horrified gasp. “My son doesn’t need to know—”
Her words stilled in the air as the front door clicked shut and footsteps approached the sitting room from the hall. Both women turned to face the doorway.
Dan Eastwood looked around the corner, his dark eyes glittering dangerously. Even at a distance, Elly could see the thin blue vein throbbing at his temple and the tense cut of his mouth. “I don’t need to know what, Mother?”
Elly’s heart felt as if it were being squeezed by a cold, hard hand. She crossed her fingertips over her chest and swallowed. The warning rumble of Dan’s voice sent icy prickles down her spine.
She glanced quickly at Madge, whose expression had altered with amazing speed from a stubborn glare to a helpless pucker. “Oh, dear. I guess I shouldn’t have let this young woman in. She told me she was your girlfriend, Danny.”
Elly gasped in outrage and shot to her feet. The woman wasn’t as guileless as she appeared. “I never said that! Mrs. Eastwood, you know that I never implied my visit was—” She let out a frustrated wail. Between his mother and a stranger, who was the man likely to believe? “Never mind. I came alone because I felt your mom might feel less self-conscious speaking to me without your being here.”
Dan quirked one skeptical, dark brow at her.
“Honest. I didn’t mean any harm.”
“I told you I would bring you around if necessary!” Dan snapped, then turned to his distraught-looking mother. “I don’t know how she found you. I’m sorry. Now, ladies, what is it I don’t need to know?”
Madge firmly pressed her lips together.
“Then you tell me,” he stated, swiveling back to Elly.
“At the moment, there may or may not be anything to tell.” She was doing her best to be discreet. But Dan was making things harder by the minute, and Madge seemed incapable of saying anything to either stop the truth from coming out or to set facts straight. Elly stood to face him. “It’s important that I find out if your mother was ever in Europe…specifically, in Paris.”
Dan looked from the woman he’d fantasized about less than an hour earlier, to his mother. He read a level of anxiety in Madge’s eyes he had never seen before. “What’s going on here, Mom?”
“She’s upsetting me,” Madge whimpered. “Make her leave.”
Dan ground out words between clenched teeth, fighting to hang on to his temper. “She’s going to leave as soon as she explains what the hell she’s fishing for!”
As infuriating as Elly was, his body still reacted with disturbing warmth to her presence. It was impossible to keep his eyes off her pretty, animated face…or her hands, which kept moving from twin perches on her hips to tug nervously at her blouse’s neckline or tuck themselves away when she folded her arms over her chest. Which was another issue entirely…her enticingly lovely, perfectly proportioned chest. She’d evidently left off her jacket for this visit, which offered a much nicer view. Someone help him!
“Why does it matter whether or not my mother ever was in Europe?” he had the presence of mind to demand.
Elly took a deep breath and stepped toward him, praying the right words would come to her. “Papers have recently come to light that indicate a young American woman named Margaret Jennings spent a year abroad, as a student in Paris. That was your maiden name. Right, Mrs. Eastwood?”
Dan answered for her. “Yes, and her junior year she attended the Sorbonne. You told me you did, Mom.”
Madge closed her eyes but acknowledged nothing.
Elly held her breath and asked, “Was it during that year that you met a young man named—”
“I met Carl Eastwood there, yes!” Madge snapped, pushing herself up from her armchair with startling energy. “We married, and nine months later Dan was born. But Carl died very young.” Tears filled her eyes and she wiped at them with the sleeve of her dress.
Dan frowned, looking more puzzled than ever. “I thought you and Dad hooked up in Baltimore.”
“No. No, it was in a little village outside of Paris.” Madge sniffled and looked away from her son. “Years later, I heard the church burned down. Probably destroyed all its records too.”
Elly opened her mouth to tell the woman she knew that was a lie, but at the last second thought better of it since her six-foot-plus son stood by ready to defend his mother’s honor.
“Go on,” Dan growled, his too-perceptive gaze locked onto Elly’s face. “What were you about to say?”
She swallowed over a sandpaper-dry spot in her throat. “There is no record of a marriage, that’s true.” She hesitated, but the look on Dan’s face told her she must finish what she’d begun, regardless of how he took the news. “There is no record…because there has never been a Carl Eastwood in your mother’s life. And there never was a marriage.”
“All right, you’re out of here!” Dan’s wide hand shot out. He seized Elly by the arm and marched her firmly toward the door.
She had only enough time to swipe her purse from the coffee table and grab her coat from the back of her chair before he ushered her out of the room.
“I don’t know what kind of game you’re playing, and I don’t care. You’re leaving, lady.”
“But don’t you want to—”
Before she could get out the rest of her sentence, she found herself standing alone in the cold ocean mist on Madge’s lemon-bright porch. She could still feel the pressure of Dan’s strong fingers on her arm and his palm on her backside after the door slammed behind her. The nerve of the man. He’d thrown her out!
Then the implication of what had just happened hit her. A triumphant grin spread slowly across her lips.
She had found her missing prince!
Two
Elly bounced in anticipation on the edge of the hotel bed, her ear pressed to the telephone receiver. Someone had gone to find her father to take her call. She’d never seen the castle in person, but photographs of Der Kristallenpalast, the famous crystal palace, revealed an immense, turreted structure of pale, lustrous marble and hundreds of richly appointed rooms. Frank Anderson could easily be half a mile from the nearest phone.
His unmistakable smoker’s voice suddenly rasped across the line. “It’s about time. What do you have?”
“It’s a boy!” she cried.
“The old king had a son with the Jennings girl?”
Elly grinned, enjoying her moment of triumph. “That girl is now in her fifties, goes by Madge and is being really stubborn about admitting that she had a royal fling thirty-some years ago.”
“Understandable,” he grumbled. “She married now? Not wanting her husband to know about her past?”
“No,” Elly admitted with a sigh. “But she’s sticking to a story about an American husband
