fitted the bill. You were a nobody. You had no family. He married you out of hand, settled you in France and made you pregnant. Only then, of course, his father died. Kass was stuck with a wife he didn’t need or want. So he simply paid his henchmen to dig up dirt on you—make it up, it now seems. Crater had doubts—he was the only one who’d met you before you were married when Kass had called on him to draw up the marriage documents—but there was little he could do. The prenuptial contracts were watertight and you were gone before he could investigate further.’

‘Yes…’ She remembered it every minute of her life. A paid nanny holding the baby—her baby. Matty had been four weeks old. Kass, implacable, scornful, moving on.

‘I’m cancelling your visa this minute, you stupid cow. You won’t be permitted to stay. Stop snivelling. You’ll get an allowance. You’re set up for life, so move on.’

She’d been so alone. There had been a castle full of paid servants but there had been no one to help her. She remembered Crater—a silver-haired, elderly man who’d been gentle enough with her—but he hadn’t helped her, and no one else had as much as smiled at her.

She had to go, so leave she had. And that had been that. She’d gone back to France for a while, hoping against hope there’d be a loophole that would allow her access to her little son. She’d talked to lawyers. She’d pleaded with lawyers, so many lawyers her head spun, but opinion had all been with Kass. She could never return to Alp de Ciel. She had no rights at all.

She’d lost her son.

Finally, when the fuss had died—when the press had stopped looking for her—she’d returned to Australia. She’d applied for the job here under her mother’s maiden name.

She’d never touched a cent of royal money. She’d rather have died.

And now here he was. Her son. Five years old and she knew nothing of him.

And Matty? What had he been told of his mother?

‘What do you know about me?’ she asked the little boy, while the big man with the gentle eyes looked at her with sympathy.

‘My father said you were a whore,’ Matty said matter-of-factly as he carried over the plates, obviously not knowing what the word meant. ‘But Aunt Laura and Uncle Rafael have now told me that you’re a nice lady who digs old things out of the ground and finds out about the people who owned them. Aunt Laura says that you’re an arch…an archaeologist.’

‘I am,’ she said softly, wonderingly.

‘My mother and I have told Matty as much of the truth as we know,’ Rafael told her. The cake plates were in front of them now, and they were seated round the table almost like a family. The fire crackled in the old wood-stove. The rain pattered on the roof outside and the whole scene was so domestic it made Kelly feel she’d been picked up and transported to another world.

‘Kellyn, my mother and I would like you to return,’ Rafael said, so gently that she blinked. Her weird little bubble burst and she couldn’t catch hold of the fragments.

‘Return?’

‘To Alp de Ciel.’

‘You have to be kidding.’ But she couldn’t take her eyes from Matty.

‘Mathieu is Crown Prince of Alp de Ciel.’

She couldn’t take this in. ‘I…I guess.’

‘I’m Prince Regent until he comes of age.’

‘Congratulations.’ It sounded absurd. Nothing in life had prepared her for this. Matty was calmly sitting across the table eating chocolate cake, watching her closely with wide brown eyes that were…hers, she thought, suddenly fighting an almost irresistible urge to laugh. Hysteria was very, very close.

Matty was watching her as she was watching him. Maybe…maybe he even wanted a mother. He wanted her?

This was her baby. She longed with every fibre of her being to take him in her arms and hug him as she’d dreamed of holding him for these last five years. But this was a self-contained little person who’d been brought up in circumstances of which she knew nothing. To have an unknown woman—even if it had been explained who she was—hugging and sobbing, she knew instinctively it would drive him away.

‘I’ll never go back to Alp de Ciel,’ she whispered but she knew it was a lie the moment she said it. She’d left the little principality shattered. To go back… To go back to her son… Her little son who was looking at her with equal amounts of hope and fear?

‘It would be very different now,’ Rafael said. ‘You’d be returning as the mother of the Crown Prince. You’d be accepted in all honour.’

‘You know what was said of me?’

‘Kass said it over and over, of all his women,’ Rafael said. ‘The people stopped believing Kass a long time ago.’

‘Kass was Matty’s father,’ she said with an urgent glance at Matty, but Rafael shook his head.

‘Matty hardly knew his father. Matty, can you remember the last time you saw Prince Kass?’

‘At Christmas?’ Matty said, sounding doubtful. ‘With the lady in the really pointy shoes. I saw his picture in the paper when he was dead. Aunt Laura said we should feel sad so I did. May I have some more chocolate cake, please? It’s very good.’

‘Certainly you can,’ Kelly whispered. ‘But Kass…Kass said he intended to raise him himself.’

‘Kass intended nothing but his own pleasure,’ Rafael said roughly. ‘The people knew that. There’s little regret at the accident that killed him.’

‘Oh, Matty,’ Kelly whispered, and the little boy looked up at her and calmly met her gaze.

‘Ellen and Marguerite say I should still be sad because my papa is dead,’ he said. ‘But it’s very hard to stay sad. My tortoise, Hermione, died at Christmas. I was very sad when Hermione died so when I think of Papa I try and think of Hermione.’

‘Who are Ellen and Marguerite?’

‘They’re my friends. Ellen makes my bed and cleans my room. Marguerite takes me for walks. Marguerite is married to Tony who works in the garden. Tony gives me rides in his wheelbarrow. He helped me to bury Hermione and we planted a rhod…a rhododendron on top of her.’

He went back to cutting cake. Rafael watched her for a while as she watched her son.

‘So you’re in charge?’ she managed at last.

‘Unfortunately, yes.’

‘Unfortunately?’

She gazed across the table at his hands. They were big and strong and work-stained. Vaguely she remembered Kass’s hands. A prince’s hands. Long and lean and smooth as silk.

Rafael’s thumb was missing half a nail and was carrying the remains of an angry, green-purple bruise.

‘What do you do for a living?’ she asked. ‘When…when you’re not a Prince Regent.’

‘I invent toys. And make ’em.’

It was so out of left field that she blinked.

‘Toys?’

‘I design them from the ground up,’ he said, sounding cheerful for a moment. ‘My company distributes worldwide.’

‘Uncle Rafael makes Robo-Craft,’ Matty volunteered with such pride in his voice that Kelly knew this was a very important part of her small son’s world.

‘Robo-Craft,’ she repeated, and even Kelly, cloistered away in her historical world, was impressed. She knew it.

Robo-Craft was a construction kit, where each part except the motor was crafted individually in wood. One could give a set of ten pieces to a four-year-old, plus the tiny mechanism that went with it, and watch the child achieve a construction that worked. It could be a tiny carousel if the blocks were placed above the mechanism, or a weird creature that moved in crazy ways if the mechanism was in contact with the floor. The motor was absurdly strong, so inventions could be as big as desired. As kids grew older they could expand their sets to make wonderful inventions of their own, fashioning their own pieces to fit. Robo-Craft had been written up as a return to the tool-shed, encouraging boys and girls alike to attack plywood with handsaws and paint.

‘They say it encourages kids to be kids again,’ Kelly whispered, awed. ‘Like building cubby houses.’

‘Uncle Rafael helped me build a cubby house in the palace garden,’ Matty volunteered. ‘We did it just before we left.’

‘So you do spend time in the castle?’ she asked him. She was finding it so hard to look at anything that wasn’t Matty, yet Rafael’s presence was somehow…intriguing? Unable to be ignored.

‘I’ve been there since Kass died.’

‘But not before.’

‘My mother still lives in the dower house. I didn’t see eye to eye with Kass or his father and left the country as soon as I was able, but my mother…well, the memories of her life there with my father are a pretty strong hold. And then there’s Matty. She loves him.’

So it seemed that at least her little son had been loved. Her nightmares of the last five years had been impersonal nannies, paid carers, no love at all. But thanks to this man’s mother… And now thanks to this man…

‘What do I do now?’ Kelly whispered, and Rafael looked at her with sympathy.

‘Get to know your son.’

‘But…why?’

‘Kelly, my mother and I have talked this through. Yes, Matty’s the Crown Prince of Alp de Ciel, but you’re his mother. What happens now is up to you. Even if you insist he stay here until he’s of an age to make up his mind…no matter what the lawyers say, we’ve decided it’s your right to make that decision. You’re his mother again, Kellyn. Starting now.’

CHAPTER TWO

TO SAY Kelly was stunned would be an understatement. She was blown away. For five years she had dreamed of this moment—of this time when she’d be with her son again. But she’d never imagined it could be like this.

It was ordinary. Domestic. World-shattering.

‘Why don’t you take a bath and get some dry clothes on?’ Rafael suggested, and the move between world-shattering and ordinary seemed almost shocking.

‘Excuse me?’

‘You’re wet through,’ he said. ‘You’ve been shivering since we met you, and it’s not just shock. You’ve been ill. You shouldn’t stay wet. Matty and I aren’t going anywhere. We’ll stay here and eat your chocolate cake and wait for you.’

‘But…where are you staying?’

‘We have a place booked in town,’ he said. ‘But there are things we need to discuss before we leave. Go take your bath and we’ll talk afterwards.’

She had no choice but to agree. Her head wasn’t working for her. If he’d told her to walk the plank she might calmly have done it right now.

And she couldn’t stop shivering.

So she left them and ran a bath, thinking she’d dip in and out and return to them fast. But when she sank into the hot water her body reacted with a weird lethargy that kept her right where she was.

She had no shower—just this lovely deep bath tub. The water pressure was great, which meant that by the time she’d fumbled through getting her clothes off the bath was filled. The water enveloped her, cocooned her, deepening the trance-like state she’d felt ever since she’d seen Matty.

She could hear them talking through the door.

‘She makes very good cake.’ That was Matty. As a compliment it was just about the loveliest thing she could imagine. Her grandmother had given her the chocolate cake recipe. Her son was eating her grandma’s chocolate cake.

‘I think your mama is a very clever lady.’ That was Rafael. His compliment didn’t give her the same kind of tingle. She thought of the lovely things Kass had said to her when he’d wanted to marry her, and she still cringed that she’d believed him. This man was a de Boutaine. Every sense in her body was screaming beware.

‘Why is she clever?’ Matty asked.

‘She’s an archaeologist and a historian. Archaeologists need to be clever.’

‘Why?’

‘They have to figure out…how old things are. Stuff like that.’

‘Was that why she was at our castle? Trying to figure out how old it is?’

‘I guess.’

‘It’s five hundred and sixty-three years old,’ Matty said. ‘Crater told me. It’s in a book. Mama could have just read the book.’

‘People like your mama would have written the book. She could have worked it out. Maybe you could ask her how.’

‘She does make good cake,’ Matty said and Kelly slid deeper into the hot water and felt as if she’d died and gone to heaven.

What did they want? Where would she take things from here? No matter. For this moment nothing mattered but that her son was sitting by her kitchen fire eating her grandma’s cake.

She hadn’t taken dry clothes into the bathroom. This was a tiny cottage and her bathroom led straight off the kitchen. She hadn’t been thinking, and once she was scrubbed dry, pinkly warm, wrapped in her big, fuzzy bathrobe and matching pink slippers she kept in the bathroom permanently and with her hair wrapped in a towel, she felt absurdly self-conscious about facing them again.

There was hardly a back route from bathroom to bedroom unless she dived out of the window. Face them she must, so she opened the door and they both turned and smiled.

They’d been setting the table. There were plates and spoons and knives in three settings. Rafael had cut the bread on the sideboard. The sense of domesticity was almost overwhelming.

‘That’s much better,’ he said approvingly, his dark eyes checking her from the fluffy slippers up.

‘You look pretty,’ Matty said and then amended his statement. ‘Comfy pretty. Not like the ladies my papa brought to the castle.’

She flushed.

‘You’re pink,’ Matty said, and she flushed some more.

‘I guess the water was too hot.’

‘At least you’re warm,’ Rafael said. ‘Sit down and eat. I know we’ve done this the wrong way round—cake before soup—but it does seem sensible to eat. That is, if you don’t mind sharing.’

‘I…no, of course I don’t mind. But it’s all I’ve got.’

‘Until next pay day?’ he asked, teasing, and she flushed even more. Drat her stupid habit of blushing. Though, come to think of it, she hadn’t blushed for a very long time.

‘I meant soup and toast is all there is.’

‘After a hard day down the gold-mines? It’s hardly workman’s fare.’

‘I need to get dressed,’ she said.

‘You’re not hungry?’

She was hungry. She’d fiddled with her cake, not able to pay it any attention. Now she was suddenly aware that she was ravenous.

But to sit in her bathrobe…

‘We’re jet lagged,’ Rafael said, seeing her indecision. ‘We need to get some sleep pretty soon, but this soup smells so good we’d love to share. If you don’t mind eating now.’

She gave up. Thinking was just too hard. ‘Fine.’

‘Great,’ he said.

‘We can’t find your toaster,’ Matty told her, moving right on to important matters.

‘I make my toast with the fire.’

‘How?’

Okay. She was dressed in a bathrobe and fluffy slippers and nothing else. She was entertaining the Prince Regent and the Crown Prince of Alp de Ciel in her kitchen. A girl just had to gather her wits and teach them how to make toast.

She tied another knot—firmly—in the front of her bathrobe, flipped open the fire door and produced a toasting fork. She pulled a chair up to the stove, lifted Matty on to it—she couldn’t believe she did that—she just lifted him on to the chair as if it were the most natural thing in the world—she arranged a piece of bread on the toasting fork and set him to work.

It was the first time she’d touched him. She felt breathless.

‘Wow,’ Matty breathed and she smiled, and Matty turned to see if Rafael was smiling too, and so did Kelly and suddenly she didn’t feel like breathing.

It was the shock, she told herself. Not the smile. Not.

It was his cousin’s smile. The de Boutaine smile.

She remembered almost every detail of Kass’s courtship. One moment she’d been part of a team excavating in the palace grounds; the next she’d looked up and Kass had been watching her. He had been on his great, black stallion.

He’d been just what a prince ought to look like—tall and dark and heart-stoppingly handsome, with a dangerous glint behind his stunning smile. And his horse… She’d spent half her childhood with thoroughbreds but the stallion had made her gasp. The combination, prince and stallion, had been enough to change her world.

‘Cinderella,’ he murmured. ‘Just who I need.’

It was a strange comment, but then he left his horse, stooped beside her in the dust and watched her brush the dust from an ancient pipeline she was uncovering. He seemed truly interested. He spent an hour watching her and then he asked her out to dinner.

‘Anywhere your heart desires,’ he told her. ‘This Principality is yours to command.’

He meant it was his to command. Kass’s ego was the size of his country, but it had taken her too long to find that out.

Stunned, she went out to dinner with him. She was mesmerized by his looks, his charm and the fact that he seemed equally fascinated by her. It was heady stuff.

The next morning he met her at the stables. He mounted her on a mare, almost as beautiful as his stallion, Blaze, and they rode together into the foothills of the mountains in the early morning mist. The magic of the morning blew her away. It left her feeling mind-numbingly, blissfully in love, transported to a parallel universe where normal rules of sense and caution no longer applied.

That night, as she finished work, he appeared again, in his dress uniform. Regal and imperious and still utterly charming, he was focusing all his attention on her. He’d just come from a ceremonial function, he told her, but she suspected now that he’d dressed that way to overwhelm her.

And overwhelmed she was. Royalty and stallions. Swords and braid and wealth. He chartered a private plane to take her to Paris. No matter that she had nothing to wear—they’d shop for clothes in Fabourg Saint-Honoré, he told her. He’d take her personally this night, before their weekend started.

For Kelly, the only child of disinterested academic parents, whose only love had been her neighbour’s horses, this seemed a fairy-tale.

Instead it was a nightmare. One where she ended up losing everything.

So now Rafael was smiling at her and there was no way she was smiling back. That way led to disaster. Royalty…no and no and no.

‘I’m not Kass,’ he said and she blinked.

‘Pardon?’

‘I know there’s a family resemblance,’ he told her, and there was a note of anger behind his studied gentleness. ‘But I’m not Kass and I’m not like him. You have no reason to fear me, Kelly.’

‘I…’

‘Let’s make toast,’ he said, and smiled some more and supervised turning the bread on the toasting fork. ‘You pour the soup.’

So eat they did, by the fireside. Matty was hungry and Kelly was hungry for him. She could scarcely take her eyes from him.

‘He’ll still be here tomorrow,’ Rafael said and leaned over the table, filled her soup spoon and guided her lifeless hand to her lips. ‘You look like you need a feed as much as Matty.’

‘You’ll still be here tomorrow?’

‘Yes.’

There should have been a fuss, she thought, bewildered. She thought of Kass, flying to Paris that first weekend she’d met him. There’d been minions everywhere—pomp and pageantry, recognition of Kass’s rank and dignity.

‘Why aren’t there reporters?’ she asked, forcing herself to drink her soup as Rafael had directed, if only to stop him force-feeding her. He had the look of a man who just might.

He was frowning at her. He looked as if he was worried about her. That was crazy.

‘Just how sick were you?’ he demanded and she flushed and spooned a bit more soup in.

‘It was a horrid flu but I’m fine now. You haven’t answered my question. Why are there no reporters? If you’re indeed Prince Regent…’

‘We came incognito.’

‘Oh, sure.’

‘It can be done,’ he said. ‘In fact I changed my name to my mother’s when I left the country. I have an American passport—I’m Rafael Nadine.’

‘And Matty?’

‘Trickier,’ he said. ‘But not impossible when you know people in high places.’

‘As you do.’

‘As we do,’ he said gravely. ‘It was important. To sweep in here in a Rolls-Royce or six with a royal entourage behind me…it wouldn’t achieve what I hoped to achieve.’

‘Which was what?’

‘To find out for sure what my investigators have been telling me. That you are indeed a woman of principle. That you are indeed a woman who should have all the access to your son that you want.’

‘Oh,’ she said faintly.

‘Eat your soup.’

‘I don’t think…’

‘We’re not talking about anything else until you’ve eaten your soup and at least three slices of toast,’ he said roughly. ‘Matty, something tells me your mama needs a little looking after. As a son, that’s your duty. Finish your soup and then make us all some more toast.’

Matty crashed. Just like that. One minute he was bright and bubbly and enthused about toast-making, but the next minute, as he ate his third piece of toast, spread thickly with honey, his eyelids drooped. He pushed aside his plate, put his head on his hands and sighed.

‘My head feels heavy,’ he said. ‘Uncle Rafael…’

‘We need to go,’ Rafael said ruefully. ‘We hadn’t meant to stay this long.’ He smiled at her—that damned smile again. ‘It’s your fault. The soup smelled so good.’

‘Where are you staying?’ she asked.

‘The Prince Edward.’

‘But that’s…’ She paused, dismayed.

‘That’s what?’ Rafael said. ‘We found it on the Internet, Matty and I. It looks splendid. We checked in this afternoon and it seems really comfortable.’

‘Yes, but it’s over a really popular pub,’ she said. ‘Thursday night here is most people’s pay night. The Prince Edward is the party pub. By two in the morning it’ll be moving up and down on its foundations.’