Shock Heir For The King

But...

Oh, yes. He wanted her.

Moving slightly closer, just enough to be able to catch a hint of her vanilla perfume, he spoke, his eyes intent when they met hers.

‘I am to marry. Soon.’

* * *

His words seemed to come to her from a long way away, as though he were shouting from atop a high-rise, and the floor of the gallery lifted in one corner like a rug being shaken, threatening to tip her off the sides of the earth.

I am to marry.

Her stomach rolled with what she told herself must be relief. Because his impending marriage meant she was safe—safe from the flashes of desire that were warming her insides, safe from an insane need to revisit the past even though it was so obviously better left there. How dare she feel like that, when he’d walked out on her without having the decency to leave so much as a note?

‘That’s nice,’ she said, the words not quite as clear and calm as she’d have liked. ‘So perhaps you are after a painting after all? A wedding present for your wife?’ She spun on her heel, moving deeper into the gallery. ‘I have some lovely landscapes I painted out in Massachusetts. Very pretty. Romantic. Floaty.’ She was babbling but she couldn’t help it.

I am to marry. Soon. His words were running around and around in her mind, ricocheting off the edges of her consciousness.

‘Perhaps this piece.’ She gestured to a painting of a lake, surrounded by trees on the cusp of losing their leaves, orange and bright, against a beautiful blue sky. Her heart panged as she remembered the day, that slice of life, when she’d taken Leo on their first vacation and they’d toured Paxton and its surroundings.

‘Frankie...’ His voice was deep and, though he spoke softly, it was with a natural command, a low, throbbing urgency that had her spinning to face him and—damn him—remembering too much of their time together, the way he’d groaned her name as he’d buried his lips at her neck, then lower, teasing her nipples with his tongue.

Only he was so much closer than she’d realised, his large frame right behind her, so when she turned their bodies brushed and it was as though a thousand volts of electricity were being dumped into her system.

She swallowed hard then took a step backwards, but not far enough. It gave her only an inch or so of breathing space and when she inhaled he was there, filling her senses. He’s getting married!

‘What are you doing here?’ She didn’t bother to hide the emotion in the question. He was a part of her past that hadn’t been good. Oh, the weekend itself, sure, but waking up to discover he’d literally walked out on her? To find herself pregnant and have no way of contacting him? The embarrassment of having to hire a detective who even then could discover no trace of this man?

‘I...’ The word trailed off as he echoed her movement, taking a step forward, closing the distance between them. His expression was tense; his face wore a mask of discontent. Frustration and impatience radiated off him in waves. ‘I wished to see you again. Before my wedding.’

She took a moment, letting his statement settle into her mind, and she examined it from all angles. But it made no sense. ‘Why?’

His nostrils flared, his eyes narrowed with intent. ‘Do you ever think about our time together?’

And the penny dropped and fury lashed at her spine, powerful and fierce, so she jerked her head away from him and bit back a curse her adoptive mother certainly wouldn’t have approved of.

‘Are you kidding me with this, Matt? You’re getting married and you’re here to walk down memory lane?’ She moved away from him, further into the room, her pulse hammering, her heart rushing.

He was watching her with an intensity that almost robbed her of breath. Only she was angry too, angry that he thought he could show up after all this time and ask about that damned weekend...

‘Or did you want to do more than walk down memory lane? Tell me you didn’t come here for another roll in the hay?’ she demanded, crossing her arms over her chest, then wishing she hadn’t when his eyes dropped to the swell of her cleavage. Indignation made her go on the attack. ‘You can’t be so hard up for sex that you’re resorting to trawling through lovers from years ago?’

A muscle throbbed low in his jaw as her insult hit its mark. Matt Whatever-his-last-name-was was clearly all macho alpha pride. Her suggestion had riled him. Well, so what? She couldn’t care less.

‘And no, I don’t think about that weekend!’ she snapped before he could interject. ‘So far as I’m concerned, you’re just some blip in my rear-view mirror—and if I could take what happened between us back, I would,’ she lied, her stomach rolling at the betrayal of their son.

‘Oh, really?’ he asked softly, words that were dangerous and seductive all at once, his husky accent as spicy and tempting as it had been three years earlier.

‘Yes, really.’ She glared at him to underscore her point.

‘So you don’t think about the way it felt when I kissed you here?’ She was completely unprepared for his touch—the feather-light caress of a single finger against her jaw, the pulse-point there moving into frantic overdrive as butterflies stormed through her chest.

‘No.’ The word was slightly uneven.

‘Or the way you liked me to touch you here?’ and he drew his finger lower, to her décolletage, and then lower still, to the gentle curve of her breast.

Heaven help her, memories were threatening to pull her under, to drown her with their perfection, even when the truth of their situation was disastrous.

Just for a second, she wanted to surrender to those recollections. She wanted to pretend they didn’t have a son together and that they were back in time, in that hotel room, just him and her, no consciousness of the outside world.

But it would be an exercise in futility.

‘Don’t.’ She batted his hand away and stepped away from him, anger almost a match for her desire. She rammed her hands against her hips, breathing in hard, wishing there was even the slightest hint of his having been as affected by those needs as she had been. ‘It was three years ago,’ she whispered. ‘You can’t just show up after all this time, after disappearing into thin air...’

He watched her from a face that was carefully blanked of emotion, his expression mask-like. ‘I had to see you.’

Her heart twisted at those words, at the sense that perhaps he’d found it impossible to forget their night together. Except he’d done exactly that. He’d walked away without a backwards glance. He could have called her at any time in the past three years, but he hadn’t. Nothing. Not a blip.

‘Well, you’ve seen me,’ she said firmly. ‘And now I think you should go.’

‘You’re angry with me.’

‘Yes.’ She held his gaze, her eyes showing hurt and betrayal. ‘I woke up and you were gone! You don’t think I have a right to be angry?’

A muscle twisted at the base of his firm, square jaw. ‘We agreed we would just spend the weekend together.’

‘Yes, but that wasn’t tacit approval for you to slink out in the middle of the night.’

His eyes narrowed. ‘I did not slink.’ And then, as if bringing himself back to the point, he was calm again, his arrogant face blanked of any emotion once more. ‘And it was best for both of us that I left when I did.’

It was strange, really, how she’d been pulling her temper back into place, easing it into the box in which it lived, only to have it explode out of her, writhing free of her grip with a blinding intensity. ‘How? How was you disappearing into thin air best for me?’ she demanded, her voice raised, her face pale.

He sighed as though she were a recalcitrant toddler and his impatience at fraying point. ‘My life is complicated.’ He spoke without apology, words that were cool and firm and offered no hint of what had truly motivated his departure. ‘That weekend was an aberration. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have let it happen. I had no business getting involved with someone like you.’

‘Someone like me?’ she repeated, the words deceptively soft when inside her cells were screeching with indignation. ‘But it was fine to sleep with someone like me?’

‘You misunderstand my meaning,’ he said with a shake of his head. ‘And that is my fault.’

‘So what is your meaning?’

He spoke slowly, carefully, as though she might not comprehend. ‘I wanted you the minute I saw you, Frankie, but I knew it could never be more than that weekend. I believe I was upfront about that; I apologise if you expected more from me.’ He went to move closer but she bristled, and he stilled. ‘There are expectations upon me, expectations as to who I will marry, and you are not the kind of bride I would ever be able to choose.’

She spluttered her interruption. ‘I didn’t want to marry you! I just wanted the courtesy of a goodbye from the man I lost my virginity to. When you crept out of that hotel suite, did you stop to think about what I would think?’

She had the very slight satisfaction of seeing something like remorse briefly glance across his stony features. ‘I had to leave. I’m sorry if that hurt you—’

‘Hurt me?’ She glared at him and shook her head. It had damned near killed her, but she wasn’t going to tell him that. ‘What hurts is your stupidity! Your lack of decency and moral fibre.’

He jerked his face as though she’d slapped him, but she didn’t stop.

‘You were my first lover.’ She lowered her voice. ‘Sleeping with you meant something to me! And you just left.’

‘What would you have had me do, Frankie? Stay and cook you breakfast? Break it to you over scrambled eggs and salmon that I was going to go back to Tolmirós to forget all about you?’

Her stare was withering. ‘Only you haven’t forgotten me, have you?’

She held her breath, waiting for him to answer, her lips parted.

‘No,’ he agreed finally. ‘But I left because I knew I needed to. I left because I knew what was expected of me.’ He expelled a harsh breath, then another, slowly regaining control of himself. ‘I didn’t come here to upset you, Frankie. I’ll go away again.’

And at that, true, dark anger beat in her breast because it simply underscored their power imbalance. He’d come to her and so she was seeing him again, and he’d touched her as though desire was still a current in the room—it was all on his terms. All his timeline, his power, his control. He thought he could leave when it suited him and have that be the end of it.

Well, damn him, he had no right! ‘Did you even think about the consequences of that night, Matt? Did you so much as give even a second thought to whether or not I would be able to walk away from what we shared as easily as you did?’

CHAPTER TWO

FOR THE BRIEFEST of moments he misunderstood. Surely, he’d misunderstood.

As the heir to the throne of Tolmirós, Matthias had never taken any risks with sex. That weekend had been no different. He’d employed protective measures. He’d been careful, as always.

‘I knew there would be no consequences,’ he said, shrugging, as though his heart hadn’t skidded to a dramatic halt seconds earlier. ‘And I truly believed a clean break would be better for you.’

And for himself. He hadn’t trusted his willpower to so much as call her, to explain who he was and his reasons for needing to disappear from her life.

‘How did you know that?’

His frown was infinitesimal. ‘Are you saying there was a consequence?’

‘A consequence?’ she repeated with an arched brow. But her fingers were shaking, a small gesture but one he noted with growing attention. ‘Why are we speaking in euphemisms? Ask what you really mean.’

She spoke to him in a way no one in his life had ever dared, and it was thrilling and dangerous and his whole body resonated with a need to argue with her, just like this. Passions were stirring inside him but he shoved them aside, focusing everything on whatever the hell she was trying to say.

‘You are the one who is insinuating there was a complication from our night together.’

‘I’m telling you your arrogant presumption that you took sufficient measures to protect me from the ramifications of our sleeping together is wrong.’

He narrowed his eyes and her words sprayed around them like fine blades, slicing through the artwork on the walls.

‘Are you saying you fell pregnant?’ he demanded, his ears screeching with the sound of frantically racing blood. The world stood still; time stopped.

For a moment he imagined that—his child, growing in her belly—and his chest swelled with pride and his heart soared, but pain was right behind, because surely it wasn’t possible. His forehead broke out in perspiration at the very idea of his baby. He knew it was inevitable and necessary, but he still needed time to brace himself for that reality—for the idea of another person who shared his blood, a person who could be taken from him at any time.

Rejection was in every line of his body. ‘We were careful. I was careful. I took precautions, as I always do.’

‘Charming!’ She crossed her arms over her chest. ‘Tell me more about the other women you’ve had sex with, please.’

He ground his teeth together. He hadn’t meant that, and yet it was true. Sexual responsibility was ingrained in Matthias. Anyone in his position would take that seriously.

‘What the hell are you saying?’ he demanded, all the command his position conferred upon him in those words.

She sucked in a deep breath as though she was steadying herself. ‘Fine. Yes. I fell pregnant.’ Her words hit him right in the solar plexus, each with the speed and strength of a thousand bullets.

‘What?’ For the first time in his life, Matthias was utterly lost for words.

When his family had died and a nation in mourning had looked to him, a fifteen-year-old who’d lost his parents and brother, who’d been trapped in a car with them as life had left their bodies, he had known what was expected of him. He’d received the news and wrapped his grief into a small compartment for indulgence at a later date, and he’d shown himself to be strong and reliable: a perfect king-in-waiting.

She lifted her fingertips to the side of her head, rubbing her temples, and fixed him with her ocean-green stare. Her anguish was unmistakable.

‘I found out about a month after you left.’

His world was a place that made no sense. There were sharp edges everywhere, and nothing fitted together. ‘You were pregnant?’

She pulled a face. ‘I just said that.’

His eyes swept shut, his blood raced. ‘You should have told me.’

‘I tried! You were literally impossible to find.’

‘No one is impossible to find.’

‘Believe me, you are. “Matt”. That’s all I had to go on. The hotel wouldn’t give me any information about who’d booked the suite. I had your name and the fact you’re from Tolmirós. That’s it. I wanted to tell you. But trying to find you was like looking for a needle in an enormous haystack.’

And hadn’t he planned for it to be this way? A night without complications—that was what they’d shared. Only everything about Frankie had been complicated, including the way she’d cleaved her way into his soul.

‘So you made a decision like this on your own?’ he fired back, the pain of what he’d lost, what his kingdom had lost, the most important thing in the conversation.

‘Decision?’ She paled. ‘It was hardly a decision.’

‘You had an abortion and took from me any chance to even know my child,’ he said thickly, his chest tight, his organs squeezing inside him.

She sucked in a loud breath. ‘What makes you think I had an abortion?’

He stared at her, the question hanging between them, everything sharp and uncertain now. When he was nine years old he’d run the entire way around the palace, without pausing for even a moment. Up steps, along narrow precipices with frightening glimpses of the city far beneath him, he’d run and he’d run, and when he’d finished he’d collapsed onto the grass and stared at the clouds. His lungs had burned and he’d been conscious of the sting of every cell in his body, as though he was somehow supersonic. He felt that now.

‘You’re saying...’ He stared at her, trying to make sense of this, looking for an explanation and arriving at only one. ‘You didn’t have an abortion?’

‘Of course I didn’t.’

Matthias had a rapier-sharp mind, yet he struggled to process her words, to make sense of what she was saying. ‘You did not have an abortion?’

‘No.’

And something fired inside his mind, a memory, a small recollection that had been unimportant at the time. He spun away from her and stalked through the gallery, through the smaller display spaces that curved towards a larger central room. And he stared at the wall that had framed Frankie when he’d first walked in. He’d been so blindsided by the vision of her initially that he hadn’t properly understood the significance of what he was seeing. But now he looked at the paintings—ten of them in total, all of the same little boy—and his blood turned into lava in his veins.

He stared at the paintings and a primal sense of pride and possession firmed inside him. Something else too. Something that made his chest scream and his brow heat—something that made acid coat his insides, as he stared at the boy who was so familiar to him.

Spiro.

He was looking at a version not only of his younger self, but also of his brother. Eyes that had held his, pain and anguish filling them, as life ebbed from him. Eyes that had begged him to help. Eyes that had eventually clouded and died as Matthias watched, helpless, powerless.

For a moment he looked towards the ground, his chest heaving, his pulse like an avalanche, and he breathed in, waiting for the familiar panic to subside.

‘This is my son.’ More than his son—this was his kin, his blood, his.

He didn’t have to turn around to know she was right behind him.

‘He’s two and a half,’ Frankie murmured, the words husky. She cleared her throat audibly. ‘His name is Leo.’

Matthias’s eyes swept shut as he absorbed this information. Leo. Two and a half. Spiro had been nine when he’d died, the vestiges of his boyish face still in evidence. Cheeks that were rounded like this, and dimpled when he smiled, eyes that sparkled with all his secrets and amusements.

He pushed the memories away, refusing to give into them like this. Only in the middle of the night, when time seemed to slip past the veil of living, when ancient stars with their wisdom and experience whispered that they would listen, did he let his mind remember, did he let his heart hurt.

He turned his attention to the paintings, giving each one in turn the full power of his inspection. Several of the artworks depicted Leo—his son—in a state of play. Laughing as he tossed leaves overhead, his sense of joy and vitality communicated through the paint by Frankie’s talented hand. Other paintings were a study of portraiture.

It was the final picture that held him utterly in its thrall.

Leo was staring out of the canvas, his expression frozen in time, arresting a moment of query. One brow was lifted, his lips were turned into a half-smile. His eyes were grey, like Matthias’s—in fact, much of his face was a carbon copy of Matthias’s own bearing. But the freckles that ran haphazardly across the bridge of his nose were all Frankie’s, as was the defiant amusement that stirred in the boy’s features.

Emotions welled inside Matthias, for his own face was only borrowed—first from his father, King Stavros, and it had now been passed onto his own son. What other features and qualities were held by this boy, this small human who was of his own flesh and blood?

His own flesh and blood! An heir! An heir his country was desperate for, an heir he had been poised to marry in order to beget—an heir, already living! An heir, two years old, who he knew nothing about!

‘Where is he?’ The question was gravelled.

He felt her stiffen—he felt everything in that moment, as though the universe was a series of strings and fibres connected through his body to hers. He turned around, pinning her with a gaze that shimmered like liquid metal.

‘Where.’ The word was a slowly flying bullet. ‘Is.’ He took a step closer to her. ‘He?’

All the myths upon which he’d been raised, the beliefs of his people as to the power and strength that ran through his veins, a power that was now in his son’s veins, propelled him forward. But it was not purely a question of royal lineage and the discovery of an heir. This was an ancient, soul-deep need to meet his son—as a man, as a father.

Alarm resonated from Frankie and until that moment he’d never understood what the term ‘mother bear’ had been coined for. She was tiny and slight but she looked more than capable of murdering him with her bare hands if he did anything to threaten their child.

‘He’s outside the city,’ she said evasively, her eyes shifting towards the door. Through it was the foyer, and somewhere there the man who ran this gallery. Her fear was evident, and it served little purpose. He was no threat to her, nor their son.

With the discipline he was famed for, Matthias brought his emotions tightly under control. They didn’t serve him in that moment. Just like his grief had needed to be contained when his family had been killed, so too did his feelings need to be now.

His whole world had shifted off its axis, and he had to find a way to fix that. To redefine the parameters of his being. An heir was driving his need for marriage and here, it turned out, an heir already existed! There was no option for Matthias but to bring that child home to Tolmirós.

His future shifted before his eyes, and this woman was in it, and their son. All the reasons he’d had for walking away from her still stood, except for this heir. It changed everything.

‘I had no idea you were pregnant.’

‘Of course you didn’t. How could you? You probably walked out as soon as I fell asleep.’

No, he’d waited longer than that. He’d watched her sleep for a while, and thought of his kingdom, the expectations that he would return to Tolmirós and take up his title and all the responsibilities that went with that. Frankie had been a diversion—a distraction. She’d been an indulgence when he’d known he was on the cusp of the life he’d been destined to lead.

Only she’d also been quicksand, and a fast escape had seemed the only solution. The longer he’d lingered, the deeper he’d risked sinking, until escape had no longer been guaranteed.

Besides, he’d comforted himself at the time, he’d made her no promises. He’d told her he was only in the States for the weekend. There were no expectations beyond that. He hadn’t broken his word.

‘If you’d left your number, I would have called. But you just vanished into thin air. Not even the detective I hired could find you.’

‘You hired a detective?’ The admission sent sparks through him—sparks of relief and gratitude. Because she hadn’t intentionally kept their son a secret. She’d wanted him to be a part of the boy’s life. And if he’d known of the child back then? If he’d discovered Frankie’s pregnancy?

He would have married her. Her lack of suitability as a royal bride would have been beside the point: his people cared most for the delivery of an heir.

And now he had one.

Every possibility and desire narrowed into one finite realisation. There was only one way forward and the sooner he could convince Frankie of that, the better.

‘Yes.’ She looked away from him and swallowed visibly, her throat chording before his eyes and his gut clenched as he remembered kissing her there, feeling the fluttering of her racing pulse beneath her fine, soft skin. ‘I felt you should know.’

‘Indeed.’ He dipped his head forward and then, appealing to the sense of justice he knew ran through her passionate veins, ‘Will you come for dinner with me?’