Wanted: Royal Wife and Mother Read online

  ‘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 trancelike 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.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, in a voice which said that if Matty hadn’t been present he might have said something else.

  ‘I need to go to sleep,’ Matty said unnecessarily.

  ‘You can stay here,’ Kelly said before she realized she intended to say it.

  ‘We can’t…’

  ‘I’ve just got the one bedroom,’ she said quickly. ‘But it’s a double bed. You and Matty could have it and I can sleep on the settee.’

  ‘This settee?’ Rafael asked. There was no separate living area from the kitchen in this cottage. The settee stretched out along one wall, big and piled with cushions and incredibly inviting.

  ‘I could sleep on that,’ Matty announced.

  ‘So you could,’ Rafael said. ‘If that’s okay with your mama. I’ll go back to the Prince Edward.’

  Matty’s face fell. ‘I want to go with you,’ he whispered.

  Of course. Kelly was his mother but he’d known her for all of two hours. Rafael was his security.

  But now she’d said it, Kelly knew the invitation had come from the heart. She so wanted them to stay. She wanted Matty to stay.

  Rafael was watching her face. He wouldn’t have to be brilliant to see the aching need she had no way of disguising.

  The thought of them going to the Prince Edward, where she knew they’d lie awake all night rocked by the vibrations of truly appalling bands was almost unbearable. But in truth the thought of Matty going anywhere was unbearable. She’d put up with Rafael-with a de Boutaine in her house-to know that Matty was under her roof.

  ‘So here’s a plan,’ Rafael said gently, looking from Matty to Kelly and back again. ‘Matty, your mama says the hotel we’re planning on staying in is very noisy. She’s invited us to stay in this little cottage with her. Would you like to do that?’

  ‘Yes, but only if you stay here too,’ Matty said, and his bottom lip trembled.

  ‘Then I will,’ Rafael said. ‘But you know, you and your mama look as tired as each other. Why don’t you pop under the blankets on one side of your mama’s bed? Your mama can sleep on the other side and I’ll sleep by the fire.’

  ‘Why can’t you and mama sleep in the bed while I sleep by the fire?’ Matty whispered but he was losing force. He was drooping as they watched.

  ‘It wouldn’t be dignified,’ Rafael said. ‘You know Aunt Laura says you and I need to learn to be dignified.’

  ‘It’s not dignified to sleep in the same bed as my mama?’

  ‘For you, yes. For me, no.’

  ‘Okay,’ Matty said, caving in with an alacrity born of need. ‘Can I go to bed now?’

  And an hour later she was in bed with her son.

  It felt like a weird and spacey dream. She lay in her big double bed and listened to him. Her son was breathing.

  No big deal. To listen to a child breathe…

  How could she go to sleep? She’d left the blind open and the moon was shining over her little vegetable garden, into the window, washing over her little son’s face.

  Normally she blocked the moon out. She had a single woman’s need for security-privacy-so the blind went down every night.

  There was no way the blind was coming down this night. She lay and watched Matty’s chest rise and fall, his small face intent even in sleep, the way his lashes curled, the way his fingers pressed into his cheek…

  She could see his father. She could see the de Boutaine side. But she could also see little things about herself. She had funny quirky eyebrows, too thick for beauty. Whenever she had a haircut, the hairdresser tut-tutted and thinned them out.

  Here were those same thick brows.

  On a guy they’d be gorgeous.

&nbs
p; On Matty they were gorgeous.

  Her son.

  There were vague sounds from outside and she looked out of the window in time to see the security guards wandering past her back fence. Yes, she should get up and close the blind. It wasn’t safe.

  It was safe, for just through the door Rafael de Boutaine was stretched out on her settee.

  Her son was in bed beside her. The Prince Regent of Alp de Ciel was just through the door.

  ‘As if that makes us safe,’ she muttered into the night.

  But…but…

  ‘He’s different from Kass. He’s honourable, I know.

  ‘How do you know?’ She was whispering into the dark. Her hand was lying on Matty’s pillow. She wouldn’t touch him. She wouldn’t for the world wake him, startle him. But with her hand on his pillow she could feel his breathing. It was enough.

  ‘Rafael brought him home.

  ‘There must be some underlying motive.

  ‘Maybe, but he’s brought him home,’ she whispered and the thought of Rafael lying in the darkness just through the door remained solid. Good. Comforting in a way she hadn’t been comforted for years.

  Her little boy was asleep beside her. Rafael had brought him to her.

  What more could a woman want?

  ‘I have my son,’ she whispered into the dark and thought how could she sleep with such happiness?

  But she was still recuperating from the flu. She hadn’t slept well for weeks.

  She leaned up on her elbows and gazed for one long last moment at her son. She touched her lips with her finger and then transferred the kiss to her son with a feather touch that wouldn’t disturb him for the world.

  She snuggled down on to her pillows where she could watch her son’s breathing.

  He breathed. He breathed.

  Rafael was just through the door. Prince Regent of Alp de Ciel. A prince who’d brought her son to her.

  She felt warm and safe and almost delirious with love.

  She slept.

  Kelly woke to the smell of coffee. She opened one eye. They were standing at the bedroom door, smiling. Both of them. Identical smiles, where warmth and mischief combined.

  Rafael was dressed in the same casual cords and soft sweater he’d been wearing the night before. Last night Matty had been wearing jeans and a soft blue coat. Now he was wearing almost identical cords to Rafael and a sweater of the same colour as well. They looked…They looked…