Kitabı oku: «New Year Wedding For The Crown Prince»

CHAPTER ONE

CHARLES EDOUARD ALBERT CINZETTI, Crown Prince of Livaroche, gripped the armrest of his seat as the small plane in which he was travelling—foolishly, he now conceded—was tossed around in gale-force winds and lashing rain.

The journey had been interminable: long hours in the air, lengthy delays at foreign airports and now this. The pilot’s laconic apology for the rough flight—‘Sorry about the bumps, folks, bit of a low off the coast’—had hardly been reassuring, although Charles began to see lights through the rain, growing steadily brighter, and then they were down, with every passenger on board heaving a huge sigh of relief.

Not that Charles’s journey had ended. He had to find his way to the seaside town of Port Anooka, another thirty miles from the airport.

‘Just down the road,’ the travel agent had told him. ‘You could hire a car.’

Which had been a good idea back in Sydney, where the weather was clear and bright, but in this deluge?

No way!

‘Just a bit of a low off the coast,’ the cab driver told him, as he steered his vehicle through practically horizontal rain. ‘Port’ll be cut off, and that place you want, the old lady’s house on the bluff—well, you won’t even be able to get back to the village once the tide comes in and the road floods.’

Charles wondered if it was jet lag that made the conversation—carried out in clear, everyday English words—unintelligible.

A village that was cut off and flooded at high tide?

Coming from a tiny, landlocked principality, he knew little of tides but surely villages were built above high-tide marks?

And what was this low everyone was talking about?

He gathered it was a meteorological depression but he didn’t know much about them either. At home, it might mean rain, or in winter snow, but obviously here it brought a deluge and wild wind.

‘The old lady’s barmy, ya know,’ the driver continued, breaking into Charles’s consideration of the limits of his very expensive education. ‘Livin’ out there on her own, the place fallin’ to bits around her.’

Place falling to bits? Charles thought. He thought of the comfortable apartment he’d left behind at the palace. Of the snow, already deep on the mountain slopes, and Christmas lights slung along the streets; rugged-up carollers knocking on doors, and the city’s Christmas tree ready to be raised into pride of place in the city square.

Had he made a mistake, coming here?

But how else could he get to know at least something of the mother who’d died giving birth to him—the woman his father had loved, married and buried, all within eighteen months of meeting her?

His father would talk of how she had made him laugh, how kind she had been to everyone she’d met, and how they’d fallen in love at first sight.

Not much help in putting together a picture of the whole woman, but Charles did know they’d met at Christmas, which was why he’d chosen to come now to see what she’d seen, do what she’d done, and hopefully get to know his grandmother—and to learn why she’d never contacted them. Something his father had never been able to explain—or perhaps had not wanted to explain.

As far as Charles was concerned, someone as loving and giving as his mother—gleaned from his father’s description of her—must have grown up in a warm, loving family. He wasn’t personally familiar with normal families, but anyone who’d worked in children’s wards in a hospital had seen loving families up close, and knew they existed. Not in every case, of course, but in enough to have learnt how strong the bonds of family love could be.

His father had encouraged him to come, perhaps hoping once his son had it out of his system, he’d settle down, marry and have the children so important to the continuation of the royal line.

Charles sighed.

It wasn’t that he didn’t want to marry, but no woman he had ever met had made him feel the way his parents must have felt when they’d run away together.

‘Port Anooka!’ the driver announced, breaking into his thoughts as they entered another lit-up area. ‘Not that there’s much of it these days, and you’re still ten minutes from the house.’

He half turned.

‘Sure you want to go out there? Look how high the tide is already. You won’t get back in an hour.’

Charles peered through the streaming windshield and was startled to see huge waves crashing onto the promenade along the foreshore, not a hundred yards from the cab.

Was he sure?

Shouldn’t he book into a hotel, and perhaps go out tomorrow?

But the journey had already been too long.

‘Of course,’ he said, hoping the words sounded more positive than he felt. He’d come all this way, so there was no turning back.

Not now he was so close...

Besides, there, ahead of him, was the house, rising up two stories, high on a bluff above the ocean, looking for all the world like something out of a horror film, wreaths of sea mist wisping around it in a temporary lull in the rain.

He paid the driver, thanked him for his further warning of being stuck out here on the bluff, grabbed his hold-all, and headed for the two low steps leading up to the front door.

He’d barely raised his hand to knock when the door flew open and a bucket of water was tossed onto him.

Barmy old lady?

He knew that in England barmy meant a bit mad.

But was she really mad, and this her way of repelling intruders?

Perhaps not as good as the boiling oil of olden days, but still reasonably effective as it had sent him tripping backwards into a large puddle at the bottom of the steps.

He struggled to his feet, still clutching his bag, and faced his opponent.

But the thrower wasn’t an old lady. She was a heavily pregnant woman, surely close to giving birth, who was turning away from him, shouting up the stairs to some unseen inhabitant.

‘Of course you knew the roof was leaking, Dottie. Why else would you own twelve buckets?’

She was swinging the door shut when she must have caught a glimpse of him, hesitantly approaching the bottom step, drenched in spite of the umbrella he still held with difficulty above his head.

‘Who are you? Where did you come from? What are you doing here?’ A slight pause in the questions, then, ‘You’re wet!’

He watched realisation dawn on her face and saw her try to hide a smile as she said, ‘Oh, no, did I throw the water over you? You’d better come in.’

‘What is it? Who’s there?’

The querulous questions came from above—nothing wrong with the barmy old lady’s hearing apparently.

‘It’s just some fellow I threw water at,’ the woman yelled back, not bothering to hide her smile now.

She was gorgeous, Charles realised. Tall, statuesque, carrying her pregnancy with pride. And the condition suited her, for her auburn hair shone and her skin was a clear, creamy white tinged with the slightest pink of embarrassment across high cheekbones.

‘Don’t let him in,’ came the instruction from on high, but it was too late. He was already standing, dripping, in the black and white tiled entry, watching the woman disappear into the darkness beyond.

She returned with a large towel, but as she handed it to him she laughed and shook her head.

‘That won’t do, will it? You’re drenched. Come through, there’s a bathroom off the kitchen—a little apartment from the days when the house had servants. Mind the bucket! Have you dry clothes in your bag or shall I find something for you?’

* * *

Of course he’d have dry clothes in his bag, Jo thought, but she was in such a muddle she barely knew what she was saying. It was shock, that was what it was! Opening the door to find a man standing there—a man at whom she’d just hurled a bucket of water. A man so stunningly attractive even her very pregnant body felt the heat of attraction.

And Dottie was probably right, she shouldn’t have let him in. But he’d been drenched, and he didn’t look like an axe murderer.

In fact, even wet, he was the visual representation of tall, dark and handsome.

Was she out of her mind?

Tall, dark and handsome indeed.

All this was flashing through her head as she led him through the kitchen to the minuscule bathroom beyond.

‘Servants obviously didn’t get many luxuries,’ she said as she waved him through the door and watched him duck his head to get in.

Which was when she recovered enough common sense to realise she had no idea who the man was!

Or why he was here!

Well, she could hardly ask now, as he’d shut the door between them, and she was not going to open it when he was doubtless undressing.

Or think about him undressing...

She didn’t do men—not any more, not seriously...

She shook away painful memories of that long-ago time when a man had betrayed her in the worst possible way.

Had being pregnant brought those memories back more often?

Think of this man. The stranger. The here and now.

She’d ask his name later.

The growling noise of the stair lift descending told her Dottie had tired of waiting for an answer and was coming to see what was going on for herself.

Jo hurried back through the kitchen, meeting Dottie in the hall.

‘Who is it? What’s going on?’ the old lady demanded.

‘It’s a man,’ Jo explained. ‘He was on the doorstep and I didn’t see him as I emptied the bucket. He was soaking wet so I’ve put him in the downstairs bathroom to dry off.’

‘You invited him in?’

Incredulous didn’t cut it. The words indicated total disbelief.

‘Dottie, he was wet. I’d thrown a bucket of water over him, on top of whatever rain he’d caught getting to the house.’

‘He had an umbrella!’ Dottie retorted, pointing to where the large black umbrella stood in a pool of water in a corner of the hall.

Jo took a very deep breath and changed the subject.

‘I need to check the buckets upstairs,’ she said. ‘According to the radio reports, the weather is going to get worse.’

Better not to mention that the road to the village was likely to be cut, and the man, whoever he was, might have to stay the night.

Would have to stay the night most probably!

‘You can’t leave me down here with your stranger,’ Dottie told her.

He’s hardly my stranger, Jo thought, but said, ‘Well, come back upstairs with me. I’ve just emptied the one down here.’

She waved her hand towards the bucket responsible for all the trouble.

Dottie glared at her for a moment, five feet one of determined old lady, then gave a huff and stalked into the living room, which was bucket-free as there were bedrooms or bathrooms above most of the downstairs rooms.

‘I won’t be long,’ Jo promised, taking the stairs two at a time, glad she’d continued her long walks up and down the hills around the village right through the pregnancy.

There were six buckets upstairs and she emptied them all into the bath before replacing them under the leaks. How Dottie slept through the constant drip, drip, drip she didn’t know. For herself, too uncomfortable to sleep much anyway, the noise was an almost welcome distraction through the long nights.

She was back downstairs when their visitor returned to the hall.

‘I left my wet clothes over the shower, if that’s all right,’ he said, his beautiful, well-bred, English accent sending shivers down Jo’s spine.

‘That’s fine,’ she said, ‘although I could put them in a plastic bag for you if you like, because you really should be going. The road to the village will be cut off any minute. The weather bureau’s warning that the place will flood at high tide.’

‘So everyone keeps telling me,’ the stranger said with a smile that made Jo’s toes tingle.

But Dottie was made of sterner stuff. Ensconced in her high-backed armchair in the living room, she made her presence known with an abrupt, ‘Fiddle-faddle! Stop flirting with the man, Joanna, and bring him in here. If he had any manners he’d have introduced himself before he came through the door.’

Jo shrugged and waved her hand towards the inner door.

‘After you,’ she said, smiling at the thought of the diminutive Dottie coming up against the stranger.

‘Who are you?’ Dottie demanded, and Jo watched as the man pulled a chair up close to Dottie and sat down in it, so he was on a level with her, before replying.

‘I’m Charles,’ he said. ‘And I believe I’m your grandson.’

His voice was gentle, so hesitant Jo felt a rush of emotion that brought a wetness to her eyes. Pregnancy sentimentality!

She held her hand to her mouth to stop her gasp escaping, and waited for Dottie to erupt.

She didn’t have to wait long.

‘Are you just?’ Dottie retorted. ‘And I’m supposed to believe you, am I? You turn up here with your fancy voice and good shoes and expect what? That I’ll leave you my house?’

Trust Dottie to have checked his shoes, Jo thought. Dottie was a firm believer that you could judge a person by his or her shoes...

‘No,’ Charles was saying politely. ‘I wanted to know more about my mother and her family—my family—and you seemed like the best person to tell me.’

‘You can’t ask her?’

Not a demand this time, but a question asked through quivering lips, as if the answer was already known.

The stranger hesitated, frowning as if trying to make sense of the question, or perhaps trying to frame an answer.

Maybe the latter, for he leant a little closer.

‘I’m so very sorry but I thought you’d been told. She died when I was born.’

The words were softly spoken, the stranger bowing his head as he said them, but Jo was more concerned with Dottie, who was as white as the lace collar on her dress.

But even as Jo reached her side, Dottie rallied.

‘So, who’s your father? No doubt that lying vagabond she ran away with. I suppose you’ve proof of this!’

If the man was disturbed by having his father labelled this way, he didn’t show it.

‘My father is Prince Edouard Alesandro Cinzetti. We are from a tiny principality in Europe, a place even many Europeans do not know. It is called—’

‘Don’t tell me!’ Dottie held up her hand. ‘I’ve heard it all before. Some place with liver in the name, or maybe the vagabond’s name had liver in it.’

‘Liver?’ Jo repeated faintly, totally gobsmacked by what was going on before her eyes.

The stranger glanced up and smiled.

‘Livaroche,’ he said, imbuing the word with all the magic of a fairy-tale.

But Jo’s attention was back on Dottie, who seemed to have shrunk back into the chair.

‘Go away, I don’t want you here,’ she said, so feebly that Jo bent to take her arm, feeling for a pulse that fluttered beneath her fingertips.

‘Perhaps if you could wait in the kitchen. This has been a shock for Dottie. I’ll settle her back in bed and make us all some supper.’

Dottie flung off Jo’s hand and glared at the visitor.

‘You can’t stay here!’ she said. ‘If you are the vagabond’s son, next thing I know you’ll be making sheep’s eyes at my Jo, and whispering sweet nothings to her.’

Dark eyes turned towards Jo, his gaze taking in her bloated figure, and the man had the hide to smile before he answered Dottie.

‘Oh, I think someone’s already whispered sweet nothings to Jo, don’t you?’

The rogue!

But he’d turned her way again, serious now, frowning.

‘That’s if you are Jo! I’m sorry, we didn’t meet—not properly. You know I’m Charles, and you are?’

His aunt? Charles wondered, though why that thought upset him he didn’t want to consider.

No, Dottie had said ‘my Jo’, but it was impossible she could be Dottie’s daughter. Dottie must be touching ninety, and if Jo was much over thirty he’d eat his hat.

Maybe a cousin...

But the statuesque beauty was talking.

‘I’m Jo Wainwright, local GP in Port Anooka. I took over the practice a couple of years ago, but I have a locum there at present.’

‘Then why are you here? Is D—my grandmother ill?’

Somehow saying Dottie seemed far too informal—inappropriate really.

Jo was shaking her head, the red in her hair glinting in the lamplight.

‘Dottie is probably the fittest eighty-five-year-old it’s ever been my pleasure to meet. She’s also the stubbornest—’ She broke off to smile at the old woman. ‘And she’s not entirely steady on her feet, while as for the stair lift—you’d swear she was taking off for Mars, the speed she roars up the stairs on it.’

‘Fiddle-faddle!’

Charles ignored the interruption.

‘So?’

But again it was Dottie who answered.

‘Oh, she thinks I’m not safe to be out here on my own, and she knows darned well I won’t move to one of those nasty places where old people rot away and die, so now she spends all her spare time here, eating me out of house and home, and leaving spies here during the week to report back to her.’

As the words were warmed by fondness, and Dottie was clinging to Jo’s hand as she spoke, Charles knew it was only bluster, and understood there was a special bond between the pair.

‘Dottie’s right,’ Jo told him. ‘I don’t like her being out here on her own, but I’ve grown to love the place almost as much as she does, so staying out here when I can is no hardship.’

She paused, looking a little rueful as she added, ‘Mind you, I didn’t know about the roof. I keep asking Dottie what needs maintenance and although we’ve done a bit, there’s been a long dry spell so the roof didn’t get a mention.’

She had such an animated face the words seemed to come alive as she spoke them, but he could hardly keep staring at her, any more than he could ask her what her husband thought of this arrangement.

So he watched as she spoke quietly to Dottie, helping her to her feet.

‘I usually take Dottie her supper in bed. Would you excuse us?’

For the first time, he actually took in the long Chinese robe the older woman was wearing. Had she been settled in bed when he’d arrived and thrown them both into confusion?

‘Can I be of assistance?’ he offered, and was rewarded with a ferocious scowl from the woman he’d come so far to meet.

‘You’ve caused quite enough drama for one day, thank you very much. You’d best be getting back to the village and we can discuss your visit in the morning.’

‘The tide, Dottie,’ Jo said gently. ‘He won’t be able to get back to the village now. He’ll have to stay the night.’

‘Then put him in the front room,’ Dottie said, with such malicious glee Charles knew it was either haunted or, more prosaically, lay beneath the worst of the roof damage.

Left on his own, Charles prowled around the room, aware through all his senses that his mother had once walked here, sat here, maybe helped decorate the ragged imitation tree that stood forlornly in one corner. The need to know more about her had brought him all this way.

He tried to imagine her living in this house, but his thoughts turned to Jo, and it was she he pictured in his mind, maybe on a ladder, laughing as she tried to fix a star to the pathetic tree.

He closed his eyes, replacing Jo’s image with one of his mother that he had only formed from pictures, and the stories his father would tell. Would Dottie tell him more stories, the ones he’d come so far to hear? Stories of his mother as a child, her likes and dislikes, anything at all to turn her into a living person instead of a picture by his bed.

It had been close to Christmas back then, too, some annual event having brought his father to the tiny seaside town, and he knew it was a degree of silly sentimentality to have come now, to find out what he could before he married and settled down, taking some of the burden of official duties from his father.

Had his mother prowled the room as he now prowled, arguing with herself—or her parents—about leaving with the lying vagabond?

He knew that had to be his father, because neither of them had ever loved another. And a vagabond he might have been, only even then, Charles was sure, he’d have been called a backpacker. Travel had been something his father had been determined to do, the only time he’d ever argued with his parents. But although it had disturbed his relationship with them, he’d known he had to see something of the world, to mix with ordinary people, the kind of people he would one day rule.

He himself had done much the same, he realised, when he’d insisted on studying medicine in Edinburgh, with men and women from all layers of society. Eton had been all very well for an education, but he knew how his fellow students had thought and how that layer of society worked. He’d needed to know everyday people.

Even back home for holidays, he’d worked in bars and cafés in the summer, and been a ski instructor in the winter.

But getting back to his father...

A lying vagabond?

Jo returned before he had time to consider the word Dottie had used, bringing light into the gloomy room with her smile.

‘Been looking for memories of your mother?’ she said. ‘I’ve done the same, but sadly never found a thing.’

She paused, then added, ‘Though I don’t pry to the extent of going through drawers. I wouldn’t take advantage of Dottie that way, but I do shake out the books I borrow to read, just in case there’s a photo been left to mark a page.’

Charles looked at the wall of books at the back of the room and shook his head. It would take for ever...

‘Has she not spoken of her to you?’ he asked.

Jo shook her head.

‘Not a word, and apparently there’s enough solidarity in the village that no one else ever talks about her. I know there has to be a reason because although Dottie’s a bit eccentric—well, pretty eccentric—she’s not irrational.’

She sighed, shook her head, and bent over to pick up a glass bauble from a box of decorations that stood by the tree, hanging it on a low branch before turning back to Charles.

‘Dottie and I usually have grilled cheese on toast for supper, but if you haven’t had dinner and would like something more substantial, there are lamb cutlets and plenty of salad things.’

Charles shook his head.

‘Grilled cheese on toast sounds fantastic. Takes me back to student days when it was one of the few things I could cook—cheese on toast, beans on toast, eggs on toast!’

That won another smile, which was so open and honest and full of good humour that it caught at something in his chest—just a hitch, nothing more...

You cannot be attracted to a very pregnant stranger, he told himself as he followed her to the kitchen, narrowly missing the bucket in the entry.

But the sway of her hips mesmerised him...

It had to be abstinence. How long since he’d been with a woman? The experience of the match his father had promoted, with a young woman who had a very dubious family connection to the old Russian royalty, had been enough to put him off women for life.

Well, for several months at least!

She’d been nice enough, attractive enough, but her conversation began and ended with horses and although he quite liked horses and rode occasionally himself, as a conversational topic, they were way down his list of favourites.

He doubted the woman with the swaying hips would talk horses.

‘There’s the toaster, and the bread’s in the cupboard underneath it. You can do the toast while I grate the cheese. I think it melts better grated. Do you like relish or chutney under the cheese? My dad used to slice up pickles under his.’

Jo only just stopped herself from explaining how her mother had liked Vegemite, and she herself didn’t mind the pickles. After all, there was only so much conversational mileage you could get out of grilled cheese on toast. And it had all been a very long time ago.

The memory of that time made her shudder—so much sadness, so much despair and emptiness and loss.

Don’t think about it now—concentrate on toast but don’t babble on.

She was embarrassed, that was why she’d been talking so much and there were no points for guessing why!

This man’s presence—or perhaps her own hyper-awareness of him—was embarrassing her. For some peculiar reason, she’d felt his eyes on her as she’d walked to the kitchen. Not casually on her, but studying her, although that was ridiculous. She’d been imagining things. Why would a man like him be studying a slightly damp, very untidy, very pregnant woman like her?

For a start, being thirty-eight weeks pregnant would announce her as unavailable!

She hauled butter and cheese out of the refrigerator, then milk for Dottie’s cocoa, relish in case Charles wanted it, the bottle of pickled gherkins to slice for under her cheese, set it all on the scrubbed wooden table in the centre of the big kitchen, then turned to their guest.

He was waggling the handles on the doors of the toaster.

‘You realise I’m touching something my mother probably touched. This toaster has to be at least fifty years old.’