Hand-Me-Down Princess (36 page)

How easy for him to say when he was secure in his own heritage. And how difficult to remember when he learned he was not, biologically, the child of an earthly king.

A tone told him another text had come in.

Please let me know you’re all right. I know security guards are following you-and I know you know they are. Please, please, let me know you’re okay.

He wanted to ignore it, but he could almost see the tears filling her eyes. Malachi forced himself to take a few deep breaths and try to see things from her perspective. Yes, he’d discovered he was the result of a predator drugging and raping his mother, but she’d found that she was the result of a sordid affair that nearly ruined his family more than once. The man who’d been anything
but
kind to her since their wedding was, in reality, her
father
.

Malachi, more than anyone, knew that Jessabelle had loved her father dearly, but also struggled with the lack of affection from him. How would the king treat her now, knowing that she was his child?

How would the people treat her? Their opinions had been waffling between “poor girl, stuck in a situation she’s not equipped to deal with” and “she’s not cut out for this; Malachi should have married someone else.” Or would the people ever know? Was this a secret his family would take to their graves? Nana Yvette would have.

And his father had known since Malachi was little that he might be another man’s son.

He hadn’t even bothered to have the testing done.

Because...

It.

Didn’t.

Matter.

King Antonio Robert Philip Louis Van Rensselaer of Mevendia
didn’t care
if a child who may have been conceived in rape was in reality his biological child or not. If anything had ever happened to William, Malachi would still have been the second in line for the throne. No one would have known the Van Rensselaer line had ended.

Malachi felt the weight begin to lift from his shoulders. He tapped back on his phone.

I’ll be back in a little while, but I’d rather not see anyone else right now.

He hoped she would help them respect his wishes.

Now, did he want to walk back or have the security team call a car?

Chapter 36

When she read the text, Jessabelle closed her eyes and breathed a prayer of thanksgiving.

“What is it?” Her father sat across from her in one of the main sitting areas.

“Malachi is on his way back, but he said he would prefer to be left alone for the time being.”

The king nodded. “Of course. We will give him the space and time he needs to assimilate the new information.” He looked older and more careworn than Jessabelle had ever seen him. “And pray he realizes his genetics never mattered to me.”

“He will.” She hoped. She prayed.

After bidding him good night, Jessabelle returned to their apartment, wrapping her arms around herself as she stared out the window overlooking the gardens.

“I’m not coming from that direction.”

Malachi’s voice didn’t surprise her, though she hadn’t heard the door open. Turning, she drank in the sight of him. Thankfully, he’d been wearing boots and jeans when he left, though they were definitely more scratched and scarred than they had been.

She had to clear her throat twice before she could speak. “How are you?”

“I’m okay.” He came closer and flopped onto the couch. “It’s been a long day.”

“You’ve been walking around a mountain without any food most of the day.”

“I ate,” he replied defensively.

“You walked into that restaurant an hour ago.” She crossed her arms across her chest.

“You kept up on my whereabouts?” Jessabelle couldn’t decide if he sounded irritated or not. “Yes. I asked the security teams to keep me posted.”

“Why?” Was that genuine curiosity?

“Because I wanted to know that, physically, you were safe.” She perched on the edge of her favorite chair. “I can’t begin to understand what the emotional side of you must be going through, but it brought me some relief to know you hadn’t fallen over the side of a cliff somewhere.”

He sighed and sat up. “If anyone can understand, it’s you. How many curveballs have you been thrown this year?”

“Several,” she admitted. “Starting with the news that we were to be married.”

Malachi ran a hand through his hair. “Do you really think my great-grandmother knew about all of this? That she wouldn’t have let us get married if we’d actually been related?”

“I had a chance to talk with her. She was the one who made the arrangements for my parents to adopt me. They didn’t know that, though. They thought the king had expedited their application to adopt somehow. At least that’s how my mother’s notes read.”

“I can understand that. She worked for my great-grandmother at one point, and they liked each other a lot.” He leaned back staring at the corner where the fireplace stonework met the ceiling. “But me? How could she have suspected I wasn’t my father’s son?”

“Your eye color.”

He looked at her and blinked. “Pardon?”

“I’m surprised no one ever made a big deal of it in the tabloids. Your parents both have blue eyes, but yours are brown. It is possible for two blue-eyed parents to have a brown-eyed child, but it’s not common.”

“I never even thought about it.”

“Neither did anyone else apparently.”

“Did they discuss a game plan?”

Jessabelle sighed and shrugged. “There isn’t one. We go on as before. For all anyone needs to know, the king is your father. He always has been. He always will be.”

“What about you?”

“What about me?” she returned. “It doesn’t matter to anyone but you, me, and maybe your father who my biological family is.”

“Do you want to meet her?”

The question caught her off guard, and she blinked rapidly. “Pardon?”

“Your biological mother. Do you want to meet her?”

“I hadn’t even thought about it.” Did she want to? Or did she want to let that part of her past remain in the past.

“As I thought about it today, I realized there is a bit more than a passing resemblance between the two of you. Not enough to be definitive, like William and my father, but enough.” He called the king “my father”-surely that was a good sign, right?

Malachi didn’t look at her. “What did he say to you?”

Jessabelle wasn’t sure how much she wanted to tell him. Not that any of it was a secret, per se, but because she wasn’t sure what his reaction would be. Finally, she said, “That he truly had no idea I existed. That if he had, he would have done more to make sure my parents had what they needed, that I would have had more help caring for my father the last few years.”

“He wouldn’t have insisted on raising you at the palace with the rest of us?” Bitterness had seeped into her husband’s voice.

“No,” she answered slowly. “He didn’t indicate anything like that. I believe there is likely a far less chance we would have married unless he’d changed his mind about knowing if you are his biological child. He would have made certain I had everything I ever needed or wanted for life, though.”

He didn’t reply, and Jessabelle decided she needed to be completely honest with him.

“There was one thing he said that I’m still mulling over in my mind.”

“What’s that?”

“He told me that, if I’m ever comfortable with it, he would be honored to have me call him ‘father’ like you and William do, or ‘papa’ like Yvette does. Even as he said it, I could tell he didn’t think that day would ever come, and he said as much later.”

“Will it? Will you call him papa someday?”

She shook her head. “I doubt it. I suppose it’s possible, but not likely. Or not any more likely than it would have been if he was
just
my father-in-law. Lots of people call their in-laws Mom and Dad.”

“I can’t imagine you would ever have done that.”

“Not the way things begun, but they had already started to get a little better.”

“Not much,” he snorted.

She ignored the comment. “He also told me, again, that you are a better man than he ever was when he was your age. That you are still the better man.”

“Some consolation,” he muttered.

“Let’s say for a moment, that you were just like your father,” she challenged. “He still insisted we get married, but you were the kind of husband he was in the beginning. How do you see our marriage turning out?”

He seemed to turn it over in his mind for a minute before he finally answered.

* * *

“It would have eaten away at you. You wouldn’t have ever left me, I don’t think, but it would not have been a good place for you to be.”

“Would we ever have children?” The gentleness in her voice showed him again why he didn’t deserve her.

“I don’t know.” A dozen different scenarios ran through his head in an instant, and he immediately dismissed all of them. “Eventually, perhaps.”

“Or is it more likely you would have taken advantage of the six month escape clause? If we weren’t sleeping together, I couldn’t be pregnant, and if you wanted to, you could annul the marriage for not producing an heir immediately.”

Malachi looked at her, realization dawning on him.

“What?” She looked adorably confused.

“It’s not just me that could force an annulment,” he told her jumping up. “My father could, too. Or William, if he was already king.”

“And you think he’s planning to?” Her eyes filled with tears for what had to be the twentieth time in one day.

“Not necessarily and I’m not saying he didn’t consider it at first, but that must be what Mr. Bence was after. If my father forced an annulment, they could arrange a marriage between Lizbeth and me.” It all made sense.

The wheels were turning in his wife’s pretty head. He could practically see them. “I don’t think Lizbeth had anything to do with it.”

“Not voluntarily, but I could see her father coercing her into cooperation. He can be very persuasive.” Malachi could look back on at least a dozen different times in his experiences with the man and see Lizbeth being manipulated. Mr. Bence had even tried a few times with Malachi-with no success, to Malachi’s knowledge.

“What would his end game be? Just to have a prince for a son-in-law?” She chewed on her bottom lip, like she often did when she was thinking.

He couldn’t help snorting. “The joke would have been on him then, wouldn’t it?”

Jessabelle gave him a reproachful look. “You are your father’s son.”

“I know.” He thought he did. He was trying to, anyway. “But the point remains, any children I have will only carry the Van Rensselaer blood because you will be their mother.”

She shifted so her leg curled underneath her. “So? Why would it matter if the children actually had Van Rensselaer blood? No one would ever know any differently.”

Malachi began to pace. “I’m not sure. But, in looking back, I can see how he very definitely wanted Lizbeth to end up as my wife. When I thought about it, I figured he wanted to say his daughter was the princess, maybe use it to move further into my father’s inner circle.” How easily he continued to call the king his father. “I can’t imagine there was anything else, could you?”

“Wasn’t Queen Christiana’s uncle planning to take over after he killed her entire family? At least, when he planned to in that car accident?”

She had a good point. “I’m pretty sure her father never trusted Uncle Henry. That’s why the marriage contract with Yvette was made the way it was. He never would have gained the throne even if all four of them had died. Yvette would have been queen with my father as regent until she came of age.”

“What? How do you know all of that?”

“My father brought William and me into the loop last year when the Ravenzarians were investigating Henry, trying to sort out what he was plotting. The marriage contract was part of the deal.”

“But Prince Nicklaus was killed in the accident,” she protested.

“It wouldn’t have mattered. As his fiancée, and an heir to a commonwealth throne in her own right, or at least in the line of succession, she would have been queen and my father her regent. That’s the way the laws work in all three of our countries as part of our friendship pact. Unless duplicity on the part of the other country’s monarch or family can be proven, that’s the way it works.”

Jessabelle seemed to struggle to keep up. He did, too, and he’d grown up knowing these things.

He went on. “Even if the marriage contract weren’t in force, the country would have likely been absorbed into both Mevendia and Montevaro. The northern islands with us and the southern ones with Montevaro. Her father came from a long line of only children. There was a great celebration when her brother was born for that reason and not just because he became the Crown Prince. I’m not entirely certain they know who the next in line is if something were to happen to Christiana.”