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