Her Royal Baby

womaniser.’ So he kissed me. So what? If you breathe and you’re female then you get kissed by His Royal Highness. I’m lucky it didn’t go any further.

‘Lucky?

‘Yes, lucky.’ She was talking out loud. She’d erected the tent well out of sight of the palace. Here she could conduct her conversation with herself without fear of interruption. Which was just as well. She had serious things to discuss.

‘But if he’d wanted…

‘To take things further? You’re out of your mind, Tammy Dexter. He’s just ditched Ingrid-in fact, you don’t know for sure that he has ditched Ingrid. You want to fall into his arms between his little affairs with society bimbos?

‘I wouldn’t mind.

‘Tamsin Dexter!’ She was scolding herself, even managing to sound shocked, and she grinned into the night. Good grief. What on earth was happening to her?

She was fantasising over one gorgeous specimen of manhood. Maybe she’d been celibate for far too long. That was all this was. Fantasy.

So how was her fantastic male going with Henry?

‘It’s none of my business. Go to sleep.

‘I could just sneak back and have a listen…

‘Yeah, and get caught. You know darned well that would be the way of disaster.

‘Why?

‘Because…

‘The servants will all be in bed. There’ll just be Henry, who’ll drift off to sleep pretty soon now. Which will leave me and His Highness, the Prince Regent.

‘Not a good idea,’ she told herself, zipping her sleeping bag up to her nose. ‘In fact a very bad idea.’

So why did she desperately want to do it?

Where was she?

Henry’s time clock was still out of kilter and he wanted to play, so Marc took his nephew back to bed, hauled open his laptop and started working on a design for a series of agricultural channels. He wasn’t working very seriously. Henry’s attention span was about thirty seconds, after which he demanded some new distraction. He’d come a long way from the baby who not a week before had known only that a window was the best distraction on offer.

Now Henry had found these wonderful new playthings called adults, and he intended to exploit them to the full. Teddy looked pretty boring compared to a clicking keyboard, and before long Marc’s canal system looked like nothing so much as the work of a very drunken spider.

‘So how are the farmers of Southern Broitenburg going to link up with this?’ Marc demanded of his nephew, and Henry chortled, put his fist into the keyboard and sent a spiral of water channels veering northward.

‘Oh, great. You realise you’re sending water from a drought-affected area to one where the rainfall’s the highest in Broitenburg?’

Henry clearly thought it was a great idea.

‘Where’s your aunt?’

Henry didn’t know and he didn’t care. Unlike Marc who found himself caring far too much.

‘She came over here to look after you. That’s her job.’

No comment.

‘Damn, where is she?’ He glanced at his watch. Two-thirty.

‘She’d better be here in the morning.’

He didn’t want her in the morning, he thought savagely. He wanted her now!

Tammy woke at dawn.

There was something about sleeping under the stars that made waking at dawn almost compulsory-which was just as well. She didn’t want to be found by the gardeners, so two minutes after waking she’d packed up and was returning to the palace.

She made herself slow. The servants would still be asleep. She’d ordered them not to stir before seven.

Maybe Marc would like a cup of tea, she thought dubiously, pausing in the front entrance, unsure what to do. If he’d been up all night with the baby…

If he’d been up all night the last thing he’d want now would be a cup of tea. He’d be fast asleep. She let herself into the kitchen, made herself tea and toast and kept on thinking about it.

Whether he’d like it or not, the temptation was irresistible.

‘What man wouldn’t want toast and tea at sunrise?’ she asked herself, and she grinned. She knew the answer to that. ‘But, hey, he deserves it. He’s been working hard.’

The temptation was too much. She made him toast, loaded it with marmalade, and brewed fresh tea.

‘Coming, ready or not,’ she said, and took a deep breath.

What on earth was she doing?

She didn’t have a clue.

He was dead to the world. They both were. Tammy’s knock on the door to the main royal bedroom went unanswered. She pushed the vast door wide and saw them at once: one big prince and one little one, deeply lost in sleep.

Marc had been working when he’d fallen asleep. His laptop lay on the floor beside him, still powered up, fluorescent and flashing with something that looked like spiderwebs on the screen. Lines were scrawling everywhere. He’d fallen back on his pillows with the baby cradled to him.

Naked from the waist up, Marc’s only covering was Henry’s already battered teddy. Henry himself lay cradled under his big cousin’s arm, sound asleep and looking for all the world as if this was his very favourite place in the whole world.

Tammy stood, rooted to the spot, taking in the scene before her. She had a plate of toast in one hand and a mug of tea in the other, but she made no move to set them down. She couldn’t.

The sight was enough to form a lump in her throat so large she could hardly swallow. She didn’t know what on earth was happening to her, but the sight of this big man and this baby…

She didn’t want relationships, she told herself fiercely. She wasn’t interested in men. She should walk away fast-back out of this room right now. Instead she stood as if her eyes were locked on the sight before her.

Marc was so…large. His chest was tanned and strongly muscled. The tiny teddy sprawled over his breast accentuated the raw strength of the man.

Man and baby. They looked right together.

And the realisation slammed home. They belonged.

She didn’t.

It was she who was the outsider. She’d come half a world to protect her small nephew but there’d been no need. If this man would protect him…love him…

She felt her eyes blur with tears.

Somehow she managed to back into the corridor, but the door hadn’t swung shut behind her when Marc’s eyes opened. For a long moment he stared at her, their eyes meeting across the room. Something passed between…

Good grief. She was so out of control. Her foot was holding the door open and she started shifting it. Still her eyes held his.

‘Don’t go.’

‘I…’

He was out of the bed so fast she hardly saw him coming-lunging across the room to catch the door before it shut. Then he was steadying her, catching the toast, which was threatening to slide. He was right beside her. Right…there!

He was wearing only boxer shorts and nothing else. He was too large. He was too male. He was too darned