Her Best Kept Royal Secret by Lynne Graham

CHAPTER FOUR

STATEDRIGHTUPFRONT, before she even got the chance to speak in her own defence, Angel’s explicit rebuttal was a daunting challenge.

‘You seem very sure of that,’ Gaby responded without any expression at all, although her small figure was stiff and her face pale. His icy expression and the rigid tension spliced into his lean powerful frame were totally unfamiliar to her. It was as if something had flipped in Angel, something she hadn’t met with in him before.

‘I am. Have you any idea how often I’ve been through this scenario with other women?’ Angel derided with a curled lip. ‘Four times at the last count! I know exactly what happens next. You will threaten me with legal action and take it to court for a DNA test and only then will your claim be exposed for the lie that it is. As I’m sure you know you can make a great deal of money out of the publicity that any paternity case against me will give you.’

‘I’ve already told you that I don’t want publicity and the only claim I would make would be support for our child.’

‘Don’t say “our”!’ Angel incised. ‘It’s offensive! If you are carrying a child, it is notmine.’

Gaby breathed in slow and deep, tamping down her ire with difficulty. But, if Angel had already been falsely accused on several occasions of having fathered a child, she could at least understand his distrust even if she resented it. ‘I am not those other women, Angel,’ she began. ‘And—’

‘But you’ve just proved that you are by forcing me to meet up with you and trying to pass off some other man’s child as mine!’ Angel condemned, nostrils flared on his classic straight nose, his strong masculine jaw at an aggressive angle. His eyes shimmered gold, narrowed, dagger-sharp and angry.

‘Why are you so convinced that this is not your child? Aside from your outrage that I should dare to confront you with this development, please explain,’ Gaby urged thinly. ‘Are you infertile? Specially blessed not to reproduce by your throne? There is no such thing as one hundred per cent efficiency with any form of contraception!’

‘But it’s remarkable how often it allegedly fails for me,’ Angel intoned very drily.

‘Let me get this straight...you think that you have the right to insult and punish me for your experiences with other women, who lied and plotted to try and entrap you or make money out of their connection with you?’ Gaby slammed back at him wrathfully. ‘How fair is that?’

‘You forced me into this meeting,’ Angel derided, his stunning eyes awash with anger. ‘What else am I supposed to think?’

Gaby inclined her chin. ‘I didn’t force anything. I asked politely,’ she reminded him curtly. ‘This child is your child. Nor am I apologising for that when you must know as well as I do that no contraceptive method is totally safe. Let’s at least behave like adults here.’

‘I am dealing with this like an adult,’ Angel sliced in icily.

‘No, you’re not. You’re ignoring the situation by making the assumption that I’m lying,’ Gaby censured. ‘But, in only a few weeks I will give birth to your son.’

‘At which time you will doubtless contact a lawyer and make a legal claim, which will eventually go to court and a DNA test,’ Angel cut in drily. ‘Why would I waste my energy on the issue now?’

When he put it like that, Gaby could see his point when he was so utterly convinced that the child she carried could not possibly be his child. Even so, she loathed him for his attitude and knew she would never forgive him for it or for treating her like a con woman, meeting with him to scam and fleece him. ‘Well, I’ve done my duty by informing you of the situation and, considering your mindset, I have absolutely nothing more to say to you. Have a nice life, Angel. You’d have to be dying in a ditch for me to cross your path again!’

With that proud declamation, Gaby stalked out of the room with her head held high and moved back to the lift. When Petronella Casey walked back into the hotel suite, Angel was preoccupied with his thoughts, his lean, darkly handsome features shuttered. He was recalling his mother’s infidelity and his father’s weak inability to deal with her behaviour. Angel had vowed that he would never allow himself to be put in such a position, and as time had moved on, and he’d learned for himself how dishonest and untrustworthy women could be, his attitudes had only hardened.

‘Evidently you do not believe a word that that young woman said,’ Petronella remarked quietly. ‘Whereas I suspect that it might be wise to pay a little more attention to her.’

‘Of course Gabriella’s lying,’ Angel asserted with ringing confidence, doubt or insecurity rarely featuring in his decisive nature. But it was also only now occurring to Angel in that same moment that, if she was not lying, he had burned his boats with a vengeance. ‘She has to be lying, just like her predecessors. Hire a private investigation agency to look into her. I should take every precaution.’

‘Bear in mind that in spite of the barrage of paternity claims that you have endured,’ Petronella murmured in a diplomatic undertone, ‘sooner or later and by the law of averages there will possibly be a woman telling the truth.’

‘With respect, I hope you are mistaken,’ Angel breathed tautly. ‘The first male child born to me is automatically the heir to the throne. That is in our constitution and not something I can change.’

But the question had been raised and he could not ignore it, even if the prospect shot naked alarm through him. What if he were to become a father? How the hell could he ever handle that? He was the product of no parenting, who only knew what to avoid rather than what a father should do.

Gaby walked back into Liz’s home with tears walled up in a dam behind her scratchy eyes. She had never been so grateful that her friend was on maternity leave and still accessible rather than back at work. The blonde took one look at Gaby’s tight, pale face and immediately gave her a hug. ‘It was that bad?’ she whispered in dismay.

‘Yes. Plan A was a major fail, so I will move immediately to plan B,’ Gaby quipped a little chokily. ‘Angel is not planning to be supportive or involved in any way. He refuses even to recognise that this could be his child, so that’s that, then.’

‘He still has to pay child support, whether he likes it or not,’ Liz argued vehemently.

‘If I can’t survive without his help,’ Gaby qualified. ‘But if I can get by, he will never lay eyes again on me or his child in this lifetime.’

Just as Gabriella had spent troubled weeks striving to work out her future with a young child to raise, Angel had, possibly for the very first time in his life, been required to work through months of stress, inconvenience and ultimate disappointment. Why? Gabriella Knox had, to all intents and purposes, disappeared off the face of the earth and, with her, the child Angel now suspected was his child as well.

On his monthly trip to London to ensure that the investigation agency he had hired were still making the search for Gabriella a top priority, he learned that there had finally been a breakthrough and intense satisfaction gripped him, the frustration of the past nine months draining away to be replaced by a powerful need for action instead. Now all he had to do was seal the deal and he saw refusal on her part as so unlikely as to be virtually impossible...

Gaby smiled as the early-summer sunshine engulfed her in the garden. It wasn’t hot but it was infinitely preferable to another grey wet day. She tossed the clothes pegs and sheets into a basket to carry back indoors. The long winter at the isolated farm had provided a wonderfully therapeutic time out for her, calming wounded and tangled emotions, soothing the painful regrets and showing her the way forward.

And her way forward, she reflected fondly, was definitely through her son, Alexios. She set down the laundry basket for sorting later and padded into the cosy living area, which comprised kitchen, dining and sitting room. An elderly woman sat there in an armchair. Clara Paterson, her friend Liz’s godmother, was a widow in her seventies and recovering from recent minor surgery. Clara was currently waiting to move into a more compact property in town and Gaby was staying with her as a temporary housekeeper. Living in the Scottish borders while looking after Clara had given Gaby a comfortable peaceful home while she adjusted to being a new mother.

Not that Alexios, beaming at her from the rug at Clara’s feet, looked like much of a challenge, she conceded proudly. He didn’t bear much resemblance to her or, for that matter, Angel. Nobody in her family had had bright green eyes or black curls, but then, neither did Angel, so she had no idea whose ancestor had donated those genes. It didn’t much matter either, she reflected cheerfully. What did matter was that Alexios was a happy, healthy eight-month-old baby, already crawling and trying to talk to her. He had his father’s brash confidence and fearless approach to life, but he was infinitely more loving in nature. And Gaby had discovered that not since the death of her family when she was fourteen had she ever loved anyone or anything as much as she loved her baby.

The earth-shattering racket of a helicopter passing overhead barely made her blink because the house was only a few miles from a military base. A frown line pleated her brow, though, when the noise not only failed to recede but also increased and she moved to the front window, disconcerted to see a craft landing in the field beyond the wall surrounding the garden.

Clara peered out of the window beside her. ‘That’s not an army helicopter,’ the older woman commented knowledgeably. ‘And what’s that flag on the bodywork? I don’t recognise it...’

But Gaby did. The stripes of colour and the dragon logo featured on the flag of Themos. Her slim body froze inside her jeans and sweater, her pale aghast face suddenly washing with colour. ‘It’s Alexios’s father...he’s found us.’

‘About time too,’ Clara remarked calmly. ‘You can’t hide for ever with a child.’

‘But he didn’t want to know about Alexios!’ Gaby protested.

‘He’s a very stubborn young man but he’s had time to see the light. An alpha male can react badly when you plunge him into a situation out of his control,’ Clara commented.

‘Clara!’ Gaby exclaimed in surprise. ‘What do you know about alpha males?’

‘Probably more than you do,’ Clara quipped with a smile. ‘I was married to one for almost half a century and there’s not a day goes by when I don’t miss his bossy, bullheaded ways.’

Gaby patted the old lady’s thin hand comfortingly. ‘I know...’

‘So, go and deal with yours...sensibly,’ Clara stressed. ‘I’ll watch Alexios until you’re ready to introduce him to his father.’

Gaby was too respectful to tell the older lady just how far removed she was from the point of introducing her son to his very reluctant parent. Instead, she nodded as she watched a tall, frighteningly familiar figure clad in a winter coat and dark suit literally step over the low garden wall and head across the lawn to the rarely used farmhouse front door. She felt sick with stress, but her tummy was twisting with a fury she could not suppress. How dared Angel track her down after the way he had treated her at their last meeting? How dared he? There was nothing even slightly sensible about Gaby’s attitude to such an incursion into her much-cherished privacy.

As the front doorbell wheezed from long disuse, Gaby glimpsed her reflection in the hall mirror, her mass of copper hair tamed and anchored somewhat messily to the back of her head, her flushed face bare of cosmetics. So, she wasn’t exactly looking her best and why would she even think about something as trivial as her appearance at such a moment?

Her rage at Angel’s characteristic chutzpah simply boiled over. In the back of her mind were all the times she could have done with the support of her child’s father in recent months, not least when she had struggled to cope with a newborn’s demands just after her C-section or during the many disrupted and sleepless nights that had followed before Alexios had eased into a routine. There had been the rather frightening knowledge that, while friends might help, she was essentially alone and had to handle her own emergencies. Becoming a single parent with that awareness was very stressful and in the early days she had had nightmares about what would happen to Alexios if anything were to happen to her.

Gaby jerked open the front door without unhooking the security chain that allowed it to open only a few inches. Through the gap, though, she saw Angel, with his smoulderingly beautiful face that could make angels weep and poets sigh. Silky black hair flopped above his brow and striking tawny eyes set off flawless cheekbones and a full sensual mouth. Once one glance at him had sent wanton shimmers of excitement travelling through her, but this time around seeing Angel was like having an ice cube trail down her rigid spine as she deliberately chose to remember the humiliation he had doled out to her that day in the London hotel.

‘I realise that you’re probably surprised by my arrival.’

‘Gobsmacked!’Gaby shot back at him with deliberate vulgarity.

‘May I come in?’ Angel dealt her a gleaming narrow-eyed appraisal, the kind of rapier look royalty wore like a blazing shield of confidence, warning her that he was not expecting to meet with any opposition. His audacity only inflamed her more.

‘No!’Gaby snapped caustically and she slammed the door shut again. Spinning in a rapid arc, she folded her arms and paced the narrow hall.

Angel pressed the bell again. ‘I’m not leaving,’ he announced from outside, that perfect diction of his enunciating every syllable with clarity.

Gaby gritted her teeth and only just resisted the childish urge to drag the door open again and scream at him. Nobody could unleash her temper more easily than Angel.

‘Is this what you call adult behaviour?’ Angel enquired sibilantly from behind the glass door.

Her hands clenched into fierce fists. Had she had a brick in her hand she would have thrown it at him. Instead, she paced up and down the hall, battling to get her tempestuous emotions in check. He was so cool and calm, and it inflamed her when she thought of what he had made her endure.

Yet she also knew that what she was feeling wasn’t all Angel’s fault. Time had made her more honest with herself. She had been madly in love with Angel at university and he had hurt her badly. It had not been a girlish infatuation that she could quickly put behind her, it had been full-blown over-the-top love, bordering on obsession. And, sadly for her, some lingering shard of those soft, sappy feelings had made her succumb to that one-night stand in Alharia because the attraction had been as strong as ever. Even so, she couldn’t blame him for walking away afterwards when she had been well aware of his womanising reputation.

But she did very much blame Angel for his attitude when she had confronted him with her pregnancy. She didn’t care that he had been taken by surprise. She had no sympathy for him on that score and much more sympathy for herself, walking round the size of a barrel for months on end while agonising about how she was to cope and survive as a single parent. And then the father of her baby had flatly refused to accept his share of the responsibility and had shot her down in mortifying flames. It would be a cold day in hell before she forgave Angel for that crushing rejection!

‘Gaby?’ Clara murmured from behind her. ‘I’ve put Alexios up for his nap and I’m heading out to the greenhouse.’

Gaby whirled round, taken aback to see Clara now clad in her outdoor jacket and boots. ‘OK...’

Angel appeared behind the older woman and Gaby’s jaw simply dropped at the sight of him indoors rather than outside where he should still have been.

‘I brought your visitor in through the back,’ her employer and friend informed her quietly. ‘You need to talk...and not through a closed door.’

Angel surveyed her with hidden fascination, unable to forget how long it had taken and how hard it had been to find her again. He could feel untamed emotion buzzing through him and that annoyed him when he needed to be in cool control of himself, unlike his parents, who had never been in control or even accepted that they ought to be.

Flags of embarrassed colour had flown into Gabriella’s already flushed face, Angel noted appreciatively. He didn’t think there could be a woman alive who could look as beautiful as she did without making the smallest effort to do so. There she stood, blue eyes burning bright, utterly enraged by him, in a shabby old pastel-pink sweater and faded jeans, both of which clung to her mesmerising curves like a second skin. For a split second, Angel forgot why he was there, forgot their audience, forgot everything and almost reached for her like a hot, thirsty man tempted by a drink of water. In terms of sexual need, he reasoned grimly, he was both hotly aroused and very thirsty. Annoyance at his masculine predictability chilled his overheated blood and he tilted his arrogant dark head back to study Gabriella with an assessing look. Was she the mother of his son...or not?

‘Well, I won’t say that that wasn’t embarrassing,’ Gaby breathed tightly as she marched past him back into the living area.

‘Since the lady appears to know who I am, will she be discreet?’ Angel enquired.

And that fast, Gaby wanted to thump him again. ‘Of course she will be. Clara isn’t remotely interested in you or in publicity,’ she pronounced curtly. ‘What are you doing here? What do you want from me?’

‘I would like to see the child,’ Angel intoned without any expression at all. Gaby interpreted that as Angel, unusually, watching his every word.

‘You said that child was nothing to do with you!’ Gaby reminded him.

‘May we sit down and discuss this important matter?’

‘You’re asking me to be reasonable when you were not remotely reasonable with me nine months ago?’ Gaby launched at him incredulously. ‘I can’t believe your nerve!’

The smooth, hard planes of his lean bronzed features were impassive, infuriatingly uninformative. ‘You’ve said that to me before.’

‘Yes...’ Gaby compressed her lips on the reminder.

‘It could be...’ Angel breathed in deep and slow ‘...that I was a little hasty at our last meeting.’

A spasm of intense satisfaction arrowed through Gaby at that unexpected admission from Angel. ‘A little hasty? Is that so?’

Picking up on her pleasure at his discomfiture, Angel gritted his even white teeth. ‘Yes, that is so. As you pointed out at the time, there is always risk attached to sexual intimacy.’

‘I do not view the conception of my son as a risk.’

Angel shrugged a cashmere-clad broad shoulder, seemingly indifferent to her sensitivity, his hard, handsome face unyielding. ‘I should have acknowledged at the time that there was a chance that I could be responsible, but I had already been through this scenario with one too many of your predecessors with the result that I was too angry to be logical. My background has made it a challenge for me to trust women.’

Gaby did not like being included in the category of ‘predecessors’ but her curiosity was piqued by his admission that he found it difficult to trust her sex. ‘It was one night,’ she conceded with a careless shrug that in no way mirrored how she felt about it. ‘Now that you’re apologising, I suppose I can follow your feelings to some degree.’

‘I was not aware that I was apologising,’ Angel framed grittily.

‘If you’re not prepared to apologise for the way you treated me that day at the hotel, I have nothing more to say to you,’ she told him truthfully. ‘Nobody treats me like that and gets away with it!’

Angel ground his teeth together again.

‘You see, I understand that you’re rude because you’re used to people tiptoeing around your royal person, but your birth and your wealth do not mean that you are better than I am,’ Gaby spelt out succinctly. ‘Or that I will let you get away with behaving as though you are.’

Angel’s brilliant dark golden eyes smouldered as though she had lit a fire behind them. ‘Message received,’ Angel murmured dulcetly, disconcerting her with that easy switch. ‘I apologise for treating you unfairly.’

Gaby hadn’t believed that he would or even could climb down off his high horse and the shock of that accomplishment knocked her off balance. ‘All right...so let’s move on. Why do you want to see Alexios? Surely you would want DNA testing before doing so?’

‘Is it true that he has green eyes?’ Angel demanded, startling her with that apparently random question.

‘Yes, it is...but what does that have to do with anything? And how did you track me down here anyway?’ Gaby pressed in a ruffled tone.

‘Let me give you a hint...you’ve been too active on social media with your friends. I’ve been searching for you for months,’ Angel revealed. ‘There were no leads until I was able to establish a link between Laurie Bannister, your friend Liz’s twin, and you. From that point it was possible to check out their connections to find out where you might be.’

‘What do you mean by searching?’ Gaby prompted in dismay at what he had revealed. It was true that she had often chatted to Liz’s twin, Laurie, online, mentioning meetings because Laurie lived only forty miles away with her husband.

‘If your son is also my son, we have a situation which I cannot ignore. He would not be an ordinary child—he would be a royal child. It was imperative that I locate you and check it out. I used a private detective agency to trace you.’

‘Through my friends,’ she repeated in horror. ‘You had someone snoop into their lives to track me down? That’s appalling.’

‘If you had left a forwarding address or told your friend Liz that it was acceptable to tell me where you were, we wouldn’t be in this position now and I wouldn’t have had to have anyone investigated,’ Angel countered without hesitation.

Gaby studied a scratched area of the pine kitchen table, mastering her resentment. It was done and too late to complain about anyone’s privacy being invaded, she conceded grudgingly. Perhaps telling Liz not to share her address, should Angel enquire, had been a step too far in mistrust...and he had enquired through staff. But then, she recognised ruefully, she had wanted to punish him, an urge which Clara’s intervention had reminded her that she needed to suppress.

‘Look,’ she said stiffly. ‘Come into the...er...sitting room...’ Walking back across the hall, she pushed open the door of the room that was hardly ever used, crossing to the window to lift the blind and let in the sunlight. ‘Do you still drink black coffee with one sugar?’

Angel released his pent-up breath, registering that Gabriella wasn’t going to shout or throw things at him again. The strangest sense of disappointment instantly afflicted him and took him aback. No woman had ever argued with him or criticised him the way that Gabriella did and why the hell would he miss that?

‘Yes, thank you,’ he murmured with scrupulous politeness.

Angel sounded smooth as glass and Gaby shot him a suspicious glance, wondering what manipulative thoughts were currently operating behind that wickedly attractive façade of his. As she had learned in the past, he was clever, very clever, and well able to play the long game to conceal his true purpose. But just then she had more on her mind than working out Angel’s motivation and she bent to light the gas fire in the chilly room before speeding off to check on Clara and make the coffee.

She could have taken Angel up to the small apartment above the extension where she lived but that would take him too close to her son and she wasn’t ready for that step yet. So, instead of that she put on the kettle and hurried out to the greenhouse to see Clara.

‘We’re in the sitting room, so you don’t need to stay out here if you don’t want to,’ she told the older woman gently. ‘Sorry about the shouting. I’m afraid Angel tends to send my temper sky-high.’

‘I reckon his temper is every bit as bad as yours but he’s too reserved to let it fly,’ Clara surmised as she worked at her bench, potting up seedlings. ‘He’s much too handsome for his own good, and he’ll be a truckload of trouble, but I suspect he might be worth it. Only you can decide if he is.’

‘He’s only here because he is finally accepting that Alexios could be his,’ Gaby muttered unhappily.

‘Whatever happens, you mustn’t get into a hostile relationship with him.’

‘How could it be anything other than hostile?’ Gaby’s lovely face was strained as she hovered in the greenhouse doorway.

‘It has to be something else for your son’s sake. Boys need a father,’ Clara informed her.

Paling, Gaby walked back indoors to make the coffee. Be polite, be civilised, she instructed herself, stop making it all so personal and emotional. Wasn’t that a dead giveaway of how Angel made her feel? Getting all riled up and shouting? She was making it far too obvious that she was emotionally involved and had been wounded by the fallout of that night in Alharia. Gaby flinched at the thought and reminded herself that she had been a consenting adult, who had believed that she knew exactly what she was doing. It was a little late now to acknowledge that she had fooled herself into reaching for what she thought she wanted only to discover afterwards that she had secretly wanted much more than a brief sexual encounter...

Angel was cold and he stood by the fire, which put out a miserable amount of heat. He checked his watch, regretting that he had to be back on Themos by morning to attend an important event. He needed time to deal with Gabriella and he didn’t have time to spare. In any case, he was naturally impatient, he conceded, a muscle tightening at his strong jaw as he struggled to clamp down on the volatile mix of anger, frustration and desire that Gabriella always evoked.

Her reappearance with a tray almost made him laugh. Gabriella serving him graciously with coffee was not a vision that rose easily to his imagination. He grasped the cup.

‘Months ago, you joked on social media about having a child with green eyes and curly hair,’ Angel remarked tautly.

Gaby lifted a brow. ‘And the significance of that...is?’

‘My mother had green eyes and curls. She was a legendary beauty. Queen Nabila. Look her up online,’ Angel urged forbiddingly, as though the subject were distasteful to him.

And, of course, on his terms it had to be distasteful to contemplate the likelihood of his first child having been accidentally born to an ordinary woman not of his choosing. Both his parents had been born into royal families and he knew nothing else.

‘But that could just be coincidence,’ Gaby heard herself declare because, when push came to shove, she was realising that she was not eager to share her little boy with Angel. No doubt that was selfish but that was how she felt. Alexios was her family now and, having lost her family when she was fourteen, she was particularly keen now to hold her son close.

‘Do you have reason to believe that your son could have been fathered by someone else?’ Angel queried curtly. ‘Were you with any other man shortly before or soon after me?’

A tide of angry red flooded up her throat into her cheeks. ‘There was no other man. You were my first...’ and her voice ran out of angry steam on that admission because she had not meant to tell him that much.

Angel’s ebony brows pleated in consternation. ‘Your...first? Are you serious?’

‘Wish I wasn’t but yes,’ Gaby confirmed with bitter force.

‘I wouldn’t have taken you to bed had I known that,’ Angel breathed in a driven undertone, swinging away from her to stand by the window and stare out, his strong profile taut and set. ‘I don’t mess around with virgins. It’s too inequal, too open to misinterpretation.’

‘Not in my case,’ Gaby said dulcetly. ‘I knew what I was getting and I got it.’

Angel flipped back to her, sizzling dark golden eyes bright as the sun. ‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’ he flared back at her, sensing that he was being insulted.

‘A guy who wouldn’t even wake me up to say goodbye.’

Angel visibly ground his even white teeth together and then froze to say, ‘No, we’re not doing this! You’re not going to derail me from the reason I’m here by making me angry again,’ he told her harshly. ‘And I’m here to ask if you will agree to a private DNA test being done.’

Gaby recalled how he had thrown it in her face that she would drag him to court to demand a DNA test. ‘No.’

Angel’s gaze narrowed, hardened. ‘Then we go through the courts.’

Gaby paled at that immediate rejoinder. ‘No, there’s no good reason to take it that far.’

‘Yes, there is. If your child is mine, then I will have to marry you!’ Angel bit out rawly.

Gaby’s dark blue eyes widened to their fullest extent and she stared back at him in disbelief. ‘Now it’s my turn to a-ask if you are serious,’ she stammered unevenly.

‘Serious as a heart attack,’ Angel qualified without a shade of amusement.