Royal Christmas: Royal Love-Child, Forbidden Marriage. Кейт Хьюит

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СКАЧАТЬ for the TV’s remote control and stabbing curiously at the buttons. ‘How long are we staying?’

      ‘Two weeks,’ Phoebe replied tightly. She felt wound up, ready to snap, and they hadn’t even seen the king yet. They hadn’t seen anything, done anything, and already the tension was biting at her, fraying her calm, her strength. She went to the bathroom to splash water on her face, and grimaced at her pale, strained reflection.

      Christian wandered in, the remote control still clutched in one hand. ‘If the prince is my cousin, what should I call him?’ he asked, wrinkling his nose. ‘And if he is a prince, does that make me one too?’

      A light knock on the door kept Phoebe from answering those alarming questions. She opened the door to another blank-faced servant, who informed her in flawless English that King Nicholas awaited in the throne room.

      ‘Already?’ Phoebe asked, to which the servant simply gave a helpless little shrug. She hadn’t changed or even brushed her hair, but if the king was going to be so rude as to demand her attendance before she’d even caught her breath, he could take her as she was.

      She gestured to Christian and, ever ready for an adventure, he quickly trotted to her side. They followed the servant through a maze of corridors and down another, more private staircase until finally they were standing in front of a pair of ornate doors decorated in gold leaf.

      Phoebe swallowed. This part of the palace she’d never seen.

      ‘His Majesty, King Nicholas the First of Amarnes,’ a servant intoned, and the doors were thrown open. Phoebe started forward, Christian at her side, only to have a burly, solemn-faced servant step straight in front of her, so she smacked into his chest.

      ‘What—?’ she cried in dazed confusion. A hand came down hard on her shoulder.

      ‘Only the boy,’ a voice, low and final, spoke in clipped English, and before Phoebe could frame a protest she was hustled away as Christian disappeared behind the heavy, ornate doors.

      CHAPTER SIX

      ‘WHAT?’ Leo looked up from the mail he’d been rifling through, his brows drawn sharply together in a frown. His top aide, Piers Handsel, gave a nod of confirmation.

      ‘I thought you’d like to know. The king summoned the boy ten minutes ago.’

      ‘But they’ve just arrived,’ Leo said, his voice no more than a growl. Had the king no tact, no sensibility? Running roughshod over Phoebe was not the way to gain her trust.

      ‘Just the boy,’ Piers clarified. ‘Not …’ he paused delicately ‘ … the mother.’

      Leo dropped the letter he’d been holding and glared at his aide. ‘What do you mean?’ he asked, his voice menacingly soft.

      Piers shrugged in apology. ‘The king has no wish to see her, apparently. He refused her entrance into the throne room.’

      ‘She would have resisted—’

      Piers coughed. ‘I believe Lars escorted her to the blue salon.’

      ‘Lars!’ Leo repeated in disgust. Lars was little more than a thug, paid to do Nicholas’s dirty work. And when Piers said escorted, Leo had no doubt he really meant forced. So, only minutes after arriving at the palace, Phoebe was being treated like an unwanted prisoner, and her son was alone with the king. A stranger.

      Rage, white-hot and electric, coursed through Leo. For a moment a memory of his own mother’s treatment blazed through him. Just like Phoebe, she’d been shunted from the palace and her son’s life because she’d been surplus to requirements. He felt sick at what Phoebe had to endure. What he had allowed her to endure.

      ‘I will speak to the king,’ he said shortly and, tossing the rest of his mail aside, he strode from the room. Rage fuelled him as he navigated the palace’s many corridors before arriving at the throne room. He paused at the doors, for if Christian was still with the king he had no desire to frighten the boy. All was silent from within. Leo threw open the doors and strode in.

      Nicholas sat on the throne, a small, grey-haired man, diminished by age, wearing his usual three-piece suit, his thin, liver-spotted hands folded over his middle.

      Leo didn’t bother with the preliminaries; he was too angry. ‘What were you thinking,’ he demanded tersely, ‘to separate Phoebe from her child practically the moment they arrived?’

      Nicholas regarded his nephew shrewdly. ‘Phoebe, is it? I told you not to bring her.’

      ‘I had no choice,’ Leo replied, his voice curt despite the anger that still coursed through him. He curled his hand into a fist at his side, resisting the urge to plough it straight into the king’s sagging belly. ‘She wouldn’t be bought.’

      ‘Everyone can be bought.’

      Leo pressed his lips together. ‘Phoebe is utterly dedicated to her son. I’ve seen it myself.’ He paused. ‘Before I went to New York, I didn’t realise quite how much.’ He’d gone to New York anticipating a flighty, careless woman … the kind of woman who had married a man she’d known for little more than a week, and separated from a month later. Yet Phoebe hadn’t been that woman. She’d changed, he realised, changed and grown, and he felt a surprising flash of both pride and admiration at the thought.

      Nicholas shrugged. ‘No matter. I’m sure we can find a way to dispose of her.’

      Dispose of her. Like rubbish, Leo thought, just as Phoebe had feared. Twenty-four hours ago such a statement would have caused barely a ripple of unease; Phoebe had just been an inconvenience to deal with. Yet now his uncle’s callousness infuriated him. Enraged him, touching and hurting him in a deep place inside he couldn’t bear to think about. ‘Your sensitivity astonishes me,’ he said in a clipped voice that belied the emotion coursing through him in an unrelenting river, ‘but she has a legal right to her son—’

      ‘As did your mother,’ Nicholas replied with a glimmer of a smile. ‘Yet she saw fit to step aside.’

      Leo struggled to speak calmly; the mention of his mother caused that river of emotion flowing through him to become a torrent, an unstoppable tide. For a moment he was that boy again, standing at the window, struggling not to cry, yet wanting desperately to shout out, to beg her to come back or at least turn around. She never had.

      Mio Dio, did he see himself in Christian? His mother in Phoebe? How could he have ever considered separating them for a moment?

      Yet he hadn’t, Leo realised. From the moment he’d entered the salon at the consulate and seen Phoebe standing there, so proud and afraid, so much the same as he remembered with her wide grey eyes, as clear as mirrors, and her dark, curly hair, irrepressible and wild … his plans to buy her off had disappeared. Evaporated, like so much meaningless mist. He would never separate a mother from her child … yet what could he do with her now? What life could she have in Amarnes? Or would the king tire of the boy as Phoebe hoped?

      ‘What do you intend,’ he asked now, trying to sound unconcerned, ‘with the boy?’

      Nicholas shrugged. ‘I like him,’ he said, his tone that of a child with a new toy. ‘He has courage. He was obviously afraid when he entered the throne room, but he didn’t succumb to tears. He threw back his shoulders СКАЧАТЬ