The kings hidden heir, p.1
The King's Hidden Heir, page 1
“Look... I should have told you sooner.” Emmy swallowed.
She was biting her lip in a way that was making warning bells ring loudly inside his head, when suddenly she sat up, all that hair streaming down over her shoulders like liquid gold. She looked like a goddess, he thought achingly, when her next words drove every other thought from his head.
“You have a son, Kostandin.”
What she said didn’t compute. In fact, she’d taken him so completely by surprise that Kostandin almost told her the truth. That he’d never had a child, nor wanted one. His determination never to procreate was his get-out-of-jail-free card. He felt the beat of a pulse at his temple. Because what good was a king without an heir?
Sharon Kendrick once won a national writing competition by describing her ideal date: being flown to an exotic island by a gorgeous and powerful man. Little did she realize that she’d just wandered into her dream job! Today, she writes for Harlequin, and her books feature often stubborn but always to-die-for heroes and the women who bring them to their knees. She believes that the best books are those you never want to end. Just like life...
Books by Sharon Kendrick
Harlequin Presents
Secrets of Cinderella’s Awakening
Confessions of His Christmas Housekeeper
Her Christmas Baby Confession
Innocent Maid for the Greek
Italian Nights to Claim the Virgin
The Housekeeper’s One-Night Baby
Jet-Set Billionaires
Penniless and Pregnant in Paradise
Passionately Ever After...
Stolen Nights with the King
Visit the Author Profile page at Harlequin.com for more titles.
The King’s Hidden Heir
Sharon Kendrick
For my darling husband, Pete Crone—an exemplar of humour, adventure and romance. xxx
Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
EPILOGUE
EXCERPT FROM A TYCOON TOO WILD TO WED BY CAITLIN CREWS
CHAPTER ONE
London
HIS BODY WAS bathed in the sheen of the early-morning sun. Every sinew washed with pale gold. A powerful thigh spread carelessly over her hip, anchoring her where she most wanted to be.
With him.
Next to him.
And—at countless points throughout the night—under him.
Her body still warm with the aftermath of pleasure, Emerald’s gaze drifted over him, drinking in all that hard muscle and marvelling that a man could be so strong and so beautiful.
‘I’m not asleep.’
His accented voice filtered through the air and she blushed, unsure of how to respond, because she’d never done anything like this before. Picking up the mechanics of sex was the easy bit—it was the emotional side which was tricky. Would it be so wrong to relay an unarguable fact? She sighed. ‘That was fantastic.’
‘Yes, it was,’ he agreed.
She stroked her finger over his arm. ‘Really?’
‘Really.’ There was a pause while he removed his leg from her body and suddenly a breath of air rippled in from the open window onto her exposed skin and made her shiver. ‘But you should have told me.’
She thought about pretending she didn’t know what he was talking about but his tone had suddenly become touched with ice and instinct warned Emerald that a man like this would have no desire for game-playing.
A man like this.
What did she know of a man like this? Very little really, apart from the glaringly obvious.
He was a royal prince. A billionaire hunk pursued by just about every woman with a pulse and yet it had been her he had chosen. It was still difficult to get her head around that. But she hadn’t known or cared about his status when she’d first met him, when he’d handed her his exquisite cashmere coat and she’d given him a ticket in exchange, at the gentlemen’s club where she put in a few hours here and there to supplement her meagre income. She had just looked into the sapphire glitter of his eyes and totally lost her heart. She hadn’t shown it, of course. She wasn’t that stupid.
‘That I was a virgin, you mean?’ she ventured cautiously.
‘Well, I certainly wasn’t referring to my surprise when your debit card bounced,’ he said wryly.
Emerald wondered whether that was intended to demonstrate just how different their circumstances were—as if he needed to! But none of it was relevant. He’d already explained this wasn’t going to morph into a relationship and she’d told him she didn’t care. She’d even convinced herself that she meant it.
Because magic didn’t come along very often, did it? And when you got the chance, you needed to grab it fast. So she had. She’d had the most blissful night of her life and now she was going to have to do the most grown-up thing of all and pretend she didn’t want to see him again.
CHAPTER TWO
Northumberland, six years later
HIS FACE STARED back at her and just the sight of it was doing strange things to her heart. Twisting it with a pain Emerald hadn’t expected to feel, not after six years. Making her mind spin with unwanted images as the screen illuminated his autocratic features. Golden-olive skin and hair as black as a raven’s wing. Eyes like splinters of blue glass, courtesy of the powerful Greeks who had invaded his country half a millennium ago, though his sensual lips owed more to the Italians, who had arrived a few decades later.
Feeling as if she’d been punched in the solar plexus, she turned away from the computer as her sister came charging into the small kitchen of the house they shared.
‘Have you seen the news?’ Ruby demanded.
Emerald huffed out a sigh. A mug of cold tea stood in front of her, next to a slice of untouched toast, which should have been fairly explanatory, given how much she usually enjoyed her breakfast.
She looked up to meet her twin’s worried gaze. ‘Yes, of course I’ve seen the news,’ she answered quietly. ‘The Internet is awash with it. I keep telling myself to turn it off, but somehow I can’t seem to look away.’
‘No. I get that. The question is, what are you going to do?’
Emerald swallowed as she studied Kostandin’s image for the hundredth time and wondered if she would ever become immune to those arresting features.
‘Emerald?’ said Ruby urgently. ‘Did you hear me? I said, what are you going to do?’
Did she actually have to do anything? Emerald wondered. Couldn’t she just bury her head in the sand and pretend none of it had ever happened? After all, when he’d said goodbye to her on that unseasonably frosty English morning Kostandin had made it clear he had no intention of seeing her again. He hadn’t been unkind, but he had certainly been very specific.
‘Don’t waste a second of your time thinking about me, Emerald. I’m not in the market for a relationship. Understand?’
Of course she had. He was a royal prince and she a humble cloakroom attendant—it was hardly a match made in heaven. Their one-night stand was obviously intended to be just that and she’d told herself she should be grateful for his honesty. But it seemed she had been naïve.
Because several days after their passionate liaison his elder brother had been killed in a hunting accident and Prince Kostandin had become King Kostandin of Sofnantis. That had been a lot to process—but what had happened next had provided the killer blow to her tentative plans. For, with almost indecent haste, and despite having told her he never intended to marry anyone, her handsome royal lover had wed his dead brother’s fiancée and they were living happily ever after.
Or so she and the rest of the world had thought—judging by the saccharine-tinted photos of the couple, which were periodically released by the palace and which made Emerald flinch every time she saw them.
But no. The latest news reports were stark. The King and Queen of Sofnantis had recently undergone a quiet and ‘amicable’ divorce. Was there any such thing? she wondered. The couple had requested ‘privacy’ and there would be no further statement.
Emerald might have been able to absorb this news in peace and think about whether it should be allowed to impact on her future, but Kostandin was on an official visit to London. He was tantalisingly close, not locked in his glittering palace far away. Wasn’t fate offering her a golden opportunity to do what she had intended to do all those years ago? What her conscience was urging her to do, even though she was absolutely dreading it.
Ruby’s voice broke into her thoughts. ‘If you want my advice, you’ll give him a wide berth. He won’t want to see you,’ her sister added, with hurtful candour.
‘No, I’m sure he won’t. But that’s irrelevant, surely. My feelings aren’t really the issue here.’ Emerald licked her lips. ‘The point is that he has a son. A son he doesn’t even know about and I think he has a right to know.’
‘And what about your rights?’ demanded Ruby. ‘Don’t your needs count for anything? He’s a king, f or heaven’s sake—and one of the most powerful men in the world. He’s already shown how heartless he could be by acquiring a wife just weeks after sleeping with you. If you just pitch up there with his son and heir, isn’t there a chance...?’ She paused, delicately. ‘Isn’t there a chance he could take Alek away from you?’
‘Things don’t work like that any more,’ argued Emerald staunchly, but she could hear the sudden leak of fear into the words she was saying as much to convince herself as her sister. ‘Women don’t have their children snatched away by men just because they’re powerful.’
‘Don’t they? Aren’t you forgetting something, Emmy? Despite being one of the wealthiest men in the world—what’s the one thing he hasn’t got? The only thing money can’t buy, which is extra important for a king. A son and heir. Don’t you think he’s going to look at Alek—who we both know is the cleverest and most handsome little boy in the whole world—and decide he wants him, no matter what lengths he has to go to in order to achieve that?’
‘Aren’t you jumping the gun?’ questioned Emerald crossly. ‘I don’t have to take Alek with me. I was planning to go and see him on my own and work out the best way of telling him. Obviously if he seems like some kind of autocratic control freak, I’ll walk away, leaving him none the wiser.’
‘But I presume you wouldn’t have slept with him in the first place if you’d thought he was unstable?’
Emerald wondered what Ruby would say if she confessed that she’d barely known him when she’d spent that unforgettable night in his arms. She hadn’t exactly lied about her brief relationship with the devastatingly attractive prince, but she hadn’t been particularly forthcoming, either. Wasn’t the truth that she felt slightly ashamed of getting pregnant by a man with whom she’d shared little more than engaging banter whenever he came into the posh London club where she worked? Until the night when he’d taken her out for dinner and suddenly the sky had exploded with stars—and her foolish heart with it. She wasn’t the first woman to have her head turned by a gorgeous man, nor to have to deal with the surprise pregnancy which had followed, and she wouldn’t be the last. Yet though she shared her sister’s reservations, she knew she had to tell Kostandin about his boy. She couldn’t let this secret burn a hole in her heart for much longer, and didn’t she owe it to Alek, too?
Getting close to him was going to be the difficult bit. He wouldn’t be able to move around with the ease he had always prided himself on before acceding to the throne. She hovered her mouse over the screen until it reached the page which listed the King’s official UK engagements. A state banquet in his honour at Buckingham Palace tonight. A parade of military cadets who were passing out from the Sofnantian Military Academy tomorrow, and security would be tighter than tight in both those places. Her gaze skimmed downwards, until she reached the part which read:
The King will be holding a private party at his old members’ club, on London’s Strand. The chairman of the Colonnade Club professed himself ‘thrilled and honoured’ that the monarch was revisiting one of his old haunts.
Quickly, Emerald shut down her computer and carried it upstairs, away from the searching stare of her sister.
The modest cottage she shared with her son and twin was described as having three bedrooms, but even the most optimistic person would have listed hers as nothing more than a boxroom. Alek had the biggest room and Ruby the next biggest. But Emerald was fine with that. She was used to coming last in the pecking order, because she was the one who had thrown their lives into disarray with the unplanned birth of her son. Plus, she relied on her sister for help, though it was much easier now Alek was at school. She closed her eyes and imagined his beloved jet-dark head bent diligently over his books, but hot on this rush of maternal pride came a shiver of apprehension. Her son’s life might be about to change out of all recognition, and suddenly she was scared.
Picking up her phone, she scrolled through numbers she hadn’t used for years. The first she tried was out of service and nobody answered the second. But then a familiar female voice answered her third attempt.
‘Emmy?’ said the voice doubtfully. ‘Is that you?’
‘It sure is. How are you, Daisy?’
‘I’m good. What the hell happened to you? One day you were there and the next you were gone... You disappeared like a puff of smoke!’
Emerald’s heart began to race. She didn’t want to answer questions like that, especially not now. Nobody had known she was pregnant when she’d left London and that was the way she wanted it to stay, at least for the time being. ‘Oh, I decided to turn my back on the city and embrace country living, and it was cheaper for my sister and I to start our catering business in Northumberland,’ she said truthfully. She hesitated. ‘You’re not still working at the Colonnade, by any chance?’
‘Too right, I am. Got promoted, too. I’m in charge of the staff rota now.’
‘No way!’
‘Yeah.’ There was a pause. ‘We missed you, Emmy. All the punters loved you.’
And one punter in particular, thought Emerald—though she doubted he would have used the word love in any context other than sex. Or was she being unfair? Kostandin might have flirted with her, but she had flirted right back, hadn’t she? If any boundaries had been crossed before they had tumbled into bed together—they had both been complicit in crossing them. She cleared her throat. ‘Listen, I’m in London next week. It would be great to see you but...well, I’m a bit strapped for cash. I don’t suppose there’s any chance of me doing a shift at the club?’
There was a pause. ‘There could be,’ said Daisy, dipping her voice in the way people did when they were about to tell you something they shouldn’t. ‘Remember that hunky prince who was a member here before he became a king?’
A mocking face and a hard body swam into Emerald’s mind. A powerful thigh slung carelessly over her naked hip. She swallowed. ‘Vaguely.’
‘Well, he’s throwing a big do here. A sort of trip down memory lane, I guess. And he’s invited some of the members. We could do with an extra pair of hands for that. Someone we can trust. I can’t really organise a last-minute booking through an agency—not when I’m dealing with an actual member of a royal family.’
Emerald’s throat thickened, because this kind of opportunity seemed almost too good to be true. Had her luck changed for once—giving her relatively free access to a heavily guarded king?
‘I’d really appreciate that,’ she said huskily. ‘I owe you, Daisy.’
‘Sure. Look, why don’t you come here around about five on Saturday afternoon and I’ll fix you up with a uniform?’
* * *
Kostandin glanced around at the mass of people thronging in the columned reception room of his old members’ club, each one of them trying to catch his eye. Had it been a mistake to come back? he wondered grimly. To imagine that he might somehow capture a sense of the man he used to be. Because wasn’t it here, in London, that he had sampled a tantalising taste of freedom, before the constrictions of royal responsibility had been straitjacketed onto his unwilling shoulders?
He thought back to a lifestyle which now seemed like a distant dream. Those heady days when he’d been able to move around the world with relative anonymity, for he had worn his title lightly. And why wouldn’t he, when he had never been intended to rule? The business he had built up through his own endeavours had paid dividends—and his development of induction motors had made him one of the wealthiest men on the planet. And when people enquired why he considered it necessary to work so hard, when his birthright would surely have provided a much easier option, he had shrugged, allowing them any amount of unfounded guesswork.
Because Kostandin knew the truth. He had seen his father ruined by emotional weakness and his brother corrupted by greed and excess. From the get-go it had been a point of honour for him to make his own way in the world, rather than benefit from the supposedly swollen coffers of his royal homeland. He hadn’t wanted to be like them—and he hadn’t been. Until a cruel fate had intervened and the powerful magnet of royal duty had sucked him back into the fold.
