Kitabı oku: «Shock Heir For The Crown Prince»

CHAPTER ONE

‘YOUR HIGHNESS, A moment of your time.’

Casimir looked up from the papers on his desk and nodded for Rudolpho to enter. The king’s chief advisor looked more careworn than usual but that was only to be expected given that his king, Casimir’s father, was dying. Loyal to a fault, Rudolpho had found the transfer of power from Leonidas to Casimir an unpalatable process. Crown Prince or not, Rudolpho was first and foremost the king’s man.

And he didn’t always like the changes Casimir was insisting on.

Soon Casimir would have to leave his winter fortress and take up permanent residence in the palace in the capital. Soon he would no longer have to bear witness to his father’s relentless march towards death. He and his father weren’t close. A big part of him loathed the man, and always would. Another part pitied him. And then there was a tiny sliver of Casimir’s soul that craved the man’s approval.

It wasn’t like Rudolpho to hang back in doorways, but the older man still hadn’t entered the room and his stance was stiffer than usual. Something was amiss. ‘What news of my father?’ he asked.

‘Your father had a comfortable evening. Morphine helps. He’s sleeping now.’ Rudolpho approached the desk, his gaze roving over the neat stacks of paperwork to either side of Casimir’s laptop. ‘You need to delegate some of this workload.’

‘I intend to. Just as soon as I understand exactly what it is I’m delegating.’ Some of these duties were new to him. Not many, but some, and Casimir was nothing if not thorough. ‘I thought you left the palace hours ago.’ Casimir let his raised eyebrow ask the obvious question.

If the king was resting comfortably and Rudolpho had a rare evening off, what was he doing here?

Rudolpho set a yellow courier’s envelope on the desk as if he couldn’t wait for it to leave his hand. ‘The report you ordered on Anastasia Douglas came in. I took the liberty of opening it.’

‘You open everything.’ Nothing unusual about that.

‘Not every report I glance through threatens my ability to breathe. Did you know?’

The older man’s voice had taken on a hard, precise edge, with an undertone of something Casimir couldn’t quite place. Fear? Despair? Maybe it was disappointment. ‘Know what?’

‘I’ll be in my office,’ Rudolpho said, and stalked away, his spine one ramrod line of displeasure.

Disappointment it was. Casimir eyed the offending envelope with deep suspicion before reaching for it.

New memories to replace the old, he reminded himself grimly. Closure, rather than curiosity. Nothing to worry about. He’d asked for this.

So why did his hand tremble ever so slightly as he reached in and withdrew the contents of the envelope?

There were photos, lots of photos, and the topmost image was a close-up of Ana’s face. A heart-shaped face, wide of brow and pointy of chin, with eyes to drown in and lips that promised heaven. Strong, shapely eyebrows and lashes, thick and black, made the cerulean blue of her eyes all the more arresting. In this picture her hair had been scraped back into a careless ponytail. In the next photo it framed her face in sultry waves that curled around her neck and shoulders. It was a face to stop a man’s breath. Casimir put a hand to his face and rubbed hard before turning to the next photograph.

So she’d grown into her beauty. No surprises there.

The next shot was a full-body take of Ana walking up a set of wide outdoor steps—rushing up them most likely, because her body was a study in motion. Slender legs and rounded curves and, again, that loose mane of ebony hair. She wore a dark grey corporate skirt and jacket and had a black satchel slung over her left shoulder. Two more photos showed similar variations on a corporate theme.

The next photo showed her in jeans and a pink short-sleeved T-shirt, standing outside school gates with a young schoolgirl by her side. The photographer had caught them from the rear, as Ana adjusted the shoulder strap of the girl’s backpack. So she was a mother now—good for her. Hopefully she had a husband to love and a solid family life. Casimir looked to her hand to see if she wore a wedding ring but the photo didn’t allow for that level of detail.

The next shot was a formal school photo of the child.

At which point the world as Casimir knew it simply stopped.

There was no sound. No air.

Grey threatened the edges of his sight.

No.

Yes.

Casimir had had a sister once. For seven years he’d had a sister three years younger than he was. And then the rebels to the north had taken her and when his father hadn’t agreed to their demands they’d killed her and sent back pieces to prove it.

His mother had never recovered. She’d taken her own life a year later to the day, leaving her husband and her son to carry on alone.

They didn’t talk about it, Cas and his father. They never had and probably never would. Therapists had been out of the question—too much potential for exploitation to ever let someone inside the young Prince of Byzenmaach’s head, so Cas had survived as best he could.

The pictures of his mother and sister remained prominent in the palace—a permanent reminder of failure, loss and grief. One of the first things he’d do as king would be to remove them to a rarely used dining room and shut the door on them.

Such a small and petty command for a new monarch to give.

He couldn’t look away from the picture of the girl. The cloud of unruly black hair, the cowlick at the child’s temple, the aristocratic blade of her nose.

Those eyes.

He put his hands to his own eyes and rubbed, but the picture was still there.

There would be no getting rid of this.

More pictures followed and each one brought with it a barrage of conflicting emotions because from a distance the kid could be any young girl, but up close...up close, and especially around the eyes—the hawkish, tawny-gold colour of her eyes...

The photo of her twirling in the garden, arms outstretched as if to catch the dust motes in the air...

Heaven help him, he was ten years old again, only this time he hadn’t left his sister alone in the garden to go and get a jar to catch the praying mantis in, and when he came back she hadn’t been gone.

Taken.

Kidnapped.

And never coming back.

Weakness didn’t sit well on him but he’d rather cut his own eyes out than look at another photo of Anastasia Douglas’s daughter. Cas closed his eyes and concentrated on the formerly simple act of breathing.

The clink of glasses and a bottle thudding down on the table prevented him from doing either. Rudolpho was back, and with him a glass and a bottle of Royal Vault brandy. Age spots and veins stood out on the older man’s hands as he poured generously and pushed the glass into Casimir’s hand.

‘I don’t know the royal protocol for this,’ Rudolpho said gruffly. ‘But drink. You’re white.’

‘She’s... It’s...’ Cas took a steadying breath. ‘It’s not her.’

‘No. It’s not her,’ Rudolpho said evenly. ‘But the likeness is uncanny. How far did you get?’

Wordlessly, Casimir picked up the photo of the child in the garden. Rudolpho winced.

‘Summarise,’ Casimir said.

Rudolpho sighed and stared momentarily at the brandy. Casimir gestured for him to have one and succeeded only in offending the man. Rudolpho was a product of an earlier era and would no more sit and drink with Casimir, Crown Prince, than fly. It wasn’t done. It breached a thousand protocols. ‘The child is six years old and has a British birth certificate, courtesy of her being born at the Portland Hospital in London and her mother’s chosen nationality.’

Now it was Casimir’s turn to wince at the thought of a child of Byzenmaach claiming a foreign nationality.

‘The mother is Anastasia Victoria Douglas,’ Rudolpho continued. ‘Twenty-six years of age. Marital status: single. Occupation: interpreter for the European Parliament and the United Nations Secretariat. Currently residing in Geneva, where most of her work is.’

‘And the father?’ He had to ask. He already knew.

‘Father unknown.’

So.

Casimir, future king of Byzenmaach, had an illegitimate six-year-old daughter. A daughter who was the spitting image of his long-dead sister.

‘Your name isn’t on the birth certificate,’ Rudolpho pointed out quietly. ‘Maybe the child’s not yours. Maybe Anastasia Douglas doesn’t know who the father is.’

Cas silently rifled through the photos for the headshot of the girl in school uniform and held it up.

Rudolpho could barely bring himself to glance at it. ‘Maybe the mother has a weakness for amber-eyed men. My point being that the girl’s mother hasn’t contacted you in seven years. She hasn’t asked you for anything, least of all acknowledgement. She provides amply for the child. The girl has a roof over her head, good schooling, loving grandparents. The child is intelligent. She won’t lack for life choices.’

‘Are you suggesting I don’t acknowledge her?’

Rudolpho stayed silent.

‘That’s your counsel?’

‘Or you could bring her here,’ Rudolpho said finally. ‘And do your best to protect her.’

Temper soared. ‘You think I can’t?’ Never mind that Casimir had been the one to leave his sister unprotected in the first place. ‘You think I’m like him?’

‘I think...’ Rudolpho paused, as if choosing his words carefully. ‘I think this innocent bastard child looks like your sister reincarnated. She’d be a target for your enemies from the outset. Front page fodder for the press.’

Silence fell again, the deeply unsettling kind.

‘This stays between us for now,’ Casimir said finally.

Rudolpho met his gaze. ‘It can stay between us for ever, if that is your wish.’

Could he do it? Casimir glanced at the pictures strewn across his desk. Could he really shut her out the way he’d shut out all memory of his seven-year-old sister and too-weak-for-this-world mother? Pack all the pictures away and never look back?

Could he really continue on as if the girl simply didn’t exist?

The child was his blood. His responsibility. His to protect. ‘What’s her name?’ he asked gruffly.

‘Your Highness, the less you know the easier it’ll be to—

‘What’s her name?’

‘Sophia.’ Rudolpho sounded defeated. ‘Sophia Alexandra Douglas.’

A fitting name for the daughter of a king.

Had she known? Had Anastasia Douglas known who she was getting in bed with?

‘Your Highness—’

‘Enough!’ Whatever it was, he didn’t want to hear it.

‘Your Highness, please. Sleep on this. Think carefully before you expose the child to Byzenmaach, because there’s no coming back from that. They’ll take her and shape her into whatever they most desire, and you’ll have to protect her from that too.’

‘The way my father never did for me?’ Casimir asked, silky-soft and deadly.

Rudolpho remained silent. Never would he speak ill of the king he’d served for over forty years.

‘Are you asking if I can accept this child as a person in her own right—with strengths and flaws of her own making? Can I protect her from the expectations of others? Do I know how to be a father to a child who carries the expectations of a nation on her shoulders? Is that your concern?’

Rudolpho said nothing.

‘I was that child,’ he grated. ‘Who better to defend her exploitation than me?’

Casimir scowled and reached for his drink again. He knew exactly what his father would do with this information, and it would be as Rudolpho said. Use the girl to shore up a nation’s hope until legitimate heirs were produced, then cast her aside because she no longer fitted in the Byzenmaach monarch’s perfect world. She wouldn’t have it easy here. No child of Byzenmaach ever did.

The desk, this room and everything in it stank of duty and the weight that came with it. ‘You really think a part of me doesn’t realise that the kindest thing I can do for both of them is to leave them alone?’

All that, and still...

‘She’s mine,’ he said. ‘My child. My blood. My responsibility.’

The bottom line in all of this.

And yet.

And yet...

Could he really expose the child to the dangers that awaited her here in Byzenmaach?

‘There’s one more thing.’ Rudolpho eyed him warily. ‘We weren’t the only ones watching them. Anastasia Douglas and her daughter were already under surveillance. There was a team on the house, and another in place at the girl’s school. As far as we could ascertain, their focus was the girl rather than the mother.’

Dread turned his skin cold and clammy. ‘Who were they?’

‘We don’t know. They disappeared before we could deal with them. They’re good.’

Not good.

‘I’ve ordered a covert security team to watch and wait for additional orders,’ said Rudolpho. ‘I don’t think it wise to involve your father in any decision-making at this point.’

His father only had days to live. That was what Rudolpho meant. ‘I’ll handle it.’

‘If you need additional counsel—’

Casimir smiled bleakly. ‘I don’t.’