mother and I have told Matty as much of the truth as we know,’ Rafael told her. The cake plates were in front of them now, and they were seated round the table almost like a family. The fire crackled in the old wood-stove. The rain pattered on the roof outside and the whole scene was so domestic it made Kelly feel she’d been picked up and transported to another world.
‘Kellyn, my mother and I would like you to return,’ Rafael said, so gently that she blinked. Her weird little bubble burst and she couldn’t catch hold of the fragments.
‘Return?’
‘To Alp de Ciel.’
‘You have to be kidding.’ But she couldn’t take her eyes from Matty.
‘Mathieu is Crown Prince of Alp de Ciel.’
She couldn’t take this in. ‘I…I guess.’
‘I’m Prince Regent until he comes of age.’
‘Congratulations.’ It sounded absurd. Nothing in life had prepared her for this. Matty was calmly sitting across the table eating chocolate cake, watching her closely with wide brown eyes that were…hers, she thought, suddenly fighting an almost irresistible urge to laugh. Hysteria was very, very close.
Matty was watching her as she was watching him. Maybe…maybe he even wanted a mother. He wanted her?
This was her baby. She longed with every fibre of her being to take him in her arms and hug him as she’d dreamed of holding him for these last five years. But this was a self-contained little person who’d been brought up in circumstances of which she knew nothing. To have an unknown woman—even if it had been explained who she was—hugging and sobbing, she knew instinctively it would drive him away.
‘I’ll never go back to Alp de Ciel,’ she whispered but she knew it was a lie the moment she said it. She’d left the little principality shattered. To go back… To go back to her son… Her little son who was looking at her with equal amounts of hope and fear?
‘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.’
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