by Raye Morgan
He was still looking at her as though he wasn’t too sure, but she was ready to move on.
“Listen, I know about your service with the Army Rangers in Southeast Asia. And I know a little bit about what you went through in the Philippines.”
He glanced at her and bit his tongue. There were things he could say, but he wasn’t going to say them. She might think she knew, but there was no way she could know the half of it.
“I know about how you were wounded. In fact, it was that article in a local newspaper I just happened to see, all about your wounds and how you were recuperating. That’s how I first found out about you. What I don’t know is all the connections in between. Tell me why you went into the army instead of going to college. Tell me how you ended up being adopted by those people.” She put her hands out, palms up. “Tell me the story from your point of view.”
He watched Mei playing with a stuffed clown for a moment, then took a deep breath. “Okay, here goes. Here’s what the woman I called ‘Mum’ always told me.”
“Your, uh, mother?”
“No. My mother was a maid who actually did work for the royal family of some country. Mum never seemed to be sure what one, but it could have been Ambria, I suppose. My mother’s name was Sally Tanner. She wasn’t married and no one knows who my father was. She brought me back to England when I was four, but she died when I was five. I actually remember her a bit. Just a little bit.”
He paused for a moment, recalling it all. Yes, he remembered her. But he didn’t remember loving her. And that had bothered him all his life.
“I got passed around from one relative to another for a few years and finally got adopted by a sister of Sally’s. Martha and Ned Tanner. Martha is the one I called Mum. They brought me along when they emigrated to New York, and we moved to California when I was twelve.”
“So you have a family,” she noted, relieved to hear it.
He shrugged. “I had a family,” he corrected. “A family of sorts. I never felt like I was any more than an afterthought, though. I never knew why they decided to adopt me. There was never any real closeness.”
He stopped. What the hell was he doing, opening up old wounds to a woman he’d only just met? A woman he knew was fishing for exactly this type of information. Was he crazy? This was the sort of garbage that stirred up old resentments and made them fester. He never told anyone this stuff. Why was he telling her? He was going to stop. Let her find out what she wanted to know by going to these sources she seemed to be so good at finding.
Incredibly, despite his determination, he heard himself talking again. He was telling her more. Unbelievable.
“I grew up pretty much like any other American kid, playing baseball and football and living a typical suburban American life. Ned and Martha got divorced and things got a lot worse financially after that. My so-called brother and sister both began to get into trouble. Things just generally fell apart. So when I graduated high school, I wanted to get as far away from them all as possible. I joined the army. And I guess you know most of the rest.”
She nodded, touched and saddened by what he’d gone through as a child. She was so sure he was royal, and yet he’d grown up in hard circumstances, the hardest being not having anyone to really love him. She wanted to put her arms around him and tell him it was okay, but she knew he wouldn’t welcome something like that. Besides, what could she promise him? That life would be better from now on? That was something she really couldn’t manipulate for him. Better to keep quiet.
By now, Mei was fussing and needed attention. Kelly rose, put a hand on his shoulder and said softly, “Thank you for telling me that, Joe. I know it’s an intrusion to even ask you, so I really do appreciate it.”
He caught her hand and brought it to his lips, kissing the palm in a way that startled her.
“Isn’t it obvious I’ll do just about anything for you?” he said, pretending to be teasing, but coming across as serious as she’d ever seen him. He let her go tend to the baby, but her heart was thumping.
She’d spent a lifetime finding all the men she met and dated completely inadequate. And now she’d turned around and fallen in love with a prince.
Mei, who had been so good for the last two days, fell apart when Kelly took her to her room. She cried and she wailed and she sobbed, and nothing could console her. Kelly rocked her and walked her and tried every trick she’d seen her sister-in-law employ. Nothing worked.
Joe looked in on them. “Anything I can do?” he asked.
Kelly shook her head. “She’s just so tired, but she can’t fall asleep,” she told him. “I may have to put her down and let her cry herself to sleep, but I hate to do it. That can take hours.”
He groaned. “Oh, well. You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din,” he said as he walked back to the other room.
Kelly wasn’t sure what that meant, but she knew it was a compliment, so took it in good spirits. But she was getting desperate as far as this baby was concerned.
She held Mei and rocked her and hummed a tune or two, trying to think of something she could sing besides “Rock-a-bye Baby,” which she’d already done to death.
And suddenly one came to her. She hummed it for a moment and then began to sing. It was in a foreign tongue, but the words came naturally to her, and she realized after a moment that it was in Ambrian.
She didn’t remember ever singing this song before, and yet she seemed to know all the words. She sang it more softly, again and again, and Mei finally began to quiet. It was the only thing that seemed to please the child. In a few minutes, she was asleep.
Kelly kept singing. She knew how easily babies came awake again and she was going to make sure this one was out. At the same time, she was marveling at the mind’s ability to pull things from the past, things one didn’t even know one possessed. She was singing a song in Ambrian that she was sure her mother must have sung to her when she was a baby. It was all there, sounds more than words, but nevertheless, complete. It felt like a miracle.
Joe heard the whole thing. He sat in the living room and listened to Kelly singing a song in a language he didn’t understand, and suddenly he found he had tears streaming down his cheeks. He knew that song. Not consciously, not overtly, but his heart knew it. His soul had been nurtured by it years ago. It was a part of his heritage. He could never lose it.
And now he knew the truth. He was Ambrian. There was no denying it any longer.
CHAPTER NINE
RISING SLOWLY FROM his chair, Joe went to the garage and rummaged around until he found his old army duffel bag. Deep inside, down at the bottom, he found an old cigar box wrapped in rubber bands, and pulled it out. Most of the bands disintegrated as he tried to remove them, and the box opened easily. Inside were artifacts of a life he didn’t really remember, and a place he didn’t really know. He’d never understood what they were. Maybe Kelly would be able to interpret them for him. He tucked the box under his arm and went back into the house.
She had just put Mei down and was coming out of the room when she met Joe in the hall. He showed her the box.
“Come on into the living room. I want you to take a look at this,” he said.
He spread the items out on the coffee table, under the light, and the two of them looked at them. Kelly’s heart was beating out of her chest. There were three gold buttons with lion heads carved in them, such as might have been on a little boy’s dress jacket. There was a small child’s prayer book, a small signet ring, and a brightly colored ribbon with a tin medal dangling from it.
Kelly picked up the prayer book. There was an inscription in the front, written in Ambrian. She wasn’t great at the language, but she knew enough to translate, “To my most adorable little son. Say your prayers! Your Mama.”
Kelly could hardly breathe. She looked at Joe. “Where did you get these things?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. I’ve always had them. I assumed my mother, Sally Tanner, had collected them for me. I’ve never really pai
d any attention to them. I’m not sure why I’ve even kept them.”
Kelly nodded, her eyes shining. “You understand what this means, don’t you?”
He groaned and tipped his head back. “Probably.”
“You are almost certainly…” she swallowed hard and forced herself to say it “…Prince Cassius.”
“But what if I don’t want to be?” he asked.
“Joe…”
He put up a hand to stop her and give himself space to explain his current thinking. “What I’m going to say now may sound like blasphemy to you. I’m a simple guy. I was raised by simple people. I’ve lived a simple life.”
She was shaking her head. “I don’t think what you’ve done with your life is simple at all.”
“But it’s not an upper-class, royal life. Kelly, once you get to my age, I don’t think there’s any turning back. I am what I am and what I’ll always be.”
She pressed her lips together, thinking. She understood his argument, but didn’t believe it was valid, and she was trying to figure out how to counter it successfully.
“I think you have a skewed idea of what royalty is really like,” she said at last. “As people, they’re not necessarily all that special. These days a lot of them seem pretty much like everyone else.”
Joe made a face. “You mean like that prince of that little country I saw on the news the other day—the one who photographers caught with about twenty naked ladies running around on his yacht with him?”
Kelly laughed. “Those were not ladies.”
“Probably not.” He rubbed his head and grimaced. “Now, I’m not going to claim that such a thing wouldn’t appeal to the male animal in me, but they said this prince had a wife and a baby at home. What normal man would think it was okay to do that?”
She sighed. “Sure, there are some royalty who take advantage of their opportunities in a rotten way. But there are plenty that don’t.”
“Name one.”
She hesitated. “I don’t have to name one,” she said evasively. “And anyway, if there weren’t any, you could be the first.” Her smile was triumphant. “You haven’t grown up being overindulged. You’ve got your own brand of honesty and integrity. You won’t go bad.”
His own smile was crooked but his eyes were still sad. “Your faith in me is touching,” he said.
“Why not? You deserve it.” She picked up the little gold buttons. “I’ll bet these were on the jacket you wore the night you escaped.”
He gave her a startled look. “What makes you so sure I escaped?”
She put them down and sat back. “Okay, here’s what I see as what probably happened—based on a lot of research I’ve done on the subject and a lot of memoirs I’ve read. The castle was attacked. Your parents had already set up an elaborate set of instructions to certain servants, each of whom was assigned a different royal child, to smuggle you out if the worst happened.”
“And you know this how?”
She shrugged. “People who knew about it wrote explanations later. Anyway, the worst did happen. The Granvillis began to burn the castle. Your mother’s favorite lady-in-waiting was supposed to take care of you—she wrote about that in her book on the coup. But something went wrong and you ended up being whisked away by one of the kitchen maids instead, an English girl named Sally Tanner. Here’s what I think happened after that. Sally catches a ride to the mainland in a rowboat. The trip takes most of the night, and it becomes impossible to hide you from the others escaping as well. She doesn’t want them to know you are one of the royals, so she claims you as her own secret love child, and as no one else on the boat actually knows her, this is accepted.”
His face was white. She stopped. “Joe, what is it?”
“I remember that boat ride,” he said hoarsely. “The feeling of terror on that trip has stayed with me ever since.”
Reaching out, she took his hand in hers. “Now Sally has you and doesn’t know what to do with you. She didn’t get the special instructions the others are following. She just grabbed a kid she saw needed help, and saved him. Now what?”
Joe laced fingers with Kelly’s. “This is all sounding so right to me,” he told her. “I can’t believe you know this much.”
“It’s partly speculation, but speculation built on facts,” she said. “Anyway, she doesn’t know what to do. Should she try to contact someone? But that might be certain death for you. She knows, by now, what happened to your parents. She can’t see any alternative. She might as well take you with her and hope something happens that makes it possible to find out what to do with you. She takes you to London to stay with her family, who aren’t really sure who you are or what to make of you. They suspect you really are Sally’s, a secret child she hadn’t told them about. She tells them your name is Joe. Before Sally can contact anyone to find out what to do with you, she dies in an accident.”
He nodded. “And that’s why they tell me she’s my mother.” His half smile was sad. “And that’s why I can’t remember loving her the way a son should. When she died, I was probably still waiting for my real mom to show up and take me home.”
“There you go.”
He sat brooding for a few minutes. Kelly was still holding his hand, and she smiled at him.
“Joe, I’m sure this is all hard to hear, but you needed to know. Not only so you can decide if you want to take your rightful place in Ambrian society, but also so you can protect yourself. You need to be careful of people like Sonja. Or anyone who might come from the current regime.”
He frowned, still trying to assimilate it all. “Tell me again what is so bad about the current regime?”
“They killed your parents.”
His eyebrows rose. “There is that.” He thought of those beautiful people in the photographs. To think of his parents as a king and queen still seemed utterly ridiculous. But that couple had looked right to him. He liked them. He had to admit there was a crack in his heart when he thought of what might have been—if only the coup hadn’t happened.
Joe looked at Kelly, enjoying the way her blonde curls were rioting around her pretty face. She was so gracious and decent and caring. And basically happy. How was he going to make sure that Mei turned out that way?
“Kelly, you said something earlier about some bad things that had happened in your life. I feel like I’m hogging all the emotion around here. Let’s hear your story.”
“Oh gosh, it was nothing like what happened to you. I’m embarrassed to even bring it up. It’s nothing at all. It’s just everyday life disappointments. You know how that is….”
“Come on.” He tugged on her hand. “I told you about myself. Your turn. Don’t hold out on me.”
“Joe…”
“You told me about your family, and that there was a time when you were all very close.”
“Yes.” She went still. “That’s true. Actually, I had a wonderful childhood. I tend to forget that sometimes.”
“You see, that’s what I want for Mei. Somehow I want to create that warm, safe, nurturing ideal, like the Norman Rockwell pictures, for her. Everything’s got to be perfect.”
Unspoken were the words like I never had and she heard them loud and clear. She often felt the same way.
“So come on. What about your family?”
“What about it? I’ve had one. It’s pretty much gone now.”
Funny, but this was an area where they had some things in common. No real family around. Not anymore.
“But your brothers and those nieces and nephews.”
She nodded. “I see them at Thanksgiving and Christmas. The rest of the year they forget I exist.”
Joe looked surprised and somewhat shocked. “Kelly, I didn’t realize…”
“Oh, I don’t mean to sound bitter. Really. But they’re young professionals with young families, and they have very full lives, lives I don’t fit into very easily.”
He looked puzzled. “What happened to your parents?”
“My mother di
ed when I was eighteen. When she was alive, I definitely had a family. She was the glue that kept us all together. And she was my biggest booster, my best friend. So her death was a major blow to me. It really threw me for a loop for months.” And it still gave her a horrible, hollow feeling in the pit of her stomach whenever she thought of it.
“And your father?”
“My father.” She took a deep breath and thought about him. A tall, handsome man with distinguished gray hair at his temples, he’d been a prime target for hungry females of a certain age as soon as her mother had died. They’d swarmed around him like bees, and he didn’t last long. Kelly remembered with chagrin how she’d vowed to dedicate her life to taking care of the man, only to turn around and find him carrying on with a woman in tight T-shirts and short shorts, the sort of floozy her mother wouldn’t have given the time of day to.
“My sixty-five-year-old father married a woman in her late thirties who wanted to pretend I didn’t exist,” she said, not even trying to hide the bitterness she felt this time. “They live in Florida. I never see them.”
“Wow. I’m sorry.”
He was looking at her as though he wasn’t sure who she was. From the beginning, she’d fit his image of the perfect daughter in the perfect family full of people who loved each other and made sure things went right. Lots of presents at birthdays. A huge turkey at Thanksgiving. All the things he’d never had. And now to find out she was as lonely as he was… What a revelation. Joe had a hard time dealing with it.
Where, after all, was happiness in the world? Maybe you just had to make your own.
“So you see, we’re alike,” she said with a wistful smile. “We both had great families, and then we blew it.”
“We didn’t blow it,” he countered. “Somebody blew it for us.”
“Regardless, it was blown.”
“So that’s the goal,” he said, holding her hand in his and moving in closer. “Don’t blow it for the next generation.”
