by Kate Hardy
‘You miss the army, don’t you?’ she asked.
‘I do,’ he admitted. ‘Yes, there are days when I see terrible things that no human should ever have to see, but it’s a job where my team and I can make a real difference. Where we can help people.’
‘Will you go back to it?’
‘If my father had still been alive, I would’ve been back with my team now,’ he said. ‘But at the moment my brother, my mother and my new sister need me.’
She could understand that—and she liked the fact that family was important to him.
‘So can you take a sabbatical until things settle down, or will you have to leave the army?’
‘I’m on special leave for now, but I’ll do what it takes to support my family and my country.’
She wasn’t entirely sure whether that meant he put his duty first or his family first. Or maybe they were one and the same for someone in a royal family. ‘So you’d be happy to stay at the palace?’
He looked at her, as if weighing it up. ‘This stays between you and me?’
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I have no intention of running to the media and gossiping.’
‘I was thinking less of the media and more of my family,’ he said dryly. ‘But OK. Thank you. The palace I can handle. But the politics drives me insane.’ He rolled his eyes. ‘The senseless squabbles and point-scoring between people. I want to bang their heads together and tell them to stop behaving like pompous kindergarteners boasting “My dad’s more important than yours” because there are so many more important problems in the world that need solving, and you solve things much more effectively if you work together as a team.’
She grinned. ‘I guess you’d get into a lot of trouble if you did that.’
‘Yes. I don’t know how my brother copes with it.’ He wrinkled his nose. ‘Well, I do. He was brought up knowing that he’d serve our country. He’s trained for the job.’
‘What about your half-sister?’ The woman who might end up being Queen.
‘She didn’t even know who she was until this year,’ Antonio said. ‘Her mother, Sophia, never told her about her heritage—and Sophia died when Gabriella was three, so Gabriella was brought up by her aunt and uncle. She ran a bookshop in Canada. She certainly wasn’t brought up the way Luca and I were. And then she found a letter from her mother while she was clearing out. She contacted my mother to find out the truth of it—and obviously as she’s older than Luca that would make her my father’s heir. The DNA test will prove things beyond doubt.’
‘Do you think she’s your father’s daughter?’
‘Yes. I look at her and I can see my father,’ Antonio said. ‘A softer, warmer version.’
So his childhood hadn’t been idyllic? If his father had been formal and cold, it would explain why Antonio suppressed his emotions. Why he didn’t seem to believe in love.
‘Is she nice?’
‘I like her,’ Antonio said. ‘She’s sensible. I think she’s a lot like Luca.’
‘It must be hard, suddenly discovering you’re not who you think you are,’ Tia said. ‘And having to do it in the public eye.’
‘She’s strong. She’ll cope. Plus,’ Antonio added, ‘there is the palace library. Hundreds and hundreds of rare volumes. I think that will be her bolt-hole. A place where she’ll be surrounded by books.’
Antonio’s bolt-hole meant that he was surrounded by mountains. Was he trying to tell her something? Or was she reading too much into it?
He let her prepare the vegetables and the couscous while he sizzled the chicken and made the sauce for the stew, and soon the kitchen was filled with a delicious scent.
‘I’ll just go and see if Giacomo wants to eat with us,’ Antonio said. ‘I’ll be back in a minute or two.’
Tia sat down and sipped a glass of water, reflecting on what she’d learned about Antonio. It sounded as if his childhood had been lonely; although his family was wealthy, it didn’t seem as if he had the same close bond that she and Nathan had had with their parents before their father died. And because everything was so formal at the palace, it would explain why he’d seemed so reserved and emotionless there.
Maybe he wasn’t really like that, inside. And hadn’t he said something about the media making up a story when there was nothing to tell? Maybe he’d grown up not trusting himself to show any feelings, in case they were misreported and it made waves for his family.
Poor little rich boy.
If she’d had to choose between her own impoverished childhood filled with love and his wealthy childhood filled with rules and regulations, it would’ve been an easy choice. She’d pick love, all the way.
Could Antonio learn to love? Could he be a real father to their baby and a partner to her? Could they actually make this work?
Or would it be kinder to all of them if she just disappeared quietly back to London?
Antonio came back into the kitchen. ‘Giacomo says he’s going to have something later, in his room.’
‘Does that mean he’s speaking from experience and he knows your cooking doesn’t taste as good as it smells?’ she asked.
Instead of looking slightly affronted, he surprised her by laughing. ‘No. But he’s probably going to taste this, pull a face and add a lot of garlic and chilli.’
And now she felt guilty. She’d been the one to ask him not to use garlic or spices. Antonio, too, would probably find the meal tasteless. She could put up with the indigestion. All she’d have to do was sit upright for most of the night and take frequent sips of water. ‘Sorry. Please don’t think about what I said. Add the garlic and chi—’
‘It’s fine, Tia,’ he cut in. ‘I’m happy to eat the same as you. Shall we eat in the dining room?’
‘Could we eat here in the kitchen?’ she asked. ‘Otherwise the two of us are going to be a bit lost, sitting at a table big enough for twelve.’
‘Sure.’
* * *
She laid the table while Antonio dished up. And he was surprised by how nice it felt, eating in the kitchen with her: how cosy and domestic. It was a world he’d never really experienced. It had never occurred to him before that this existed: this feeling of being settled, of belonging, of being close to someone.
Home.
He’d never yearned for domesticity before. He’d enjoyed travelling the world and the adrenalin rush of his job, knowing that he was making a difference. But settling down... Now he was beginning to see what it could be like. And he was shocked to discover how much he wanted this.
‘This is good,’ she said when she tasted the tagine.
‘Not too garlicky or spicy?’ he checked.
‘It’s perfect,’ she said. ‘Thank you for accommodating me.’
‘My pleasure.’ Though he was uneasy about behaving like polite strangers to each other when they’d been so much more than that. Her very obvious baby bump was proof of what they’d been to each other, for that one night. And, even though it made him antsy thinking about the way she’d made him feel, at the same time he wanted that closeness back. Here, in the one place he could remember having fun as a child and where he felt free of the restrictions of the palace, he wanted to keep her talking to him. Maybe starting with a neutral topic would help. ‘So what do you think of Casavalle?’
‘The village here and the mountains are beautiful. And your palace is a bit like a fairy-tale castle, all pure white stone and turrets,’ she said.
He’d never really thought about it like that before. ‘I suppose so.’
‘And that Christmas tree in the palace foyer is amazing,’ she said. ‘It must’ve taken ages to decorate.’
‘We have a team in charge of decorating the palace,’ he said.
She smiled. ‘I guess you can’t have the King of Casavalle climbing up a ladder and reaching across the branches.’
‘We use sca
ffolding for a tree of that height, actually, but you’re right.’ He looked at her, suddenly curious. She’d focused on the tree. Christmas for him was a time of duty, but had it been different for her? ‘What were Christmases like when you were young?’
‘We’d put the tree up as soon as Dad came home on leave, the week before Christmas,’ she said. ‘We’d go and choose one together, as a family—a real one that smelled lovely. And then Dad would put the lights on, and Mum would get out the box of decorations and we’d all take turns in putting an ornament on the tree. Each year Nathan and I would choose a new one in the shop, and we’d have one each that we’d made at nursery or school.’ She smiled. ‘Yogurt pots we’d painted and covered in glitter and decorated with a tinsel loop so they looked like a bell, or a star we’d cut out and glued pasta on and spray-painted gold, and an angel made out of a cardboard tube, a ping-pong ball, scraps of fabric and wool. Mum kept every single one of the ones we made; even though they’re too worn to go on the tree nowadays, she can’t bear to throw them away.’
A small family Christmas, with decorations on the tree that had meaning and had been made with love, rather than being bought en masse from a retailer, or priceless baubles that had been part of the family for decades but were never allowed to be played with. So very different from his own. What would it have been like to grow up in a warm, close family like that?
‘And every year on Christmas Eve we’d hang our stockings at the foot of the bed. Mum made them herself—she’s amazing with a needle—and she embroidered our names and stars on them with silver thread so they sparkled. We’d set out a glass of milk and a chocolate biscuit for Father Christmas, and a carrot for his reindeer; and every year we’d come down to find an empty glass, a plate with just crumbs on it, and a half-eaten carrot.’
His family had never had traditions like that. He couldn’t even remember when he’d stopped believing in Father Christmas.
‘When we were little, our stockings would be filled with sweets and a couple of tangerines, a colouring book and crayons, maybe a toy car for Nathan and a bottle of bubbles with a wand for me.’ She smiled. ‘Even after Dad died and money was a bit tight, Mum would still fill a stocking for us. She used to buy a little something every couple of weeks and she’d hide the gifts away in a box at the top of her wardrobe so we wouldn’t find them. On Christmas Eve, we’d go to midnight mass with Mum in the church round the corner and sing carols, then come home to have hot chocolate and marshmallows before going to bed.
‘Even when we stopped believing in Father Christmas, we still put our stockings out. Nathan and I used to make a stocking for Mum, too. We’d save our pocket money and buy her nice bath stuff from the market and make her photo frames, that sort of thing. She cried the first year we did it, and we were so worried we’d upset her, but she told us how special the stocking was and how much she loved us.’
Love. A word that was never really used in the palace. Their father had always been distant, even here; although their mother was warmer, Queen Maria was very practical and didn’t tend to talk about emotional things. And, although Antonio loved his brother and looked up to him, he wasn’t sure he’d ever actually told Luca he loved him, and Luca certainly hadn’t said it to him. They just didn’t do that sort of thing.
And now he was beginning to wonder if he’d missed out. If his childhood had been so structured and full of regulations that there hadn’t been room for love. Grace Phillips had clearly done her best to give her children as much of their dreams as she could afford, but the main thing had been that those gifts, however much she’d spent, had been chosen with love.
‘What about Christmas with you? Do you have traditions?’ Tia asked.
‘You’ve seen the tree in the foyer. That’s one of our traditions,’ he said. ‘Each of the decorations is a special one designed for us by Buschetta—that’s a family of jewellers in Casavalle, a bit like Fabergé. The tradition has been going on for more than a century, and there’s a secret compartment in each one. Every year, there’s a special ceremony to unveil that year’s ornament.’
It was about as close as he could get to the special decorations chosen by Tia and her brother each year. Just on a different scale.
‘We have Mass in the palace cathedral, and the day after Christmas we open the palace to all the citizens. There’s a buffet, with mulled wine and hot chocolate; the palace kitchens bake for days beforehand. Then Luca and I stand at the palace doors with our parents and greet everyone.’ Except this year would be different. The first one without his father. The first year with the new King—or Queen. He pushed the thoughts aside. ‘There are ice sculptures in the fountain area, and the hedge maze is all lit up for the children to explore. We make sure we give our people a magnificent, beautiful Christmas.’
‘I get that you need to do something for your people—like the Queen of England at Sandringham, going to church with her family on Christmas morning and greeting everyone who’s queued up outside to see them,’ she said. ‘But I didn’t mean the public stuff. I meant your private family Christmas. What about traditions for you? Did you have stockings or anything like that?’
No, they hadn’t. Not in the way she meant. ‘As royal children,’ he said, ‘Luca and I had masses of gifts from other royal families and from around the world. To the point where we needed people to help us open them and we didn’t always know what people had bought us.’
She frowned. ‘You didn’t have special things just for you, Luca, your mum and your dad? Not a special story they always read to you, or a film you always watched together?’
‘No.’
‘That,’ she said softly, ‘is a shame. Because Christmas isn’t about the gifts. It’s about love. It’s about spending time with your family. Playing games—we’d play everything from snap to charades to snakes and ladders, and I think the best year ever was the year Nathan bought me this game with kazoos where we had to play whatever song was on the card we picked up. We were all terrible at it, Mum and Dad and Nathan and me, and we laughed so much our sides hurt.’
That was something he’d definitely never done with his family. It was more like the sort of thing he’d done with his army friends. ‘That sounds like fun,’ he said carefully.
‘It was. And I’m sorry you didn’t get to share something like that with your family.’
‘We had our duties to perform,’ he said. Though, now she’d said it, he was sorry, too. He wished he’d been able to share that sort of fun with his parents and his brother.
Would it be different for his baby? If he could persuade Tia to marry him, would she change things at the palace? Would she institute new, more personal, traditions? Would he change, too?
The ground felt as if it was shifting under him.
‘So did you always want to be in the army?’ she asked.
‘I’m the younger son, so there weren’t quite the same expectations for me as there were for Luca. I had a lot more freedom. And I liked the idea of travelling the world, of being able to make a positive difference for people.’
‘Like Nathan,’ she said. ‘Like our dad.’
‘What about you?’ he asked.
‘I’m fine as I am.’
‘No, I mean, what were your dreams when you were young?’ He already knew the answer, but he wanted to hear it from her.
‘I didn’t want to join the army, but I did want to travel,’ she said. ‘I would’ve liked to be a primary school teacher, but my grades at school weren’t good enough.’
Nathan had always talked about his sister being bright, and Antonio had seen that for himself when he talked to her. He guessed that, as her mother’s carer, she’d been too busy to concentrate on her studies at school. ‘You could,’ he said carefully, ‘train as a teacher now. Be a mature student.’
She shook her head. ‘Mum suggested that, but I don’t want to leave her. And I’m happy as I am. I like my
job. My bosses are lovely, and we have regular customers who tell us all kinds of stories of London in the past.’
He had the strongest feeling that Tia was the sort who’d manage to find happiness in any situation: she was one of those incredibly positive people. And she was also incredibly proud and independent. He needed to back off before he upset her. ‘OK.’
Once they’d finished dinner, Tia insisted on helping him to wash up, and then they headed back to the conservatory to watch the stars. Rather than switching on the overhead light, guessing that she’d prefer something softer, Antonio lit the scented pillar candles in their wrought iron and glass lanterns.
‘This smells like Christmas,’ she said. ‘Cinnamon and cloves and orange.’
‘I’m glad you like it,’ he said. ‘Would you like some music?’
‘That’d be nice.’
‘What do you like?’ He knew so little about her.
‘Anything.’
‘You don’t have to be polite,’ he said. ‘What do you really like listening to? Pop? Classical?’
‘This time of year,’ she said, ‘I really like Christmas music—carols as well as all the old pop songs.’
It didn’t take him long to find a medley of Christmas music on a streaming service.
‘This is lovely,’ she said with a smile. ‘All that’s missing is the Christmas tree.’
He remembered how her face had lit up when she’d talked to him about the Christmases of her childhood, with her family. Maybe this was a way of getting closer to her. Although he could simply buy everything and have it all shipped in while he took her out for the day tomorrow, he had a feeling that she’d find that much too impersonal—hadn’t she said that Christmas for her was all about love and spending time with your family? She’d talked about decorating the tree together. So maybe that was what they should do.
