Angel sighed and I took a swig of my drink, hissing under my breath as the harsh liquid burned down my throat.
“That seems unlikely,” she said kindly. “But you obviously have your reasons to not even fight.”
Her words were said gently, but they had an underlying hardness to them too, and I had to admit they stung. Had I been a coward not to go up against my family and fight for Penny? To do what Frederick so clearly wanted me to do; to be happy and damn the consequences?
The empty, pit-like feeling in my stomach told me that I had been. I’d let her slip through my fingers and would no doubt regret it for the rest of my life.
Angel got to her feet and I did the same. Surprisingly she gave me a warm hug. “You take care of yourself, Captain. It’s been a pleasure working with you.”
I nodded and returned the hug. “Same to you, Angel.”
Angel was a few steps away when I called to her. “Angel?”
“Yes, Cherie?”
“If you see Penny again… will you tell her that I wish her the best?”
“I will, of course,” she answered with a regretful smile.
From the moment I stepped off the plane, back on U.K. soil, and stripped off my uniform as well as the name Haven that had shielded me for a number of years, my life would no longer be my own.
There would be a crowd of photographers awaiting me and they would no doubt follow my every move—good, bad, and indifferent from now onwards.
My freedom was over. And if I’d dragged Penny into that life with me, not that the family would ever let me bring just any old soul into the ranks anyway, I’m not sure I would’ve been able to forgive myself. Being in the spotlight, practically twenty-four-seven, was not a life she’d want to lead. And I couldn’t imagine the reaction I would’ve gotten if I’d tried to take a civilian from Montana, with no connections whatsoever, into the palace.
I was going to miss my squad too, especially Claire and Mark. We had been sent to some pretty hellish places over the years together and I knew that adapting to life in a standard U.K. hospital without them by my side to ease me through would be one of the toughest things I would ever have to do. And now, my “career” would play second fiddle to the long list of society engagements and more important duties I would be expected to undertake.
All in all, there wasn’t much to look forward to. I longed to remain exactly who I was now. Captain Robert Haven, Army Medical Corps, surgeon… a man in love. But I wasn’t born into a family where that was enough or permissible.
I took a deep breath as the troop transport touched down on the tarmac. Nobody from my family would be there to greet me—but I peered out of the tiny window anyway and saw that there was indeed a huge bank of press waiting. I waited nervously as the doors opened wide, then walked out onto the runway. I strode calmly towards them, counting my breaths as I did so. I found that this often helped me to feel more in control. I waved, felt compelled to, and a cacophony of voices began yelling out questions, most of which I couldn’t make out—they seemed to merge into one loud clump.
“Captain, how was this last posting?”
“Your Highness, where were you this time?”
“When can we expect to see you at home with your family?”
“What are your plans for the future, Robert?”
I waved at them to shush, and thankfully they did.
“I have a final debrief back at base and then I will be heading to the family estate in Berkshire for some R&R,” I informed them. “I have been offered a position as a surgical registrar at St. Bartholomew's Hospital, which I will be taking up in one month’s time. And if the Royal Army and the Medical Corps wished you to know of my whereabouts, I am sure they would have sent out a Press Release,” I said with a wink.
I knew that they would always want more than they got from me, but I liked to try to be as amiable as I could about things. Though I expected their insistence and intrusion would only ramp up now that there were less of us heirs to go around. But unfortunately for them, they were barking up the wrong tree. I was deemed to be the sensible one. As a respected surgeon, and an Army Officer, I simply didn’t make the blunders they so loved to capture. They’d have to train their cameras and mics on William, and maybe even Victoria if they wanted sensationalism. Yet, one still had to be cautious. Their keen, hungry eyes, were just waiting for me to make a mistake, to trip up over the hurdles of Royal Protocol.
I got into the waiting military vehicle, and was whisked away to the base for my final debrief. I had just one question I wanted answering, and I was barely inside the door when it blurted out of me.
“Did you send all of that stuff because of who I am?” I asked a little too hastily.
Colonel Johnston looked at me with an exasperated expression.
“Of course we did, Captain. You’re a surgeon and you requested medical equipment. We damn sure as hell weren’t going to send you a drone or a missile launcher instead! Now sit down, and get that damn chip off your shoulder.”
“Sir,” I said, saluting respectfully, but I knew I had already pissed him off. I sat, and looked at his tired face as he did the same. Staring at one another across the antique oak desk, I couldn’t help but feel like I was being called into the Headmaster’s Office. “But, you did send me the exact contents in that shipment because I am who I am?”
Johnston sighed heavily, and I could see the truth in his eyes.
“Yes, but before you get all uppity about it, your mother, the Queen, was the one who requested that we complied. We just had to make it appear that it was the military supplying it. She was very impressed by the work you were doing there, and wanted to help out. She’s recently become the patron of Medica, the charity that is running the camps out there.”
I leaned back in the chair. The news startled me. She’d barely spoken to me during my brief visit home. Not that I could blame her. We’d all been out of sorts and thrown for a loop. Maybe it was her way to show her support in my decision to return to work so soon after Frederick’s accident? And I supposed when it came down to it, it was something she would do; working silently in the background, doing what she could to help. Well, that was true of most of my family really. They gave so much of their money and time to good causes, but only the tiniest amount of it ever got mentioned in the press—because they chose it to be that way. Their belief was that you did good deeds because you could, not because you sought reward for doing them.
“So that was why we were able to leave it there with them?”
“Indeed. Now, if you could deliver your report of the posting and get out of my hair for good and all, I would be ever so grateful, Your Highness!”
I grinned at the Colonel and handed it over without delay.
“Thank you, Colonel Johnston.” We both stood and saluted each other. I turned, and left the office. So, I was no longer a captain in His Majesty’s Armed Forces.
I began to wonder what life would throw at me next.
Thirteen
Penny
The porch creaked as I sat quietly thinking. I hadn’t done much else since I’d got back home, if I were to be honest, but I tried to let my mind wander.
The summer colours were gorgeous, so rich and vibrant. I’d always loved my home; Great Falls was somewhere I saw myself settling down in and raising a family—should I ever be so blessed, yet my heartstrings tugged; lazily dreaming of drizzly English grey skies. I pulled my cable-knit cardigan around my ribs tightly and rocked back and forth in the old rocking chair that had once belonged to my great-grandpa.
“Penny?” Mom’s voice called from inside. “D’you want some hot chocolate?”
She had been spoiling me ever since I got off the plane, and I was dead certain that I had gained at least ten extra pounds since I got home. “Sure, Mom. Do we have any marshmallows left?” I asked cheekily.
“Sure, I’ll bring it all out and some cake too. It’s so good to see you filling back out again.” Mom had been appalled by h
ow thin I’d gotten whilst in Africa—but I couldn’t convince her that I had been eating way more than I ever did back here. It was just that we were always so busy that I had burnt it all off so fast. Not even Angel’s fried food could keep up.
“Thanks, Mom,” I said as the tiny woman whom I adored more than anyone alive brought out a tray and sat beside me in the other old rocker.
We drank our chocolate in comfortable silence, enjoying the solitude of the old ranch house that no longer had a ranch attached to it. Grandma had sold it off when Pops had gone into the military years ago. She hadn’t wanted to, but one of the big commercial growers wanted the land and they’d offered a price she couldn’t in good conscious refuse.
So, we still had the family home, passed down from father to son since Great Great Great Granddaddy Hawkins had taken the chance and moved his wife and young son Caleb out to Montana in the 1860s.
“Now, are you going to tell me about whoever it is you’ve been mooning over since you got home or not?” Mom said, patting me on the hand and winking.
I stared at her. It never ceased to amaze me how she knew everything without ever being told a thing. She claimed it just happened that way when you became a mom.
“Sure, I guess. His name is Captain Robert Haven, and he was the most amazing surgeon I have ever seen,” I sighed.
“And he captured my baby’s heart?”
I nodded. Suddenly the tears that had been corked, bottled up inside me since I left the camp were let loose, and I bawled; truly bawled. With snot running down my face and hiccups that were becoming painful, my mom didn’t hesitate. She jumped up and gathered me into her arms, soothing me with her tiny hands.
“There, there, honey. You just cry it all out. It must have been so tough out there.”
“Oh, Mom, all the little ones we couldn’t save. All of them that we just couldn’t help,” I wailed.
“And then you fell for a handsome soldier?”
Mom grabbed a tissue from the box on the table and made me blow. It made me feel like a little girl again, and strangely I needed that cathartic regression. She wiped my face, pushed my hair back behind my ears and then held my chin.
“I can’t blame you, honey—your daddy was the only man I ever wanted. But you know it’s no life.”
“I know, and I didn’t want to. I wanted to believe it was just a fling, that it meant nothing, but I don’t seem to be able to stop thinking about him.”
“Is there any chance he felt the same way?”
“I don’t know. I think so, yes,” I lisped, still weeping. “But he couldn’t commit to anything. I got the feeling there was something he couldn’t tell me, wouldn’t tell me.”
“D’you think he might have been married?”
My eyes widened, I hadn’t entertained that notion, but I shook my head. “No, I don’t think it was that. I think it was something to do with his family. His father in particular. He was so classy and polite… but not pretentious about it.”
“Well, we’ve never exactly been slumming it, honey!” Mom teased me. We were definitely on the better side of comfortable thanks to the money from the sale of the farm, and my thrifty ancestors’ careful estate planning through the generations.
“I know, but I mean seriously wealthy—not our kind. Not country club and a nice house kind. More like mansions on estates, old money, big businesses.”
“Well, if you don’t think anything can come of it, and if he is in the U.K., or in war zones where you can’t exactly do much to find out if there is or isn’t, then you’ll have to do what every other girl with a broken heart has to do; wait until you work him out of your system.”
“That’s your only advice? Wait?” I cried. I had so hoped she would have something more to offer me, something that would speed it all up. Or maybe I wanted her to tell me to go find him, to demand answers.
“Sorry, honey, you know yourself only time heals wounds like this. You’ll have to be brave, take each day as it comes and wait it out. It will get easier, I promise.”
Suddenly it struck me that she had been so brave over the years since we lost daddy. She had never once complained, had just been stoic and got on with everything.
“You still miss Daddy, don’t you?” I asked softly.
“Yes I do, just like you do. But, though he is always in our hearts—it doesn’t hurt like it used to now, does it?”
I thought about what she said as I watched the sun go down. She was right, I knew she was. But, I simply didn’t know how long it would take me to get to that stage about Robert. He truly had captured my heart, and merely thinking of him still set my nerve endings fluttering.
My month back home passed all too soon, and after some pretty tearful goodbyes I was back on the plane, heading out to Chad once more.
Mom and I had really gotten to know one another, as adults and equals, and I felt we had grown even closer because of it. She had sent me off with a suitcase full of luxuries for all the wonderful people back at the camp, and the sage advice to bury myself in my work and let time do what it’s best at; healing.
I sat on the commercial flight out to Africa, feeling antsy. This time it wasn’t first-class, though I didn’t mind at all; it had been a nice luxury while it had lasted. And I’d tried to get to the bottom of how both Shane and I had been upgraded, but it still remained a mystery. Medica denied all knowledge of it, and they let me know they certainly had not made up the difference or paid for it. So, I mostly passed it off as a weird fluke.
My fingers drummed upon the armrest. I usually tried to sleep on long haul flights, but for some reason sleep seemed to elude me that night. I flicked through the channels on the in-flight entertainment stations, deciding that the last thing I needed to see while in the air was Snakes on a Plane, or Passenger 57. Whomever had programmed the entertainment for the flight had a very strange sense of humour, I thought.
I reached up to press the little button to summon the steward in my section. I prayed that he might have something other than the in-flight magazine that I might read.
“Yes, madam?” the young man asked politely.
“I seem to have run out of reading material; I don’t suppose you have a magazine or a book I can borrow? I was hoping to be out for the count by now.” He smiled at me and pursed his lips in thought.
“I’m sure I can find something. I’ll see what we have at the back there. Anything in particular?”
“I don’t mind. I rarely get the chance to read anything anyway,” I admitted, shamefacedly. He strode confidently up the aisle, the odd shudder of mild turbulence barely making him so much as sway. I would never have made a good flight attendant and always prayed that I didn’t need to go to the bathroom when I flew, as I am so uncoordinated I seemed to bash into every passenger along the way when nature did call.
But with long-haul flights, holding it in just wasn’t an option, and most of the time I showcased my clumsiness to the rest of the passengers.
In moments he was back with a new Marian Keyes novel, a battered copy of The Great Gatsby and a selection of magazines. “The choice is yours,” he said with a pleased grin. “Or you can take them all.”
I thanked him and started to flick through the bundle, starting with Vogue. I had never really been into fashion, and marvelled at the idea that anybody would pay such a vast sum of money for a magazine that was predominantly advertisements. I put it down, and was pleased to find a copy of the U.K.’s Homes and Gardens. Now this was a publication that could hold my attention. I loved looking at other people’s houses, and the glossy images of large gardens and elegant stately homes inside this upmarket magazine were a real pleasure. I couldn’t imagine living in something like it, but a girl could dream, right?
Sadly, it was finished all too soon, and I put it down and ordered myself an orange juice. I was left with a selection of gossip magazines, and not really caring if it was a British magazine or an American one, I picked one up at random.
As I flicked th
rough the pages, the first twenty or so were of pictures of supposedly famous people, but I had never heard of them. The captions made me laugh, “Bunty and Milton Akaster relax with their new baby”. Distant relatives to the king, they were proud to receive a beautiful silver rattle from His Majesty to celebrate. It was all so quaint, and so utterly British.
But then I turned the page and saw a face I knew all too well. I almost cried with alarm as I took in the perfect features I had traced so lovingly with my fingers, and found myself doing it to the two-dimensional image before me.
Finally, I read the caption, my throat thick and bobbing, “Eugenie Fitzroy finally tames the youngest Prince. Bumped up to second in the line for the throne, Prince Robert Louis Rothchester is a catch we all wanted to make, but dutifully following in his brother William’s footsteps he is also off the market!”
I stared at the young and very beautiful woman standing beside him; they were clearly intimate. The smiles between them were warm and he had his hand in the small of her back, guiding her into a nightclub.
I slammed the magazine shut, stunned that I had not only met and worked with a member of the Royal family—a prince no less—but that I’d been foolish enough to fall for him without knowing a thing about him!
No wonder he was always vague about his family. Oh my God, the ROYAL FAMILY. And though the tears threatened to drown me, I was determined that I would cry no more over a man who had not only broken my heart, but had also lied to me about who he really was!
Yet, I had gone into our brief relationship with my eyes wide open; I’d instigated it, and he had been somewhat honest, we’d both agreed that it couldn’t last… so why did this feel so very much like a betrayal?
I opened the magazine back up only moments after I’d shut it. I couldn’t stop staring at the picture; that ridiculously trite and gossipy caption. I didn’t want it to be true, but it told me everything I needed to know.
Everything he should have told me in person—yet hadn’t.
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