The Secret Prince
“Oh my goodness, no. But Maryland is my home now. I’ve been here all of my adult life. Sit down, I’ll bring you a cup of coffee and a warm slice.”
Elly turned around to protest but Margaret was gone.
“You said you’ve lived here all of your adult life?” she shouted toward the kitchen door.
“In Maryland, not Ocean City. We lived in Baltimore while Dan was young. But he turned into such a beach bum after a few summers of lifeguarding down here. After he was discharged from the service, he wanted me to move down here with him while he attended the community college. Later, he and his friend bought this land and built these cute little cottages.” She was beaming proudly as she walked back into the room, holding a tray laden with coffee mugs and plates of fresh gingerbread topped with mountains of whipped cream. “Danny also runs a summer camp for city boys and girls.”
“I didn’t know that,” Elly admitted.
“Oh yes. He feels very strongly about giving inner-city children a few weeks off the streets, to let them see a different world from their troubled neighborhoods.”
Elly accepted a steaming mug of coffee and a dessert plate with a second twinge of guilt. She didn’t want to deceive this woman who was being so hospitable to her. “Mrs. Eastwood, I have to confess that Dan didn’t actually send me over to talk with you.”
“Oh?” She looked disappointed.
“I’ve been hired by a European family to fill in a missing branch on their family tree. The von Austerands. Do you recognize the name?”
Elly watched as the woman’s face grayed and her fingers pinched nervously at the napkin in her lap. “No.”
“They’re like the Windsors of England. They are the royal family of a small country that borders on Austria. Elbia.”
“I think you’d better leave,” Madge said tightly.
But Elly was determined. She continued choosing her words carefully. “We have reason to believe that a young American woman had a brief romantic liaison with the young king of that country thirty-three years ago, before he married. There is a chance that she was carrying his child when they parted, but if so, she disappeared before the baby was born. Would you know anything about this, Mrs. Eastwood?”
Dan’s mother firmly set her plate on the coffee table and turned her face toward the rainbow of glass in the window. “My husband was an American. His name was Carl Eastwood, and he died before Dan was a year old,” she pronounced tightly.
Carl Eastwood. There it was again, the name Dan had used. Carl with a C according to the documents she’d already dug up. Could it be a coincidence that the young king’s name had been Karl? His Royal Highness Karl von Austerand had died just a few years ago, and now his son Jacob wore his crown. Jacob had always been thought to be the king’s sole heir, until evidence of a secret love affair turned up in a routine cataloguing of the family’s papers only days ago. Days which now felt to Elly like weeks and months of frantic searching.
“I wouldn’t know about affairs or kings or illegitimate royal babies,” Madge said sharply.
Elly’s heart beat faster despite the woman’s denial. Something in her pale eyes told Elly this was a woman unaccustomed to lying, who was desperately trying to do just that.
“I understand how difficult this must be for you,” Elly said softly, setting aside her own coffee and fragrant gingerbread to reach across the space between the two chairs and pat the other woman’s arm. “But if you can just give me a little more information, please.”
Madge’s chest rose and fell with labored breaths. She stiffened and leaned back into her chair, her hands gripping the arms. Her features contorted into sharp folds, as if she was trying to work out a difficult puzzle. “Go,” she whispered hoarsely. “Get out of my house.”
Elly sighed inwardly. She respected the woman’s right to privacy, but if she didn’t get to the truth soon, both Madge and her son would find themselves in a terrible fix. This was no time for cat-and-mouse games. A simple statement from the woman would save days they didn’t have for a full public records’ investigation. She’d already picked up and lost two reporters on her way from Connecticut to Baltimore. They might show up at any moment—then it would be out of her hands, if her theory about Dan Eastwood was right. She decided to try a different angle.
“Mrs. Eastwood, I’m not trying to upset you. But in cases where relationships have broken up, the children often want to know about their lost family members. Don’t you think Dan would like to learn who his real father is?” She was bluffing, just a little, for she wasn’t one-hundred-percent certain of all the facts. But if it worked she would know for sure.
Madge’s mouth flew wide on a horrified gasp. “My son doesn’t need to know—”
Her words stilled in the air as the front door clicked shut and footsteps approached the sitting room from the hall. Both women turned to face the doorway.
Dan Eastwood looked around the corner, his dark eyes glittering dangerously. Even at a distance, Elly could see the thin blue vein throbbing at his temple and the tense cut of his mouth. “I don’t need to know what, Mother?”
Elly’s heart felt as if it were being squeezed by a cold, hard hand. She crossed her fingertips over her chest and swallowed. The warning rumble of Dan’s voice sent icy prickles down her spine.
She glanced quickly at Madge, whose expression had altered with amazing speed from a stubborn glare to a helpless pucker. “Oh, dear. I guess I shouldn’t have let this young woman in. She told me she was your girlfriend, Danny.”
Elly gasped in outrage and shot to her feet. The woman wasn’t as guileless as she appeared. “I never said that! Mrs. Eastwood, you know that I never implied my visit was—” She let out a frustrated wail. Between his mother and a stranger, who was the man likely to believe? “Never mind. I came alone because I felt your mom might feel less self-conscious speaking to me without your being here.”
Dan quirked one skeptical, dark brow at her.
“Honest. I didn’t mean any harm.”
“I told you I would bring you around if necessary!” Dan snapped, then turned to his distraught-looking mother. “I don’t know how she found you. I’m sorry. Now, ladies, what is it I don’t need to know?”
Madge firmly pressed her lips together.
“Then you tell me,” he stated, swiveling back to Elly.
“At the moment, there may or may not be anything to tell.” She was doing her best to be discreet. But Dan was making things harder by the minute, and Madge seemed incapable of saying anything to either stop the truth from coming out or to set facts straight. Elly stood to face him. “It’s important that I find out if your mother was ever in Europe…specifically, in Paris.”
Dan looked from the woman he’d fantasized about less than an hour earlier, to his mother. He read a level of anxiety in Madge’s eyes he had never seen before. “What’s going on here, Mom?”
“She’s upsetting me,” Madge whimpered. “Make her leave.”
Dan ground out words between clenched teeth, fighting to hang on to his temper. “She’s going to leave as soon as she explains what the hell she’s fishing for!”
As infuriating as Elly was, his body still reacted with disturbing warmth to her presence. It was impossible to keep his eyes off her pretty, animated face…or her hands, which kept moving from twin perches on her hips to tug nervously at her blouse’s neckline or tuck themselves away when she folded her arms over her chest. Which was another issue entirely…her enticingly lovely, perfectly proportioned chest. She’d evidently left off her jacket for this visit, which offered a much nicer view. Someone help him!
“Why does it matter whether or not my mother ever was in Europe?” he had the presence of mind to demand.
Elly took a deep breath and stepped toward him, praying the right words would come to her. “Papers have recently come to light that indicate a young American woman named Margaret Jennings spent a year abroad, as a student in Paris. That was your maiden name. Right, Mrs. Eastwood?”
Dan answered for her. “Yes, and her junior year she attended the Sorbonne. You told me you did, Mom.”
Madge closed her eyes but acknowledged nothing.
Elly held her breath and asked, “Was it during that year that you met a young man named—”
“I met Carl Eastwood there, yes!” Madge snapped, pushing herself up from her armchair with startling energy. “We married, and nine months later Dan was born. But Carl died very young.” Tears filled her eyes and she wiped at them with the sleeve of her dress.
Dan frowned, looking more puzzled than ever. “I thought you and Dad hooked up in Baltimore.”
“No. No, it was in a little village outside of Paris.” Madge sniffled and looked away from her son. “Years later, I heard the church burned down. Probably destroyed all its records too.”
Elly opened her mouth to tell the woman she knew that was a lie, but at the last second thought better of it since her six-foot-plus son stood by ready to defend his mother’s honor.
“Go on,” Dan growled, his too-perceptive gaze locked onto Elly’s face. “What were you about to say?”
She swallowed over a sandpaper-dry spot in her throat. “There is no record of a marriage, that’s true.” She hesitated, but the look on Dan’s face told her she must finish what she’d begun, regardless of how he took the news. “There is no record…because there has never been a Carl Eastwood in your mother’s life. And there never was a marriage.”
“All right, you’re out of here!” Dan’s wide hand shot out. He seized Elly by the arm and marched her firmly toward the door.
She had only enough time to swipe her purse from the coffee table and grab her coat from the back of her chair before he ushered her out of the room.
“I don’t know what kind of game you’re playing, and I don’t care. You’re leaving, lady.”
“But don’t you want to—”
Before she could get out the rest of her sentence, she found herself standing alone in the cold ocean mist on Madge’s lemon-bright porch. She could still feel the pressure of Dan’s strong fingers on her arm and his palm on her backside after the door slammed behind her. The nerve of the man. He’d thrown her out!
Then the implication of what had just happened hit her. A triumphant grin spread slowly across her lips.
She had found her missing prince!
Two
Elly bounced in anticipation on the edge of the hotel bed, her ear pressed to the telephone receiver. Someone had gone to find her father to take her call. She’d never seen the castle in person, but photographs of Der Kristallenpalast, the famous crystal palace, revealed an immense, turreted structure of pale, lustrous marble and hundreds of richly appointed rooms. Frank Anderson could easily be half a mile from the nearest phone.
His unmistakable smoker’s voice suddenly rasped across the line. “It’s about time. What do you have?”
“It’s a boy!” she cried.
“The old king had a son with the Jennings girl?”
Elly grinned, enjoying her moment of triumph. “That girl is now in her fifties, goes by Madge and is being really stubborn about admitting that she had a royal fling thirty-some years ago.”
“Understandable,” he grumbled. “She married now? Not wanting her husband to know about her past?”
“No,” Elly admitted with a sigh. “But she’s sticking to a story about an American husband who died young. I’m certain she made him up for her son’s benefit.”
“But you’re sure about this young man?”
She hesitated barely a heartbeat. “Yes. Dad, he even looks like Jacob. And the photos of Karl when he was young could be Daniel Eastwood today. They have the same dark hair and strong, angular features, although Eastwood’s eyes are dark brown, not blue.”
“That could easily come from the mother’s side. Good. I’ll tell Jacob.”
“Do we have enough to prove legally he’s the old king’s son, though?” she asked. She trusted her intuition and the facts she’d uncovered, but the law was another thing.
“Karl was studying at the Sorbonne the same time as Margaret Jennings, according to the school’s records. He kept her love letters to him and her farewell note. A handwriting expert can make quick work of comparing this woman’s handwriting with that of the person who wrote those letters. There are other documents as well.”
Elly was so excited she could barely speak. But she was also deeply moved by the drama revealed by the decades-old letters they’d found. Those must have been desperate times for a young prince, soon to become king, and his frightened mistress. Had Karl even known that the girl he’d fallen in love with but could never marry carried his child? Nothing they’d found to this date mentioned her pregnancy. How very sad, Elly thought, if the man had died never knowing he had another son.
But now, years later, wonderful things might come of this discovery for Dan and his mother. Not that they deserved it, Elly thought ruefully, tossing her out the way they’d done. But imagine discovering a brother you never knew existed! And a royal one at that!
“What now?” Elly asked her father breathlessly.
“Jacob’s advisors told me this morning that if you found the woman and she had a child by the king, they’d want both of them brought over on the first possible plane.”
She frowned. “Why?”
“Damage control. They believe that with the pair here in Elbia, the press will have a harder time getting to them. There are also some touchy legal issues to be ironed out, the sooner the better from the crown’s perspective.”
Elly’s mind whirled, and she felt short of breath. “Eastwood doesn’t even believe me. How will I get him on a plane to Europe? Dad, this isn’t our job. All we agreed to do was verify historical records. We’re not private investigators.”
“Elizabeth.” His chastising papa-bear growl ended in a soft cough. She hated that he smoked. But since her mother had died there had been no one, including herself, who could talk sense to the man about his health or anything else.
“Well, we’re not!” she insisted.
“We have no choice at this point. The king blames us for the leak. He’s absolutely convinced that no one in his court would peddle such volatile news to the press. Now we have to do what we can to save a bad situation. And—” He balked.
“There’s more bad news?” She didn’t want to think about one more complication.
“Consider the many implications of this discovery, Elly. There is enormous wealth at stake. Even an illegitimate child might demand a portion of his father’s fortune. And what about the mother? As far as we know, she has never been compensated for her pregnancy or given any financial help in raising the boy.”
Elly rolled her eyes to the motel room’s chalky ceiling. The packet of letters her father had only recently discovered hidden behind a panel in an ancient armoire had turned into a modern Pandora’s box. In addition to the love notes, signed “adoringly, Margaret,” other letters, returned from the United States as undeliverable, indicated that over the next ten years Karl had tried to locate his lost love, but failed. Perhaps it was just his beloved Margaret he searched for. Or maybe he feared the existence of a child and knew the danger an illegitimate offspring, older by several months than his son by the queen, would pose to his dynasty.
“Get them on a plane,” Elly repeated dully, shaking her head. “Short of kidnapping mother and son, I’m not sure how I’ll manage that.”
“We don’t have much time,” Frank reminded her. “If I were that young man or his mother, I’d want to find a good place to hide out for a while. The press will eat them alive.”
Elly shook her head. “Something tells me this guy isn’t the type to run away from anything.”
“Elizabeth,” her father whispered hoarsely, sounding increasingly worried, “if this explodes in our faces, our professional reputation will be destroyed. We might as well give up the business. Do you understand?”
She swallowed. It was that bad then. “I’ll bring them to you,” she promised. “Somehow.”
Dan was thirty minutes late for his appointment with the contractor, mostly because he had other things on his mind. His thoughts boomeranged back and forth between memories of manhandling an attractive redhead out his mother’s door, his hand placed strategically on her pretty rump, and the less enjoyable knowledge that he’d probably never see Elly Anderson again.
Luckily, the contractor was still in his office. They negotiated a few terms, signed the contract. Within a week the storm damage to the bungalows closest to the shoreline would be repaired. One less thing to worry about.
Dan drove back toward the Haven along Ocean Avenue and turned into the parking lot. A flash of crimson hair in the sunlight caught his eye. Setting the parking brake on his SUV, he squinted through the windshield into the wintry glare. A man and a woman stood where the lot met the sandy boardwalk.
Elly’s elegant legs appeared even longer whenever the wind flipped up the hem of her skirt. Her hair, lifting free of confining pins, swirled in russet waves around her face as she talked to Kevin and occasionally lifted a hand to hold flaming wisps out of her eyes.
“What’s that woman up to now?” he muttered, heaving himself up out of the car.
Dear old Kev wore that deer-staring-into-headlights expression common to men confronted by a pretty woman. Dan only hoped his friend hadn’t said anything to encourage Elly’s snooping. He jogged across the parking lot toward them.
“I thought we agreed you were through with this nonsense!” Dan shouted into the wind.
Elly turned to observe him, her eyes far too enticing to cool his simmering blood. Simmering because he was furious with her but also because she looked so deliciously disheveled with the wind tugging at her skirt and hair, and teasing open the collar of her jacket to reveal a sliver of flesh at the top of her breast.
She planted her feet firmly and straightened her spine to meet him. “We need to talk, Mr. Eastwood.”
“Isn’t that where we started this morning?”
Kevin looked from one to the other of them with a puzzled expression then backed off two steps. “I don’t know what this is about, but I’ll let you two hash things out. Got work to do.”
To Dan’s surprise, Elly didn’t so much as blink or make any move that might be construed as retreat. “I need you and Mrs. Eastwood on a plane for Europe,” she stated. “Tonight at the latest.”
He laughed. “You’re not only wrong about my mother, you’re insane!”
“No,” she said solemnly, “I’m not. Not on either account. I have evidence. Please listen to me. If you don’t, both of you are going to be hurt far more than you can imagine.”
There was something fervent and beyond argument in her tone. This was a woman who believed in what she said. For the first time Dan felt deep in his gut that Elizabeth Anderson wasn’t flinging idle fairy tales at him or working some kind of confidence game. He remembered the look on his mother’s face earlier that day. Madge had been afraid—not of lies, but of the truth. And that terrified him.
He looked at his watch. “It’s getting close to lunch time. Are you hungry?”
Elly gave him a guarded look. “Famished,” she admitted. “No time for breakfast this morning. Why?”
“Let’s get a table at Kirby’s. We can talk this out over crab cakes.”
Kirby’s, one of the most popular seafood restaurants on Ocean Avenue, was nearly deserted during off season. They sat in a fifties-style red vinyl booth and Dan ordered two steaming crab cake platters piled high with salty French fries, little paper cups of sweet coleslaw on the side.
Elly poured a stream of rich ketchup over her fries and dug in hungrily. Dan ate more slowly than usual, watching her. He was aware of her thin ankles crossed beneath the table, visible through the space between his bench and the table top. When he lifted his eyes they fixed with fascination on her animated lips as she relished the crunchy potatoes and fat crab cake with its savory Old Bay seasonings perfuming the room around them.
He found it impossible to hold onto his irritation with her. But he was curious and more than a little suspicious of her motives for wanting to whisk him off to another continent. “So tell me about this proof. And why the urgency to get me out of the country?”
“I know you feel I’m intruding,” she began, spearing another fry with her fork and shaking it at him in schoolmarm fashion, “and I don’t like being put in the position of having to accuse anyone of lying about their past but—”
“But that’s precisely what you are doing, isn’t it?” he asked in a low voice.
Elly pursed her lips and studied him for a long moment, as if searching for diplomatic words. “People can be very creative about their past, if they are afraid. A woman has to be particularly careful. And a single mom always has to explain herself to others. No doubt your mother felt that a dead husband was easier for people to accept than the truth.”
“And that truth is?” He might be willing to believe her. Might. But not without one hell of an explanation.
Elly continued with obvious caution as she pulled a manila envelope from the briefcase on the bench beside her. “I have photocopies of letters found on the von Austerand family’s property. There now is little doubt that the ones signed Margaret were written by your mother, but we can verify that as soon as she is in Elbia.”
She put up a hand to stop him from interrupting. “We believe your mother fell deeply in love with Karl von Austerand the year she studied in Paris. She probably believed they would marry, but he wasn’t completely honest with her. He was engaged to another woman of royal blood. And he was the crown prince, soon to become King of Elbia.
“Karl was attending the college under an assumed name to avoid publicity. When Madge discovered they could never wed, she ran home to America—probably just after learning she was pregnant. Instead of returning to her parents’ home in Massachusetts, she found a place to live in Baltimore and hid her shame by inventing a husband. The move probably was intended to elude Karl, too. Perhaps she feared what he might do if he discovered their child. You.”
Dan could feel the heat rising from his chest to his throat. He glared at the folder resting on the table beneath her hand. “This is very difficult to believe,” he said tightly.
Elly slowly shook her head. “I’m sorry. See for yourself.”
He couldn’t move, was barely capable of breathing. Still furious with Elly, he was nevertheless increasingly fearful that what she claimed might be true. She didn’t have to tell him how drastically his life would change if it was.
And what about Madge’s quiet existence? She hated confrontation. She had always favored a life without complications. Any shattered love affair and unwanted baby were as complicated as life got. Unless the father of your baby was a man whose family’s status rivaled that of the royals of England or Monaco—people with unlimited wealth and power, who could never escape their celebrity or stay off the front page of grocery-store gossip rags for long.
Elly rested her warm hand over his on the tabletop. “This must be a shock to you. You’ve grown up believing one thing, and here I am telling you everything is different. I’m sorry. Truly, I am.” Her eyes shone with sincerity and compassion. “I would have preferred to let your mother keep her secret. But it’s out of my hands now. Others have found out, so you both needed to know.”
He couldn’t utter a word. His lips felt as stiff as if he’d climbed from a December ocean.
“Take your time reading while you finish eating,” she offered. “Then let me know what you think.” Her accent was flavored with New England. Maple-syrup sweet, with a touch of Yankee logic. He would have liked to get to know her better, a whole lot better. She seemed a nice person, in addition to being so easy on the eyes. But it appeared that more pressing matters were on deck.