The park horses-a working team that tugged a coach round the diggings during the day-lumbered up the track towards the stables and she stood well back. Horses…Once she’d loved them, but even now, after all this time, she hated to go near them. She waited.

Once the horses passed she expected her way home to be clear, but there were always one or two tourists lagging behind, as eager to stay as she was eager to leave. She had to manoeuvre her way past a last couple. A man and a child. They seemed to have been waiting for the horses to pass so they could speak to her.

Who were they? She hadn’t seen them on the tour and she’d surely have noticed. The guy was strikingly good-looking: tall, tanned, jet-black hair-aristocratic? It was an odd description, she thought, but it seemed strangely appropriate. He was lean and strongly boned. Almost…what was the word…aquiline?

The little boy-the man’s son?-was similarly striking, with olive skin, glossy black curls and huge brown eyes. He looked about five years old, and the sight of him made Kelly’s gut clench as it had clenched countless times over the past five years.

How many five-year-old boys were there in the world?

Could she ever move on?

Could this be her?

Rafael stared across the track at the slip of a girl waiting for the horses to pass. Princess Kellyn Marie de Boutaine of Alp de Ciel? The thought was laughable.

She was wet, bedraggled and smeared with mud. She was dressed like an eighteen-fifties gold-miner, only most eighteen-fifties gold-miners didn’t have chestnut curls escaping from under their felt brimmed hats.

He’d read the report. This had to be her.

But this was harder than he’d thought.

Back home it had seemed relatively straightforward. He’d been appalled when he’d received the investigative report. Like the rest of the population of Alp de Ciel, he’d thought this woman was a…well, no fit mother for a prince. He’d thought she’d left of her own free will, as unwilling to commit to her new baby as her royal husband had been.