The Forbidden Prince

Was it homesickness, perhaps? Because he was feeling a new and rather extraordinary sensation of being alone? No. He’d dealt with homesickness many years ago when he’d been sent to the best schools that Europe had to offer and, while the love of his family and homeland would always draw him back and enfold him, he loved to travel.

It was relief, that was what it was. He had won this time. A reprieve from thinking about the overwhelming responsibility of being in charge of a nation, along with the daunting prospect of a marriage that had been arranged when he’d been no more than a child. A union that would bond two similar principalities together and strengthen them both.

Raoul turned away from the view of the sea. Les Iles Dauphins was out of sight and he was going to try and put it out of mind for just a little while.

He was free. All he had was in his backpack and he could choose any direction at all, the time he would take to get there and how long he would stay when he did. As of yesterday, nobody knew where he was and he was confident that nobody would recognise him. His hair grew fast and he’d deliberately missed his last cut. His beard was coming along well, too. With his dark sunglasses, he could pass for any European tourist. Italian, French... Spanish, even.

He could feel the corners of his mouth curve. If he’d had a guitar case on his back instead of his backpack, he would probably have looked like a flashback to the sixties. He was completely alone for what felt like the first time in his entire life. No family, no friends and, most importantly, no bodyguards or lurking paparazzi. He had won the freedom simply to be himself.

He just needed to find out who that was, exactly, because he had a feeling there were layers to his personality that had been buried for ever. Even his earliest memories involved a performance of some kind. Of behaving in a way that would never have been expected of others.

How many five-year-olds could take part in a national ceremony to mourn both parents and not cry until they were finally alone in their own beds and presumed to be sound asleep? Who had childhood friends chosen for them and, even then, had to be careful of what was said? What young adult knew how much had been sacrificed by a generation that had already raised a child and shouldn’t have had to start all over again? The burden of a debt that could never properly be repaid had never been intended but it was there all the same.

He had never been drunk enough to do anything inappropriate or create a scandal by dating indiscreet women. He had excelled in his university studies and military training and, until he’d taken this leave, had shone in his role as a helicopter pilot for a service that provided both military transport and emergency rescue services.

Sometimes, it felt like his life had been recorded by photographs that had been staged for public consumption and approval. A picture-perfect life of a happy prince. And the next album would have all the pomp and ceremony of his coronation, then his wedding and then the births of the next generation of the de Poitier royal family.

The happiness was not an illusion. Raoul loved his life and knew how incredibly fortunate he was but his curiosity of the unknown had teased him with increasing frequency of late. Was there something solid that formed the essence of who he was as a person? Something that would have been there if he hadn’t been born a prince?

He had four weeks to try and find some kind of answer to what seemed an impossible question and the only plan he had come up with was to see if he could find a challenge that would be testing enough to make him dig deep. He had set out with no more than the bare essentials of survival in a backpack—a phone, a fake ID, limited funds and a change of clothes. This demanding climb up a mountain to the track that led from Praiano to Positano was just the first step on a very private journey.

Or maybe it wasn’t quite that private.

Frowning, Raoul stared at the narrow, winding track ahead of him. He could hear voices. One voice, anyway.

Faint.

Female.

‘Aiuti... Per favore aiutatemi...’

* * *

The vertigo had come from nowhere.

Utterly unexpected and totally debilitating.

Tamika Gordon was clinging to the side of a cliff and she didn’t dare open her eyes. If she did, the nausea would come back, the world would start spinning again and there would be nothing to stop her falling into that terrifyingly sheer drop onto rocks hundreds of feet below. But keeping her eyes shut didn’t wipe out the knowledge that the unprotected edge to this track was no more than the length of her arm away.

The panic that led her to cry for help was almost as terrifying as the yawning chasm below.

Mika didn’t do panic. She’d been told more than once that she was ‘as hard as nails’ and she was proud of it. It was a badge of honour, won by surviving. Of course she was tough. Who wouldn’t be when they’d been dragged up through a succession of disastrous foster homes and then had ended up on the streets as a teenager? She’d fought for everything she had achieved in her twenty-nine years on earth so far and she’d been confident she could cope with whatever life chose to throw at her.

But this...this was totally out of her control. She’d fought it for as long as possible with sheer willpower but the symptoms were physical rather than mental and they had increased in ferocity until she’d reached a point of complete helplessness—reduced to a shivering blob of humanity clinging to a couple of tufts of coarse mountain grass. It was beyond humiliating. She’d be angry about it as soon as she got out of this and the terror had a chance to wear off. If she ever got out of this...

She hadn’t seen anyone else on this supposedly popular walking route so far. Maybe that was her own fault. She’d chosen to set off from Praiano much later in the day than most people because she knew the light would be so much better for taking photographs. And maybe she’d spent too much time down at the monastery halfway up the steps, taking photographs with her precious new camera and scribbling notes in her pristine journal.

How long would it be before it got dark?

‘Help...’ She tried English this time instead of Italian. ‘Can anyone hear me?’

Her voice wavered and tears stung as they gathered behind her eyelids. This recognition of a despair she hadn’t felt since she’d been too young to protect herself had to be the worst moment of her adult life.

‘I’m coming... Hold on...’

She wasn’t alone. There was hope to be found now. A glowing light in the darkness of that despair. It was a male voice she’d heard, the words short, as if he was out of breath, and in the space after those words Mika could hear the sound of shoes crunching on the sparse gravel of the track.

He was running?

When there were only a few feet between the steep wall of the cliff above and that appalling drop into nothingness below?

The speed of the footsteps slowed and then stopped.

‘What is it?’ A deep voice with a faint accent that she couldn’t place. ‘Are you hurt?’

Mika shook her head, her eyes still tightly closed. The overwhelming relief at not being alone any more made speech impossible for several breaths.

‘Vertigo,’ she managed finally, hating how pathetic her voice sounded. ‘I... I can’t move...’

‘You’re safe,’ the man said. ‘I’ll keep you safe.’

Dear Lord...had anybody ever said that to her? Being so helpless had made her feel like a small child again, so it was too easy to imagine how it would feel to have somebody say those words to that frightened little girl. To feel fear and desolation start to drain away as if a plug had been pulled. To have an insight into how different her life might have been if somebody had said that to her, back then, and meant it. If somebody had been there to protect her. To love her...

How humiliating was it to have her outward breath sound like a child’s sob? She’d learned long ago that weakness was something to be hidden very deeply.

‘It’s okay,’ the man said. ‘You’re going to be fine. How long have you been stuck?’

‘I...don’t know.’ It felt like for ever.

‘Are you thirsty? I have water.’

She heard a shuffling sound and then a zip opening. She was thirsty but to accept a water bottle would mean opening her eyes, and what if the spinning started again? Sobbing in front of a stranger was bad enough. Imagine if she threw up?

‘It’s okay. I don’t need a drink.’

There was a moment’s silence. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Mika.’

‘It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mika.’

This time her breath came out as a huff of something closer to laughter than tears. Her rescuer had very nice manners. He sounded as though they’d just been introduced at a cocktail party.

‘I’m Ra...um... Rafe.’

She had only been speaking to him for a minute or two, and she didn’t even have any idea what he looked like, but the hesitation seemed out of character. Did he not want her to know his real name? Was it possible that she was about to step from the frying pan into the fire and put her faith in an axe murderer? Or a...a rapist?

It might have been five years ago but the fear was always too close to the surface. If he hadn’t chosen that precise moment to touch her, she could have dealt with it. It wasn’t like the vertigo; she could persuade herself to think rationally and conquer it.