Finding Her Prince

“Yes.”

“Dr. Feldman contacted you? He went through all the names in Jodie’s address book.”

“I expect that’s how he reached me. I didn’t actually ask.”

“Then you’ve—?”

“I saw him yesterday, and he arranged for me to be able to visit here.”

“How long will you be in New York?”

“That depends. I’ll stay as long as I need to. It might be weeks. Longer.” He paused for a moment. “You seem suspicious about all this. About me. Why is that?”

Suzanne controlled a sigh and her mind raced as she sorted through what she felt safe in telling him, and what she didn’t want to reveal. She didn’t dare to look at him.

“Alice’s future is…so uncertain at the moment,” she said, still staring down at the tiny baby.

She was dressed only in a diaper as small and thin as an envelope, a white undershirt patterned with pastel rocking horses and little pink booties. She still had a feed tube in her nose, an oxygen mask on her face and monitors all over.

“It’s no secret that I’d like to get custody and bring her up as my own,” she added.

“Yes, so I understand.”

“I’ve been here every single day since she was born, and I love her so much. But that doesn’t mean I’ll be able to keep her permanently.”

“I know.” His voice had softened. “There’s your mother’s claim, too.”

“You know?”

“I talked with Michael Feldman for a while. I wanted to find out as much as I could. Look, we can’t have this discussion here. It’s too important, and there’s so much we have to work out.”

“Work out?” She was really alarmed, now. “What do we have to work out?”

Her head whirled around toward him too fast, and she swayed unsteadily for a moment. The neonatal unit went dark, then her vision cleared again.

“Are you all right?” His fingers brushed a strand of hair away from her mouth, and he was frowning.

“I’m fine.” She shook her hair back, not wanting his hand anywhere near her face. “I felt a little light-headed for a moment, that’s all.”

“How have you been sleeping lately?”

“Not very well,” she admitted. “I’m here every day, and I have to try to slot it in around work. I’ve got a lot to think about. And then I’ve had—” she counted remorsefully “—seven cups of coffee today.” With all those men who weren’t interested in fitting little pink booties into their lives. “I don’t usually do that.”

“You’re under a lot of strain,” he said. “There are things you haven’t told me, yet.”

“You think so?”

“And things I haven’t told you. As I said before, we need to work it all out, and it looks to me as if you need to eat, instead of drinking seven cups of coffee.”

“What are you suggesting?”

“There’s a coffee shop just off the lobby.”

“Believe me, I know it!”

She must have eaten a hundred meals there over the past couple of months. Didn’t suggest going elsewhere, because there didn’t seem much point. She didn’t want to turn this “talk” of his into a big production.

So this was why, five minutes later, there she was at her favorite table near the window—the one where she’d met Robert and Les and Colin and Dan—waiting for her burger, fries and soda to arrive and rummaging frantically in her messy purse for her packet of tissues. The woman sitting behind her had cat hair on her jacket, and Suzanne was allergic, and—

“Ah-ah-choo!” She got the tissue to her nose just in time, grabbed at another one and saw that familiar little pink bootie drop out onto the table. Not surprising. It had been deliberately positioned right on top of the clutter that filled her purse.

Sneezing for the third time, she thought, I’m sick of the sight of that bootie, now. It hasn’t helped.

Stephen picked the bootie up and fiddled with it absently, the way he might have fiddled with a pencil on a desk.

This isn’t where I want to be, he thought. This isn’t how I’d be handling the situation if there was more time, or if this woman wasn’t involved. I don’t enjoy playing a double game. But I can’t see any choice. My country must come first. My father taught me that, and my great-grandmother….

He was tired, he knew. His emotions had been buffeted by all the changes that had come in his life over the past few months, and the ones that were still ahead. Most of those changes were good. The Aragovian people had voted for a new constitution, with the heir to the Serkin-Rimsky family’s ancestral throne as the nation’s head of state. He had enormous hopes for his life and his country, now—hopes that would have seemed almost impossible to realize sixteen years ago, when he’d reached legal adulthood at eighteen.

But he wasn’t safe yet. Nothing was set in stone yet. Not in his country and not, it now appeared, in tiny Alice’s life. He was under pressure from his political advisers at home. Pressure to ensure that the line of succession was rock solid, by whatever means necessary. Pressure to marry as soon as possible. A suitable bride. Someone the Aragovian people would come to love. Her actual identity hardly mattered, let alone Stephen’s feelings for her.

“As a bachelor prince, Stephen, you are vulnerable to unsuitable women from your past with an eye on what you have to offer now.”

“Unsuitable women? Well, yes, there have been one or two of those….”

“No one now?”

“No.”

His last meaningful relationship had been with an American woman, part of the same family practice residency program as himself. Elin would have been “suitable.” Like Jodie, however, she hadn’t wanted him to return to Aragovia, and they’d parted in mutual anger. He’d heard she was now married to someone else.

Since then, his work as a doctor and the changing situation in his country had kept him too busy to think of relationships, suitable or otherwise.

And then there was baby Alice’s situation. He had talked with Feldman for a long time, yesterday.

“Jodie talked about you,” Michael Feldman had said, with a reserve that Stephen hadn’t missed. “She didn’t want anything to do with you at one stage, and certainly nothing to do with a place as obscure as Aragovia. Her father never believed there was any future for your family there.”

“No. That’s why he left, in the fifties. My father felt differently.”

“What’s the situation there now? The place is controlled by Russian mafia, isn’t it?”

“It was. Or by a couple of offshoots of it. But that’s changed now. There is high hope for the future of the country.”

“You should be thinking of your future, and just get out.”

Stephen hadn’t known how to answer that. He had earned a great deal of respect in his country over the past few years, through his medical work there. He had almost lost his life in defense of its heritage, and he had firm hope that his devotion to Aragovia would soon be rewarded. He wasn’t planning to “just get out.”

And yet Dr. Feldman was right about Jodie and her attitude. Stephen’s friendship with his cousin had soured, in the end, as a result of their sharply diverging views. Should he admit any of this to Suzanne? Should he tell her the full truth?