MARION LENNOX is a country girl, born on an Australian dairy farm. She moved onâmostly because the cows just werenât interested in her stories! Married to a âvery special doctorâ, Marion writes for Medical Romance⢠as well as other Mills & Boon>® series. She used a different name for each category for a whileâif youâre looking for her past Mills & Boon>® romances, search for author Trisha David as well.
In her non-writing life Marion cares for kids, cats, dogs, chooks and goldfish. She travels, and she fights her rampant garden (sheâs losing) and her house dust (sheâs lost). Having spun in circles for the first part of her life, sheâs now stepped back from her âotherâ career, which was teaching statistics at her local university. Finally sheâs reprioritised her life, figured out whatâs important, and discovered the joys of deep baths, romance and chocolate. Preferably all at the same time!
CHAPTER ONE
IT WAS the end of a long day in the goldfields, and Kelly had personally found almost a teaspoon of gold. The slivers of precious metal were now dispersed into scores of glass vials, to be taken home as keepsakes of a journey back in time.
Her tourists were happy. She should be, too.
But she was wet. She was dressed in period costume and raincoats hadnât been invented in the eighteen-fifties. As the day had grown colder Kelly had directed her tour groups down the mines, but sheâd been wet before sheâd gone down and the cold had stayed with her. Now she emerged from underground, desperate to head to her little cottage on the hill, strip off her dungarees and leather boots and sink into a hot bath.
She might be a historian on what was the recreation of a piece of the Australian goldfields but, when it came to the offer of a hot bath, Kelly was a thoroughly modern girl.
The park horsesâa working team that tugged a coach round the diggings during the dayâlumbered up the track towards the stables and she stood well back. Horses⦠Once sheâd 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 hadnât seen them on the tour and sheâd surely have noticed. The guy was strikingly good-looking: tall, tanned, jet-black hairâaristocratic? It was an odd description, she thought, but it seemed strangely appropriate. He was lean and strongly boned. Almostâ¦what was the word⦠aquiline?
The little boyâthe manâs son?âwas similarly striking, with olive skin, glossy black curls and huge brown eyes. He looked about five years old, and the sight of him made Kellyâs 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 didnât have chestnut curls escaping from under their felt brimmed hats.
Heâd read the report. This had to be her.
But this was harder than heâd thought.
Back home it had seemed relatively straightforward. Heâd been appalled when heâd received the investigative report. Like the rest of the population of Alp de Ciel, heâd thought this woman was aâ¦well, no fit mother for a prince. Heâd thought sheâd left of her own free will, as unwilling to commit to her new baby as her royal husband had been.
But what the report had told himâ¦
He cast a glance down at the child at his side. If the report was true⦠If sheâd been forced awayâ¦
He had to step forward. If he did only this one thing as Prince Regent, it had to be the righting of this huge injustice.
Mathieu was gripping his hand with a ferocity that betrayed his tension. Theyâd come all this way. The child couldnât be messed around.