Royal Christmas: Royal Love-Child, Forbidden Marriage

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 and greeted me like a man.’ Nicholas paused, and Leo turned around to see the king give him a sly, sideways smile. ‘He will make a good king.’

For a moment all Leo could do was stare blankly at the king as his words echoed through him. ‘He will make a good king … a good king … a good king …’ ‘What,’ he finally asked with soft menace, ‘do you mean?’

Nicholas chuckled. ‘You didn’t realise, did you? Why do you think I sent for the boy?’ Nicholas’s mouth twisted cynically. ‘To play happy families?’

Leo didn’t trust himself to answer. Suddenly he realised how ridiculously sentimental, how glaringly false Nicholas’s desire to see his grandson was. Of course he had an ulterior motive … but king?

‘Anders abdicated,’ Leo finally said in a low voice. ‘You can’t undo—’

‘Can’t I?’ Nicholas looked positively gleeful, causing rage to course through Leo once more. Rage and regret and guilt, all wrapped together, consuming him, choking him—He’d been so blind. So blind to follow the king’s bidding, to ignore his own memories, to bring Phoebe and Christian here—to think he could be king. That he deserved to be.

‘I’ve called a session of Parliament,’ Nicholas said. He sat back on the throne, an ageing tyrant still determined to wield his power. To hurt.

‘And just like that,’ Leo demanded in a hiss, ‘you’re going to change the line of succession, make a child you don’t even know your heir—?’

‘The line of succession is intact,’ Nicholas informed him coldly. ‘You were the aberration.’

Of course he was. He always had been. The older son of the younger brother. What a useless position that was. Leo laughed, a harsh, ugly sound. ‘I know how much it infuriated you that I was made heir—tell me, was it pride that kept you from begging Anders not to abdicate? Perhaps in time you would have accepted his bride, as long as it meant your son could be king.’

Nicholas’s eyes narrowed to two slits blazing hatred and contempt, the only weapons he had. ‘And now my grandson will be king instead,’ he said coldly.

‘If Parliament agrees to reinstate Anders posthumously.’

‘They will.’ Nicholas spoke with such certainty, and Leo knew he had reason to. Parliament did what the king wanted it to. He shook his head, the implications of Nicholas’s pronouncement filtering through him.

He wouldn’t be king. For six years he’d been the heir, serving the crown, serving Nicholas in attempt after attempt to show how worthy he was. Even if he didn’t believe he was himself.

It had taken several years of honest living before the Press—and the people—started to believe in him, in the idea of him as king, but he’d won their trust. Their respect.

He’d never won the king’s.

He was the son of a second son; he’d been a playboy, a reprobate, a rake. And deeming him even more unworthy were the feelings he’d locked inside himself, feelings he refused to consider or acknowledge because to do so would be to open a Pandora’s box of emotions that might never be shut again.

And now it was going to be taken away, his life—and Christian’s—irrevocably changed by the whim of an ill, old man. The twin demons of regret and guilt lashed him. He’d brought Phoebe straight into the lion’s den—a pit of vipers! For if Christian was heir, there was no question of him returning to his life in New York … ever. And Nicholas would want Phoebe completely and utterly out of the way … out of the country, out of Christian’s life, and he’d do whatever he could to achieve his goal.

And Leo … Leo had practically been his stooge. He’d thought he was serving the crown, but now he saw he’d only been serving the greedy whims of a vicious old man. He shook his head slowly, steeled his spine.

‘If you’re so determined to see the boy king, so be it,’ he said coolly. ‘I suppose you’d rather see the monarchy crumble to nothing than have me on the throne.’ Nicholas’s mouth tightened, but he didn’t reply. ‘But you won’t get what you want by bulldozing over Christian’s mother. As much as you might loathe her presence, she can’t be bought or intimidated.’

‘We’ll see about—’

‘She’s American,’ Leo cut across him coldly, ‘and that boy is her whole world. She has no notion of royal duty as my mother did, and she won’t be frightened or bullied the way my mother was.’ Again he felt the old rage, the guilt and sorrow and regret. How could he have acted in such a way, putting Phoebe in the same utterly untenable position as his mother? How could he not have seen what was happening, what Nicholas was planning? Or had he just closed his mind to it, an act of bloody-minded will, because he was determined to do what he could to protect his crown?

Except the crown wasn’t his any more. Nicholas shrugged impatiently. ‘I’ll find a way—’ ‘No,’ Leo cut him off, ‘you won’t.’ Determination filled him, a cold sense of purpose that made him gaze directly, unflinchingly, at the king, allowing the old man to see his scorn. ‘And if you want Christian to remain in this country, in the crown’s protection, then you need a subtler method.’ The smile he gave his uncle was cold and feral. ‘From now on we’ll do it my way.’

Phoebe rubbed her arms, fighting a rising sense of panic—near hysteria—as she paced the room, one of the palace’s many salons. The doors, she knew, were locked. She’d tried them, rattled the handles helplessly, unable to believe they’d actually locked her away without a word of explanation … without her son.

She was a prisoner, and the realisation that she’d walked straight into this gilded jail made her choke. She’d trusted Leo—she hadn’t even known she’d been doing so, he’d insinuated himself into her thoughts, her heart so insidiously—and now look where she was. Locked up like a criminal, and Christian—

She pressed a fist to her trembling lips and willed the panic to recede. She needed to be calm, to think clearly, rationally—

They couldn’t just take him from her. Surely, surely in this day and age, in the Western world, a mother couldn’t be forcibly separated from her son—

Except she really had no idea what could happen, what the royal family could do. Lord, where was he? It had been half an hour, an endless thirty minutes. She resisted the urge to go to the door and rattle the knob once more, to pound and kick and scream until she was heard. Such antics would surely only weaken her position, and she needed to be calm—

A sound at the door had all sense of calm leaving her as she flew to it, her breath heaving in her chest. The door opened and Leo stood there, looking all too calm, all too unruffled—

‘You lied!’ Her voice came out close to a scream. ‘They took him from me, and locked me in here—’ She choked back a helpless sob.

Leo moved into the room, closing the door quietly behind him. ‘I’m very sorry for what happened,’ he said in a careful voice. ‘That was never my intention.’

‘Wasn’t it?’ Phoebe threw back at him. ‘Somehow I have trouble believing you didn’t know exactly—’

‘I promise you, Phoebe, I didn’t.’ The intensity in his voice, the throbbing sincerity, made her still. She believed him, she hadn’t been wrong to trust him, and the realisation—the hope—gave her comfort.

‘Then what?’ she asked, drawing in a steadying breath. ‘The king acted on his own?’

‘Basically, yes.’ Leo thrust a hand into his pocket and strode to the window, gazing out at the cloudless blue sky, the palace courtyard glittering under a winter sun. Phoebe watched him, saw the tension in every taut line in his body, felt the anger simmering under his calm exterior. Perhaps he wasn’t so unruffled after all.