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MILLS & BOON
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CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
EPILOGUE
Copyright
PROLOGUE
THE dark-haired figure seated at the antique desk and illuminated by an ornate, gold trimmed lamp slapped shut the leather folder, placed it on the growing pile to his right, and reached for yet another folder, opening it with an impatient flick. Dio, was there no end to these damned documents? How could so small a place as San Lucenzo generate so many of the things? Everything from officers’ commissions to resolutions of the Great Council, all needing to be signed and sealed—by him.
Prince Rico gave a caustic twist of his well-shaped mouth. Perhaps he should be grateful the task seldom came his way. But with his older brother, the Crown Prince, in Scandinavia, representing the House of Ceraldi at a royal wedding, the temporarily indisposed Prince Regnant—their father—had for once been obliged to turn to his younger son to carry out those deputised duties he was generally excluded from.
Rico’s eyes darkened for a moment with an old bitterness. Excluded from any involvement in the running of the principality—however tedious or trivial—yet his father still condemned him for the life he perforce led. The twist in his mouth deepened in cynicism. His father might deplore his younger son’s well-earned reputation as the Playboy Prince, yet his exploits both in the world of expensive sports like powerboat racing, and on the glittering international social circuit—including the bedrooms of its most beautiful women—generated invaluable publicity for San Lucenzo. And, considering just how much of the principality’s revenues derived from it being one of the world’s most glamorous locales, his part in contributing to that glamour was not small. Not that either his father or older brother saw it that way. To them, his exploits brought the attention of the paparazzi and the constant risk of scandal—both of which were anathema to the strait-laced Ruling Prince of San Lucenzo and his upright heir.
Not, Rico grudgingly allowed, as he scanned through the document in his hand, that they were not sometimes justified in their concerns. Carina Collingham was an unfortunate instance in that respect—though how he could have been expected to know she was lying when she told him her divorce was through was beyond him.
Despite his instantly having dissociated himself from her the moment he’d discovered the unpalatable truth about the marital status of the film actress, the damage had been done, and now his father had yet another complaint to lay at his younger son’s door.
His older brother, Luca, had taken him to task as well, berating him for not having had Carina security-checked adequately before bedding her. Better to exercise some self-restraint when it came to picking women out of the box like so much candy.
‘There’s safety in numbers,’ Rico had replied acerbically. ‘While I play the field, no woman thinks she has the ticket on me. Unlike you.’ He’d cast a mordant look at his brother, along whose high Ceraldi cheekbones a line had been etched. ‘You watch yourself, Luca,’ he’d told him. ‘Christabel Pasoni has plans for you.’
‘Christa’s perfectly content with the way things are,’ Luca had responded repressively. ‘And she does not cause a scandal in the press.’
‘That’s because her fond papa owns so much of it! Dio, Luca, can’t you damn well ask her to tell Papa to instruct his editors to lay off me?’
But Luca had been unsympathetic.
‘They wouldn’t write about you if they had nothing to write. Don’t you think it’s time to grow up, Rico, and face your responsibilities?’
Rico’s expression had hardened.
‘If I had any, I might just do that,’ he’d shot back, and walked away.
Well, he’d wanted responsibilities and now he’d got some—signing documents because there was no one else available to do so, and atoning for having had a misplaced affair with a stilltechnically-married woman.
Maybe if I sign every damn document in my best handwriting before Luca gets back I’ll have earned a royal pardon…
But his caustic musing was without humour, and impatiently he scanned the document now in front of him. Something to do with a petition from a convent to be rescinded of the obligation to pay property tax on land on which a hospital had been built in the seventeenth century—a petition which, so the helpful handwritten note appended by his father’s equerry reminded him, was nothing more than a pro forma request, made annually and granted annually since 1647, requiring nothing more than the customary royal assent. Dutifully, Rico scrawled the royal signature, put down the quill, and reached for the sealing wax, melting the required dark scarlet blob below his name, and then waiting a few moments for it to cool before impressing on it the royal seal. He was just replacing the seal when his phone went.
Not the phone on the desk, but his own mobile—to which very, very few people had the number. Frowning slightly, he slid a long fingered hand inside his jacket pocket and flicked open the handset.
‘Rico?’
He recognised the voice at once, and his frown deepened. Whenever Jean-Paul phoned it was seldom good news—certainly not at this late hour of the night. The hour when, Rico knew from experience, the press went to bed. And what a certain section of the press across Europe all too often went to bed with was a story of just who he had gone to bed with.
Damn—had the vultures stirred yet more trouble for him over Carina Collingham? Had she been milking the situation for yet more publicity for her career?
‘OK, Jean-Paul, tell me the worst,’ he said, when foreboding.
The gossip-columnist, who was also the impoverished grandson of a French count, as well as a rare genuine friend in the press, started to speak. But the story that he’d heard was about to break had nothing to do with Carina Collingham. Nothing to do with any of Rico’s affaires.
‘Rico,’ said Jean-Paul, and his voice was unusually grave, ‘it’s about Paolo.’
Rico stilled. Slowly he released his hand from the back of his neck and slipped it down on to the leather surface of the desk. It tensed, unconsciously, into a fist.
‘If anyone—’ his voice was a soft, deadly snarl ‘—thinks they are going to dig any dirt on him, they are—’
He could hear the wariness in the other man’s voice as he interrupted.
‘I wouldn’t call it dirt, Rico. But I would…’ he paused minutely ‘…call it trouble. Seriously big trouble.’
Emotion splintered through Rico.
‘Dio, Paolo is dead. His broken body got pulled from the wreckage of a car over four years ago.’
Pain stabbed him. Even now he could not bear to think about, to remember, how Paolo—the golden prince, the only one of his father’s three sons who had ever won his parents’ indulgence—had been snuffed out before he was even twentytwo. Like a bright flame extinguished by the dark.
The news had devastated the family. Even Luca had wept openly at the funeral, where the two of them had been the chief pallbearers who had carried their young brother’s blackswathed coffin into the cathedral on that unbearable day.
And now, years later, some slimeball hack dared to write some kind of sleaze about Paolo.
‘What kind of trouble?’ he demanded icily. On the desk, his hand fisted more tightly.
There was a distinct pause, as if Jean-Paul were mentally gathering courage. Then he spoke.
‘It’s about the girl who was in the car crash with him…’
Rico froze.
‘What girl?’ he asked slowly, as every drop of blood in his veins turned to ice.
Haltingly, Jean-Paul told him.
CHAPTER ONE
‘OH MYdarling, oh my darling, oh my darling Benjy-mine—You are mucky, oh, so mucky, so it’s Benjy’s bathy-time.’
Lizzy chirruped away, pushing the laden buggy along the narrow country lane as dusk gathered in the hedgerows. Crows were cawing overhead in the trees near the top of the hill, and the last light of day dwindled in the west, towards the sea, half a mile back down the coombe. It was still only late spring, and primroses gleamed palely in the verges and clustered in the long grass of the lower part of the hedge. The upper part was made of stunted beech, its branches slanted by the prevailing west wind off the Atlantic, which, even now, was combing along the lane and whipping her hair into yet more of a frizz—though she’d fastened it back as tightly as she could. But what did she care about her awful hair, charity shop clothes and total lack of looks? Ben didn’t, and he was all she cared about in the world.
‘Not mucky, Mummy. Sandy,’ Ben corrected her, craning his head round reprovingly in the buggy.
‘Mucky with sand,’ compromised Lizzy.
‘Keep singing,’ instructed Ben.
She obeyed. At least Ben was an uncritical audience. She had no singing voice at all, she knew, but for her four-year-old son that was not a problem. Nor was it a problem that everything he wore, and all his toys—such as they were—came from jumble sales or from charity shops in the local Cornish seaside town.
Nor was it a problem that he had no daddy, like most other children seemed to have.
He’s got me, and that’s all he needs, Lizzy thought fiercely, her hands gripping the buggy handles as she pushed it along up the steepening road, hastening her pace slightly. It was growing late, and therefore dark, but Ben had been enjoying himself so much on the beach, even though it was far too cold yet to swim, that she had stayed later than she had intended.
But its proximity to the beach had been the chief reason that Lizzy had bought the tiny cottage, despite its run-down condition, eleven months ago, after selling her flat in the London suburbs. It was much better to bring a child up in the country.
Her face softened.
Ben. Benedict.
Blessed.
That was what his name meant, and it was true—oh, so true! He had been blessed with life against all the odds, and she had been blessed with him. No mother, she knew, could love her child more than she did.
Not even a birth mother.
Grief stabbed at her with a familiar pain. Maria had been so young. Far too young to leave home, far too young to be a model, far too young to get pregnant and far too young to die. To be smashed to pieces in a hideous pile-up on a French motorway before she was twenty.
Lizzy’s eyes were pierced with sorrow. Maria—so lovely, so pretty. The original golden girl. Her long blonde hair, her wide-set blue eyes and angelic smile. Her slender beauty had been the kind of beauty that turned heads.
And sold clothes.
Their parents had been aghast when Maria had bounded in from school, still in her uniform, and told them that she’d been spotted by a scout for a modelling agency. Lizzy had been despatched to chaperon the eighteen-year-old Maria when she went up to the West End for her try-out shoot. The two girls had reacted very differently to the experience, Lizzy recalled. Maria had been ecstatic, instantly looking completely at home in the fashionable milieu, while Lizzy couldn’t have felt more out of place or more awkward—as if she were contaminated by some dreadful disease.
Lizzy knew what that disease was. She’d known it ever since her blue-eyed, golden-haired sister had been born, two years after her, when, overnight, she had become supremely unimportant to her parents. Her sole function had been to look out for Maria. And that was what she’d done. Walked Maria to school, stayed late at clubs Maria had belonged to, helped her with her homework and then, later, with exam revision. Although Maria, being naturally clever, had not, so her parents had often reminded her, needed much help from her—especially as Lizzy’s own exam results had hardly been dazzling. But then, who had expected them to be dazzling? No one. Just as no one had expected her to make any kind of mark in the world at all. And because of that, and because going to college cost money, Lizzy had not gone to college. The pennies had been put by to see Maria through university.
But all their hopes had been ruined—Maria had been offered a modelling contract. She’d been over the moon, telling her parents that she could always go to university later, and pay for it herself out of her earnings. Her parents had not been pleased, they had looked forward to spending their money on Maria.
‘Well, now you can pay for Lizzy to go to college instead,’ Maria had said. ‘You know she always wanted to go.’
But it had been ridiculous to think of that. At twenty, Lizzy had been too old to be a student, and not nearly bright enough. Besides, they’d needed Lizzy to work in the corner shop that her father owned, in one of London’s outer suburbs.
‘Lizzy, leave home,’ Maria had urged, the first time she’d come back after starting her new career. ‘They treat you like a drudge like some kind of lesser mortal. Come up to London and flat with me. It’s a hoot, honestly. Loads of fun and parties. I’ll get you glammed up, and we can—’
‘No.’ Lizzy’s voice had been sharp.
Maria had meant it kindly. For all her parents’ attention to her she had never been spoilt, and her warm, sunny nature had been as genuine as her golden looks. But what she’d suggested would have been unbearable. The thought of being the plain, lumpy older sister dumped in a flat full of teenage models who all looked as beautiful as Maria had been hideous.
But she should have gone, she knew. Had known as soon as that terrible, terrible call had come, summoning her to the hospital in France where Maria had been taken.
If she’d been living with Maria surely she’d have found out about the affair she’d started? Perhaps even been able to stop it? Guilt stabbed her. At least she’d have known who Maria was having an affair with.
Which would have meant—she glanced down at Ben’s fair head—she would have known who had got her pregnant.
But she did not know and now she would never know.
She paused in her tuneless singing. Further back down the lane she could hear the sound of a car engine. Instinctively she tucked the buggy closer to the verge. There was a passing place further along, but she doubted she could reach it before the approaching vehicle did. Wishing it weren’t quite so dusky, she paused, half lifting one set of buggy wheels on to the verge, and warning Ben that a car was coming along.
Headlights cut through the gathering gloom and swept up the lane, followed by a powerful vehicle. It slowed as the lights picked her out, and for a moment Lizzy thought it was going to stop. Then it was past them, and accelerating forward. As it did so, she frowned slightly. The lane she was walking along led inland, whereas the road back to the seaside town ran parallel to the coast. Little traffic came along this lane. Well, maybe the occupants were staying at a farm or a holiday cottage inland. Or maybe they were just lost. She went on pushing the buggy up the final part of the slope, and then around the bend to where her cottage was.
As she finally rounded the curve she saw, to her surprise, that the big four-by-four had parked outside her cottage.
A shiver of apprehension flickered through her. This was a very safe part of the world, compared to the city, but crime wasn’t unknown. She slid her hand inside her jacket and flicked her mobile phone on, ready to dial 999 if she had to. As she approached her garden gate she saw two tall figures get out of the car and come towards her. She paused, right by her gate, one hand in her pocket, her finger hovering over the emergency number.
‘Are you lost?’ she asked politely.
They didn’t answer, just closed in on her. Every nerve in her body started to fire. Then, abruptly, one of them spoke.
‘Miss Mitchell?’
His voice was deep, and accented. She didn’t know what accent. Something foreign, that was all. She looked at him, still with every nerve firing. His face was shadowed in the deepening dusk; she just got an impression of height, of dark eyes—and something else. Something she couldn’t put a name to.
Except that it made her say slowly, ‘Yes. Why do you want to know?’
Instinctively she moved closer to the buggy, putting herself between it and the strangers.
‘Who are those men?’ Ben piped up. His little head craned around as he tried to see, because she’d pointed the buggy straight at the gate to the garden.
She heard the man give a rasp in his throat. Then he was speaking again. ‘We need to speak to you, Miss Mitchell. About the boy.’ There was a frown across his brow, a deep frown, as he looked at her.
‘Who are you?’ Lizzy’s voice was shrill suddenly, infected with fear.
Then the other man, more slightly built, and older, spoke.
‘There is no cause for alarm, Miss Mitchell. I am a police officer, and you are perfectly safe. Be assured.’
A police officer? Lizzy stared at him. His voice had the same accent as the taller, younger man, whose gaze had gone back fixedly to Ben.
‘You’re not English.’
The first man’s eyebrows rose as he turned back to her. ‘Of course not,’ he said, as if that were a ridiculous observation. Then, with a note of impatience in his voice, he went on, ‘Miss Mitchell, we have a great deal to discuss. Please be so good as to go inside. You have my word that you are perfectly safe.’
The other man was reaching forward, pushing open the gate and ushering her along the short path to her front door. Numbly she did as she was bade. Tension and a deep unease were still ripping through her. As she gained the tiny entrance hall of the cottage she paused to unlatch Ben from his safety harness. He struggled out immediately, and turned to survey the two tall men waiting in the doorway to gain entrance.
Lizzy straightened, and flicked on the hall light, surveying the two men herself. As her gaze rested on the younger of the two, she saw he was staring, riveted, at Ben.
There were two other things she registered about him that sent conflicting emotions shooting through her.
The first was, quite simply, that in the stark light of the electric bulb the man staring down at Ben was the most devastatingly good-looking male she’d ever seen.
The second was that he looked terrifyingly like her sister’s son.
In shocked slow motion Lizzy helped Ben out of his jacket and boots, then her own, then folded up the buggy and leant it against the wall. Her stomach was tying itself into knots. Oh, God, what was happening? Fear shot through her, and convulsed in her throat.
‘This is the way to the kitchen,’ announced Ben, and led the way, looking with great interest at these unexpected visitors.
The warmth of the kitchen from the wood-burning range made Lizzy feel breathless, and the room seemed tiny with the two men standing in it. Instinctively she stood behind Ben as he climbed on to a chair to be higher. Both men were still regarding him intently. Fear jerked through her again.
‘Look, what is this?’ she demanded sharply. Her arm came around Ben’s shoulder in a protective gesture. The man who looked like Ben turned briefly to the other man, and said something low and rapid in a foreign language.
Italian, she registered. But the recognition did nothing to help her. She didn’t understand Italian, and what the man had just said to the other one she’d no idea. But she understood what he said next.
‘Prego,’ he murmured. ‘Captain Falieri will look after the boy in another room while we…’ he paused heavily ‘…talk.’
‘No.’ Her response was automatic. Panicked.
‘The boy will be as safe,’ said the man heavily, ‘as if he had his own personal bodyguard.’ He looked down at Ben. ‘Have you got any toys? Captain Falieri would like to see them. Will you show them to him? Can you do that?’
‘Yes,’ said Ben importantly. He scrambled down. Then he glanced at Lizzy. ‘May I, please?’
She nodded. Her heart was still pounding as she watched the older man accompany Ben out of the kitchen. Supposing the other man just walked out of the house with Ben. Supposing he drove off with him. Supposing…
‘The boy is quite safe. I merely require to talk to you without him hearing at this stage. That much is obvious, I would have thought.’
There was reproof in the voice. As though she were making trouble. Making a nuisance of herself.
She dragged her eyes to him, away from Ben leading the other man into the chilly living room.
He was looking at her from across the table. Again, like a blow to her chest, his resemblance to Ben impacted through her. Ben was fair, and this man was dark, but the features were so similar.
Fear and shock buckled her again.
What if this was Ben’s father?
Her stomach churned, his heartbeat racing. Desperately she tried to calm herself.
Even if he’s Ben’s father he can’t take him from me—he can’t!
Faintness drummed through her. Her hand clung on to the back of the kitchen chair for strength.
‘You are shocked.’ The deep, accented voice did not hold reproof any more, but the dark eyes were looking at her assessingly. As if he were deciding whether she really was shocked.
She threw her head back.
‘What else did you expect?’ she countered.
His eyes pulled away from her and swept the room. Seeing the old-fashioned range, the almost as old-fashioned electric cooker, ancient sink, worn work surfaces and the scrubbed kitchen table standing on old flagstones.
‘Not this,’ he murmured. Now there was disparagement clear in his voice. His face.
The face that looked so terrifyingly like Ben’s.
‘Why are you here?’ The words burst from her.
The dark eyebrows snapped together. So dark, he was, and yet Ben so fair. And yet despite the difference in colouring, the bones were the same, the features terrifyingly similar.
‘Because of the boy, obviously. He cannot remain here.’
She felt the blood drain from her.
‘You can’t take him. You can’t swan in here five years after conceiving him and—’
‘What?’ The single word was so explosive that it stopped Lizzy dead in her tracks.
For one long, shattering moment he just stared at her with a look of total and utter stupefaction on his face. As if the world completely and absolutely did not make sense. Lizzy stared back. Why was he looking at her like that? As if she were insane. Deranged.
‘I am not Ben’s father.’
The words bit from him. Relief washed through her, knocking the wind out of her. The terror that had been dissolving her stomach—the terror that, for all her defiance, this man invading her home had the power to take Ben from her, or at the very least to demand a presence in her son’s life—the fear that had gripped her since she had seen the startling resemblance in their faces, began to subside.
‘I am Ben’s uncle.’ The words were flat. Irrefutable. ‘It was my brother, Paolo, who was Ben’s father. And, as you must know, Paolo—like your sister Maria, Ben’s mother—is dead.’ Now his voice was bleak, stark.