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‘Highness...?Rafe...really?’ Marco’s expressive lips twitched.
The other man grinned and pushed his wire-framed glasses up his nose. ‘All right, Marco, but...’
‘Butthere is no one around to hear. You can grovel as much as you like in company, but being calledHighnessby a man I once saw dance on a table after half a cider—you really are a lightweight—and a man I used to thrash at rugby doesn’t sit right.’ Not that friendship, or even the pleasure of winding up the cabal of blue bloods that took their power for granted, was the reason that Marco had given his old university friend and son of his chauffeur the lynchpin role. It was for the simple reason that Rafe was the best man for the job.
‘Rugby... I think recollections may vary on that one, but as you’re my boss I’ll let it pass. I take it the flight in was...interesting?’
Marco’s grin flashed. ‘You could say that. I think I have had my week’s adrenaline rush.’ Had he not known the service history of the decorated pilot at the controls he might have been worried at their third attempt at landing. His grin faded as he observed Rafe’s glance drifting to the waiting boat.
‘You need to be off?’
Rafe nodded and, excusing himself, climbed into the boat with more caution than Marco had exited it. Marco watched the boat speed away before striding towards the waiting car. As he reached the long, low, armour-plated limo with the blacked-out windows a power surge caused the lights, including those dancing on the water, to flicker.
The door was opened by a suited figure who had emerged from the driver’s seat. ‘Did you see Rafe, Tomas?’
‘My son, the minister,’ he self-corrected, ‘is working.’ Despite the stony expression Marco could hear the pride in the older man’s voice.
‘Of course.’ Marco’s finger traced the white scar on his cheek. Tomas had been Marco’s personal childhood bodyguard before an injury acquired rescuing Marco after he tested out his youthful theory that a waterfall was made for leaping into and sliding down had put Tomas on desk duty.
The thin white line on his cheek was Marco’s only lasting reminder. Tomas’s reminder was the bleep of metal detectors when he walked through them, and a limp that had negated his role as a personal security guard.
Desk duty had not suited him, nor had early retirement. He had jumped at the chance to enter service as Marco’s personal driver.
‘He is grateful for the chance you have given him, Highness.’
‘He deserves it.’
‘Yes,’ the older man agreed factually, adding, ‘The storm has followed you home, I think, Highness.’
Marco made a non-committal sound in his throat. He did not assign human characteristics to forces of nature, he simply respected them. The door closed behind him. The air-conditioned interior of the car was pleasant after the sultry pre-storm heaviness outside. Marco loosened his tie and shrugged off his jacket, dislodging the small gift-wrapped package in his breast pocket. It was hard to know what to get a five-year-old girl who had pretty much everything. In the end he’d opted for a delicate necklace, a silver hand-beaten shell on a silver chain.
Would Freya like it?
He had no idea; he dodged the acknowledgment of his ignorance but not before he experienced a stab of something that felt like loss...what five-year-old wasnota mystery?
Freya would smile and say thank you. His daughter was a very polite child...her old-fashioned manners were a credit to Nanny Maeve, his own nanny back in the day, who was reluctantly retiring due to crippling arthritis, but she had insisted she was well enough to stay on another month and ensure a smooth transition before she moved to the luxurious surroundings of an upmarket retirement village in her native Ireland.
Opening his laptop, he began scrolling through emails as the car drew away from the dock. They had driven through the gate cut into the sixteenth-century walls of the capital before the dark outside was briefly illuminated by a sodium-silver flash that for a brief moment blinded the passenger to the iconic image of the castle. A moment later the much-replicated image of the illuminated honeyed walls that inevitably drew gasps of amazement reappeared.
Marco didn’t gasp. He was focusing on the laptop in front of him. He had grown up inside those fortified walls and was more interested in the results of the latest opinion poll he had recently set in motion.
A quick scan of the table of figures twitched the corners of his wide sensual mouth upwards into a satisfied smile. This information would be useful ammunition at tomorrow’s scheduled meeting. It was just what he needed to pull the rug from under the expensively shod feet of the cabal of palace officials who held strong to the belief that any change was a bad one.
There were days, in fact entire weeks, when it felt to Marco he was banging his head against a brick wall when he tried to convince the courtiers who felt it was their job to keep the status quo that stagnation was not a good thing, and that the subjects of the admittedly prosperous island state were a lot more open-minded than the courtiers believed.
And the figures he was looking at backed up this view. A representative cross section of the island kingdom’s population, when asked their views on a fictional scenario equivalent to the real one he had in mind, were not so closed-minded.
As he closed the laptop the time in the corner of the screen caught his eye, causing him to self-correct the thought. It actually already was tomorrow.
Ahead the gilded gates silently swung open. There was no visible security presence beyond the sentinel figures in traditional dress who stood at intervals along the battlements, but it was there. Marco had signed off on the new improved security measures six months ago in direct response to theincidentthat had involved a tourist armed with nothing more sinister than a camera who had somehow wandered into Freya’s fifth birthday party.
A guest speaker at a European climate-change conference, Marco had learnt of the incident second-hand from his mother, who had told it as an amusing anecdote, which was possibly to be expected of a monarch who regularly rode around the island on a bicycle with her security detail trying to keep up.
His mother refused to accept that there were bad people out there...just misunderstood souls. He was surprised her good nature was not taken advantage of more.
Marco hadnotbeen amused and had instigated a full-scale overhaul of the palace security arrangements. He had not kept her mother safe but the child she had died giving life to would be protected.
Marco pushed away the image of his late wife’s pale sweat-slicked face as, utterly exhausted by the traumatic birth, she had refused to look at her newborn child, before the image could shift, as it inevitably did, to the next scene.
