And Matty? What had he been told of his mother?

‘What do you know about me?’ she asked the little boy, while the big man with the gentle eyes looked at her with sympathy.

‘My father said you were a whore,’ Matty said matter-of-factly as he carried over the plates, obviously not knowing what the word meant. ‘But Aunt Laura and Uncle Rafael have now told me that you’re a nice lady who digs old things out of the ground and finds out about the people who owned them. Aunt Laura says that you’re an arch…an archaeologist.’

‘I am,’ she said softly, wonderingly.

‘My mother and I have told Matty as much of the truth as we know,’ Rafael told her. The cake plates were in front of them now, and they were seated round the table almost like a family. The fire crackled in the old wood-stove. The rain pattered on the roof outside and the whole scene was so domestic it made Kelly feel she’d been picked up and transported to another world.

‘Kellyn, my mother and I would like you to return,’ Rafael said, so gently that she blinked. Her weird little bubble burst and she couldn’t catch hold of the fragments.

‘Return?’

‘To Alp de Ciel.’

‘You have to be kidding.’ But she couldn’t take her eyes from Matty.

‘Mathieu is Crown Prince of Alp de Ciel.’

She couldn’t take this in. ‘I…I guess.’

‘I’m Prince Regent until he comes of age.’

‘Congratulations.’ It sounded absurd. Nothing in life had prepared her for this. Matty was calmly sitting across the table eating chocolate cake, watching her closely with wide brown eyes that were…hers, she thought, suddenly fighting an almost irresistible urge to laugh. Hysteria was very, very close.

Matty was watching her as she was watching him. Maybe…maybe he even wanted a mother. He wanted her?

This was her baby. She longed with every fibre of her being to take him in her arms and hug him as she’d dreamed of holding him for these last five years. But this was a self-contained little person who’d been brought up in circumstances of which she knew nothing. To have an unknown woman-even if it had been explained who she was-hugging and sobbing, she knew instinctively it would drive him away.