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