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‘You told him I was kind?’ he prompted, remembering the remark their son had made on the flight over.
She was defensive. ‘I wanted him to believe his father was a good man. I wanted him to be proud of you.’
Matthias’s breathing was shallow. ‘Why?’
She toyed with her fingers in front of her, weaving them together. ‘One day, he’ll be old enough to ask about you. I didn’t want him to fill in the gaps in the meantime. I didn’t want him to think...’
Her words trailed into nothingness.
‘Go on,’ he urged desperately.
‘I didn’t want him to think he wasn’t wanted.’ She cleared her throat. ‘I told him you were good and kind and funny but that you live far away from us, but that...’
‘Yes?’ The word was quick to escape from him, an impatient hiss.
‘That you think of us often. That you look into the stars and think about the stars above us.’ There was defiance in her tone now. ‘It’s for him, not you.’
His chest felt heavy. She’d created a myth for their son, a myth of him as a good, kind, decent man—she’d done the opposite of what he might have imagined a woman in her shoes doing: she’d praised him and spoken of him in a way that would make their son want to know his father.
It was impossible not to look at her with growing respect, with appreciation. He wasn’t sure he’d deserved any of that.
‘I don’t want him to have a paternity test,’ she said quietly, but with a strength that called to him. ‘I don’t want him to think...’
‘To think what, Frankie?’ he pushed when her words trailed off into the air.
‘To think he wasn’t wanted.’ She lifted her gaze to his and there was a haunted quality to her expression, a hurt he couldn’t comprehend. ‘I don’t want him to think he had to have a blood test before you’d let him into your life.’
He expelled a breath, his nostrils flaring as he instinctively rejected her take on the situation. ‘It is merely a formality.’
‘It’s unnecessary.’ Again, he felt her tender insistence deep in his gut and a protective instinct surged inside him—though what he was wanting to protect her from, he couldn’t have said.
‘He’s your son,’ she continued quietly, lifting one hand to his chest and pressing it just above his heart.
And emotions flooded him—paternal pride, completeness, rightness—relief that it was this woman who’d borne him a son and heir. His words were thick with all his feelings when he dredged them from deep within his soul. ‘And soon the whole world will know it.’
CHAPTER SIX
MATTHIAS COULDN’T REMEMBER when he’d last slept for longer than an hour or two. He was bone-weary, exhausted to the depths of his soul, b
ut the sight of Frankie fast asleep in his bed arrested him and energised him all at once and he found his feet reluctant to move.
The way she’d smiled at him earlier that day had stayed with him all afternoon, replaying in his mind, so that he had rushed through his commitments, hoping to see her again, to see if he could make her smile once more. Not that he could say what he’d done to change her mood—it wasn’t like in New York, three years earlier, when they’d both smiled often and freely.
He’d wanted to see her again, but events had conspired to keep him from dining with her—a problem at the embassy in Rome—and so now she was fast asleep.
Her long blonde hair was drawn around her shoulder like a skein of gold and her breathing was slow and rhythmic. Her lips, parted and pink, were so perfect, and he remembered instantly how they’d felt when she’d kissed him in New York, years earlier.
Tentatively at first, and then with the madness that had overtaken them. He remembered how she’d felt in his arms downstairs earlier today, when he’d taken her by surprise and kissed her, and he remembered the moment when she’d become pliant in his arms. He could identify the exact moment when she’d lost a part of herself to this madness. He’d known he could have deepened the kiss, that he could have taunted her with their desire and turned her into a jumble of nerves and responses in his arms, but he hadn’t.
He’d stemmed his own needs, respecting her boundaries, knowing deep down how overwhelmed she must be. Not just by his position as King, and her son’s place in the country’s order of succession, not even by her future as Queen. But by this, them, whatever they felt. He was a man of far greater experience, of greater years, and yet he still found their chemistry explosive and somehow awe-inspiring.
Even as he stood by the bed, watching her gentle exhalations, desire flooded his system and he wondered how she’d respond if he reached for her. If he strode to the bed, put a hand on her shoulder and stirred her to wakefulness, if he pressed his lips to the soft flesh at the base of her throat that had always driven her wild...
And as though his thoughts had pushed into hers, she moved in her sleep, her eyes blinking open and landing straight on him. Breath that had been slow suddenly stopped altogether as she stared at him.
It was just after midnight, and magic was thick in the air—magic with the power to bring the past into the present.
‘Matt?’ She blinked, frowning, pushing up so that the sheet dropped to reveal the soft swell of her cleavage. There was nothing sexy about the singlet she was wearing or at least it shouldn’t have been. But somehow it was, and he was groaning with side-splitting need.
