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 step 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,
