The Forbidden Prince by Alison Roberts Page B

still hear the music from here and it was a quieter number—a folk song that was wistful enough almost to create a sensation of yearning...
    A need to feel less alone by connecting with another human being...
    â€˜I don’t remember my mother very well,’ Raoul said quietly. ‘She died, along with my father, in a plane crash when I was only five.’
    People were always shocked that he’d been orphaned so early but the glance Mika gave him had no pity in it.
    â€˜I wish I’d never known mine very well,’ she said. ‘Maybe it wouldn’t have hurt so much when she abandoned me.’
    Raoul was definitely shocked. ‘ Abandoned you? How?’
    â€˜She took me into the city for the day. Put me in the play area of a big department store and just never came back.’
    â€˜How old were you?’
    â€˜I was five, too. I’d just started school.’
    Wow... To have lost a parent at such a vulnerable age was something that he’d never found he had in common with anyone. Ever. Even now, he could remember how lost he’d felt. How empty his world had suddenly become.
    Had Mika had loving grandparents to fill such an appalling void? A small army of kind nannies, tutors and so many others, like cooks and gardeners, who would go out of their way every day to make a small, orphaned prince feel special?
    â€˜What happened? Who looked after you?’
    â€˜The police were called. I got put in the hands of the social welfare people and they found a foster home.’
    â€˜Did the police find your mother?’
    â€˜Oh...eventually. She turned up dead about ten years later. Drug overdose. Maybe she thought she was doing me a favour by shutting me out of her life.’
    â€˜What about your father?’
    â€˜Don’t have one. My mother never told me anything about him other than that he was Scottish. A backpacker she’d met in a bar somewhere. I have no way of tracing him. No idea of where I came from, really.’
    â€˜I’m sorry...’
    â€˜Don’t be. It has a good side. I’m as free as a bird. Or a dolphin, maybe. I can’t imagine living away from the sea. I had to do that in a couple of foster homes and I hated the cities.’
    Raoul was silent for a long moment. He could trace his family back to the twelfth century when their islands had become a principality. He knew every drop of his bloodline and almost every square mile of the place that was where he came from and where he would always belong.
    How lost would someone feel not to have that kind of foundation? Did he really envy the freedom she’d had in comparison to how precisely his own life was mapped out?
    Was that what Mika was looking for—a place where she felt she belonged? A life that offered the safety of a real home? How much heartache had been covered by that casual reference to ‘a couple of foster homes’? How often had she been passed from home to home? Abandoned again and again?
    The sun was low now and Mika’s nut-brown skin seemed to have taken on a golden glow as Raoul’s silent questions led him to turn his head towards her. Her bikini was white—small scraps of fabric that left very little to the imagination.
    It wasn’t his imagination that was his undoing, though.
    Mika had her hands shading her eyes from the glare of the setting sun so she didn’t see him looking at her. She might be tiny, Raoul decided, but she was most definitely perfectly formed. And real ... It would probably never occur to Mika to make her breasts larger or wear killer heels to make herself look taller and sexier. He couldn’t imagine her plastering her face with make-up, either. She didn’t need it, with those amazing eyes of hers.
    She was...gorgeous.
    He’d come to the conclusion that Mika was an extraordinary person within a short time of knowing her and learning about her rough start in life somehow didn’t surprise him.
    What