Reunited With Her Surgeon Prince

‘Why not?’

‘I guess I’ve been too busy.’

‘You weren’t too busy to marry my mum.’

‘I wasn’t,’ he said gravely. ‘But your mum and I were both students then, so we had more time. We hadn’t realised just how many responsibilities we faced. There was a war in my country and I had to go home. Your grandmother was ill and your mum was needed here. There wasn’t time for us to stay married.’

And finally Felix fixed his eyes on his father and asked the question she’d been dreading. ‘There was time to make me,’ he said flatly. ‘Didn’t you want me?’

If ever she wanted to turn into a puddle of nothing, it was now. What had she been thinking, not telling Marc what she intended?

It had been for all the right reasons, she told herself, but her silent reasoning sounded hysterical. It sounded wrong.

And Marc? He’d respond with anger, she thought, and he had every right. He could slam her decision of nine years ago. He could drive a wedge between her and her son, give Felix a reason to turn to her with bewilderment and betrayal.

Marc glanced at her, for just a moment. Their eyes locked.

She saw anger, but underneath there was mostly confusion. And concern.

All that she could see at a glance. Why?

Because she knew this man. She’d married him. Three glorious months...

‘Felix, this takes some understanding,’ Marc said, and whatever betrayal he was feeling seemed to have been set aside.

But she hadn’t betrayed Marc, she told herself. She’d told him the truth.

Sort of.

‘Your mum and I were very young when we met,’ Marc continued. ‘We were not much more than kids. We fell in love and we got married. It was all very fast and very romantic. But sometimes you do things that you hope might work out, even if they probably won’t. Have you ever done that?’

‘Like riding Sam Thomas’s brother’s bike down the hill at top speed,’ Felix said. Marc was talking to him as an adult and he was responding in kind. ‘It was too big for me and I couldn’t make the brakes work but there was a grassy paddock at the bottom so I sort of hoped it’d be okay.’

‘It wasn’t, huh?’

‘No,’ Felix said but he peeped a cautious smile at Marc, obviously looking for a reaction. ‘I broke my leg. Getting married was like that? Getting on a bike with no brakes?’

‘I guess so,’ Marc said and Ellie saw a faint smile in response. ‘Only in this case we didn’t break our legs. A war started in my country. A big one. There were many, many people killed and more hurt. And your grandma was ill here. So your mum and I had to part.’

‘You didn’t write to me.’

‘No,’ Marc said softly and Ellie thought, Here it comes.

But it didn’t.

‘I didn’t write,’ Marc continued. ‘And I’m very, very sorry.’

And, just like that, he’d let her off the hook. Of all the things he could have said, the anger, the blame...

He could be telling Felix it was his mother’s fault, his mother’s deception. Instead of which, he was simply apologising.

‘When I left I didn’t know your mother was pregnant,’ Marc said. ‘And when she told me, I was in the middle of a war zone, helping people survive. But I should have come back for you and I’m very sorry I didn’t.’

All the questions Felix had been firing at her had been becoming increasingly belligerent. Increasingly angry.

She’d known that she’d have to face that anger some time. Now, Marc had taken it all on himself. He’d let her off the hook.

She’d been staring into her water glass sightlessly, numbly. Now she looked up and met his gaze.

Not quite. She wasn’t off the hook. There were still questions she had to answer. Accusations to face.

But not from her son. For that, at least, she was so grateful she could weep.

‘So, the wheelchair,’ Marc said, and she thought, He hasn’t asked it until now. That was a gift in itself. For most people it was the obvious focus, and now he asked. ‘What’s the matter with your leg?’ And it was a simple follow-up on the preceding conversation. ‘That was the bike, huh? Bad break?’

Felix hated the questions. The sympathy. The constant probing from a small community. ‘How are the feet? Does it hurt? Oh, you poor little boy...’

Felix routinely reacted either by pretending he hadn’t heard or by an angry brush-off. Now, though, for some reason he faced the question head-on.

‘I was born with club feet,’ he told Marc. ‘Talipes equinovarus. You know about it?’

‘I do,’ Marc told him. ‘Rotten luck. Both feet?’

‘Yeah, but the left’s worse than the right. I had to have operations and wear braces for years and now the right one’s almost normal. But my left leg won’t stay in position and it’s been shorter than the right one. Then I broke it and the surgeon in Sydney said let’s go for it and see if we can get a really good cure for the foot as well as for my leg. So it was a big operation and I’m in a wheelchair for another two weeks and then braces again for a bit. But Mum reckons it should be the last thing. Won’t it, Mum?’

‘We hope so.’ Ellie was having trouble getting her voice to work. Somehow she had to make things normal.

As if they could ever be normal again.

She had to try, but she had a moment’s grace. It was well past Felix’s bedtime. ‘You have school in the morning,’ she managed. ‘Bed.’

‘You weren’t at school today?’ Marc asked.

‘The doctor who did my leg had a clinic at Wollongong,’ Felix told him. ‘Mum and I drove down early and got the first appointment. We only just got back when the accident happened.’

‘Which is why you need to go to bed now,’ Ellie said, struggling to sound firm.

‘But you’ll stay?’ Felix looked anxiously at Marc. ‘You’ll be here when I get home from school tomorrow?’

‘I’m booked into the motel.’

‘So you will be here.’

Marc met her gaze and held it. Questions were asked in that look. Questions she had no hope of answering.

But obviously Marc was more in charge of the situation than she was. He knew what he was here for, even if she didn’t.

‘Yes, Felix, I will.’

‘Cool,’ Felix told him. ‘I might bring my mate to meet you. He’s always ragging me about not having a dad. You want to meet him?’

‘Of course.’

‘Cool,’ Felix said again and yawned.

‘You did a great job today, by the way,’ Marc told him and Ellie found herself flushing. You compliment my kid, you compliment me. It shouldn’t happen like that but it did. And then Marc added, ‘Both of you.’

‘You didn’t do too badly yourself,’ Ellie muttered. She could feel herself blushing but there wasn’t a thing she could do about it. ‘Are you heading back to the motel now?’

‘In a while,’ Marc told her. ‘You and I need to talk.’

‘Felix and I usually read. His leg often aches and reading helps him sleep.’

‘Would you mind if I read to my son tonight?’

And what was she to say to that?

My son.

Her world had changed.

* * *

Felix was obviously exhausted, too tired to ask any more questions but, under instructions, Marc sat on his bed and read. This wasn’t a storybook, though. What he and Ellie were obviously halfway through was a manual on the inner workings of the Baby Austin—a British car built between nineteen-twenty-two and nineteen-thirty-nine.

The back axles of spiral bevel type with ratios between 4.4.1 and 4.6.1 5.6:1. A short torque tube runs forward from the differential housing to a bearing and bracket on the rear axle cross member...

It was enough to put anyone to sleep, Marc thought, but as he read Felix snuggled down in his bedclothes and his eyes turned dreamy.

‘One day I’m going to find one and do her up,’ he whispered. ‘Do you know anything about cars?’

‘A bit. I don’t know much about short torque tubes.’

‘But you could find out about them with me,’ Felix whispered. ‘Wouldn’t that be cool?’

And then his eyes closed and he was asleep.

For a few moments Marc didn’t move. He sat looking down at the sleeping child.

He had a son.

A kid who coped with club feet with courage. A kid who guarded doors with crutches. A kid who wanted to introduce his dad to his mate and who needed help with something called short torque tubes.

A son to be proud of.

The feeling was almost overwhelming.

He’d known of Felix’s existence for years but it had always seemed theoretical rather than real. He hadn’t been with Ellie when she’d found out she was pregnant. He hadn’t been here for the birth.

He hadn’t questioned her decision to put the baby up for adoption.

Maybe he should feel anger that she’d kept this from him for so long but all he managed was sadness. It had been an appalling time. His country had had to come first, but what a price he’d paid. He’d missed out on nine years of Felix’s life.

Walking away from Ellie had been the hardest thing he’d ever had to do in his life. He’d felt it had broken something inside that could never be repaired. And when she’d told him she was pregnant, and he couldn’t go to her...

The nights he’d lain awake on his hard bunk and thought of her; the fantasies he’d had of his dream life, where they could be a family...

But the dreams had been just that. Fantasies. He hadn’t been able to go to her. He’d been in no position to be a husband or a father.

He’d lost his family. He’d lost Ellie.

He thought of her now, out in the sparse little sitting room she called home. She’d changed after work, into faded jeans and an old windcheater. She looked tired. Worn.

He’d thought he’d had to cope with trauma. How much more had she had to deal with?

Felix was deeply asleep. He touched his son’s face, tracing the cheekbones. His son who looked like him. But who also looked like Ellie.

Back in the kitchen, Ellie was waiting for him. She’d cleared the dishes and was standing with her back to the sink, hands behind her back. She looked...trapped.

‘Marc, I’m sorry,’ she managed. ‘I should have told you that I kept him.’

‘Why didn’t you?’ He wasn’t sure where to go with this. There were accusations everywhere.

‘You didn’t want him.’ But she shook her head. ‘No. That’s unfair to you. At the time, neither of us wanted him. We were kids. The pregnancy was a mistake, Marc, as was our marriage. We should have known that it was never going to work. Our backgrounds were so different it was impossible.’

‘If it hadn’t been for the war...’

‘And if it hadn’t been for my mum’s illness...’ She shrugged. ‘But even without, there were responsibilities. You never told me how important your role was at home. And maybe I didn’t tell you how much my mum needed me.’

‘So when did you decide to keep him?’

She tilted her chin, like a kid facing the headmaster. Defiant.

‘I came back here after you left,’ she told him. ‘As I told you I had to. Mum’s lung transplant had failed. She loved the freedom the transplant gave her, the illusion of health, but she didn’t take care. She refused to follow the doctors’ instructions and maybe I can understand why. For the first time in her life she felt healthy and she made the most of it. Until she crashed. Then, you knew I had to put my studies on hold to care for her. When I found I was pregnant, life became even more impossible.’

He remembered. He’d received the email after a day coping with massive trauma wounds, when he was so exhausted the words had blurred.

Ellie was pregnant.

What could he do? Where he was, he couldn’t even phone her.

But the email had been blessedly practical. She couldn’t support a baby and care for her mother. She still—eventually—wanted to study medicine. There were so many good parents out there desperate for a baby, she told him, so the logical answer was surely adoption. Did he agree?

He’d felt gutted but there seemed no choice but to accept her decision. The war looked as if it would drag on for years. Ellie would have to cope on her own, so what right did he have to interfere?

‘So I was back here and pregnant,’ she told him. ‘Mum was totally dependent. I had your funds which kept us, but there was no way I could go back to university. University, our marriage, they seemed like a dream that had happened to someone else. Mum seemed to be dying and the pregnancy hardly mattered. When I thought about the pregnancy at all, it was just a blanket decision that adoption was the only answer.

‘Then, when I was thirty weeks pregnant, Mum was so bad she had to be hospitalised. And one of the nurses asked if I was looking after myself—if I’d had my check-ups, my scans. It was the first time anyone had asked, and it sort of shook me. So the nurse got bossy. She sent me for scans and the radiographer told me to take a few deep breaths and relax. And I lay there and listened to my baby’s heartbeat, and suddenly it was real. I was having a baby.’

‘Our baby,’ he said softly.

There was a long silence. Our baby. How loaded were those two words?

‘I think that was in the mix too,’ she whispered at last. ‘Yours and mine. What we had...it was good, Marc.’

‘It was.’

‘But I was still planning on adoption,’ she told him. ‘I remember lying there thinking, He’s real. He was conceived out of love. He has to go to a wonderful home. And then the radiographer’s wand reached his feet.’

‘Which were clubbed.’

‘I could see them,’ she whispered. ‘I could see how badly they were clubbed. And of course I’d done two years of medicine. I knew what he’d be facing, but I also knew there was the chance of more.’

Marc did too. Of course he did. Club feet were sometimes associated with other problems. He thought them through and they weren’t pretty. Trisomy 18 syndrome. Distal arthrogryposis. Myotonic dystrophy. The chance of each of those was small, but real.

‘I know it’s only twenty per cent of cases,’ she told him. ‘Club feet are usually the only presenting condition, but that was enough. I lay there and watched his image and thought, Who do I trust to look after my baby? Because suddenly he was my baby. And there was no need to answer, because by the time I walked out of that room no one was going to have the chance.’

He understood. He hated probing more, but he had to have answers. ‘So you decided to keep him—but you also decided not to tell me?’

‘How could I? I’d been following the situation in Falkenstein. I’d seen the war shattering your country. I’d even seen you on the news, working in a field hospital, talking to reporters of the struggles you were having after so many months, with the international community losing interest, with winter coming, with so many homeless. I knew you felt guilty about me anyway, so why hang more guilt on you? You’d agreed to adoption so why not just let you think he was adopted? What’s the difference, Marc, between someone unknown taking care of our son and me?’

‘For a start I would have funded you.’

‘I didn’t need funding. You sent me two years’ income and paid the rest of my university fees. You insisted I keep that. What more could I ask?’

‘That I care for my son!’ The shock, the frustration, the rage that he’d kept at bay all day suddenly vented itself in those six fierce words. He slammed his fist on the table so hard that the salt and pepper shakers toppled and rolled to the floor.

Neither of them noticed.

His rage was so great he could scarcely contain it, but it wasn’t rage at Ellie. It was rage at himself.

He hadn’t enquired. He hadn’t followed up.

What sort of low-life left a woman with a baby and didn’t find out how she was—for nine years?

‘Marc, you did ask,’ Ellie whispered, and her response shocked him. It was as if she guessed what he was thinking. ‘You rang after Felix was born.’

He remembered the call.

He’d spent the night operating in a field hospital after yet another bomb blast had shattered lives. He’d come back to his quarters to find the email, telling him that he had a son. He’d driven for hours to the nearest place there was reception, trying to put a call through. When he’d finally reached her, Ellie had sounded tired, spent, but okay.

‘He’s a beautiful little boy, Marc. You can be proud. He’ll have a good home, I promise. Yes, I’m okay and amazingly Mum’s okay too. She’s had another transplant and this one looks like it’s taken. My plan is to go back to university and Mum’s promised to help. No, there’s nothing you can do. Would you like me to send you a photograph of your—? Of the baby?’

And, idiot that he was, he’d said no. He’d wanted no picture of his son. How many times had he regretted it? But after having said it—that he didn’t want the hurt of seeing what could have been—how could he turn back?

The events of the last few days—the royal tragedy, his ascension to the throne, things that had seemed overwhelming—were suddenly nothing.

He’d walked out on his wife, she’d borne him a son and she’d kept him. She was here now, and his son was right through the door, dreaming of splash-lubricated crankshafts and magneto ignition...and a father who might share his life.

Ellie was looking at him as if she was scared. What, that he’d hit her? Sure, he was angry. He had every right to be, but he wasn’t angry at Ellie.

He’d been a doctor for years. How many times had he seen the grief of a lost baby? How could he not have guessed that a decision taken when Ellie had first learned she was pregnant couldn’t be carried through when she’d held her son in her arms?

Once she’d known her baby had formation issues she could never have given him away. She’d have fought for him to the death.

But that was the Ellie he’d known then. The Ellie he looked at now seemed as if the fight had been knocked out of her.

‘Marc, why are you here?’ she whispered and he struggled to swallow self-loathing and answer.

‘Why did you call him Felix?’ he asked tangentially.

‘It means lucky. Blessed. When I first saw him, I swore that’s what he’d be.’

‘If he has you for a mum, that’s a given.’

But she shook her head. ‘Marc, don’t. I don’t need compliments. What was between us was over nine years ago. I haven’t heard from you since our divorce. I assumed you’d have a wife and kids by now and be ruling the health system of Falkenstein. I’ve searched for you on the Internet from time to time,’ she confessed. ‘You seem to have been doing really well. I’m sorry about your dad, by the way. Heart attack?’

She’d been keeping tabs on him while he’d blocked her out completely. That made him feel even worse.

What did he know about her?

Involuntarily, he checked her ring finger. There was nothing there.

He thought of the ring that had once lain there—his great-grandmother’s, a ring of beauty and antiquity. Ellie had returned it after the divorce but he’d sent it straight back.

‘I want you to keep it, Ellie. You’re a woman of honour and I’m sure my great-grandmother would be proud if you kept wearing it. Move it to another finger and wear it with pride.’

Why would she still be wearing it?

No reason at all.

What had she asked? His father. A heart attack. ‘Yes. It was sudden. He was still working full-time.’ He hesitated. ‘Your mum?’

‘She died five years ago. The first transplant lasted three years, the second one four. It was a good four years, though. She loved Felix and helped me care for him.’

‘And you managed to get through university.’

‘Somehow. We eked out your money. I had a room in Sydney where we all stayed. Mum looked after Felix as best she could. When she couldn’t, I’d bring them both back here. I made a deal with the town—if they helped me with Felix and Mum, I’d come back and be the local doctor.’

‘But you wanted to specialise.’

‘Family practice is a specialty.’

‘But it’s not what you wanted.’

‘So I’ve learned we can’t always have what we want.’ She looked directly at him. ‘What do you want, Marc?’

And how much would he have given to be able to say he didn’t want anything? That this was a spur-of-the-moment visit, popping in to visit his ex-wife who he hoped could still be a friend.

Ha.

‘I needed to see you,’ he tried.

She looked at him directly and shrugged. ‘No. We’re over that long since. Didn’t we figure need was another name for lust?’

‘What was between us wasn’t just lust.’

‘No. It was a juvenile love affair. But I’m asking again, Marc. Why are you here? I thought it must be that you learned about me keeping Felix, but by your reaction it seems it’s not. So, you happened to be visiting Australia and decided to see how much your ex-wife has aged? What?’

There was no easy way to say this. Just say it, Marc.

‘I came because the entire Falkenstein royal family died in a plane crash. Three days ago I was fourth in line for the throne. Now the crown is mine.’

Her face creased in shock. ‘That’s appalling. Why wasn’t it on the news? Or maybe it was. I’ve been so busy.’ And then her face softened. ‘They’re your family. Marc, I’m so sorry.’

‘I don’t need sympathy,’ he said roughly. ‘There’s never been any love lost between us. I’ve always kept as far from the palace as possible. But now...’

‘Now?’ She took a moment to take in the full implications of what he’d said. ‘You’re...you’re the new King?’

‘Yes.’

Her face changed again, becoming wary. ‘And that means...what? Why are you here?’

There was no way to soften what needed to be said.

‘I travelled all this way, fast, to ask you to keep Felix’s adoption records quiet,’ he told her. ‘There’s already intense media interest in an obscure doctor who’s suddenly their monarch. Enough people know of our short marriage that it can’t be hidden. I hoped, however, that the birth would go unnoticed, or at least you could hide the adoption details.’

‘Why?’

‘Because adoption is accepted as legal abdication,’ he said heavily. ‘According to our constitution, if Felix had been formally adopted at birth he’d have no rights to succession but the media interest could still be upsetting. Now...’

Marc paused, overwhelmed by what he had to tell her.

Ellie rose and opened the sideboard. She poured two whiskies. Large ones.

‘I don’t drink this except in emergencies,’ she told him. ‘I suspect I need it now. Maybe we both do. So tell me.’

He took the glass and drained it, and then he looked at Ellie.

He could still see the girl he’d loved behind those tired eyes. He could still see the laughter, the fun... But he could also see the care and the responsibility.

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