Reunited By The Royal Baby

She had thought about delaying it until after the King’s speech—but surely she wouldn’t stand a chance of getting near him then? Not with people clamouring around to tell him how wonderful he was as they inevitably would.

She saw the towering form of his aide beginning to advance towards her with grim intent in his black eyes and she wondered if he had been told to act as a buffer between them. So that for one crazy moment, she actually thought of making a run for it. Of flying straight over to the King and blurting out her secret before anyone could stop her. But the man he had called Orso was lighter on his feet than his huge frame suggested—and suddenly he was by her side, with a light but iron-firm grip to her elbow which meant she was going nowhere without his say-so, and she felt her nerve begin to desert her.

‘You wish to speak to the King?’

‘Y-yes.’

‘About what?’ snapped Orso.

Meeting the glare from his eyes, Melissa knew it was imperative that she held her nerve. She had come this far and she would not be fobbed off with a member of his entourage. ‘That’s between me and the King. I wish to speak privately with him.’

‘Then you will approach His Majesty with more caution.’ Orso’s heavily accented voice was harsh with disapproval. ‘Unless you wish for a posse of his armed guards to spring on you and to throw you in the jail-house at Ghalazamba?’

‘Of c-course I don’t,’ she stumbled, some of her nerve deserting her.

‘Then walk with me,’ instructed Orso tersely.

He led her by a circuitous route to the long dais where Casimiro sat along with the other exulted guests. Melissa stood looking at the backs of them all—at the women’s jewel-encrusted necklaces and priceless earrings which dangled down to their naked shoulders—and there was a moment when she wondered if he’d forgotten she was there. Until suddenly he turned, fastening her in the amber snare of his eyes—the faintest inclination of his dark head the only outward sign that he was summoning her towards him.

Heart crashing, she approached him. Had anyone noticed that she wasn’t busying herself on the sidelines with Stephen—helping deal with every little crisis as it arose? Which was what she should have been doing. But Melissa didn’t care. It didn’t even matter if her job was on the line. She could always find another job—but never find another father for her son.

‘You are very impertinent,’ Casimiro mused as she grew close enough to hear the whispered disapproval in his voice. ‘To stare at me as the hyena regards the glistening flesh.’

Had she come over as predatory? ‘I don’t mean to be, Your Majesty.’

Again, he detected the faint drift of lilac as she leaned towards him. The sense of something tantalisingly close—like a wave which washed against the shoreline before retreating again. He frowned, his interest unexpectedly awakened. ‘Do you always behave this way at functions?’

She wanted to say no—but hadn’t she been pretty unprofessional the last time she’d met him? Yet he had been the one who had driven it, she reminded herself. Who had started this whole thing between them. And was she really so invisible—so inconsequential—that he couldn’t remember a single thing about her or anything they’d done together?

‘This is not the way I normally behave, no. Perhaps…perhaps it’s the effect you have on me, Your Majesty.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘You don’t remember, do you?’ she whispered.

Sabre-sharp, her words sliced through him as she found his Achilles heel and Casimiro stilled. ‘Remember what?’ he bit out.

Was she going to have to spell it out for him? Was she really so unforgettable that he still didn’t remember their affair? Staring at the august presence in front of her, Melissa allowed herself the bittersweet luxury of recall, remembering the night she’d first laid eyes on him.

It had been when London’s biggest museum had exhibited the fabulous statues excavated during an archaeological dig on the island of Zaffirinthos. The after-show party had been held at the house of a minor British royal—a magnificent mansion which had overlooked Green Park itself.

What had made the evening stand out had been the presence of the King of Zaffirinthos, who had flown in especially to witness the first stage of the international tour of the statues. And he had turned out to be an attraction who had proved even more newsworthy than the precious artefacts. An outrageously gorgeous man in his early thirties, he was quickly dubbed by the press: “The Most Eligible Man In Europe.”

Melissa’s first glimpse of the royal had certainly borne out all the hype. As he’d been shown around the museum for a private view of the show she could see why his face had been raved about in all the gossip columns and why every hostess in the capital was clamouring to get him onto her guest list.

It was an amazing face—all carved aristocratic features and skin which gleamed like gold. His eyes were golden too, a deeper, darker shade which was closer to amber—and the jet-dark waves of his hair looked as if they had been swirled onto his head with the bold brush-strokes of some master artist’s charcoal pencil. Why, with his powerful presence she had found herself thinking that he looked almost like a statue himself.

But the stillness of his muscular body did nothing to deflect the fact that he had about him some nebulous quality which transcended his royal status. Melissa felt there was something rather wild and untamed about him.

And, of course, she hadn’t spoken to him. She had been too busy supervising the mass of summer flowers which had garlanded the entrance to the grand house in an attempt to detract from the unseasonably heavy rain outside—and reporting back to her hostess, who was a particularly exacting woman.

The evening had been memorable for another reason, too—the one which could always activate the dark aching hole inside her: the anniversary of her mother’s death in that terrible car crash. Melissa knew it was slightly pathetic for a young adult like herself to describe herself as an orphan, but on this one night of the year—when she relived the terror of the midnight phone-call and the subsequent horror which had unfolded in the intensive care ward—that was exactly what she felt like.

She had put her emotions on hold until the end of the evening when she had been unable to stem the tide of tears any longer and in a cloakroom in a deserted part of the basement she had lost the battle, and given into quiet sobs of sorrow.

Eventually, emerging red-eyed into the corridor which led back up to the main part of the house, she had almost cannoned into a tall man—quickly turning her face to one side, too embarrassed to be seen by anyone in such a fragile state as she had tried to avoid him.

‘Hey,’ came a silken voice whose marked accent should have alerted her but she was so busy dabbing at her eyes with a crumpled-up tissue that she failed to make the connection. ‘What’s the rush?’

‘Go away.’ Melissa gulped and the moment she’d said it she realised just who he was and stared up at him in horror.

He looked as if he hadn’t quite decided to be irritated or bemused—as if he wasn’t used to people saying that to him. And then his eyes drifted over her and Melissa wondered how vile she must look with her shiny red nose and blotchy skin.

‘You’ve been crying,’ he observed, with the air of a man who was never cried in front of.

Ten out of ten for observation, she thought miserably—hating feeling so vulnerable and so awful in front of someone like him. ‘Yes, I have,’ she said, in a small voice, wondering why he wasn’t upstairs drinking his champagne with the rest of the privileged gathering.

‘Why?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Oh, but it does—because I want to know. Don’t you realise that I am a king?’ His amber eyes glittered, his lips curving into a mocking smile. ‘And that everything I command is always granted?’

For a moment she thought he was joking—and maybe he was, just a little. But she could also see that he expected an answer from her and so, with a sudden mulishness, Melissa decided to tell him. Then let him be sorry he had asked.

‘It’s the anniversary of my mother’s death.’

There was a pause. ‘Oh.’

She could see the sudden tightening of his face. Could hear the sudden chatter of conversation as a distant door was opened and the dull background patter of rain as it lashed against one of the basement doors. Perhaps he heard it too for she caught him looking down at her cheap shoes, and frowning—as if it had suddenly occurred to him that they might let in water.

‘You want a ride home?’ he questioned.

‘From you?’

‘Who else? You have a car waiting? A boyfriend perhaps?’

Suspiciously, she screwed up her eyes as if to check that he wasn’t being sarcastic. ‘No. I don’t.’

‘Then how were you planning on getting home?’

‘On the underground.’

‘Well, don’t. I’ll be outside. Don’t keep me waiting.’

He walked off, leaving Melissa staring at him as if she’d seen a ghost. A ghost that looked and sounded like a king and had offered her a ride home. As she gave the kitchen a last minute check and changed from her black working dress into a pair of jeans and a raincoat she kept wondering whether she’d imagined the whole thing.

But she hadn’t. A dark-tinted limousine was sitting a little way down the road and as her steps slowed uncertainly a chauffeur suddenly got out and opened the door for her.

Briefly, it occurred to her that this was the kind of action those real-life crime programmes you saw on TV always advised you against taking. She could see Casimiro sitting in the back seat and when Melissa hesitated, this seemed to amuse him.

‘So, are you getting in—or staying there and getting wet?’

Still she hesitated.

‘Or perhaps you think I will leap on you? That you are completely irresistible to me?’

Melissa swallowed. Now he was being sarcastic. And suddenly she didn’t care—not about whether it was right or wrong or the fact that he was a king. When compared to the bigger picture of mortality and the fact that she would never see her mother again—this was about as important as chicken-feed.

‘Why are you doing this?’ she questioned as she climbed into the back of the car and into his world of luxury and soft leather. ‘Because you feel sorry for me?”

There was a pause, and then a fierce look came over his face—a look so dark and so bleak that Melissa felt as if she was intruding just by witnessing it. As if she had glimpsed into some dark corner of his soul.

‘Because I know how hard it can be,’ he said unexpectedly. ‘To lose a mother.’

And that had been it, really. Two people brought together by a rainy night and a moment of empathy. Something had fused between them—bringing together a pair of lives which couldn’t have been more disparate. Against all the odds, they had become lovers.

With lazy amusement, Casimiro told her that his usual aide was not accompanying him—and it seemed to amuse him to give the others the slip as often as possible. For five days he played hide-and-seek with them—ensuring just enough freedom to snatch at a life which could never be his, while reassuring the people who guarded him that he was safe. It seemed that everything the King did, he did well—if recklessly—and he embraced his new-found anonymity with a skill which would have made the finest actor turn green with envy.

In Melissa’s tiny bedsit he—a man who had been fed every delicacy since birth—sampled beans on toast for the first time in his life. He drank cheap wine and made tea in a mug. The two of them hired a little boat on the river and he rode on the top deck of a red London bus without anyone knowing it was him. And they spent afternoons in bed, listening to the distant hum of traffic and the sound of their own heartbeats. He told her that she smelt of summer flowers and that her eyes were like emerald stars—and hadn’t she just revelled in those lazy compliments?

Of course, it was over almost as soon as it began. Melissa had known that was going to happen—and Casimiro had never pretended that it was ever going to be otherwise. Five days could simultaneously feel like a moment or a lifetime, she discovered.

“You knew that this was never destined to last, didn’t you?” he’d murmured on that last time in bed, his clever, seeking fingers trickling down over her belly to bury themselves in the soft fuzz of hair which lay at the fork of her thighs.

“Of course I did!” she’d whispered, praying that her voice wouldn’t break down.

That didn’t stop it hurting, of course, and the pain she felt was in direct proportion to her earlier joy—fierce and strong and almost unbearable. But somehow she managed to keep the tears at bay until they’d said their goodbyes—and once he’d gone she experienced an empty void, a kind of aching no-man’s-land, before her world was completely shattered…

‘Remember what?’

Casimiro’s harsh question broke into her painful thoughts and Melissa felt her body jerk as the memories cleared and she found herself back in the present, standing beneath the imperious gaze of the man with the amber eyes in a banqueting hall full of the world’s movers and shakers. But this was no longer the anonymous lover who had kissed her so passionately in her little bedsit—but a distant and remote stranger sitting on his kingly dais.

She met the icy question in his eyes. ‘We’ve…we’ve met before, Your Majesty.’

‘And?’

Melissa blinked, confused now. ‘So you…you do remember?’

Casimiro gave a little click of disapproval as he pulled his speech from his jacket pocket and prepared to wave her away.

‘Do you realise how many people I “meet” in the course of my working life?’ he demanded impatiently. ‘And while they will each remember every detail of our encounter, most of their faces are, to me, simply a blur. What was it? Some official line-up you were on? Some catering college I was visiting?’

‘No. You don’t understand.’ Shaking her head, Melissa could see the look of surprise in his eyes as she contradicted him, but she was fearless now. This was her last chance, she realised. Her very last chance.

‘What don’t I understand?’ he asked, dangerously.

‘This was different.’

Casimiro tensed, half wondering if she was one of that thankfully rare breed of women who stalked famous men—and whether he had been foolish in granting her access. But something in the way she was looking at him made his eyes narrow and his heart began to pound. He glanced over to where Orso was clearly poised to terminate the conversation at his behest. At the guards who stood in the shadows and could be summoned at a moment’s notice. ‘Go on.’

Melissa was aware that he was in full view of everyone in the banquet hall. And that there seemed something terribly wrong about disclosing something as big as this before the curious gaze of an international audience. ‘If you don’t mind, I’d rather go somewhere…a little more private.’

‘I don’t think so,’ he said softly. ‘You’ve already had more than enough concessions. You’ve got your opportunity—which is precisely two minutes—to tell me what all this damned mystery is about.’ His mouth hardened. ‘And it had better be good.’

Her voice was trembling but somehow she got the words out. ‘Our meeting was very different from most you must encounter, Your Majesty—or, at least, I’m assuming it was. It was back in the summer nearly two years ago—in England—at a party during a tour of the Zaffirinthos marbles. In fact, we did more than meet. Much more. As it happens, we had a short affair and, as a consequence…’ She saw the disbelief and the anger which was beginning to blaze from his amber eyes ‘…as a consequence, I…I have a little son. Or, rather, we have a son. What I should say is…you have a son, Your Majesty.’

CHAPTER THREE

CASIMIRO stared into Melissa’s white face, his heart beginning to pound with fury at her outrageous claim. He, a father of her child? He would have liked to have taken her by her shoulders and to have shaken the admission from her that her words were nothing but a sham and a lie.

But he knew that all eyes were upon him, just as they always were, for hadn’t he spent a lifetime being watched—like the human equivalent of a goldfish? Wasn’t he always seated at the top table or the raised dais for precisely that purpose? Kings were not permitted the freedom to express their feelings and therefore he could not indulge in the luxury of venting his anger towards this insolent Englishwoman. The only outward sign of his ire was the clenching of his fists beneath the table—and so great was his wrath that he barely noticed that he had crushed the heavy cream parchment of his abdication speech in the process.

He leaned towards her by a fraction—as if he were about to engage in some pleasantry about the food. ‘Are you crazy?’ he said, his accusation so soft that nobody but Melissa could hear it. ‘One of those crazy women who go around pretending to have been impregnated by powerful men?’

Melissa flinched—recoiling from the naked anger in his eyes. ‘No! No! Of course not. I’m telling the truth.’

‘And I don’t believe you.’

‘Why not?’ she whispered, shocked by his venom.

‘You want me to spell it out for you?’ He wanted to hurt her now—to lash back at her for daring to concoct such a wild fantasy. To show his extreme displeasure for daring to disrupt his plans. With the hand which wasn’t holding his crushed speech, he indicated the array of glitteringly beautiful women who sat at each sparkling and flower-festooned table gazing up at him with the adoration of teenagers at a boy-band concert.

‘You think that I can’t have any woman I want in my bed? You don’t think I’m spoilt for choice by all the females who daily throw themselves at me?’ His eyes became cold. ‘Do the maths, cara,’ he added icily. ‘If I could have my pick of the most beautiful women in the world, then why the hell would I choose someone like you?’

Melissa swallowed, knowing there was no answer to this—because, deep down, wasn’t he simply echoing her own sentiments? Hadn’t she found it unbelievable at the time that such a man should have chosen to take someone like her as his lover? So she couldn’t really blame him for coming out and saying it now. She had no right to feel hurt by what was essentially the truth—but one thing still didn’t add up. One thing that was pretty painful to accept. ‘So you don’t even remember me?’ she said woodenly.

At this, Casimiro felt his heart quicken and perhaps Orso recognised his disquiet, for his aide stepped forward at just that moment.

‘Majesty? Shall I conduct Miss Maguire back to the kitchens? The time for your speech approaches.’

Casimiro let his gaze flick briefly over the abdication speech which now lay crumpled in his hand. How your life could change in one brief second, he thought bitterly. He should have been about to announce a major change in direction. A new freedom. But now…

His gaze moved to the Englishwoman, staring at the determination in her green eyes, which was at odds with the trembling of her lips. He did not know if she was crazy, or if this was some kind of audacious blackmail scheme. But there was enough plucky defiance in her gaze to make him pause and something about her lilac-scented defiance which made him determined to delve a little deeper. He wondered how much she knew. Or guessed. And suddenly the certainty hit him. His plans were not ruined completely—but they must certainly be put on hold. At least until he established that she was simply a fantasist. And in the meantime—she must be given an indication that it was he who held the power. All the power.

‘Yes, take her away,’ he clipped out. ‘And I shall begin.’

She tried one last time. ‘Majesty—’

‘Go,’ he ordered. ‘Go!’

Melissa was so shocked at his angry dismissal—at the fact that he could wave her away like a troublesome insect in the light of what she’d just told him—that she found herself following Orso from the dais as if she were on autopilot.

Feeling numb, she halted when they had reached one of the far alcoves and the aide turned to her, his eyes making no attempt to hide their hostility.

‘You will not attempt to contact the King again,’ he said coldly. ‘Ever. Do you understand?’

Part of her wanted to cry out that it was none of his business what she did, but Melissa had neither the strength nor the wherewithal to contradict him. Besides, what could she do? If she told Orso the reason for her insistence then he really would have her removed from the palace. If Casimiro himself didn’t believe her about Ben—then it stood to reason that nobody else would. She didn’t exactly fit the profile of a discarded royal mistress, did she?

Snatches of the King’s speech echoed through the hall as she bent to pick up a spray of roses which had fallen from one of the giant flower displays. She heard him commend the marriage of his brother and the subsequent birth of their son. She heard his deep, accented voice say words like ‘celebration’ and ‘new life’ and they seemed to only add to her inner pain, if that were possible.

‘…and so I ask you to raise your glasses to my dear brother, Xaviero, and his beautiful wife, Princess Catherine.’

Melissa glanced over at the beautiful, laughing blonde English Princess and felt a lump which felt suspiciously like envy rise in her throat.

Somehow she got through the remainder of the banquet and at midnight she begged Stephen if she could slip away—something she wouldn’t normally have dreamed of until the final guest had gone home. Maybe her face was white, or maybe something in her voice alarmed him, because he frowned and asked her if she was ill—and then told her to go straight to bed.

‘Don’t forget we’re leaving in the morning,’ he said.

As if she could forget something like that. She would never set foot on this island again—nor Ben grow to know his father as she had so hoped. Nobody could say she hadn’t tried—but one day she was going to have to have a painful conversation with her beloved son.

She walked back to the house they’d provided for her, which stood within the grounds of the vast palace complex, but she didn’t go straight to bed. She was so unsettled that even attempting to sleep would have been a complete waste of time. And although there was every state-of-the-art diversion you could think of, she couldn’t imagine summoning up any interest in a DVD or one of the books which took up an entire wall of the sumptuous sitting room.

She found herself missing Ben and wishing that she could ring him. But even if it hadn’t been so late—you couldn’t really speak to a thirteen-month-old baby on the phone, could you? She’d tried it when she arrived yesterday. According to her aunt, Ben had kept trying to snatch the handset and hurl it to the ground—and once he’d worked out that it was his mother at the other end of the line he had burst into noisy howls of rage.

Instead, Melissa packed her small suitcase—layering in her jeans and her tops and her work-clothes. Afterwards, she stripped off her clothes and took a shower—telling herself that tomorrow night she would be standing beneath the half-hearted splutter of tepid water in her tiny bathroom at home and to make the most of this unparalleled luxury while she had the chance.

But it was hard to be enthusiastic in such circumstances and the powerful jets of water and the lavish array of soaps and shampoos did little to distract her swirling thoughts. Plan A had been to tell Casimiro about Ben—and that had failed spectacularly. She didn’t even have a Plan B.

Towelling herself dry and raking a comb through the dark wet strands of her hair, Melissa pulled on the oversized T-shirt which had been given to her by one of her clients and which she now wore as a nightie. She’d just finished boiling the kettle to make herself a cup of herbal tea when there was a low but insistent knocking at the front door, and she glanced at her watch and frowned.