Marion Lennox - Wanted: Royal Wife and Mother

‘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.’

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 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.