‘Are you saying you fell pregnant?’ he demanded, his ears screeching with the sound of frantically racing blood. The world stood still; time stopped.
For a moment he imagined that—his child, growing in her belly—and his chest swelled with pride and his heart soared, but pain was right behind, because surely it wasn’t possible. His forehead broke out in perspiration at the very idea of his baby. He knew it was inevitable and necessary, but he still needed time to brace himself for that reality—for the idea of another person who shared his blood, a person who could be taken from him at any time.
Rejection was in every line of his body. ‘We were careful. I was careful. I took precautions, as I always do.’
‘Charming!’ She crossed her arms over her chest. ‘Tell me more about the other women you’ve had sex with, please.’
He ground his teeth together. He hadn’t meant that, and yet it was true. Sexual responsibility was ingrained in Matthias. Anyone in his position would take that seriously.
‘What the hell are you saying?’ he demanded, all the command his position conferred upon him in those words.
She sucked in a deep breath as though she was steadying herself. ‘Fine. Yes. I fell pregnant.’ Her words hit him right in the solar plexus, each with the speed and strength of a thousand bullets.
‘What?’ For the first time in his life, Matthias was utterly lost for words.
When his family had died and a nation in mourning had looked to him, a fifteen-year-old who’d lost his parents and brother, who’d been trapped in a car with them as life had left their bodies, he had known what was expected of him. He’d received the news and wrapped his grief into a small compartment for indulgence at a later date, and he’d shown himself to be strong and reliable: a perfect king-in-waiting.
She lifted her fingertips to the side of her head, rubbing her temples, and fixed him with her ocean-green stare. Her anguish was unmistakable.
‘I found out about a month after you left.’
His world was a place that made no sense. There were sharp edges everywhere, and nothing fitted together. ‘You were pregnant?’
She pulled a face. ‘I just said that.’
His eyes swept shut, his blood raced. ‘You should have told me.’
‘I tried! You were literally impossible to find.’
‘No one is impossible to find.’
‘Believe me, you are. “Matt”. That’s all I had to go on. The hotel wouldn’t give me any information about who’d booked the suite. I had your name and the fact you’re from Tolmirós. That’s it. I wanted to tell you. But trying to find you was like looking for a needle in an enormous haystack.’
And hadn’t he planned for it to be this way? A night without complications—that was what they’d shared. Only everything about Frankie had been complicated, including the way she’d cleaved her way into his soul.
‘So you made a decision like this on your own?’ he fired back, the pain of what he’d lost, what his kingdom had lost, the most important thing in the conversation.
‘Decision?’ She paled. ‘It was hardly a decision.’
‘You had an abortion and took from me any chance to even know my child,’ he said thickly, his chest tight, his organs squeezing inside him.
She sucked in a loud breath. ‘What makes you think I had an abortion?’
He stared at her, the question hanging between them, everything sharp and uncertain now. When he was nine years old he’d run the entire way around the palace, without pausing for even a moment. Up steps, along narrow precipices with frightening glimpses of the city far beneath him, he’d run and he’d run, and when he’d finished he’d collapsed onto the grass and stared at the clouds. His lungs had burned and he’d been conscious of the sting of every cell in his body, as though he was somehow supersonic. He felt that now.
‘You’re saying...’ He stared at her, trying to make sense of this, looking for an explanation and arriving at only one. ‘You didn’t have an abortion?’
‘Of course I didn’t.’
Matthias had a rapier-sharp mind, yet he struggled to process her words, to make sense of what she was saying. ‘You did not have an abortion?’
‘No.’
And something fired inside his mind, a memory, a small recollection that had been unimportant at the time. He spun away from her and stalked through the gallery, through the smaller display spaces that curved towards a larger central room. And he stared at the wall that had framed Frankie when he’d first walked in. He’d been so blindsided by the vision of her initially that he hadn’t properly understood the significance of what he was seeing. But now he looked at the paintings—ten of them in total, all of the same little boy—and his blood turned into lava in his veins.
He stared at the paintings and a primal sense of pride and possession firmed inside him. Something else too. Something that made his chest scream and his brow heat—something that made acid coat his insides, as he stared at the boy who was so familiar to him.
Spiro.
He was looking at a version not only of his younger self, but also of his brother. Eyes that had held his, pain and anguish filling them, as life ebbed from him. Eyes that had begged him to help. Eyes that had eventually clouded and died as Matthias watched, helpless, powerless.
For a moment he looked towards the ground, his chest heaving, his pulse like an avalanche, and he breathed in, waiting for the familiar panic to subside.
‘This is my son.’ More than his son—this was his kin, his blood, his.
He didn’t have to turn around to know she was right behind him.
‘He’s two and a half,’ Frankie murmured, the words husky. She cleared her throat audibly. ‘His name is Leo.’
Matthias’s eyes swept shut as he absorbed this information. Leo. Two and a half. Spiro had been nine when he’d died, the vestiges of his boyish face still in evidence. Cheeks that were rounded like this, and dimpled when he smiled, eyes that sparkled with all his secrets and amusements.
He pushed the memories away, refusing to give into them like this. Only in the middle of the night, when time seemed to slip past the veil of living, when ancient stars with their wisdom and experience whispered that they would listen, did he let his mind remember, did he let his heart hurt.
He turned his attention to the paintings, giving each one in turn the full power of his inspection. Several of the artworks depicted Leo—his son—in a state of play. Laughing as he tossed leaves overhead, his sense of joy and vitality communicated through the paint by Frankie’s talented hand. Other paintings were a study of portraiture.
It was the final picture that held him utterly in its thrall.
Leo was staring out of the canvas, his expression frozen in time, arresting a moment of query. One brow was lifted, his lips were turned into a half-smile. His eyes were grey, like Matthias’s—in fact, much of his face was a carbon copy of Matthias’s own bearing. But the freckles that ran haphazardly across the bridge of his nose were all Frankie’s, as was the defiant amusement that stirred in the boy’s features.
Emotions welled inside Matthias, for his own face was only borrowed—first from his father, King Stavros, and it had now been passed onto his own son. What other features and qualities were held by this boy, this small human who was of his own flesh and blood?
His own flesh and blood! An heir! An heir his country was desperate for, an heir he had been poised to marry in order to beget—an heir, already living! An heir, two years old, who he knew nothing about!
‘Where is he?’ The question was gravelled.
He felt her stiffen—he felt everything in that moment, as though the universe was a series of strings and fibres connected through his body to hers. He turned around, pinning her with a gaze that shimmered like liquid metal.
‘Where.’ The word was a slowly flying bullet. ‘Is.’ He took a ste
p closer to her. ‘He?’
All the myths upon which he’d been raised, the beliefs of his people as to the power and strength that ran through his veins, a power that was now in his son’s veins, propelled him forward. But it was not purely a question of royal lineage and the discovery of an heir. This was an ancient, soul-deep need to meet his son—as a man, as a father.
Alarm resonated from Frankie and until that moment he’d never understood what the term ‘mother bear’ had been coined for. She was tiny and slight but she looked more than capable of murdering him with her bare hands if he did anything to threaten their child.
‘He’s outside the city,’ she said evasively, her eyes shifting towards the door. Through it was the foyer, and somewhere there the man who ran this gallery. Her fear was evident, and it served little purpose. He was no threat to her, nor their son.
With the discipline he was famed for, Matthias brought his emotions tightly under control. They didn’t serve him in that moment. Just like his grief had needed to be contained when his family had been killed, so too did his feelings need to be now.
His whole world had shifted off its axis, and he had to find a way to fix that. To redefine the parameters of his being. An heir was driving his need for marriage and here, it turned out, an heir already existed! There was no option for Matthias but to bring that child home to Tolmirós.
His future shifted before his eyes, and this woman was in it, and their son. All the reasons he’d had for walking away from her still stood, except for this heir. It changed everything.
‘I had no idea you were pregnant.’
‘Of course you didn’t. How could you? You probably walked out as soon as I fell asleep.’
No, he’d waited longer than that. He’d watched her sleep for a while, and thought of his kingdom, the expectations that he would return to Tolmirós and take up his title and all the responsibilities that went with that. Frankie had been a diversion—a distraction. She’d been an indulgence when he’d known he was on the cusp of the life he’d been destined to lead.
Only she’d also been quicksand, and a fast escape had seemed the only solution. The longer he’d lingered, the deeper he’d risked sinking, until escape had no longer been guaranteed.
Besides, he’d comforted himself at the time, he’d made her no promises. He’d told her he was only in the States for the weekend. There were no expectations beyond that. He hadn’t broken his word.
‘If you’d left your number, I would have called. But you just vanished into thin air. Not even the detective I hired could find you.’
‘You hired a detective?’ The admission sent sparks through him—sparks of relief and gratitude. Because she hadn’t intentionally kept their son a secret. She’d wanted him to be a part of the boy’s life. And if he’d known of the child back then? If he’d discovered Frankie’s pregnancy?
He would have married her. Her lack of suitability as a royal bride would have been beside the point: his people cared most for the delivery of an heir.
And now he had one.
Every possibility and desire narrowed into one finite realisation. There was only one way forward and the sooner he could convince Frankie of that, the better.
‘Yes.’ She looked away from him and swallowed visibly, her throat chording before his eyes and his gut clenched as he remembered kissing her there, feeling the fluttering of her racing pulse beneath her fine, soft skin. ‘I felt you should know.’
‘Indeed.’ He dipped his head forward and then, appealing to the sense of justice he knew ran through her passionate veins, ‘Will you come for dinner with me?’
Her refusal was imminent but he shook his head to forestall her. ‘To discuss our son. You must see how important that is?’
She was tense, her face rigid, her eyes untrusting. But finally she nodded. A tight shift of her head and an even tighter grimace of those cherry-stained lips. ‘Fine. But just a quick meal. I told Becky I’d be home by nine.’
‘Becky?’
‘My downstairs neighbour. She helps out with Leo when I’m working.’
He filed this detail away, and the image it created, of the mother of his child, the mother of the heir to the throne of Tolmirós, a child worth billions of euros, being minded by some random woman in the suburbs of New York.
‘A quick meal, then,’ he said, giving no indication he was second-guessing her child-minding arrangements.
‘Well?’ The owner of the gallery appeared from behind the desk, his eyes travelling from Frankie to Matthias. ‘Isn’t she talented?’
‘Exceptionally,’ Matthias agreed, and he’d always known that to be the case. ‘I will take all of the artworks against that wall.’ He gestured through the doorway, to the display that housed the portraits of his son.
‘You’ll what?’ Frankie startled as she looked up at him, though he couldn’t tell if she was surprised or annoyed.
He removed a card from his wallet. ‘If you call the number on this card, my valet will arrange payment and delivery.’ He nodded curtly and then put a hand in the small of Frankie’s back, guiding her towards the front door.
Shock, apparently, held her quiet. But once they emerged onto the Manhattan street, a sultry summer breeze warming the evening, she stopped walking, jerking out of his reach and spinning to face him.
‘Why did you do that?’
‘You think it strange that I should want paintings of my son?’
She bristled and he understood—she had yet to come to terms with the fact that he was also the boy’s parent, that she now had to share their son.
Not only that—he couldn’t have paintings of his child, the heir to his throne, for sale in some gallery in New York. It wasn’t how things were done.
‘No,’ she admitted grudgingly, and the emotion of this situation was taking its toll on her. The strength and defiance she carried in her eyes were draining from her. Wariness took their place.
‘Come on.’ He gestured towards the jet-black SUV that was parked in front of the gallery. Darkly tinted windows concealed his driver and security detail from sight but, as they approached, Zeno stepped out, opening the rear doors with a low bow.
Frankie caught it, her eyes narrowing at the gesture of deference. It was so much a part of Matthias’s day that he barely noticed the respect with which he was treated. Seeing it through Frankie’s eyes though, he understood. It was confronting and unusual.
‘You know, I never even had your surname,’ she murmured as she slid into the white leather interior of the car—her skin was so pale now it matched the seats.
There was so much he wanted to ask about that. Would she have given their child his name if she’d known it? The idea of his son being raised as anything other than a Vasilliás filled him with a dark frustration.
He wanted to ask her this, and so much more, but not even in front of his most trusted servants would he yet broach the subject of his heir.
With a single finger lifted to his mouth, he signalled silence and then settled back into the car himself, brooding over this turn of events and what they would mean for the marriage he had intended to make.
* * *
‘I presumed you meant dinner at a restaurant,’ she said as the car pulled up to a steel monolith on United Nations Plaza. The drive had been conducted in absolute silence, except for when the car drew to a stop and he’d spoken to his driver in that language of his, all husky and deep, so her pulse had fired up and her stomach had churned and feelings that deserved to stay buried deep in the past flashed in her gut, making her nerve-endings quiver and her pulse fire chaotically against the fine walls of her veins.
‘Restaurants are not private enough.’
‘You can’t speak quietly in a restaurant?’
‘Believe me, Frankie, this is better.’ His look was loaded with intensity and there was a plea in the depth of his gaze
as well, begging her to simply agree with him on this occasion. There was a part of her, a childish, silly part, that wanted to refuse—to tell him it didn’t suit her. He’d disappeared into thin air and she’d tried so hard to find him, to tell him he was a father. And now? Everything was on his terms. She wanted to rebel against that, but loyalty to their son kept her quiet. All along, she’d wanted what was best for Leo. She’d spent all her life feeling rejected and unwanted by her biological parents, and she had wept for any idea that Leo might feel the same! That Leo might grow up believing his father hadn’t wanted him.
‘Fine,’ she agreed heavily. ‘But I really can’t stay long.’
‘This is not a conversation to be rushed.’ He stepped out of the car and she followed. He placed a hand on her elbow, guiding her through the building’s sliding glass doors. The lifts were waiting, a security guard to one side.
She hadn’t noticed this degree of staff with him back then. There hadn’t been anyone except a driver, and she’d never really questioned that. It was obvious that he had money—but this was a whole new degree of wealth.
‘Have you had some kind of death threat or something?’ she muttered as the doors of the lift snapped closed behind them.
The look he sent her was half-rueful, half-impatient; he said nothing. But when the lift doors opened into the foyer of what could only be described as a sky palace, he urged her into the space and then held a hand up to still the guard.
More words, spoken in his own tongue, and then the guard bowed low and slipped back into the lift, leaving them alone.
She swallowed at that thought—being alone with him—distracting herself by studying the over-the-top luxury of this penthouse. It wasn’t just the polished timber floors, double height ceilings, expensive designer furnishings and crystal chandeliers that created the impression of total glamour. It was the views of the Manhattan skyline—the Chrysler Building, the Empire State, Central Park—it all spread before her like a pop-up book of New York city.
Large sliding glass doors opened out onto a deck, beyond which there was a pool, set against a glass rail. She imagined swimming in it would feel a little like floating, high above the city.
Shock Heir For The King (Mills & Boon Modern) (Secret Heirs of Billionaires, Book 25) Page 3