Royal Christmas: Royal Love-Child, Forbidden Marriage. Кейт Хьюит

do Nicholas’s dirty work. And when Piers said escorted, Leo had no doubt he really meant forced. So, only minutes after arriving at the palace, Phoebe was being treated like an unwanted prisoner, and her son was alone with the king. A stranger.

      Rage, white-hot and electric, coursed through Leo. For a moment a memory of his own mother’s treatment blazed through him. Just like Phoebe, she’d been shunted from the palace and her son’s life because she’d been surplus to requirements. He felt sick at what Phoebe had to endure. What he had allowed her to endure.

      ‘I will speak to the king,’ he said shortly and, tossing the rest of his mail aside, he strode from the room. Rage fuelled him as he navigated the palace’s many corridors before arriving at the throne room. He paused at the doors, for if Christian was still with the king he had no desire to frighten the boy. All was silent from within. Leo threw open the doors and strode in.

      Nicholas sat on the throne, a small, grey-haired man, diminished by age, wearing his usual three-piece suit, his thin, liver-spotted hands folded over his middle.

      Leo didn’t bother with the preliminaries; he was too angry. ‘What were you thinking,’ he demanded tersely, ‘to separate Phoebe from her child practically the moment they arrived?’

      Nicholas regarded his nephew shrewdly. ‘Phoebe, is it? I told you not to bring her.’

      ‘I had no choice,’ Leo replied, his voice curt despite the anger that still coursed through him. He curled his hand into a fist at his side, resisting the urge to plough it straight into the king’s sagging belly. ‘She wouldn’t be bought.’

      ‘Everyone can be bought.’

      Leo pressed his lips together. ‘Phoebe is utterly dedicated to her son. I’ve seen it myself.’ He paused. ‘Before I went to New York, I didn’t realise quite how much.’ He’d gone to New York anticipating a flighty, careless woman … the kind of woman who had married a man she’d known for little more than a week, and separated from a month later. Yet Phoebe hadn’t been that woman. She’d changed, he realised, changed and grown, and he felt a surprising flash of both pride and admiration at the thought.

      Nicholas shrugged. ‘No matter. I’m sure we can find a way to dispose of her.’

      Dispose of her. Like rubbish, Leo thought, just as Phoebe had feared. Twenty-four hours ago such a statement would have caused barely a ripple of unease; Phoebe had just been an inconvenience to deal with. Yet now his uncle’s callousness infuriated him. Enraged him, touching and hurting him in a deep place inside he couldn’t bear to think about. ‘Your sensitivity astonishes me,’ he said in a clipped voice that belied the emotion coursing through him in an unrelenting river, ‘but she has a legal right to her son—’

      ‘As did your mother,’ Nicholas replied with a glimmer of a smile. ‘Yet she saw fit to step aside.’

      Leo struggled to speak calmly; the mention of his mother caused that river of emotion flowing through him to become a torrent, an unstoppable tide. For a moment he was that boy again, standing at the window, struggling not to cry, yet wanting desperately to shout out, to beg her to come back or at least turn around. She never had.

      Mio Dio, did he see himself in Christian? His mother in Phoebe? How could he have ever considered separating them for a moment?

      Yet he hadn’t, Leo realised. From the moment he’d entered the salon at the consulate and seen Phoebe standing there, so proud and afraid, so much the same as he remembered with her wide grey eyes, as clear as mirrors, and her dark, curly hair, irrepressible and wild … his plans to buy her off had disappeared. Evaporated, like so much meaningless mist. He would never separate a mother from her child … yet what could he do with her now? What life could she have in Amarnes? Or would the king tire of the boy as Phoebe hoped?

      ‘What do you intend,’ he asked now, trying to sound unconcerned, ‘with the boy?’

      Nicholas shrugged. ‘I like him,’ he said, his tone that of a child with a new toy. ‘He has courage. He was obviously afraid when he entered the throne room, but he didn’t succumb to tears. He threw back his shoulders and greeted me like a man.’ Nicholas paused, and Leo turned around to see the king give him a sly, sideways smile. ‘He will make a good king.’

      For a moment all Leo could do was stare blankly at the king as his words echoed through him. ‘He will make a good king … a good king … a good king …’ ‘What,’ he finally asked with soft menace, ‘do you mean?’

      Nicholas chuckled. ‘You didn’t realise, did you? Why do you think I sent for the boy?’ Nicholas’s mouth twisted cynically. ‘To play happy families?’

      Leo didn’t trust himself to answer. Suddenly he realised how ridiculously sentimental, how glaringly false Nicholas’s desire to see his grandson was. Of course he had an ulterior motive … but king?

      ‘Anders abdicated,’ Leo finally said in a low voice. ‘You can’t undo—’

      ‘Can’t I?’ Nicholas looked positively gleeful, causing rage to course through Leo once more. Rage and regret and guilt, all wrapped together, consuming him, choking him—He’d been so blind. So blind to follow the king’s bidding, to ignore his own memories, to bring Phoebe and Christian here—to think he could be king. That he deserved to be.

      ‘I’ve called a session of Parliament,’ Nicholas said. He sat back on the throne, an ageing tyrant still determined to wield his power. To hurt.

      ‘And just like that,’ Leo demanded in a hiss, ‘you’re going to change the line of succession, make a child you don’t even know your heir—?’

      ‘The line of succession is intact,’ Nicholas informed him coldly. ‘You were the aberration.’

      Of course he was. He always had been. The older son of the younger brother. What a useless position that was. Leo laughed, a harsh, ugly sound. ‘I know how much it infuriated you that I was made heir—tell me, was it pride that kept you from begging Anders not to abdicate? Perhaps in time you would have accepted his bride, as long as it meant your son could be king.’

      Nicholas’s eyes narrowed to two slits blazing hatred and contempt, the only weapons he had. ‘And now my grandson will be king instead,’ he said coldly.

      ‘If Parliament agrees to reinstate Anders posthumously.’

      ‘They will.’ Nicholas spoke with such certainty, and Leo knew he had reason to. Parliament did what the king wanted it to. He shook his head, the implications of Nicholas’s pronouncement filtering through him.

      He wouldn’t be king. For six years he’d been the heir, serving the crown, serving Nicholas in attempt after attempt to show how worthy he was. Even if he didn’t believe he was himself.

      It had taken several years of honest living before the Press—and the people—started to believe in him, in the idea of him as king, but he’d won their trust. Their respect.

      He’d never won the king’s.

      He was the son of a second son; he’d been a playboy, a reprobate, a rake. And deeming him even more unworthy were the feelings he’d locked inside himself, feelings he refused to consider or acknowledge because to do so would be to open a Pandora’s box of emotions that might never be shut again.

      And now it was going to be taken away, his life—and Christian’s—irrevocably changed by the whim of an ill, old man. The twin demons of regret and guilt lashed him. He’d brought Phoebe straight into the lion’s den—a pit of vipers! For if Christian was heir, there was no question of him returning to his life in New York … ever. And Nicholas would want Phoebe completely and utterly out of the way … out of the country, out of Christian’s life, and he’d do whatever he could to achieve his goal.

      And Leo … Leo had practically been his stooge. He’d thought he was serving the crown, but now he saw he’d only been serving the greedy whims of a vicious old man. He shook his head slowly, steeled his spine.