Best Friend To Royal Bride / Surprise Baby For The Billionaire. Annie Claydon

was the king of?’

      They’d worked in near silence for over an hour, and now that everyone had gone home for the evening they were alone. Marie had been regretting her reaction to Alex’s disclosure about his family, and the subject had become a bit of a no-go area between them.

      Alex looked up at her questioningly. ‘It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t exist any more.’

      ‘I’m just curious. And… I feel sorry about giving you a hard time when you told me about it.’

      ‘It’s nothing.’ He puffed out breath and then relented. ‘Belkraine. My great-grandfather was Rudolf the Most Excellent and Magnificent, King of Belkraine. Modesty doesn’t run in the family.’

      ‘I guess if you’ve got a few squillion in cash and a palace then you don’t need to be modest…’ She paused. ‘Did he have a palace?’

      ‘Why stop at one when you can have several? The old Summer Palace still exists; it’s near the border between Austria and Italy.’

      ‘Have you ever been there?’

      His lip curled slightly. ‘It was my father’s idea of a summer holiday. We’d go there every year, for a tour of what was supposed to be our birthright. It was excruciating.’

      Alex sounded bitter. He wasn’t a man who held on to bad feelings, so this must be something that ran deep with him.

      ‘I’d be interested to see where my ancestors lived. Although I can say pretty definitely that it wasn’t in a palace.’

      ‘I guess it’s an interesting place. It’s been restored now, and it’s very much the way it was when my great-grandparents lived there. Unfortunately my father used to insist on pointing at everything and telling my mother and me in a very loud voice that all this was really ours and that we’d been exiled to a life of poverty.’

      ‘Ouch.’

      Marie pulled a face and his lips twitched into something that resembled a smile.

      ‘Yes, ouch. Even though my great-grandfather brought a fair bit of the family’s wealth with him—and we had more than enough—my father used to reckon that he was poor because he didn’t have everything he thought he should. He had no idea what real poverty is. It was just…embarrassing.’

      ‘Is that why you never said anything about it?’ Marie was beginning to understand that this hadn’t been a wish to deceive, but something that had hurt him very badly.

      ‘That and a few hundred other things. Like having to wear a version of the Crown Prince’s military uniform at the annual party he gave on the anniversary of our family ascending the throne in 1432. After a particularly bloody series of wars, I might add. My family took the kingdom from someone else, so I never could see how having it taken from us was any cause for complaint.’

      He ripped open a seed packet as if he was trying to chop its head off. Seeds scattered all over the concrete and Alex shook his head in frustration, cursing under his breath.

      Marie swallowed down the temptation to tell him that it was okay, that they could pick them up again. This wasn’t about the seeds, and he’d obviously not had much chance to get it out of his system. The idea that it had been nagging at him for so many years, concealed beneath the carefree face he’d shown to the world, was unbearably sad.

      She bent down, picking the seeds up one by one. ‘Good thing these aren’t begonias. We’d never be able to pick up those tiny seeds.’

      He laughed, his resentment seeming to disappear suddenly. Marie would rather he held on to it. His feelings were shut away now, under lock and key, and when he’d tipped the last of the seeds back into the packet, he stood.

      ‘I’ve a few things that I really need to do. Do you mind if we start again in the morning?’

      ‘Of course not. Anything I can give you a hand with?’

      ‘No, stay here. We really need a garden. It will give people hope.’

      Would it give him hope? Or just other people?

      Marie decided not to ask, because Alex was already opening the door that led back into the building, and she doubted whether he would have answered anyway.

       CHAPTER FOUR

      WAS THIS REALLY what Marie wanted to know about him? That he was the great-grandson of a tyrant king? Alex decided he was overreacting, and that it was just natural curiosity. He’d be curious about the mechanics of the thing if he’d suddenly found out that Marie was a fairy princess. But then that wouldn’t come as much of a surprise—he’d always rather suspected that she was.

      He waited until he heard the main doors close and then threw down his pen. The table of dependencies he’d been sketching out for Jim Armitage wasn’t working anyway, and he should probably just tell him what needed to be finished before the clinic opened, and leave him to work it out. There was such a thing as being too hands-on. And he couldn’t leave without taking a look…

      Marie had moved some of the planters, obviously having changed her mind on how best to group them. The shrubs were arranged under a makeshift plastic canopy to protect them from the weather, along with the seed trays that they’d filled.

      Alex sat down on the upturned crate he’d occupied earlier. It occurred to him that this was the first garden he’d ever really had a hand in. His parents’ garden had been designed to be looked at, preferably from a distance, and hadn’t really been the kind of place for a child who might disturb its well-ordered beauty. When he’d left home, the indoor plants he’d bought to brighten up his flat had generally died from neglect, and Alex had decided that his contribution to the environment was to leave them in the shop and let them go to someone who would remember to water them.

      But this time the idea of creating something from scratch and tending it over time was something he very much wanted to be a part of. And so what if Marie had asked him about the one thing he always shrank from discussing? She wanted to know about the Kings of Belkraine because she wanted to know about him. If she had any questions tomorrow, he’d answer them.

      When he arrived at the clinic the next morning, Marie was already sitting on her crate, wearing a T-shirt and jeans. His crate had been left in exactly the same place it had occupied last night, in mute invitation.

      Alex opened the door of the courtyard and went to sit opposite her.

      ‘Morning.’

      She gave him a bright smile. Her cheeks were still a little red from where the sun had kissed them yesterday.

      Alex nodded and sat down, reaching for an empty seed tray from the pile. He filled the tray with compost and opened one of the seed packets, letting the cool quiet of the hour before everyone else arrived for work seep into him for a while before he spoke.

      ‘I argued with my father and he threw me out of the house when I was eighteen.’

      She looked up at him, her lip quivering. ‘That’s a hard thing to have to bear, Alex.’

      He shook his head. Marie knew far more about hardship than he did. ‘Your father left when you were ten.’

      ‘It’s not a competition, Alex. You don’t have to keep quiet about what happened to you because you think what happened to me might have been worse—it doesn’t work that way. Anyway, my father left because of what happened between my mum and him. She told us that. It’s different.’

      Alex wondered how different it really was. Marie had worked so hard to help support her brothers, and he’d always had a sense that she felt somehow responsible for her father leaving.

      But