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“It is a small country, between France and Belgium. It’s nothing like Miller Springs. There are forests everywhere. Everything is old. Old but beautiful. Cobbled streets. It’s rainy all winter, but in the spring every window box is full of flowers. It has its problems, like any place, but it is full of charm, you know?”
“It sounds lovely.” Kate could picture it in her mind’s eye but she couldn’t picture Emile there. It didn’t seem to suit him, somehow.
Emile took another deep breath. “I am the Prince of Charcieux.”
Kate felt the jolt of shock whip through her. She was glad she was already sitting down, but she had to close her eyes so she didn’t feel as though she were about to tip headfirst into the pool below. He was what?
“I know it’s a shock,” he went on. “My father is the King of Charcieux. He has been the king all my life. I never knew my grandparents; they died before I was born.”
“Will you be the king one day?”
He shook his head. “Even before I was exiled, it was unlikely that I would ever be king. I have two older brothers, so some dreadful things would have to happen for me to ascend the throne.”
“You wereexiled?”
“Yes, that is the technical term.” Emile’s expression darkened.
Kate tried to rein in her surprise. It was a lot to take in. Emile was an exiled prince?
But the more she thought about it, the more it made sense. No wonder he hadn’t known how to do anything when he first came to Miller Springs; why would you learn how to cook or clean if you lived in a palace with servants?
They were from two very different worlds and as she took his hand, feeling her relax slightly at her touch, Kate couldn’t help but wonder if that would mean that they couldn’t ever be together. How could she build a life with a prince? Despite the warmth of the evening, she suddenly felt cold.
CHAPTER20
EMILE
Emile had known that he would have to reveal the truth to Kate at some point. Even if he’d tried to keep it to himself, the world was not as big as all that. The truth would have come out eventually. But he didn’t relish telling her. And the worst was yet to come. It was one thing to reveal that you were a prince and quite another to reveal why you were no longer welcome in your own kingdom.
An overwhelming feeling of shame washed over him; he wished that he had been a better man so that he didn’t have to confess his sins to Kate and yet, if he had never behaved the way he had, he would never have been exiled and he would never have found her.
The sound of the waterfall crashing into the pool below broke the silence. It was peaceful up here, but he was anything but at peace. He felt jittery at what he had to tell Kate. But he had come this far already, and the soft press of her hand on his thigh and the openness of her expression made him feel like maybe it would be okay to confess his sins. This was Kate, after all. She had already been so kind to him. She was kind to everyone. She likely wasn’t going to pitch him headfirst into the water below, at the very least.
“I was never particularly princely,” he began. “My brothers have always been happy to do their duty. They never seem to put a foot wrong. In the Charcieux royal family — hell, in most royal families — there are paths set for the first two sons. One is the heir, the other is the spare.”
And then there was no need for the third. You don’t need a spare for the spare,he thought bitterly. Taking a deep breath, he continued.
“One does all of the royal duties in preparation for becoming king and the other goes into the military.”
“And what about the third son?”
He felt his heart squeeze at her question; no one ever asked about the third son. About him. But that was all that Kate cared about in this story.
“I was an accident. There was no plan for me. I have always been a disappointment to my parents. Never accomplished enough at school. Never interested enough in royal proceedings. Never content to do as I was told.”
Emile had learned early on that unconditional love was for other people. People with normal families. Not people with civic responsibilities and royal blood. He was expected to toe the line and it was made very clear that any disobedience was an affront not just to his parents, but to the whole nation. Except, that he couldn’t seem to toe the line, even when he wanted to.
“Since nothing I did was ever good enough, I sort of stopped trying. Just did whatever I wanted, since I always ended up in trouble either way, I figured it might as well be fun. I spent most of my time partying. I had this group of friends, if you can call them that, who were in a similar position. Too much money and too much time on our hands and parents who didn’t give a shit. So we went around the world, making trouble. It was something to do to fill the time.”
The shame swelled in his chest as he told the story. Kate had been in a similar situation and yet she’d used her time to build the cafe and create a community. He’d just been wasting his life. He could barely bring himself to look at her, but when he did, he didn’t see the censure he expected in her eyes.
“Go on,” she encouraged, giving him a small smile.
“There was a lot of booze. A lot of women. Gambling. We got thrown out of a lot of places. Nothing that a big payment the next day couldn’t sort out. As you can probably imagine, the press ate it up. We couldn’t go anywhere without a swarm of paparazzi. The press can be vicious and I was their favorite front-page fodder. Always doing something that was worth talking about. I got into an agreement with a few of them: if I gave them a photo early on in the night that they could sell, they’d leave me alone for the rest of the night.”
That was what he’d done on that fateful night, he remembered. He’d posed with an heiress outside of a bar to stoke the ‘are they, aren’t they’ rumors, in hopes that he’d have a peaceful rest of the night. They weren’t, as it happened. They were old school friends, and they’d gone their separate ways that evening once the photo op was complete.
Emile would never have gone to that gambling den if he’d thought it would be photographed. Someone had obviously sold him out. For a second, he wished that he knew who it was, but then he realized that it wouldn’t matter anyway.
