The Royal Baby Bargain

He noted the heat in her cheeks with a coldly cynical smile. ‘The child’s birth certificate is a pack of lies,’ he said with deadly precision, his hard, beautiful mouth curling.

Her heart contracted. She had to take a deep breath before she could ask, ‘Can you prove that?’

‘I’ve seen him.’

She stared at him, eyes huge and dark in her pale face. ‘So?’

‘He looks like Gemma,’ he said flatly. ‘I have a photograph of her at the same age, and, apart from the colouring, it looks like the same child.’

‘You call that proof?’ she asked, letting manufactured scorn ring through her voice. ‘You’ll need to do better than that to convince anyone.’

Caelan let the silence drag on, ratcheting up her tension until she had to stifle a small gasp when he finally drawled, ‘Are you prepared to have a DNA test done?’

It was a trap, of course, and her only chance was to carry it off with a high hand.

‘Of course not.’ She hoped her contempt matched his.

‘I could force you to.’

He meant it. Panic kicked ferociously in her stomach. ‘How?’

His mouth thinned into a hard line. ‘I have signed depositions from the villagers on Palaweyo—the one where you lived with Gemma—that the boy child was born to the girl with long black hair, not to the nurse who had hair like the sunrise in summer.’ He studied her drab hair for a moment of exquisite torture before drawling, ‘Any court would take that information as an indication that blood tests would be a good thing.’

The walls in the narrow hall pressed around Abby, robbing her of breath, clamping her heart in intolerable fear. Speared by anguish, she had to concentrate on keeping herself upright. Gemma, she thought numbly, oh Gemma, I’m so sorry…

She could still hear Gemma say, ‘And I won’t go and live with Caelan after the baby’s born, so it’s no use trying to make me.’

Abby had twisted in the hammock and stared at her very pregnant guest, sprawled out on the coarse white coral sand. ‘Don’t go all drama queen on me again! I’m not trying to make you do anything! All I said was that your brother seems the sort of man who’d be there for you!’

Gemma said with false heartiness, ‘Oh, he is! Believe me, they don’t come any more protective or autocratic or masterful than Caelan. It’s in the genes—all the Bagaton men are tough and dominant. I’m not telling him about this baby because—’ She stopped and sifted sand through her fingers, her expression an odd mixture of defiance and shyness. After a swift upwards glance at Abby, she began again. ‘Because Caelan would step in and take us over, and for once I want to show him that I can manage.’

Doubtfully, Abby said, ‘Gemma, being a single mother isn’t easy.’ Even when you’re cushioned by money and an assured position in world society!

‘I can learn. Other women do it,’ Gemma said stubbornly.

‘Not princesses!’

Gemma grinned. ‘We don’t use the title—well, not anywhere else but Dacia, where they do it automatically.’ The smile faded. ‘And don’t try to persuade me to let my mother know either. She couldn’t care less what I do. As for a grandchild—she’d kill me sooner than own to one! She never loved me, not even as a child. In fact, just before I came to stay with you she told me that she blamed me entirely for the break-up of her marriage to my father!’

‘Oh, no, I’m sure she didn’t…’ But at Gemma’s hard little laugh, her voice trailed away.

‘Abby, you don’t know how much I envy you those parents who loved you, and your normal happy life. I grew up in a huge house that always seemed empty and cold, with parents who fought all the time. In a way it got better after my mother left my father and I was packed off to boarding school and ignored.’

‘Even by Caelan?’

Gemma shrugged, one hand stroking her thickening waistline. ‘No,’ she admitted. ‘When he came home it was wonderful, but he was away most of the time, first at university and then overseas.’

‘I still can’t see why you don’t tell him you’re pregnant. I know he’s tough, and he’s obviously been a fairly difficult guardian, but even you admit he did his best for you.’

Gemma pouted. ‘Well, that’s part of the problem. Caelan has hugely high standards, standards I entirely failed to live up to.’

Talking to Gemma sometimes felt like trying to catch butterflies with your hands behind your back. Abby said gently, ‘What’s the other part of the problem?’

Gemma gave her a swift, upwards glance, then shrugged elaborately. ‘You’ll laugh.’

‘Try me.’

For once Gemma looked self-conscious. ‘Caelan says it’s all hokum, but I get—premonitions. I knew when—’ in a betraying gesture her hand spread out over her stomach ‘—when the baby’s father went up to rescue those wretched climbers on Mount Everest I knew I’d never see him again. I pleaded with him to stay away, but his damned sense of responsibility drove him there. He saved them, but he died on the mountain himself.’

Abby made a soft, sympathetic noise.

Gemma looked up with tear-drenched eyes and said with sudden, passionate energy, ‘OK, it sounds utterly stupid, but I think—I feel—I’m going to die soon after this baby is born.’ Ignoring Abby’s shocked exclamation, she hurried on, ‘If I do, he’ll go to live with Caelan and I couldn’t bear for him to grow up like me in some huge, formal, echoing house with no parents to love him, no one to hold him when he cries except a nanny who’s paid to look after him.’

‘Gemma—’

‘I know you don’t believe me—that’s all right. Only—if it happens, Abby, will you take Michael and love him and give him the sort of childhood you had?’ She gave a teasing smile, and added, ‘If you don’t, damn it, I’ll haunt you!’

Of course Abby hadn’t believed that her guest’s premonitions meant anything. She’d set herself to easing what she thought was maternal fear, and felt she’d managed it quite well, but Gemma had been right. Michael had only been two weeks old when one of the Pacific Ocean’s vicious cyclones had changed course and smashed into Palaweyo so swiftly there had been no time to evacuate the weather coast.

They’d taken refuge in the hospital, but a beam had fallen on Gemma, breaking her spine. And before she’d died, she’d extracted a promise from Abby—one she was determined to keep.

Whatever it took.

Abby dragged in a deep breath and stared at Caelan’s dark, impervious face. Attack, she thought bleakly; don’t go all defensive.

‘Whatever bribes you paid the villagers—and I hope they were good big ones because they need the money—he’s mine.’

‘I gave them a new hospital—cyclone-proof this time—and staff to run it.’ Caelan’s tone was dismissive, but there was nothing casual in his eyes. Icy, merciless, scathing, they raked her face. ‘I know the child is Gemma’s son.’ Watching her with the still intentness of a hunter the moment before he launched a weapon, he finished with charged menace, ‘Which makes me his uncle and you no relation at all.’

Abby’s head felt woolly and disconnected. Regulating her breath into a slow, steady rhythm, she fought for composure. If the prince knew for certain she was no relation to the child he’d get rid of her so fast that Michael would wake up tomorrow without the only mother he’d ever known.

She loved Michael more than she had ever loved anything else.

Ignoring the cold hollowness inside her, she swallowed to ease her dry throat and said tonelessly, ‘Michael is my son.’

Caelan hadn’t expected to feel anything beyond justified anger and contempt for her, but her dogged stubbornness elicited an unwilling admiration.

Not that she looked anything like the radiant, fey creature who’d met his eyes with a barely hidden challenge four years previously.

In spite of that, in spite of everything she’d done, he still wanted her. He had to clench his hands to stop them from reaching out to her—to shake her? Or kiss the lie from her lips? Both, probably.

The lust should have died the moment he’d discovered she’d stolen Gemma’s son.

Deriding himself, he examined her mercilessly, enjoying the colour that flared into her exquisite skin and the wariness shadowing her eyes. Even with bad hair colouring and depressing clothes, her riotous hair confined in brutal subjugation and her eyes hidden behind tinted spectacles, her sensuous allure reached out to him.

Golden as a faerie woman, as dangerous as she was treacherous, behind the almond-shaped eyes and voluptuous mouth hid a lying, scheming kidnapper.

The dossier said that the child seemed happy, but who knew what had happened to Gemma’s son?