New Year Wedding For The Crown Prince

He tried to imagine her living in this house, but his thoughts turned to Jo, and it was she he pictured in his mind, maybe on a ladder, laughing as she tried to fix a star to the pathetic tree.

He closed his eyes, replacing Jo’s image with one of his mother that he had only formed from pictures, and the stories his father would tell. Would Dottie tell him more stories, the ones he’d come so far to hear? Stories of his mother as a child, her likes and dislikes, anything at all to turn her into a living person instead of a picture by his bed.

It had been close to Christmas back then, too, some annual event having brought his father to the tiny seaside town, and he knew it was a degree of silly sentimentality to have come now, to find out what he could before he married and settled down, taking some of the burden of official duties from his father.

Had his mother prowled the room as he now prowled, arguing with herself—or her parents—about leaving with the lying vagabond?

He knew that had to be his father, because neither of them had ever loved another. And a vagabond he might have been, only even then, Charles was sure, he’d have been called a backpacker. Travel had been something his father had been determined to do, the only time he’d ever argued with his parents. But although it had disturbed his relationship with them, he’d known he had to see something of the world, to mix with ordinary people, the kind of people he would one day rule.

He himself had done much the same, he realised, when he’d insisted on studying medicine in Edinburgh, with men and women from all layers of society. Eton had been all very well for an education, but he knew how his fellow students had thought and how that layer of society worked. He’d needed to know everyday people.

Even back home for holidays, he’d worked in bars and cafés in the summer, and been a ski instructor in the winter.

But getting back to his father...

A lying vagabond?

Jo returned before he had time to consider the word Dottie had used, bringing light into the gloomy room with her smile.

‘Been looking for memories of your mother?’ she said. ‘I’ve done the same, but sadly never found a thing.’

She paused, then added, ‘Though I don’t pry to the extent of going through drawers. I wouldn’t take advantage of Dottie that way, but I do shake out the books I borrow to read, just in case there’s a photo been left to mark a page.’

Charles looked at the wall of books at the back of the room and shook his head. It would take for ever...

‘Has she not spoken of her to you?’ he asked.

Jo shook her head.

‘Not a word, and apparently there’s enough solidarity in the village that no one else ever talks about her. I know there has to be a reason because although Dottie’s a bit eccentric—well, pretty eccentric—she’s not irrational.’

She sighed, shook her head, and bent over to pick up a glass bauble from a box of decorations that stood by the tree, hanging it on a low branch before turning back to Charles.

‘Dottie and I usually have grilled cheese on toast for supper, but if you haven’t had dinner and would like something more substantial, there are lamb cutlets and plenty of salad things.’

Charles shook his head.

‘Grilled cheese on toast sounds fantastic. Takes me back to student days when it was one of the few things I could cook—cheese on toast, beans on toast, eggs on toast!’

That won another smile, which was so open and honest and full of good humour that it caught at something in his chest—just a hitch, nothing more...

You cannot be attracted to a very pregnant stranger, he told himself as he followed her to the kitchen, narrowly missing the bucket in the entry.

But the sway of her hips mesmerised him...

It had to be abstinence. How long since he’d been with a woman? The experience of the match his father had promoted, with a young woman who had a very dubious family connection to the old Russian royalty, had been enough to put him off women for life.

Well, for several months at least!

She’d been nice enough, attractive enough, but her conversation began and ended with horses and although he quite liked horses and rode occasionally himself, as a conversational topic, they were way down his list of favourites.

He doubted the woman with the swaying hips would talk horses.

‘There’s the toaster, and the bread’s in the cupboard underneath it. You can do the toast while I grate the cheese. I think it melts better grated. Do you like relish or chutney under the cheese? My dad used to slice up pickles under his.’

Jo only just stopped herself from explaining how her mother had liked Vegemite, and she herself didn’t mind the pickles. After all, there was only so much conversational mileage you could get out of grilled cheese on toast. And it had all been a very long time ago.

The memory of that time made her shudder—so much sadness, so much despair and emptiness and loss.

Don’t think about it now—concentrate on toast but don’t babble on.

She was embarrassed, that was why she’d been talking so much and there were no points for guessing why!

This man’s presence—or perhaps her own hyper-awareness of him—was embarrassing her. For some peculiar reason, she’d felt his eyes on her as she’d walked to the kitchen. Not casually on her, but studying her, although that was ridiculous. She’d been imagining things. Why would a man like him be studying a slightly damp, very untidy, very pregnant woman like her?

For a start, being thirty-eight weeks pregnant would announce her as unavailable!

She hauled butter and cheese out of the refrigerator, then milk for Dottie’s cocoa, relish in case Charles wanted it, the bottle of pickled gherkins to slice for under her cheese, set it all on the scrubbed wooden table in the centre of the big kitchen, then turned to their guest.

He was waggling the handles on the doors of the toaster.

‘You realise I’m touching something my mother probably touched. This toaster has to be at least fifty years old.’

Jo grinned at him.

‘At least,’ she agreed, ‘and it doesn’t flip open when the toast is done so you have to stand there and watch it and open it before it burns then turn it to do the other side.’

He gave her a ‘can you believe it’ look and a shake of his head before turning to watch his toast.

Setting the grill in the oven—which was probably older than the toaster—to high, Jo grabbed the grater and a wooden board and began her job.

And if she glanced at their visitor from time to time it was only to see he wasn’t burning the toast.

Wasn’t it?

He’d found plates and soon delivered a pile of perfectly browned toast to the table.

Toast done, she set him to buttering it—although that meant he was standing close to her, and the discomfort that caused had to be because he was a stranger...

Surely!

She was slicing gherkins when her belly tightened.

Braxton-Hicks! Her body’s practice contractions. She moved a little, knowing that usually stopped them, and kept grating. Charles was now piling grated cheese on the toast he’d buttered.

‘I’ve done two slices each, will that be enough?’ he said.

Jo turned to face him, saw a smile lurking in his dark-enough-to-drown-in eyes, and hesitated, her mouth suddenly so dry she couldn’t speak.

She had to be imagining whatever it was that was zapping between them.

Had to be!

‘You might want more than two slices,’ she finally managed, ‘and I have sliced pickles under my cheese.’

‘Like father, like daughter,’ he teased, and she blessed the distraction of another twinge in her belly.

She would hate to think she was anything like her father...

Although maybe that was unfair. He’d been a good and loving father up until her mother had died and it probably hadn’t been his fault he’d gone to pieces then...

Charles had turned away to put more bread in the toaster, apparently deciding he might need more than two slices, and Jo used the respite from his presence to slide the cheese-laden slices under the grill.

The extra hormones that pregnancy had sent spinning through her body—they must surely be the cause of her...

Her what?

Distraction, she decided, and said it firmly enough in her head to pretend she meant it.

Well, it could hardly be anything more than that, now, could it? She’d seen tall, dark and handsome men before and had never felt the slightest attraction, and so what if his broad shoulders curved in to a neat waist, and his jeans clung to neat buttocks?

She heated milk on the stove for Dottie’s cocoa, vowing for the fiftieth time she’d buy a microwave for the house next time she was in town. She put on the kettle for tea and turned to Charles.

‘Would you like tea or coffee?’

He smiled—she wished he wouldn’t—and said, ‘Could I please have cocoa? This has taken me back to student days and it seems right I should be drinking cocoa.’

Jo tore her eyes away from his face. What had she been waiting for, another smile? She poured more milk into the pot on the stove, told the visitor to watch the toast under the grill while she found mugs for the three of them. Even Dottie, to whom tea must be served in fine china cups, drank her cocoa from a mug, and a mug of tea was far more satisfying as far as Jo was concerned.

Charles, who was proving quite proficient in the kitchen, had found more plates and was cutting a couple of bubbling, lightly browned cheese toasts into fingers.

‘Two for Dottie, two with pickles for the pregnant lady, and I’ll look like a pig eating four, but it seems a very long time since breakfast.’

‘You haven’t eaten since breakfast?’ Jo said in disbelief, but the milk was close to boiling, and she had cocoa to make, so she could hardly pursue the conversation.

Not that Charles—the name was coming more easily into her head—had replied. Instead, he was moving around the kitchen, poking into nooks and crannies, finally finding the trays, hiding in the space beside the ancient refrigerator.

‘I’m assuming Dottie has the silver one,’ he said, smiling so broadly Jo had to smile back.

‘Yes, and slightly better china than you’ve found there.’

She opened a high kitchen cupboard and produced a fine china plate, bedecked with flowers and edged with gold.

‘Just because she’s old, she says, she doesn’t have to lower her standards,’ Jo quoted in explanation.

‘Bless her heart!’ Charles said, and the phrase must have startled him for he added, very quickly, ‘As my nanny would have said.’

Bless her heart indeed!

And a nanny?

No wonder he spoke like an English toff.

Only it wasn’t really like that—just beautifully pronounced words that seemed to fill the air with music.

What would it have been like to have been raised like that?

Or even in a normal household.

Another twinge reminded Jo she shouldn’t be thinking about the past and definitely not about a man she’d barely met, no matter how pleasant his voice might be.

And weren’t Braxton-Hicks contractions supposed to be irregular?

Still, she couldn’t think about that now. She’d get the tray up to Dottie, and then...

She didn’t know what.

She usually took her tray up and ate in Dottie’s bedroom, but would Dottie want the stranger in her bedroom, related though he might be?

And could she, Jo, leave him alone in the kitchen no matter how inhospitable that would seem?

She’d take Dottie’s tray up and see what transpired.

Dottie was sitting, propped up on pillows, in the middle of the big bed, the ornately carved bedhead a spectacular backdrop to the minute occupant. Resplendent in her colourful Chinese robe, she was every inch an empress, ready to receive her subjects.

As Jo settled the tray on the small table over Dottie’s legs, she said, ‘You can bring that man up here to eat his supper. You’ll come, of course, so he might as well. We’ll grill him, find out what he’s up to!’

The last sentence would have startled Jo if she hadn’t known Dottie’s passion for mystery and detective fiction. Perhaps she’d always nurtured a secret desire to grill someone.

Possibly literally!

‘We’ve been summoned,’ she told Charles when she returned to the kitchen, where she found him cutting his extra toast into fingers. He’d also made a pot of tea, though where he’d found the pot she didn’t know. ‘Do you want sugar in your cocoa?’

‘I’ve already helped myself, but left it to you to pour your own tea how you like it.’

Jo did just that, then lifted her tray and led the way upstairs.

CHAPTER TWO

CHARLES LOOKED AROUND the room, realising that when rain wasn’t lashing the windows, Dottie would have an expansive view of the sea from her bed. Here, too, there were the early signs of Christmas decorations—a small, stained-glass decal on one window, a box of tinsel in a corner. Had someone—Jo?—started on the task before the weather turned?

But what really interested him in the room was a chest of drawers to one side of the bed, and the ranks of framed photos taking pride of place across the top of it.

Was there one of his mother?

He could hardly walk over and have a look.

Jo had pulled two chairs closer to the bed from what would be a sitting alcove by the window, and put small side tables beside each of them.

She waved him to one of them, but as she bent to set down her tray, he thought he saw her wince.

Strangers don’t ask questions, he told himself, but the doctor in him had to say, ‘Are you okay?’

‘Practice twinges, that’s all,’ she said, but the pink had gone from her cheeks and she looked a little drawn.

‘I’m also a doctor,’ he said to her quietly, ‘so if your baby decides to come early, and you can’t get into the village, I have delivered them before.’

‘This baby is not coming early,’ was the reply, no less forceful for being whispered. ‘This is to be a Christmas baby, timed to the minute!’

He considered that a bit ambitious. Would she consider having it induced on Christmas morning if it wasn’t showing signs of arrival?

‘What are you two whispering about?’ Dottie demanded to know.

Charles smiled at her.

‘I was just saying it’s a coincidence, Jo being a doctor, because that’s my profession.’

‘Ha!’ said Dottie with malicious glee. ‘I knew that vagabond was lying!’

Charles shook his head—unable to make any connection.

Jo must have been equally confused, for it was she who asked the question.

‘And just why, Dottie, does Charles being a doctor make his father a liar?’

‘Because his father always said he was a prince, and if that was true then his son would be a princeling, or whatever a prince’s sons are called, and this fellow says he’s a doctor.’

She paused, smiling in malicious glee, then went on, ‘Although he could be a liar, too, and the doctor thing just humbug!’

‘Oh, Dottie,’ Jo said, barely able to speak for laughter, ‘you do come up with the most startling logic. If his dad’s a prince then he’s probably one, too, but he could hardly hang around waiting for his father to die so he can have a job. If the liver place is as small as he says it is, there probably aren’t enough duties to keep his father busy, let alone Charles as well. He would have needed a job.’

Charles had watched Dottie while Jo was speaking—better by far than watching Jo with the laughter lingering in her eyes. The old lady didn’t seem at all perturbed, eating her way through her plate of cheese toast and sipping at her cocoa.

But her eyes were on him the whole time.

Trying to make out if he was the imposter she thought him?

Or trying to see some resemblance to his mother? A family likeness of some kind...

He hoped it was the latter, but after thirty-six years would she be able to tell?

The photos up here would definitely be off limits unless Dottie agreed he could look at them. There’d been no obvious photos of his mother in the parts of the house he’d seen so far. And, like Jo, he didn’t want to pry into drawers.

But he had come all this way to learn something of the mother he’d never known, so although her behaviour so far had been hardly welcoming, he had to overcome Dottie’s suspicion and distrust somehow.

‘Why did she call you Charles? Or did your father do that?’

The questions were so unexpected Charles swallowed some cocoa the wrong way and had to cough before he could answer.

‘No, my mother named me—well, she and my father chose the names before I was born. Apparently, they both liked Charles as a name, then Edouard after my father’s father and Albert after hers.’

He looked directly at Dottie.

‘Your husband was called Albert, wasn’t he?’

He thought the scowl she gave him might be all the answer he’d get, but then she said, ‘Bertie—we called him Bertie!’ in such a gruff tone Charles guessed at the emotion she was holding in check.

And why wouldn’t there be emotion? How would he have felt if she’d suddenly turned up at home?

Overwhelmed, to say the least.

He set aside the rest of his toast and moved his chair a little closer to the bed.

‘I know this must be a terrible shock for you, but I did write a couple of times and never received a reply so it seemed the only thing to do was to come. I’ll go away again as soon as your flood goes down, if that’s what you want.’

The scowl turned to a full-blown glare.

‘I do not open letters with foreign stamps,’ she said. ‘You do not know what germs they might be carrying. It’s how they spread anthrax, you know.’

Though slightly startled by the pronouncement, most of Charles’s attention had turned to Jo, who had her eyes shut and her hand to her belly.

That, he knew, was a contraction!

Had his inattention drawn Dottie’s eyes to Jo so that she said, ‘If that was a contraction, look at your watch and start timing them.’

After which she lifted the table off her legs, set it aside on the bed, and clambered out, remarkably spry for someone who looked about a hundred.

‘And don’t worry,’ she added, crossing the room to Jo. ‘I’ve delivered most of the people still alive in the village, grandparents, parents and even some of the older children. I’ll take care of you.’

The look of horror on Jo’s face told Charles what she thought of that idea, but she rallied.

‘That’s very kind, Dottie, but I’m a doctor, I should be able to manage. I mean, don’t women in some developing countries give birth in the fields where they are working, then wrap the baby in a sling on their back and keep working? If they can do that, I should be able to manage.’

She closed her eyes, pausing as another contraction tightened her belly.

‘Anyway,’ she added, ‘I absolutely cannot have the baby now. It’s not Christmas Day, and Chris and Alice can’t get through, and you know they want to be here.’

‘You’ve got no choice, my girl,’ Dottie told her. ‘And too bad if they can’t be here. I never did approve of them using you like this.’

Jo lifted her hand.

‘Please, Dottie, no more of that. And I’ll be glad of your help, but perhaps...’

She turned to Charles.

‘You’d have a mobile, wouldn’t you? If I do go properly into labour, we could start with video chat on my mobile and if it runs out of charge, could we use yours?’

‘You want your labour going out on video chat?’ Charles asked, totally bewildered by the speed at which things had moved from his meeting with his grandmother to possibly having to deliver a total stranger’s baby in the midst of the gale that thrashed the windows and shook the house. ‘With who, and why?’

‘Only to Chris and Alice,’ Jo said. ‘You see, it’s their baby.’

She spoke as if that explained everything, though from Charles’s point of view it only made things more confusing.

Their baby?

‘You’re a surrogate?’

But even as he asked the question he watched the colour drain from Jo’s face, and knew it was another contraction, a bad one. Childbirth hurt. So why would she go through it for someone else?

And how would she feel when it came time to hand over the baby she’d carried—nurtured—for nine months?

Now Dottie was issuing orders so he couldn’t pursue the matter.

‘Take the supper things down to the kitchen,’ she was saying to him. ‘Then when you get back I’ll tell you where to find clean linen. There are some sheets that are washed so thin they’re soft, and plenty of old towels. We’d better use this room, because the others all leak. The little chaise longue should be ideal because the back of it only comes halfway. And gloves, I suppose. There might be gloves in the kitchen!’

‘Washing-up gloves?’ Jo said faintly. ‘You’re going to deliver Lulu with washing-up gloves?’

‘You just relax,’ Dottie ordered. ‘We’ll do whatever is necessary.’

Charles carried the half-eaten meal down to the kitchen, wondering whether he should get out of this madness before he caught whatever brought it on!

Was the road really flooded?

And that thought horrified him!

Surely he wasn’t thinking of leaving these women on their own—one to deliver her baby, the other as dotty as her name.

Of course he couldn’t, flooded road or not.

So he carried his burden to the kitchen, noticed the bucket was full on the way and came back to empty it, checking there was no new stranger standing at the door before he threw the water.

Back upstairs for more orders! That part at least was a novelty. At home, and at the hospital, he was more likely to be giving them...

* * *

Jo closed her eyes and wondered if she willed it hard enough she could stop the contractions.

Forget about it!

But what about Chris and Alice? her mind protested.

Charge your mobile.

She stood up, ignored Dottie’s shriek that she needed to wait for the next contraction to time it, and went to her bedroom, where, by some miracle, her mobile was already on the charger and, even more wonderful, fully charged.

The linen cupboard was her next destination. He might be willing, this Charles who’d appeared from nowhere, but she doubted he’d fathom the system in Dottie’s linen cupboard.

But Dottie had been right, there were sheets washed to a softness that could be used to clean and wrap a newborn, and plenty of old towels—Dottie rarely parted with anything—on which the baby could be delivered. And she could cut up some of the old sheets to use as nappies—they’d be softer than the towels...

She pulled out an armful of each, then, because it felt good to be standing, she walked along the hall, avoiding buckets on the way, then back again.

Walking was good, until the next contraction came—far too close to the previous one—and she leant against the wall, the linen pillowed in her arms.

‘Was that a contraction?’ Dottie asked, peering out the bedroom door to see where her patient had gone.

Jo nodded, so bemused to discover she was thinking of herself as Dottie’s patient she couldn’t manage words.

The pain passed and she carried the linen through to Dottie’s room, then turned back. What she really needed was a shower—and just in case this baby really was coming, she’d have a shower, put on a clean nightdress and—

And what?

No! The baby couldn’t come. She wasn’t ready! Chris and Alice weren’t ready! And worst of all, there was this stupid low off the coast with wind gusts too strong for a helicopter to make it out here if anything went wrong—not with her so much, but with the baby...

She considered crying, so great was the frustration, but she wasn’t the crying type—tall, well-built women couldn’t get away with tears the way petite women could. Besides which, she’d never seen the point. What good did it do? And it made her eyes red! She’d have a shower. That way, if she did happen to cry—well, in the shower, who could tell...?