The Royal Baby Revelation (4 page)

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Orso stir—his muscle-packed frame as imposing as the bear after which he’d been named. Yet he moved with surprising agility to speak softly into Casimiro’s ear.

‘Shall I get rid of her, Majesty?’ he questioned, in the Greek in which both men were fluent and which was less widely understood than their first language of Italian.

Casimiro’s instinctive response was to say yes as etiquette demanded—but as the woman called Melissa drew nearer her unquestionable breach of protocol was enough to again capture his interest. And something written on her face struck at a chord within him—an echo of the expression he had seen there earlier. Something which set off some far-distant warning bell ringing deep inside him.

Instinct told him to speak to her—and now that he was about to cast off the strictures of royal life, then surely he could listen to his instincts at long last. Surely he could satisfy his curiosity about what she wanted—if only as a distraction until this interminable meal ended, when the speech was burning a hole in his pocket and, unexpectedly, his heart was aching at the thought of delivering it.

‘No. Let her speak. She intrigues me. Perhaps there is some problem to which she wishes to alert me. This ball
is
part of my gift to my brother and therefore my responsibility, after all.’

‘But, Majesty—’

‘Let her approach, Orso—but guide her more discreetly. All eyes are upon her and she has neither the poise nor the beauty to withstand such scrutiny.’

‘Ochi,
Majesty.’

Melissa walked towards the King, her heart crashing madly against her chest, feeling a rivulet of sweat beginning to trickle its way down between her breasts. She was scarcely able to believe that she was actually going through with this, but as she had been getting ready for tonight she’d realised that she couldn’t delay telling him. Not for a moment longer. She had blown her opportunity when they’d been alone together earlier—sheer nerves had defeated her, along with her stupid and over-optimistic plan of waiting for the ‘right’ time. And there never was going to be a ‘right’ time—not when the situation was as wrong as could be. Even she, guided by fierce maternal love, could see that.

She had thought about delaying it until after the King’s speech—but surely she wouldn’t stand a chance of getting near him
then?
Not with people clamouring around to tell him how wonderful he was as they inevitably would.

She saw the towering form of his aide beginning to advance towards her with grim intent in his black eyes and she wondered if he had been told to act as a buffer between them. So that for one crazy moment, she actually thought of making a run for it. Of flying straight over to the King and blurting out her secret before anyone could stop her. But the man he had called Orso was lighter on his feet than his huge frame suggested—and suddenly he was by her side, with a light but iron-firm grip to her elbow which meant she was going nowhere without his say-so, and she felt her nerve begin to desert her.

‘You wish to speak to the King?’

‘Y-yes.’

‘About
what?’
snapped Orso.

Meeting the glare from his eyes, Melissa knew it was imperative that she held her nerve. She had come this far and she would not be fobbed off with a member of his entourage. ‘That’s between me and the King. I wish to speak privately with him.’

‘Then you will approach His Majesty with more caution.’ Orso’s heavily accented voice was harsh with disapproval. ‘Unless you wish for a posse of his armed guards to spring on you and to throw you in the jail-house at Ghalazamba?’

‘Of c-course I don’t,’ she stumbled, some of her nerve deserting her.

‘Then walk with me,’ instructed Orso tersely.

He led her by a circuitous route to the long dais where Casimiro sat along with the other exulted guests. Melissa stood looking at the backs of them all—at the women’s jewel-encrusted necklaces and priceless earrings which dangled down to their naked shoulders—and there was a moment when she wondered if he’d forgotten she was there. Until suddenly he turned, fastening her in the amber snare of his eyes—the faintest inclination of his dark head the only outward sign that he was summoning her towards him.

Heart crashing, she approached him. Had anyone noticed that she wasn’t busying herself on the sidelines with Stephen—helping deal with every little crisis as it arose? Which was what she
should
have been doing. But Melissa didn’t care. It didn’t even matter if her job was on the line. She could always find another job—but never find another father for her son.

‘You are very impertinent,’ Casimiro mused as she grew close enough to hear the whispered disapproval in his voice. ‘To stare at me as the hyena regards the glistening flesh.’

Had she come over as
predatory?
‘I don’t mean to be, Your Majesty.’

Again, he detected the faint drift of lilac as she leaned towards him. The sense of something tantalisingly close—like a wave which washed against the shoreline before retreating again. He frowned, his interest unexpectedly awakened. ‘Do you always behave this way at functions?’

She wanted to say no—but hadn’t she been pretty unprofessional the
last
time she’d met him? Yet
he
had been the one who had driven it, she reminded herself. Who had started this whole thing between them. And was she really so invisible—so inconsequential—that he couldn’t remember a single thing about her or anything they’d done together?

‘This is not the way I normally behave, no. Perhaps…perhaps it’s the effect you have on me, Your Majesty.’

‘I
beg
your pardon?’

‘You don’t remember, do you?’ she whispered.

Sabre-sharp, her words sliced through him as she found his Achilles heel and Casimiro stilled. ‘Remember
what?’
he bit out.

Was she going to have to spell it out for him? Was she really so unforgettable that he
still
didn’t remember their affair? Staring at the august presence in front of her, Melissa allowed herself the bittersweet luxury of recall, remembering the night she’d first laid eyes on him.

It had been when London’s biggest museum had exhibited the fabulous statues excavated during an archaeological dig on the island of Zaffirinthos. The after-show party had been held at the house of a minor British royal—a magnificent mansion which had overlooked Green Park itself.

What had made the evening stand out had been the presence of the King of Zaffirinthos, who had flown in especially to witness the first stage of the international tour of the statues. And he had turned out to be an attraction who had proved even more newsworthy than the precious artefacts. An outrageously gorgeous man in his early thirties, he was quickly dubbed by the press: “The Most Eligible Man In Europe.”

Melissa’s first glimpse of the royal had certainly borne out all the hype. As he’d been shown around the museum for a private view of the show she could see why his face had been raved about in all the gossip columns and why every hostess in the capital was clamouring to get him onto her guest list.

It was an amazing face—all carved aristocratic features and skin which gleamed like gold. His eyes were golden too, a deeper, darker shade which was closer to amber—and the jet-dark waves of his hair looked as if they had been swirled onto his head with the bold brush-strokes of some master artist’s charcoal pencil. Why, with his powerful presence she had found herself thinking that he looked almost like a statue himself.

But the stillness of his muscular body did nothing to deflect the fact that he had about him some nebulous quality which transcended his royal status. Melissa felt there was something rather wild and
untamed
about him.

And, of course, she hadn’t spoken to him. She had been too busy supervising the mass of summer flowers which had garlanded the entrance to the grand house in an attempt to detract from the unseasonably heavy rain outside—and reporting back to her hostess, who was a particularly exacting woman.

The evening had been memorable for another reason, too—the one which could always activate the dark aching hole inside her: the anniversary of her mother’s death in that terrible car crash. Melissa knew it was slightly pathetic for a young adult like herself to describe herself as an orphan, but on this one night of the year—when she relived the terror of the midnight phone-call and the subsequent horror which had unfolded in the intensive care ward—that was exactly what she felt like.

She had put her emotions on hold until the end of the evening when she had been unable to stem the tide of tears any longer and in a cloakroom in a deserted part of the basement she had lost the battle, and given into quiet sobs of sorrow.

Eventually, emerging red-eyed into the corridor which led back up to the main part of the house, she had almost cannoned into a tall man—quickly turning her face to one side, too embarrassed to be seen by anyone in such a fragile state as she had tried to avoid him.

‘Hey,’ came a silken voice whose marked accent should have alerted her but she was so busy dabbing at her eyes with a crumpled-up tissue that she failed to make the connection. ‘What’s the rush?’

‘Go away.’ Melissa gulped and the moment she’d said it she realised just who he was and stared up at him in horror.

He looked as if he hadn’t quite decided to be irritated or bemused—as if he wasn’t used to people saying that to him. And then his eyes drifted over her and Melissa wondered how vile she must look with her shiny red nose and blotchy skin.

‘You’ve been crying,’ he observed, with the air of a man who was never cried in front of.

Ten out of ten for observation,
she thought miserably—hating feeling so vulnerable and so awful in front of someone like him. ‘Yes, I have,’ she said, in a small voice, wondering why he wasn’t upstairs drinking his champagne with the rest of the privileged gathering.

‘Why?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Oh, but it does—because I want to know. Don’t you realise that I am a king?’ His amber eyes glittered, his lips curving into a mocking smile. ‘And that everything I command is always granted?’

For a moment she thought he was joking—and maybe he was, just a little. But she could also see that he expected an answer from her and so, with a sudden mulishness, Melissa decided to tell him.
Then
let him be sorry he had asked.

‘It’s the anniversary of my mother’s death.’

There was a pause. ‘Oh.’

She could see the sudden tightening of his face. Could hear the sudden chatter of conversation as a distant door was opened and the dull background patter of rain as it lashed against one of the basement doors. Perhaps he heard it too for she caught him looking down at her cheap shoes, and frowning—as if it had suddenly occurred to him that they might let in water.

‘You want a ride home?’ he questioned.

‘From
you?’

‘Who else? You have a car waiting? A boyfriend perhaps?’

Suspiciously, she screwed up her eyes as if to check that he wasn’t being sarcastic. ‘No. I don’t.’

‘Then how were you planning on getting home?’

‘On the underground.’

‘Well, don’t. I’ll be outside. Don’t keep me waiting.’

He walked off, leaving Melissa staring at him as if she’d seen a ghost. A ghost that looked and sounded like a king and had offered her a ride home. As she gave the kitchen a last minute check and changed from her black working dress into a pair of jeans and a raincoat she kept wondering whether she’d imagined the whole thing.

But she hadn’t. A dark-tinted limousine was sitting a little way down the road and as her steps slowed uncertainly a chauffeur suddenly got out and opened the door for her.

Briefly, it occurred to her that this was the kind of action those real-life crime programmes you saw on TV always advised you against taking. She could see Casimiro sitting in the back seat and when Melissa hesitated, this seemed to amuse him.

‘So, are you getting in—or staying there and getting wet?’

Still she hesitated.

‘Or perhaps you think I will leap on you? That you are completely irresistible to me?’

Melissa swallowed. Now he
was
being sarcastic. And suddenly she didn’t care—not about whether it was right or wrong or the fact that he was a king. When compared to the bigger picture of mortality and the fact that she would never see her mother again—this was about as important as chicken-feed.

‘Why are you doing this?’ she questioned as she climbed into the back of the car and into his world of luxury and soft leather. ‘Because you feel sorry for me?”

There was a pause, and then a fierce look came over his face—a look so dark and so bleak that Melissa felt as if she was intruding just by witnessing it. As if she had glimpsed into some dark corner of his soul.

‘Because I know how hard it can be,’ he said unexpectedly. ‘To lose a mother.’

And that had been it, really. Two people brought together by a rainy night and a moment of empathy. Something had fused between them—bringing together a pair of lives which couldn’t have been more disparate. Against all the odds, they had become lovers.

With lazy amusement, Casimiro told her that his usual aide was not accompanying him—and it seemed to amuse him to give the others the slip as often as possible. For five days he played hide-and-seek with them—ensuring just enough freedom to snatch at a life which could never be his, while reassuring the people who guarded him that he was safe. It seemed that everything the King did, he did well—if recklessly—and he embraced his new-found anonymity with a skill which would have made the finest actor turn green with envy.

In Melissa’s tiny bedsit he—a man who had been fed every delicacy since birth—sampled beans on toast for the first time in his life. He drank cheap wine and made tea in a mug. The two of them hired a little boat on the river and he rode on the top deck of a red London bus without anyone knowing it was him. And they spent afternoons in bed, listening to the distant hum of traffic and the sound of their own heartbeats. He told her that she smelt of summer flowers and that her eyes were like emerald stars—and hadn’t she just revelled in those lazy compliments?