‘People like your mama would have written the book. She could have worked it out. Maybe you could ask her how.’
‘She does make good cake,’ Matty said and Kelly slid deeper into the hot water and felt as if she’d died and gone to heaven.
What did they want? Where would she take things from here? No matter. For this moment nothing mattered but that her son was sitting by her kitchen fire eating her grandma’s cake.
She hadn’t taken dry clothes into the bathroom. This was a tiny cottage and her bathroom led straight off the kitchen. She hadn’t been thinking, and once she was scrubbed dry, pinkly warm, wrapped in her big, fuzzy bathrobe and matching pink slippers she kept in the bathroom permanently and with her hair wrapped in a towel, she felt absurdly self-conscious about facing them again.
There was hardly a back route from bathroom to bedroom unless she dived out of the window. Face them she must, so she opened the door and they both turned and smiled.
They’d been setting the table. There were plates and spoons and knives in three settings. Rafael had cut the bread on the sideboard. The sense of domesticity was almost overwhelming.
‘That’s much better,’ he said approvingly, his dark eyes checking her from the fluffy slippers up.
‘You look pretty,’ Matty said and then amended his statement. ‘Comfy pretty. Not like the ladies my papa brought to the castle.’
She flushed.
‘You’re pink,’ Matty said, and she flushed some more.
‘I guess the water was too hot.’
‘At least you’re warm,’ Rafael said. ‘Sit down and eat. I know we’ve done this the wrong way round-cake before soup-but it does seem sensible to eat. That is, if you don’t mind sharing.’
‘I…no, of course I don’t mind. But it’s all I’ve got.’
‘Until next pay day?’ he asked, teasing, and she flushed even more. Drat her stupid habit of blushing. Though, come to think of it, she hadn’t blushed for a very long time.
‘I meant soup and toast is all there is.’
‘After a hard day down the gold-mines? It’s hardly workman’s fare.’
‘I need to get dressed,’ she said.
‘You’re not hungry?’
She was hungry. She’d fiddled with her cake, not able to pay it any attention. Now she was suddenly aware that she was ravenous.
But to sit in her bathrobe…
‘We’re jet lagged,’ Rafael said, seeing her indecision. ‘We need to get some sleep pretty soon, but this soup smells so good we’d love to share. If you don’t mind eating now.’
She gave up. Thinking was just too hard. ‘Fine.’
‘Great,’ he said.
‘We can’t find your toaster,’ Matty told her, moving right on to important matters.
‘I make my toast with the fire.’
‘How?’
Okay. She was dressed in a bathrobe and fluffy slippers and nothing else. She was entertaining the Prince Regent and the Crown Prince of Alp de Ciel in her kitchen. A girl just had to gather her wits and teach them how to make toast.
She tied another knot-firmly-in the front of her bathrobe, flipped open the fire door and produced a toasting fork. She pulled a chair up to the stove, lifted Matty on to it-she couldn’t believe she did that-she just lifted him on to the chair as if it were the most natural thing in the world-she arranged a piece of bread on the toasting fork and set him to work.
It was the first time she’d touched him. She felt breathless.
‘Wow,’ Matty breathed and she smiled, and Matty turned to see if Rafael was smiling too, and so did Kelly and suddenly she didn’t feel like breathing.
It was the shock, she told herself. Not the smile. Not.
It was his cousin’s smile. The de Boutaine smile.
She remembered almost every detail of Kass’s courtship. One moment she’d been part of a team excavating in the palace grounds; the next she’d looked up and Kass had been watching her. He had been on his great, black stallion.
He’d been just what a prince ought to look like-tall and dark and heart-stoppingly handsome, with a dangerous glint behind his stunning smile. And his horse…She’d spent half her childhood with thoroughbreds but the stallion had made her gasp. The combination, prince and stallion, had been enough to change her world.
‘Cinderella,’ he murmured. ‘Just who I need.’
It was a strange comment, but then he left his horse, stooped beside her in the dust and watched her brush the dust from an ancient pipeline she was uncovering. He seemed truly interested. He spent an hour watching her and then he asked her out to dinner.
‘Anywhere your heart desires,’ he told her. ‘This Principality is yours to command.’
He meant it was his to command. Kass’s ego was the size of his country, but it had taken her too long to find that out.
Stunned, she went out to dinner with him. She was mesmerized by his looks, his charm and the fact that he seemed equally fascinated by her. It was heady stuff.
The next morning he met her at the stables. He mounted her on a mare, almost as beautiful as his stallion, Blaze, and they rode together into the foothills of the mountains in the early morning mist. The magic of the morning blew her away. It left her feeling mind-numbingly, blissfully in love, transported to a parallel universe where normal rules of sense and caution no longer applied.
That night, as she finished work, he appeared again, in his dress uniform. Regal and imperious and still utterly charming, he was focusing all his attention on her. He’d just come from a ceremonial function, he told her, but she suspected now that he’d dressed that way to overwhelm her.
And overwhelmed she was. Royalty and stallions. Swords and braid and wealth. He chartered a private plane to take her to Paris. No matter that she had nothing to wear-they’d shop for clothes in Fabourg Saint-Honore, he told her. He’d take her personally this night, before their weekend started.
For Kelly, the only child of disinterested academic parents, whose only love had been her neighbour’s horses, this seemed a fairy-tale.
Instead it was a nightmare. One where she ended up losing everything.
So now Rafael was smiling at her and there was no way she was smiling back. That way led to disaster. Royalty…no and no and no.
‘I’m not Kass,’ he said and she blinked.
‘Pardon?’
‘I know there’s a family resemblance,’ he told her, and there was a note of anger behind his studied gentleness. ‘But I’m not Kass and I’m not like him. You have no reason to fear me, Kelly.’
‘I…’
‘Let’s make toast,’ he said, and smiled some more and supervised turning the bread on the toasting fork. ‘You pour the soup.’
So eat they did, by the fireside. Matty was hungry and Kelly was hungry for him. She could scarcely take her eyes from him.
‘He’ll still be here tomorrow,’ Rafael said and leaned over the table, filled her soup spoon and guided her lifeless hand to her lips. ‘You look like you need a feed as much as Matty.’
‘You’ll still be here tomorrow?’
‘Yes.’
There should have been a fuss, she thought, bewildered. She thought of Kass, flying to Paris that first weekend she’d met him. There’d been minions everywhere-pomp and pageantry, recognition of Kass’s rank and dignity.
‘Why aren’t there reporters?’ she asked, forcing herself to drink her soup as Rafael had directed, if only to stop him force-feeding her. He had the look of a man who just might.
He was frowning at her. He looked as if he was worried about her. That was crazy.
