CHAPTER TWO
The Sandhill Bookstore was a gorgeous old building with antique mahogany shelves and an actual crystal chandelier hung high on the ceiling. It covered two floors of books both old and new, and when Philip arrived, it was already filling up with eager fans. He actually had to hustle to pick up Marnie's book, and when he thumbed through it, he was startled to see how much of her came through in her writing. There was something indefinably Marnie about it, and he warmed to her even further.
Philip decided that he didn't want to sit up front, where she might be distracted by seeing an old flame. Instead, he took a seat at the back, where the last stragglers were filling in. It was dimmer there, and he sat waiting for Marnie to appear.
Seated just a seat away from him was a little girl who couldn't be more than five. She was a fey little thing, dressed in a green dress with gold ribbons in her hair. With her dark hair and slim build, she reminded him of some of his cousins' children. Philip wondered at parents who would bring a child to such an adult event, but the little girl seemed to be content to draw in her large pad of recycled paper, making broad black lines with her stub of crayon.
When she felt his eyes on her, the girl looked up, and to his surprise, he saw that her eyes were as dark as ink. Between the dark eyes and pale skin, she could easily have passed for the child of one of his relatives.
She looked supremely unimpressed with him, which was oddly hilarious.
"Hello," he said mildly.
"Hi," she said diffidently. "I'm drawing a mountain."
He supposed that the marks on the paper could have been a mountain. "Oh, I can see that. It's a very nice mountain."
"It's for my mama," she said, almost aggressively. "She likes mountains a lot."
"Well, how lucky it is for her that you will draw them for her," Philip said, but if the little girl was taken in by his flattery, she gave no sign.
"Someday we're going to go live in the mountains," she said with a deep frown. She hesitated for a moment and began drawing a square on her mountain. He wondered if it was a house.
"Oh, really? And what are you going to do there?"
"I'm going to draw. And my mama's going to write."
Philip's mind was beginning to draw some lines, but just then the lights dropped, and Marnie appeared. Dressed in a green dress with golden accents, she looked every inch the bohemian writer she was, and her appearance was met with thunderous applause. The girl sitting next to him lost all pretense of disdain and gasped, putting her hands together with enthusiasm.
"That's my mama!" she whispered to him, but he had come to that conclusion himself.
Philip was certain that Marnie's talk was fascinating. There were certainly enough members of the audience that were impressed. However, he could barely hear what she was saying over the tumult of thought in his own mind. He thought about how quickly he and Marnie had broken things off, and he thought about how the little girl sitting next to him looked. There were coincidences in life, he thought, but he wasn't sure he believed in them. The evidence was there, and he was not leaving this evening until he got to the bottom of this.
After Marnie's talk, the people got up to mill around before she started signing. The little girl darted through the crowd to wrap herself around her mother's hip. Marnie grinned, delighted to see her daughter, and she rested her hand on her daughter's dark head as she continued talking to the people around her.
Philip positioned himself close to the end of the line, his book clutched hard in his hand. As the line progressed at what felt like a snail's pace, he tried to focus and calm himself. There was nothing to be gained by flying off the handle.
He was startled when a bookstore employee offered him a Post-it Note.
"What's this?" he asked with a frown.
"Oh, just write your name on it," the employee told him. "It tells Ms. Drake who to sign the book to. It keeps it simpler than having every one tell her up front. Write down who you want the book signed to, and stick it to the inside of the cover."
Philip hesitated for a moment, scrawled a single word on the Post-it, and shut it into the book. He kept his mind as calm and level as he could.
However, when he got to the front of the line finally, he could see that Marnie looked exhausted. She smiled at him without seeing him at all, and when she took the book from him, he could see that her hands were shaking.
"Thanks for supporting my work," she said as cheerfully as she could, "I really appreciate …"
She glanced down at the Post-it Note, and her pale face went even paler. She didn't say the word that was written on the note, but he saw her mouth it.
Daddy?
She looked up at him, finally seeing him. He wasn't sure what he had been expecting. Perhaps she would be guilty, or perhaps she would be furious. Maybe she would dress him down then and there, or perhaps she would ice over. Instead, she looked around, and then scrawled something in the book. She handed it back to him with all the smooth élan of a practiced spy.
"Thanks for reading," she said, and it was only because he had once known her so well that he could tell that her smile was utterly false.
He waited until he got out of line to open the book, and as he read it, he frowned.
Come meet me at DiMartino's down the street in an hour. I will tell you what you need to know.
It was signed Marnie Drake, and for a moment, he ran his thumb over her signature as if he were touching her deliciously full lower lip.
Whatever he had been expecting this evening, it was not this, but once again, that was just like Marnie had always been.
Despite the seriousness of the situation, he smiled.
***
The moment the signing ended, Marnie raced back to where Cassie was sitting with Victoria in the back. Cassie, who was along for moral support since she could get Marnie's signature whenever she wanted it, was showing the dark-haired little girl how to fold a paper crane from scraps of notebook paper.
"… and see, when you open it up like that, the wings flap!" Cassie glanced up at Marnie, raising an eyebrow.
"Did someone get fresh on the signing floor? Do we need to have management ban someone for life again?"
"No, nothing like that, but Cassie, please, please could you take Victoria back to your place? I'll come get her before midnight, I swear, but I really need help …"
Cassie blinked at Marnie's desperation, but she didn't agree right away.
"Does this have something to do with His Royal Highness that we saw yesterday?"
Victoria, whose ears were far sharper than Marnie cared to think about, perked up at Cassie's words. "Royal Highness? Like a prince?"
Marnie winced a little, but nodded. "Exactly like a prince, smart girl. Mama just has some things she needs to see to, that's all …"
Cassie nodded.
"Yeah, I can take her just fine tonight, though I really do need you to show up to take her by midnight. I'm doing the early shift tomorrow."
Marnie nodded with relief. "Thank you so much, I totally owe you."
"Whatever. Just make sure that you tell me what happens tonight."
Marnie turned to Victoria, who was gazing up at her with suspicious eyes. The transition to kindergarten hadn't been an easy one for her, and she had responded by being even more clingy when she wasn't at school. She had gotten a little better, but there were still days when she responded to any deviation in her routine with a meltdown.
"Honey, I know I said we would go home after the bookstore, but there's just a few things I need to do. Cassie's going to take you to her place, and then I'll come pick you up after you are asleep, okay? You'll wake up in your own bed in the morning, just like you like."
Victoria's dark brows knitted together, and Marnie was afraid a real tantrum was on the way when Cassie, blessed Cassie, interjected.
"Come on back with me, kiddo. I'll get out some of my clay and we can make animals."
Victoria brightened at that. Cassie's apartment was a mélange of art supplies, and getting to play with some of them was always a treat.
"What do you say to Cassie, Victoria?"
"Thank you, Cassie," she said dutifully, and then she hugged her mother fiercely.
"But come get me soon, okay, Mama?"
As always, Marnie could feel her heart melt. Ever since her daughter was born, she had always had that effect on her.
"I will, I promise, sweetie. Go on, you and Cassie should head out."
Once she was alone, Marnie was left to deal with her spinning thoughts, which was hardly much better. If she was being honest with herself, she had always suspected that this day would come, though she had never known exactly how it was going to go. She told herself that she had nothing to be ashamed about, squared her shoulders, and walked out.
DiMartino's was a pleasant all-night coffee shop that was fairly peaceful, given that it had not been swamped by the after-bar crowd yet. She managed to locate Philip sitting in a tucked away alcove near the rear, and taking a deep breath, she went over to sit across the table from him.
For the first time, she looked at him and she wasn't overwhelmed with the past that they shared. Instead, when she looked at him, Marnie saw a man with cold black eyes who was unpredictable and who might bring some very real harm to her small family.
"Is she mine?" The question was uttered flatly, and she supposed that that was fair. If they were there for any other reason, they might have started some other way, but at the moment, that was the only important thing.
She took a deep breath and told him the truth.
"Yes. She is."
For a moment, the silence between them was as thick as a winter fog. She waited to see if he would shout, if he would simply walk straight out of the restaurant. Marnie had no idea how Philip would react, and she finally admitted to herself that daydreams all aside, this was now a full-grown man that she could not predict.
"When did you find out?"
"It took me a month after you left before I even began to suspect," Marnie said. "After that, I was in denial for two weeks, and then Cassie made me take a test. It was positive."
For a moment, she saw a series of emotions flit across Philip's face, too fast for her to see. Then he looked at her, his expression stern. Something in her balked at that. He wasn't her father or her boss. He was not someone who had any degree of authority over her, and he had no right to act as if he did.
"Jesus, Marnie. Why the hell didn't you tell me?"
"Because you abandoned me," she hissed, and in that single exclamation, there was all the vitriol that she had thought was put away and dealt with. He looked stunned, and she pressed her advantage.
"Because you had just gotten done telling me that there was no place for me in your high and mighty life, and that you were going home to be the perfect prince in your own country. Excuse me if I thought that if there was no place for me, there would be no place for the baby, either!"
Philip looked stung at her accusatory words, but he rallied. "A baby changes everything. You should still have contacted me …"
"I tried," she said more quietly. "I … was so scared after I found out. I didn't want to, and I didn't even tell Cassie I was going to, but after I found out, I tried to call your number. It was disconnected, I suppose, because you had returned home. I racked my brain for a way to contact you, but everywhere I ran into palace protocols …"
Philip now looked stricken. "Those are meant to keep the public from harassing us," he said. "There are layers of security that can only be breached by my family or me giving out certain codes, certain phone numbers …"
"None of which you gave me," she said.
They sat in silence for a moment, and without thinking about it, Marnie reached for the hot coffee that was steaming away untouched in front of Philip. It was an automatic gesture, a relic of their relationship together from before. He raised an eyebrow when she did it, but he didn't protest.
"I didn't know what to do after that, but I realized that if I pushed it too hard, I was going to start setting off lots of rumors and unpleasantness. I didn't want to go through that, and at that point, I was beginning to think of myself as a mother. I didn't want to put my child through that, either."
"Was I ever to know?" he asked quietly. He sounded subdued now, and she was grateful. She couldn't imagine being in his spot, realizing that he had a daughter more than half a decade after the fact.
"I decided that I was going to play that one by ear," she said with a shrug."I can't tell the future. There might have been a place where I could have told you. Perhaps when Victoria was an adult and could make up her own mind about things, she would have wanted to seek you out."
"And where does she think her father is?" Philip asked.
Marnie sighed. "She's just a little girl right now. At this point, she knows that some families have two parents, and some families have one, and some people live with just one parent, and some people live with whole rooms full of extended families. It's good enough for her for now. She hasn't asked for more information."
Philip nodded, but she wasn't sure whether he agreed with her statements or whether he could see where she was coming from.
"She's my daughter," Philip said, and to Marnie, it was as if he were coming to terms with the idea. It was fair. His world had changed drastically over the course of the last few hours.
"She is," Marnie agreed.
"She has to come back to Navarra."
In the space of half a second, Marnie went from feeling calm and even sympathetic for Philip to towering rage. "Excuse me?" she asked, deceptively quiet.
"It's obvious. She must go to Navarra. She's a princess of the Demarier line, and—"
"No," Marnie said cuttingly, and her tone was so sharp that it made Philip look up, startled.
"Her last name is Drake. When she was born, the birth certificate lists just one parent, and that is me. She is a fine, healthy, happy girl, and she does not need to be yanked from everything that she knows to be taken across the sea to strangers."
Philip started to protest, but she stood up, eyes alight with anger. "No. You had a hand in making her, and for that, I thank you. She is a wonderful girl, and every day, I am thankful that I am her mother. However, you are not her father. I woke up every hour on the hour for the first six months she was born because she had colic. I held her when she fell and had to have her knee stitched together at the urgent care. I am her mother, and by god, I will not let you take her from me."
Marnie looked at Philip, meeting his gaze with steely resolve. "You have a choice, Philip. You can go back to Navarra and pretend this never happened. Or you can stay and get to know your daughter. But believe me when I say that it will be on my terms."
She scrawled her number down on a scrap of paper and dropped it in front of him. "You already told me that I wasn't good enough for your world. You will not get a chance to tell my daughter the same thing."
With that, she turned on her heel and strode to the entrance. Her heart was beating as if she had run all the way around the city, and she could feel a high red heat in her cheeks.
When she was in the cool of the night and heading for the subway stop, she wondered if she had made the right decision. She was a writer who was gaining some popularity, and money hadn't been an issue for years, but Philip was a prince who could leverage a great deal more power than she could.
At the end, though, shaking her head, she had to admit that she could do nothing else.
When she had known Philip, she knew that she was a writer. Things were different now. She was a writer and a mother, and she would never let her little girl be taken away from her.
***
Philip sat at the coffee shop long after Marnie had departed. He ignored the curious gazes of the people around him and picked up the scrap of paper.
"That … could have gone better," he murmured to himself.
He also realized that it could have gone worse. Marnie had left the door open for him to come in. He had to come in on her terms, but that wasn't a surprise. In Navarra, there was a long tradition of mothers' rights, where it was the mother who set the rules regarding the children. Hers was the greater responsibility, so hers was the greater power when it came to children.
However, the massive unfairness of not being allowed to be there, to support his daughter, cut him to the quick. He could protest all he liked that he would have wanted to be a true father to Victoria, but the fact remained that he hadn't been. Through a combination of his own carelessness and the protocols surrounding his family, he had been gone, as untouchable as if he were on the moon.
As far as he could see, Marnie had raised a lovely daughter who just happened to be his own.
If he had appeared and she had had a little blond son with gray eyes, a child of another lover, he would have been happy for her. He would have been impressed that she had raised a child while she was starting her writing career, and he would have wanted to get to know the child because, after all, he was a part of a woman he had once loved very much.
Once?
That was something that Philip wasn't prepared to think about. He thought that time would have dulled his reaction to Marnie, but apparently, it had done no such thing.
Instead, when he saw her, he was taken right back to the time six years ago, when it had been hard to go an hour without thinking of her.
In another circumstance, that might have been endearing and even enjoyable. Right now, when there was Victoria between them, he couldn't take that risk.
Philip knew what his parents would have wanted him to do. They would want him to rally up with lawyers, ones that would almost certainly be able to work with paternity suits and immigration to return Victoria to her father's homeland. No matter what Marnie tried, there would have been no way for her to fight.
He couldn't do that, not to Marnie, not to anyone. Instead, he was going to fend off his parents for a little longer, and then … Well, then he was going to get to know his daughter.