A Throne for the Taking

‘No,’ he said, hard and rough. ‘No. I will not listen to a word you say. Why should I when you and yours turned your back on my mother—on me—and left us to exile and disgrace? My mother died in that disgrace. It’s not as if anything you have to say is a matter of life or death.’

‘Oh, but …’

It could be … The words died on her tongue, burned away in the flare of fury he turned on her, seeming to scorch her skin so painfully.

This was not how she had planned it, but it was obvious that he wasn’t prepared to let her lead up to things with a carefully prepared conversation. Hastily she grabbed at her handbag, snapping it open with hands made clumsy by nerves.

‘This is for you …’ she managed, holding out the sheet of paper she had folded so carefully at the start of her journey. The document she had checked was still there at least once every few minutes on her way here.

His eyes dropped to what she held, expression freezing into marble stillness as he took in the crest at the head of the sheet of paper, the seal that marked it out for the important document it was.

‘You know that your mother needed proof of the legality of her marriage,’ she tried and got the briefest, most curt nod possible as his only response, his gaze still fixed on the document she held out.

It was like talking to a statue, he was so stiff, so unmoving, and she found that her tongue was stumbling over itself as she tried to get the words out. If only someone else could have been given this vital duty to carry out. But she had volunteered herself in spite of the fact that the ministers had viewed her with suspicion. A suspicion that was natural, after the way her father had behaved. But they didn’t know the half of it. She had only just discovered the truth for herself and hadn’t dared to reveal any of it to anyone else. Luckily, the ministers had been convinced that she was the most likely to be successful. Alexei would listen to her, they had said. And besides, with success meaning so much to her personally, to her family, she would be the strongest advocate at this time.

It was a strong irony that all the discipline, the training her father had imposed on her for his own ends, was now to be put to use to try to thwart those ends if she possibly could.

‘And for that she needed evidence of the fact that the old king had given his permission for your father—as a member of the royal family—to marry all those years ago, when they first met.’

Why was she repeating all this? He knew every detail as much as she did. After all, it had been his life that had been blasted apart by the scandal that had resulted when it had seemed that his parents’ marriage had been declared illegal. Alexei’s father and mother had been separated, with him living with his mother in England until he was sixteen, and the fact that her husband was ill—dying of cancer—had brought his mother to Mecjoria in hope of a reconciliation. They hadn’t had long and, during what time they had had, Alexei had found the old-fashioned and snobbish aristocracy difficult to deal with, particularly when they had regarded him and his mother as nothing more than commoners who didn’t belong at court. His rebellious behaviour had created disapproval, brought him under the disapproving gaze of so many. And too soon, with his father dead, there had been no one to support his mother, or her son, when court conspiracy—a conspiracy Ria had just discovered to her horror of which her father had been an important part—had had her expelled, exiled from the country, taking her son with her.

Then there was her own part in all of it—her own guilty conscience, Ria acknowledged. That was an important part of why she had volunteered to come here today, to bring the news of the discovery of the document … and the rest.

‘This is the evidence.’

At last he moved, reached out a hand and took the paper from her. But to her shock he simply glanced swiftly over the text then tossed it aside, dropping it on to his desk without a second glance.

‘So?’

The single word seemed to strip all the moisture from her mouth, making her voice cracked and raw as she tried to answer him.

‘Don’t you see …?’ Silly question. Of course he saw, he just wasn’t reacting at all as she had expected, as she had been led to believe he would inevitably react. ‘This is what you needed back then, this changes everything. It means that your parents were legally married even in Mecjoria. It makes you legitimate.’

‘And that makes me fit to have you come and visit me? Speak to me after all these years?’

The bitterness in his tone made her flinch. Even more so because she knew she deserved it. She’d flung that illegitimacy—that supposed illegitimacy—at him when he had asked for her help. She hadn’t known the truth then, but she knew now that she’d done it partly out of hurt and anger too. Hurt and anger that he had turned away from her to become involved in a romantic entanglement with another girl.

A woman, Ria. She could hear his voice through the years. She’s a woman.

And the implication was that she was still a child. Hurt and feeling rejected, she had been the perfect target for her father’s story—what she knew now were her father’s lies.

‘It’s not that …’ Struggling with her memories, she had to force the words out. ‘It’s what’s right.’

She knew how much he’d loathed the label ‘bastard’. But more so how he’d hated the way that his mother had been treated because her marriage hadn’t been considered legal. So much so that Ria had believed—hoped—that the news she had brought would change everything. She couldn’t have been more wrong.

‘Right?’ he questioned cynically. ‘From where I stand it’s too little too late. The truth can’t help my mother now. And personally I couldn’t give a damn what they think of me in Mecjoria any more. But thank you for bringing it to me.’

His tone took the words to a meaning at the far opposite of genuine thankfulness.

There was much more to it than this. The proof of his legitimacy came with so many repercussions, but she had never expected this reaction. Or, rather, this lack of reaction.

‘I’m sorry for the way I behaved …’ she began, trying a different tack. One that earned her nothing but a cold stare.

‘It was ten years ago.’ He shrugged powerful shoulders in dismissal of her stumbling apology. ‘A lot of water has passed under a lot of bridges since then. And none of it matters any more. I have made my own life and I want nothing more to do with a country that thought my mother and I were not good enough to live there.’

‘But …’

There were so many details, so many facts, buzzing inside Ria’s head but she didn’t dare to let any of them out. Not yet. There was too much riding on them and this man was not prepared to listen to a word she said. If she put one foot wrong he would reject her—and her mission—completely. And she would never get a second chance.

‘So now I’d appreciate it if you’d leave. Or I will call security and have you thrown out, and to hell with the paparazzi or the gossip columnists. In fact, perhaps it would be better that way. They could have a field day with what I could tell them.’

Was it a real or an empty threat? And did she dare take the risk of finding out? Not with things the way they were back home, with the country in turmoil, hopes for security and peace depending on her. On a personal level, she feared her mother would break down completely if anything more happened, and she would be back under her father’s control herself if she failed. One whiff of scandal in the papers could be so terribly damaging that she shivered just to think of it. The only way she could achieve everything she’d set out to do was to get Alexei on her side—but that was beginning to look increasingly impossible.

‘Honoria,’ Alexei said dangerously and she didn’t need the warning in his tone to have her looking nervously towards the door he still held wide open. The simple fact that he had used her full name was enough on its own. ‘Duchess,’ he added with a coldly mocking bow.

But she couldn’t make her feet move. She couldn’t leave. Not with so much unsaid.

CHAPTER TWO

It’s not as if it’s a matter of life or death, Alexei had declared, the scorn in his voice lashing at her cruelly. But it would be if the situation in Mecjoria wasn’t resolved soon; if Ivan took over. The late King Felix might have been petty and mean but he was as nothing when compared to the tyrant who might inherit the throne from him. With a violent effort, Ria controlled the shiver of reaction that threatened her composure.

She hadn’t seen Alexei for ten years, but she had had close contact with his distant cousin Ivan in that time. And hadn’t enjoyed a moment of it. She’d watched Ivan grow from the sort of small boy who pulled wings off butterflies and kicked cats into a man whose volatile, mean-minded temper was usually only barely under control. He was aggressive, greedy, dangerous for the country—and now, she had learned to her horror, a danger to her personally as a result of her father’s machinations. And the only man between them and that possibility was Alexei.

But she knew how much she was asking of him. Especially now, when she knew how he still felt about Mecjoria.

‘Please listen!’

But his face was armoured against her, his eyes hooded, and she felt that every look she turned on him, every word she spoke, simply bounced off his thick skin like a pebble off an elephant’s hide.

‘Please?’ he echoed sardonically, his mouth twisting on the word as he turned it into a cruelly derisory echoing of her tone. ‘I didn’t even realise that you knew that word. Please what, Sweetheart?’

‘You don’t want to know.’

Bleak honesty made her admit it. She could read it in his face, in the cruel opacity of those coal-black eyes. There wasn’t the faintest sign of softening in his expression or any of the lines around his nose and mouth. How could he take a gentle word like ‘sweetheart’ and turn it into something hateful and vile with just his tone?

‘Oh, but I do,’ Alexei drawled, folding his arms across his broad chest and lounging back against the wall, one foot hooked round the base of the door so as to keep it open and so making it plain that he was still waiting—expecting her to leave. ‘I’d love to know just what you’ve come looking for.’

‘Really?’

Unexpected hope kicked hard in her heart. Had she got this all wrong, read him completely the wrong way round?

‘Really,’ he echoed sardonically. ‘It’s fascinating to see the tables turned. Remember how I once asked you for just one thing?’

He’d asked her to help him, and his mother. Asked her to talk to her father, plead with him to at least let them have something to live on, some part of his father’s vast fortune that the state had confiscated, leaving Alexei and his mother penniless as well as homeless. And not knowing the truth, not understanding the machinations of the plotters, or how sick his mother actually was, she had seen him as a threat and sided with her father.

‘I made a mistake …’ she managed. She’d known that her father was ruthless, ambitious, but she had never really believed that he would lie through his teeth, that he would manipulate an innocent woman and her son.

For the good of the country, Honoria, he had said. And, seeing the outrage Alexei’s wayward behaviour had created, she had believed him. Because she had trusted her father. Trusted him and believed in the values of upright behaviour, of loyalty to the crown that he’d insisted on. So she’d believed him when he’d told her how the scandal of Alexei’s mother’s ‘affair’ with one of the younger royal sons was creating problems of state. It was only now, years later, that she’d discovered how much further his deception had gone, and how it had involved her.