LITMIR.BIZ

       CHAPTER ONE

      CHARLES EDOUARD ALBERT CINZETTI, Crown Prince of Livaroche, gripped the armrest of his seat as the small plane in which he was travelling—foolishly, he now conceded—was tossed around in gale-force winds and lashing rain.

      The journey had been interminable: long hours in the air, lengthy delays at foreign airports and now this. The pilot’s laconic apology for the rough flight—‘Sorry about the bumps, folks, bit of a low off the coast’—had hardly been reassuring, although Charles began to see lights through the rain, growing steadily brighter, and then they were down, with every passenger on board heaving a huge sigh of relief.

      Not that Charles’s journey had ended. He had to find his way to the seaside town of Port Anooka, another thirty miles from the airport.

      ‘Just down the road,’ the travel agent had told him. ‘You could hire a car.’

      Which had been a good idea back in Sydney, where the weather was clear and bright, but in this deluge?

      No way!

      ‘Just a bit of a low off the coast,’ the cab driver told him, as he steered his vehicle through practically horizontal rain. ‘Port’ll be cut off, and that place you want, the old lady’s house on the bluff—well, you won’t even be able to get back to the village once the tide comes in and the road floods.’

      Charles wondered if it was jet lag that made the conversation—carried out in clear, everyday English words—unintelligible.

      A village that was cut off and flooded at high tide?

      Coming from a tiny, landlocked principality, he knew little of tides but surely villages were built above high-tide marks?

      And what was this low everyone was talking about?

      He gathered it was a meteorological depression but he didn’t know much about them either. At home, it might mean rain, or in winter snow, but obviously here it brought a deluge and wild wind.

      ‘The old lady’s barmy, ya know,’ the driver continued, breaking into Charles’s consideration of the limits of his very expensive education. ‘Livin’ out there on her own, the place fallin’ to bits around her.’

      Place falling to bits? Charles thought. He thought of the comfortable apartment he’d left behind at the palace. Of the snow, already deep on the mountain slopes, and Christmas lights slung along the streets; rugged-up carollers knocking on doors, and the city’s Christmas tree ready to be raised into pride of place in the city square.

      Had he made a mistake, coming here?

      But how else could he get to know at least something of the mother who’d died giving birth to him—the woman his father had loved, married and buried, all within eighteen months of meeting her?

      His father would talk of how she had made him laugh, how kind she had been to everyone she’d met, and how they’d fallen in love at first sight.

      Not much help in putting together a picture of the whole woman, but Charles did know they’d met at Christmas, which was why he’d chosen to come now to see what she’d seen, do what she’d done, and hopefully get to know his grandmother—and to learn why she’d never contacted them. Something his father had never been able to explain—or perhaps had not wanted to explain.

      As far as Charles was concerned, someone as loving and giving as his mother—gleaned from his father’s description of her—must have grown up in a warm, loving family. He wasn’t personally familiar with normal families, but anyone who’d worked in children’s wards in a hospital had seen loving families up close, and knew they existed. Not in every case, of course, but in enough to have learnt how strong the bonds of family love could be.

      His father had encouraged him to come, perhaps hoping once his son had it out of his system, he’d settle down, marry and have the children so important to the continuation of the royal line.

      Charles sighed.

      It wasn’t that he didn’t want to marry, but no woman he had ever met had made him feel the way his parents must have felt when they’d run away together.

      ‘Port Anooka!’ the driver announced, breaking into his thoughts as they entered another lit-up area. ‘Not that there’s much of it these days, and you’re still ten minutes from the house.’

      He half turned.

      ‘Sure you want to go out there? Look how high the tide is already. You won’t get back in an hour.’

      Charles peered through the streaming windshield and was startled to see huge waves crashing onto the promenade along the foreshore, not a hundred yards from the cab.

      Was he sure?

      Shouldn’t he book into a hotel, and perhaps go out tomorrow?

      But the journey had already been too long.

      ‘Of course,’ he said, hoping the words sounded more positive than he felt. He’d come all this way, so there was no turning back.

      Not now he was so close...

      Besides, there, ahead of him, was the house, rising up two stories, high on a bluff above the ocean, looking for all the world like something out of a horror film, wreaths of sea mist wisping around it in a temporary lull in the rain.

      He paid the driver, thanked him for his further warning of being stuck out here on the bluff, grabbed his hold-all, and headed for the two low steps leading up to the front door.

      He’d barely raised his hand to knock when the door flew open and a bucket of water was tossed onto him.

      Barmy old lady?

      He knew that in England barmy meant a bit mad.

      But was she really mad, and this her way of repelling intruders?

      Perhaps not as good as the boiling oil of olden days, but still reasonably effective as it had sent him tripping backwards into a large puddle at the bottom of the steps.

      He struggled to his feet, still clutching his bag, and faced his opponent.

      But the thrower wasn’t an old lady. She was a heavily pregnant woman, surely close to giving birth, who was turning away from him, shouting up the stairs to some unseen inhabitant.

      ‘Of course you knew the roof was leaking, Dottie. Why else would you own twelve buckets?’

      She was swinging the door shut when she must have caught a glimpse of him, hesitantly approaching the bottom step, drenched in spite of the umbrella he still held with difficulty above his head.

      ‘Who are you? Where did you come from? What are you doing here?’ A slight pause in the questions, then, ‘You’re wet!’

      He watched realisation dawn on her face and saw her try to hide a smile as she said, ‘Oh, no, did I throw the water over you? You’d better come in.’

      ‘What is it? Who’s there?’

      The querulous questions came from above—nothing wrong with the barmy old lady’s hearing apparently.

      ‘It’s just some fellow I threw water at,’ the woman yelled back, not bothering to hide her smile now.

      She was gorgeous, Charles realised. Tall, statuesque, carrying her pregnancy with pride. And the condition suited her, for her

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