Royally Bedded, Regally Wedded

If she just kept saying it, it would be true. True that it was not true. Not true what this man had just said. Because of course it wasn’t true. It couldn’t be true. It was absurd. Stupid. Impossible. A lie. Some stupid, absurd, impossible lie—or joke. Maybe it was a joke. That must be it. Just a joke. She threw her head back to suck in deep draughts of air. Then she steadied herself, forcibly, and made herself look across at the man who had just said such a stupid, absurd, impossible thing.

‘This isn’t true.’

Her voice was flat. As flat, she realised, with a hideous, gaping recognition in her guts, as his had been when she’d said she had no idea who…

Ben’s father. Ben’s father was.

‘No.’ She’d spoken out loud. Her legs were starting to shake. ‘No. This is a joke. It’s impossible. It has to be. It’s just not possible. I haven’t understood it properly.’

‘You had better sit down.’ The voice was still chill, but less so. Lizzy gazed at him with wide, shock-splintered eyes. Her eyebrows shot together in a frown.

That complicated, arcane equation was still running in her head.

He had just said that Ben’s father had been the son of…she forced her mind to say it…the son of the Prince of San Lucenzo. But he had said he was Ben’s uncle. His dead father’s brother. Which meant that his father was also…

She stared. It wasn’t possible. It just wasn’t possible.

He let her stare. She could see it. Could see he was just standing there while she clung to the edge of the table in the kitchen in her tiny little Cornish cottage where, a few feet away, from her stood.

‘I am Enrico Ceraldi,’ he enlightened her.

She sat down. Collapsing on the kitchen chair with a heavy thud.

He cast a look at her.

‘Did you really not know who I was?’ There was almost curiosity in his voice. And something flickered in his eyes.

‘Of course I bloody didn’t.’ The return burst from her lips without her thinking. Then, as if she’d just realised what she’d done, her face stiffened.

‘I’m sorry,’ she spoke abruptly. ‘I didn’t mean to be—’ She broke off. Something changed in her face again. She lifted her chin, looking directly into his eyes. ‘I didn’t mean to speak rudely. But, no,’ she said heavily, yet still with her chin lifted, ‘I did not recognise you. I’ve heard of you—it would be hard not to have.’ Her voice tightened with disapproval. ‘But not with the surname, of course. Just your first name and…’ she paused, then said it ‘…your title.’

She got to her feet. The room swayed, but she ignored it. A bomb had exploded in her head, ripping everything to shreds. But she had to cope with it. She straightened her spine.

‘I find this very hard to deal with. I’m sure you understand. And I am also sure you understand that I have a great many questions I need to ask. But also—’ she held his eyes and spoke resolutely ‘—I need time to come to terms with this. It is, after all, quite unbelievable.’

She looked at him directly. Refusing to look away.

Long, sooted lashes swept down over his dark eyes. Eyes, she realised, with the now familiar hollowing still going on inside her stomach, that were more used to looking out of photographs in celebrity magazines and the gossip pages of newspapers.

I didn’t recognise him. I simply didn’t recognise him. He’s all over the press and I never recognised him.

But why should I? And why should I think that someone like him could turn up here and tell me that…that Ben is…

Shock kicked through her again.

She bowed her head. It was too much. It was all too much.

‘I can’t take any more.’

She must have spoken aloud, defeat in her voice.

For one long, hopeless minute she just stared blankly into the eyes of the man standing opposite her. The brother of Ben’s father. Who was dead. Who had been the son of the Reigning Prince of San Lucenzo. Who was also the father of the man standing opposite her.

Who was therefore a prince.

Standing in her living room.

‘I can’t take any more,’ she said again.

Rico shifted his head slightly, and glanced behind him as the occasional dazzle of other traffic on the motorway illuminated the interior of the vehicle.

She was asleep. So was the boy. She was holding his hand, reaching out to him in the child seat he was fastened into.

His mouth pressed together and he looked away again, back out over the glowing stream of red tail-lights ahead of him. Beside him, Falieri drove steadily and fast, the big four-by-four eating up the miles.

Rico stared out over the motorway.

Paolo’s son. Paolo’s son was sitting in the car. A son that none of his family had known about.

How could it have happened?

The question seared through him, as it had done so often since Jean-Paul had told him the story that was set to break in the press. It seemed impossible that Paolo’s son should have disappeared, without anyone even knowing of his existence. And yet, in the nightmare of that motorway pile-up in France all those years ago, with smashed cars and smashed bodies, he could see how rescue workers, finding the female occupant of Paolo’s car still alive and clearly pregnant, had cut her free first and rushed her to hospital. A different hospital from the one where Paolo’s mangled body had been taken hours later, when all those still living had been dealt with.

Cold horror chilled through him. In the carnage no one had made the connection between the two—the dead Prince Paolo Ceraldi and the unknown young woman, comatose and pregnant.

Never to regain consciousness.

Never to tell who had fathered her child.

And so no one had known. No one until some get-lucky hack had decided to see if there was any mileage in a rehash of the tragedy of Paolo’s death, and his investigations had turned up, against all the odds, a French fireman who’d mentioned he had freed a woman from the wreckage of the very type of sports car that the journalist knew Paolo Ceraldi had been driving. From that single item the hack had burrowed and burrowed, until he had pieced together the extraordinary, unbelievable story.

How Prince Paolo Ceraldi, dead at twenty-one, had left an orphaned son behind.

The story would blaze across the tabloids.

‘Get the boy.’

Luca’s urgent command echoed in Rico’s head. He’d phoned Luca the moment he’d hung up on Jean-Paul.

‘We have to get the boy before the press does,’ Luca had said. ‘Get Falieri on to it tonight. But, Rico, it’s essential we look as if we don’t know about the story. If they think we are trying to stop it, they’ll run with it immediately. In the meantime—’ his voice had hardened ‘—I will contact Christa. Maybe for once I will, after all, exact a favour from her father…it won’t stifle the story, but it may just delay it. Buy us some time. Enough for Falieri to get the child safely out of their reach.’ He’d paused, then gone on, his voice dry. ‘It seems, just for once, Rico, that your close proximity to the press has come in handy.’

‘Glad to be of use,’ Rico had replied, his voice even drier. ‘For once.’

‘Well, you can really be of use now,’ Luca had cut back. ‘I can’t leave this wedding, if I did it would simply arouse suspicion, so I’m stuck here for the duration. I’m counting on you to hold the fort. But Rico?’ His voice had held a warning note in it. ‘Leave it to me to tell our father about this debacle, OK? He’ll take it a lot better from me.’

Rico hadn’t stuck around to find out how his father had taken the news that the Ceraldis were about to face their biggest trial by tabloid yet. He’d had only one imperative. To find Paolo’s son.

Emotion buckled him. He’d been holding it back as much as he could, because there had been no time for it. No time to do anything other than get hold of Falieri and track down the child his brother had fathered.