The Secret Prince. Kathryn Jensen

cheeks. She twisted violently in her seat, felt the heaviness in her chest pressing relentlessly, then sensed a warm hand settling on her shoulder.

      “Are you all right?” It wasn’t her mother’s voice, as she’d so often imagined at the end of her worst attacks. This voice had a deeper, stronger timbre. “Elly?”

      She blinked her eyes open and took a moment to orient herself to an adult world, lights dim along a slender, shining cabin. Her throat burned, and her temples throbbed hotly. Turning her head, she looked up at Dan who had crossed the aisle to sit in the vacant seat beside her.

      “You were having a bad dream,” he murmured.

      “Was I?” The break between the past and the present seemed liquid, as if she still might float back into the pain and experience it all over again.

      Dan took her hand between his and rested it on his knee. “Want to tell me about it? If you share a dream, you can keep it from coming back, you know.” He smiled at her.

      “Not this one.” She shivered then swallowed twice, trying to ease the roughness in her throat, trying to calm her drumming heartbeat. Horrid sounds still reverberated in her head. The awful coldness of death clutched at her. “This one’s a keeper, whether I want it or not.”

      Dan frowned. “A bad one, huh?”

      “The worst.” She would have let it go at that. But his quiet compassion and steady gaze beckoned her to say more. She had a sudden intuitive flash that she and Dan shared something—pasts that would haunt them and remain with them all of their lives. “It’s not fantasy,” she explained. “It’s like an instant replay of something that really happened.”

      “Like a soldier having a flashback of battle?”

      “Something like that.” Elly drew herself up in the seat, still trembling, and glanced across at Madge. She was fast asleep. “You’re really good to her,” she whispered.

      “Why shouldn’t I be? She’s my mother.”

      “Some people don’t appreciate what they have, the sacrifices their parents make for them.”

      “I guess that’s true,” he agreed slowly, encouraging her with his steady gaze. “Aren’t you good to your mother?”

      Her eyes closed. She shuddered.

      “I’m sorry,” Dan whispered. “That was far too personal.” He took a deep breath. “I suppose I felt justified, since you’ve dug up so much about me. I know nothing of you, except that you work for your father.”

      She shrugged, feeling a little calmer at the sound of his mellow voice. “There’s not a lot to tell. I was twelve years old. My parents had tried for years to have a second child. They were overjoyed when it looked as if my mother would carry to full term.” Her voice was flat, without the emotion she held so carefully within her. “Mom died in childbirth. My baby brother didn’t make it either.”

      “That’s terrible.” He squeezed her hand. “It must have taken a long time to get over that.” Then their eyes met and he knew. “Or maybe you never have.”

      She looked away from his too-perceptive gaze. The thick-glassed window to her left was black. No moon. But fat, white stars shone through the night over the endless Atlantic Ocean. She felt Dan’s thumb drawing comforting circles over the back of her hand.

      Suddenly, Elly found herself talking. Pushing out words without taking a breath, baring her soul as she’d never done with anyone in her life. She couldn’t imagine why everything should tumble out of her at this moment, in front of this man. Perhaps because she fore-saw pain and a struggle coming his way. Or maybe it was because they would soon go their separate ways. Sharing the agony of her past and fears of the future with this man who was passing so briefly through her life was as devoid of threat as confiding in a wall.

      As she let the words flow, telling him of the night she had lost her mother forever and her father for many months to his grief, Dan’s arm came around her, as if to shield her from her own memories.

      “My dad just stopped functioning after my mother died. He didn’t go to work. He didn’t eat enough to keep a person alive. He started smoking again, and he drank quite a lot, I think. He spent a lot of time away—most of every day and always the nights. He wouldn’t mention her name. We didn’t talk.”

      Dan stared at her, his eyes hard and dark with concern. “That was when you most needed him.”

      She sighed. “Yes, but I can’t blame him for distancing himself from me. If you ever saw my mother’s college graduation photo, you’d think that I could be her twin. It just hurt Dad too much to look at me, and think about her.”

      “That’s no excuse for neglecting a child,” he snapped.

      She squeezed her eyes shut. “You can’t understand how it was.” She swallowed. Dare she go on? Dare she tell him the rest, the part that still controlled her future and wouldn’t let her move on with her own life? But now that she’d opened her soul to him it seemed impossible to stop the flood of feelings.

      “Years later,” she whispered, “Dad told me what had happened that night. My mother had an enlarged heart. They’d known that since I was born and had elected to do a C-section. Her doctor had advised another C-section to take the stress off delivering her second baby. When she went into labor early, her heart couldn’t take it, and the baby died of asphyxiation before the medics could arrive.” She swallowed three times before she was able to look at him again. Tears clung to her eyelashes.

      “I’m so sorry, Elly.”

      She nodded, plunging on. “Dad insisted that I get a complete physical a few years later. He didn’t seem surprised when they found I’d inherited my mother’s heart problem, it was just a little larger than it should have been. Nothing easily fixed, just something to live cautiously with.

      “From that day, I decided never to have children of my own. I love kids, I really do,” she insisted, her heart breaking even as she said the words. “But I can’t risk my life the way my mother did.”

      “Death in childbirth is a very rare thing these days,” Dan commented gently. “Chances are, if she’d been able to reach a hospital, she’d have been all right. You shouldn’t—”

      Elly pulled her hand away from him. “Don’t tell me what I should or shouldn’t do!” she snapped. Not wanting to alarm the sleeping passengers around them, she choked back the sob that swelled inside her. The words came out in breathless gulps. “Don’t…lecture…me!”

      “I’m not, Elly,” he whispered. “I’m just trying to state a medical reality. All sorts of advances have been made in the last ten or more years. Odds are that if you really want a baby, you could have one without complications.”

      She glared at him. “Odds. Chances. Do you really believe that adding one more child to this earth is worth the risk to me or any other woman whose body isn’t strong enough?”

      He didn’t answer.

      She let out a long breath, feeling strangely better for the release of emotions. She thought more clearly now about her past choices.

      Over the years, she’d had a few male friends—mostly kept at arm’s length with no physical relationship involved. A few she’d slept with, but only after first being sure they lacked all desire to settle down and start a family, then guaranteeing she couldn’t become pregnant with them. She had stayed on the Pill during those limited months in a relationship and, because she’d never given her heart, she hadn’t regretted when they’d moved on to other women. The last breakup had been heart-wrenching, though. Sam had been a good person and she’d grown intensely fond of him. His only crime was that he’d changed his mind. He had decided he wanted to be a husband and father instead of a boyfriend.

      In the year since then Elly had let no one into her life. But sitting beside her now was a man who was as much temptation as any woman could handle.