The Prince's Love-Child (The Royal House 0f Cacciatore Book 2)

by Sharon Kendrick

  ‘I mean that the inhabitants of this island seem to feel it necessary to marry off their Princes; there is pressure on Gianferro to do so, but particularly on me. Gianferro’s bride will be cherry-picked from a very small and exclusive orchard, but the field is rather wider in my case. Especially now that Nico, the youngest, has settled down and provided Mardivino with a new generation.’

  He had the grace to look slightly abashed as he stared at her, looking almost little-boy-lost with those melting dark eyes. Did he think that such grace would absolve him from what he had revealed? Or that by being allowed to see a glimpse of vulnerability she would forgive him anything?

  ‘Let me get this straight,’ she said, and her voice didn’t sound anything like her usual voice. ‘My invitation—apart from giving you the obvious benefits of having a willing sexual partner who would place no demands on you—was a kind of talisman—or maybe woman—’ she gave an ironic laugh ‘—who would ward off any prospective brides?’

  ‘That’s too simplistic a way of looking at it!’ he protested.

  ‘Is it?’ She noticed that he didn’t deny it—but how could he, when basically what she’d said was true? And would he answer the next question—the ramifications of which might really sound the death-knell to their relationship? But she reminded herself that the word relationship had a hollow ring about it in their case. What they had was not that at all—it was something merely masquerading as a partnership.

  Her eyes were very clear, but her voice sounded strained as the words came tumbling out. ‘Did you happen to go to bed with a blonde last September?’

  He stilled in the process of pulling his tie off and his eyes narrowed into shards of smoky ebony. ‘What?’ he questioned softly.

  ‘You didn’t hear me? Or you didn’t understand?’ she demanded, but pain had started to rip through her at the glaring omission of a denial. ‘It’s a simple enough question, Guido—all it requires is a simple yes or no answer. Did you or did you not sleep with a blonde woman last fall?’

  ‘How dare you interrogate me in this way?’

  ‘Is that a yes?’ she asked steadily. ‘Or a no?’

  They stared at each other across a space which seemed to be enlarging by the second.

  He nodded his head. ‘Well, yes,’ he said. ‘But it meant—’

  ‘Nothing?’ she supplied sarcastically, and now the tear in her heart was widening, and someone was tipping into the space a substance with all the painful and abrasive qualities of grit. ‘Isn’t that what men always say? That it didn’t mean anything? So not only do they damn the woman they betrayed, but also the woman they betrayed her with!’

  ‘Betrayed?’ he exploded. ‘Do not use such emotive words with me, Lucy! I had met you on precisely two occasions up until that moment!’

  ‘But you had slept with me!’ she whimpered, like a dog whose master was raising the whip.

  ‘So? For God’s sake—don’t you think you’re overreacting?’

  She felt sick. ‘How is that?’ She trembled. ‘How am I overreacting?’

  ‘Because at the time what we had was casual. It was new. It was uncertain. It was all those things which are true at the beginning, and sometimes the beginning is the end.’

  ‘Don’t try to confuse me with your warped logic!’ she raged.

  ‘I am trying to tell it like it is,’ he said, with a forced patience which was unfamiliar territory to him. ‘We had made no arrangement to see one another again, had we? Remember?’

  Through the mists of her pain she looked back through her memory, blindly searching for something which would make it all acceptable. The mists cleared. She had been back-to-back on a series of long-haul flights which had clashed with his trips around the globe in exactly the opposite direction. And, yes, in theory he was right—they had not made any arrangement to see one another again.

  In fact, he had told her casually to ring him, but she had not bothered. She had been in that early stage of a relationship where she was uncertain of him—not sure whether he really wanted to see her again and not wanting to pursue him because that way lay heartbreak and the loss of respect.

  Lucy had recognised that for a man like Guido the chase was everything, and that once a woman started reversing the traditional role she would be doomed.

  She had almost been over him when his call had come, out of the blue.

  ‘I thought you were going to call me!’ he had accused softly.

  ‘I’ve been busy,’ she’d retorted.

  ‘Oh, have you?’ He had laughed, and his voice had dipped into a honeyed caress. He had been trying to forget her. She had touched him in a way he was not familiar with—a way which spelt some unknown danger and not the kind he wanted to embrace. But it had not worked. He had not forgotten her at all. ‘I’ve missed you, Lucy,’ he’d murmured, and she had been lost.

  Intellectually, she could see now the logic behind his reasoning—but jealousy was a different plant altogether, and it flourished and grew like a weed.

  ‘And how many more?’ she demanded hotly. ‘How many since?’

  ‘None!’ he exploded. ‘After that it was only you—you know it was!’

  On some level, yes, she did—for their lovemaking had been completely different when they had met up again. It was as if the break had allowed the barriers between them to fall—certainly the sexual ones. She had felt freer and more liberated—able to indulge his fantasies. And her own.

  Perhaps she could have forgiven him then, had it not been for his motive for bringing her here. Her secret little dreams, that he’d wanted to introduce her to his family and to deepen their relationship, had been as nebulous as dreams always were.

  ‘It still doesn’t change your reasons for bringing me here.’ She stared at him sadly. ‘Have I reached such elevated heights in your regard for me that I should rejoice that you’ve brought me here to see off other women? To protect you from their advances like a human guard-dog?’

  ‘You are making a….’ For the first and only time since she had known him he seemed to struggle to find the right words in English. ‘A mountain out of the molehill!’ he declared passionately.

  But then something snapped, and her own temper exploded to match his. ‘I don’t think so!’ she raged. ‘I think that nothing very much has changed at all, if you must know! It was casual way back then, and it is still casual now!’ Hadn’t she said as much to Gianferro yesterday?

  There was a fraught and odd kind of pause, which could never have been described as silence—for the sound of their breathing punctured the air with accusations and hurt.

  ‘So what do you want to do about it?’ he said eventually. ‘Are you going to shout and rage a little more and then come over here and let me kiss it better?’

  As if it was a tiny graze on her knee instead of a jagged, deep tear through her heart! She closed her eyes briefly to blink away the salty glimmer of tears, then shook her head. ‘No. I want to go home,’ she said shakily. ‘And then I never want to see you again.’

  He stared at her, scarcely able to believe what she was saying. ‘Don’t play games with me, Lucy,’ he warned softly. ‘For I have no appetite for them. If you threaten to leave then I will arrange it. But I shall not run after you, nor plead with you to stay. That is not my style.’

  No, she couldn’t imagine that it was. But she was not playing games—she was deadly serious.

  ‘Then arrange it. Please.’

  His narrowed eyes raked over her one last time. ‘So be it,’ he ground out, like a skater digging his blade repeatedly into the ice. He turned on his heel and slammed his way out of the suite, leaving Lucy looking after him, biting her lip to stop herself from crying.

  Yet even while she was silently damning herself for ever having asked him anything the one subject she had not broached loomed up like a dark spectre in her mind.

  But it was easy to flatten it down again.

  Her philosophy on life had developed largely because her job involved a g
reat deal of flying. Accidents did happen occasionally, but there was absolutely no point in worrying about them until they did.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  HE COULD be a prince and you could be an air stewardess, but it made no difference—at the end of the day you were still both just a man and a woman, with all the problems that men and women had when they began relationships. Or—in her and Guido’s case—ended them.

  And what a problem it was.

  Lucy stared at the blue line, as if looking at it long enough and hard enough might somehow change the end result. Her sense of disbelief was tempered by the hysteria which was growing by the moment.

  She had gone through anger, concern, outright worry, denial, and now—now the most terrifying thing of all…

  Confirmation.

  She swallowed, putting the palm of her hand over her still-flat belly as if trying to convince herself that it wasn’t true, that she couldn’t be pregnant.

  Could she?

  She heard muffled moving around coming from the direction of the sitting room and her head jerked up. Gary was home! So what did she do? Did she tell him?

  There was a loud banging on the bathroom door.

  ‘You in there, Luce?’

  She licked her lips nervously. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, are you going to be all day? I’ve got a hot date tonight and I need to beautify myself!’

  Normally she would have giggled and vacated the bathroom while he had her in stitches about his love-life. Gary was a fellow steward, sweet and handsome and understanding and gay—and he seemed to spend ten times as long in the bathroom as Lucy did.

  She had never felt less like giggling in her life. But she couldn’t hide away in here for ever, and if she didn’t tell someone soon she was going to be sick.

  You already have been sick, she reminded herself. Long and retchingly this very morning, and yesterday morning, and for countless mornings before that.

  She pulled open the door and was shocked to see the look of horror on Gary’s good-looking face.

  ‘What the hell is wrong?’ he demanded.

  How to tell him? How to tell anyone when she’d only just been able to bear accepting it for herself?

  ‘I’m…I’m…’

  His eyes raked around the floor of their usually immaculate bathroom. ‘Oh, my God—you’re pregnant!’ he yelped.

  ‘How…how could you tell?’ Did that mean she actually looked pregnant?

  He pursed his lips and his eyes flicked to the discarded cardboard box and the plastic strip which was lying in the sink. ‘This may not be quite my scene—but you wouldn’t need to be a detective to work it out. How long ago and who…?’ The look of horror came over his face once again, and momentarily he clapped his hand over his mouth. ‘Oh, God—don’t tell me—it’s the Prince!’

  ‘Of course it’s the Prince!’ said Lucy tearfully. ‘Who else do you think it could be? And his name is Guido.’ Somehow that made it sound and seem more real. She couldn’t possibly be pregnant by a prince, but she could be pregnant by a man with a real name—even if it was an exotically foreign one.

  ‘Oh, love,’ said Gary sympathetically, and gave her shoulder a squeeze. ‘What on earth are you going to do?’

  Tears welled up in her eyes and she scrubbed at them furiously with her fist. ‘I’m going to have to tell him.’

  Lucy.

  The name flashed up on the screen of his mobile and Guido glanced at it with unflickering eyes, tempted to ignore it.

  Why? Because that little ember of anger still smouldered away inside him? Anger that she—she—had had the temerity to leave him, when no woman had ever done so before? Or was it because she had made him feel bad about himself, and Guido didn’t like to feel bad? He liked to float through life, taking only the good bits and discarding anything which looked as if it would even remotely lead to complications.

  But even his anger could not quite extinguish his interest.

  Why was she ringing him after having told him that she never wanted to set eyes on him again? Was she maybe regretting her words and her actions? Remembering, perhaps, how good they were together…wanting a little more?

  Even while desire leapt inside him, he half hoped that was not so. For Guido respected Lucy, and her adamant stance and her pride, and for him that kind of respect was rare—almost unheard of. Obviously she wanted more from a man than he was capable of giving—or wanted to give—and in a funny kind of way he respected that, too.

  If she came back then surely his esteem for her would die. She would become like all the others, who would sacrifice their principles for a man who might never be King but would always be Prince…

  Curiosity got the better of him, and he flicked the button with his thumb.

  ‘Si?’ he drawled.

  ‘It’s Lucy.’

  ‘I know it is,’ he said softly.

  Then why the hell didn’t you say, Hello, Lucy? She hesitated, because she couldn’t think how to say it—and even if she could was it fair to blurt it out over the phone?

  ‘How are you?’ he questioned, because now he was perplexed. Had he been expecting one of those predictable conversations? The ones where the woman brightly asked how he was, and acted as if no harsh words had been spoken, and then casually mentioned that they just happened to be passing through…

  It was a question she could not answer truthfully. ‘I have to see you.’

  Guido stared at the gleaming skyline and raised his dark eyebrows by a fraction. So she had come straight out with her desire to see him. Pretty up-front—if a little surprising. And yet there was no longing in her voice, no sultry undertone saying that she had missed him. The unpredictable was rare enough to excite him.

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘In England.’

  He frowned. ‘And when are you coming to New York?’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Then…?’

  She drew a deep breath as she heard his faint puzzlement—as if to say, Well, why are you ringing me, then?

  ‘I’m at home, in England.’

  Pull yourself together, Lucy. But what could she say? Come and visit me here because I can’t face travelling? He might refuse, and then where would that leave her? Which left her absolutely no choice at all but to tell him.

  ‘Guido, I’m pregnant.’

  He felt as he had never felt in his life—as if a dark whirlwind had swirled its way into his lungs, pushing all the natural breath away. For a moment he could not speak.

  ‘What did you say?’ he questioned at last, softly and dangerously.

  She was not going to be cast in the role of the baddie, the guilty party. There were two people involved here, and they must both share the consequences—whatever they might be.

  ‘You heard.’

  ‘It’s mine?’

  She bit down on her lip. She was not going to cry. ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Sure that I’m pregnant, you mean? Or sure that it’s yours? Yes, on both counts.’

  Guido’s words were like bitter stones spitting from his mouth. ‘What is your address?’

  He didn’t even know where she lived! With a feeling of hysteria she told him, aware of the almost laughable contrast between his penthouse apartment or his Rainbow Palace. ‘Number five Western Road, Brentwood.’

  ‘I’ll be there tomorrow,’ he said tightly, and terminated the connection.

  Unable to concentrate, and fired up by the need to fill her waking moments with any kind of activity which might temporarily give her the comfort of allowing her to forget her precarious situation, Lucy cleaned the house from top to bottom.

  Gary stood in the doorway, watching her scrub the floor on her hands and knees. ‘What’s this?’ he questioned. ‘Penance?’

  ‘I want the place to look clean,’ she said stubbornly. ‘It might be an ordinary little suburban house, but it will gleam as brightly as any damned Rainbow Palace!’

  ‘We do have a
mop, you know,’ he said mildly.

  Lucy’s mouth wobbled into a smile. ‘I’m treating it as a mini-workout!’

  Gary breathed a sigh of relief. ‘Thank God you’re smiling again!’

  ‘Being miserable isn’t going to change anything.’

  ‘That’s my gal! What time is he arriving?’

  ‘He didn’t say. This afternoon, probably.’

  ‘Just my luck to be flying off to Singapore in a minute!’ Gary put his hand on his hip in an overtly camp gesture which made her smile again. ‘You know I’d always wanted to meet a real-live prince!’

  By mid-afternoon the house was gleaming—and there were fresh flowers in vases and the smell of furniture polish wafting in the air. Why didn’t she go the whole hog and bake a cake while she was at it? Because you aren’t selling your house, that’s why. And neither are you selling yourself.

  She didn’t know what she was going to say to him, but she knew that she was not going to allow him to talk her into anything she didn’t want. And—

  The doorbell rang and Lucy froze. She shut her eyes briefly. How many times in your life did you wish that something was just a bad dream?

  Guido glanced down the road as he waited for her to answer. He had never been anywhere like this in his life—it was like a parallel universe. Neat little semi-detached houses, with sparkling windows and tidy gardens. He could hear the sound of birds, and walking down the road towards him was a woman with a pushchair, and a chubby toddler by her side, who kept stopping to peer at the pavement. He stared hard at them in a way he would never normally have done, and his mouth tightened as the door opened and there stood Lucy.

  For a moment he was taken aback to see that she looked just the same—slim and strong and curvy. Had he somehow expected her to be already swollen? Perhaps wearing some floaty smock thing to disguise a growing bump? His eyes narrowed. No, not the same at all—there were faint shadows beneath her honey-coloured eyes and her face was pale. The world seemed suddenly silent—an immense, important silence—and yet his words, when they came, were ordinary words.