Royal Heir

      Alice Sharpe

      

      This book is dedicated to my friends in the

       Mid-Willamette Valley RWA whose professionalism, enthusiasm and giant hearts make a solitary job so much more fun. Round trip tickets to Montivitz for everyone!

      Contents

      Prologue

      Chapter One

      Chapter Two

      Chapter Three

      Chapter Four

      Chapter Five

      Chapter Six

      Chapter Seven

      Chapter Eight

      Chapter Nine

      Chapter Ten

      Chapter Eleven

      Prologue

      March 2, north of Seattle, Washington

      The call came as he prepared to leave the office. He had to scramble to get the phone himself as his secretary had left for the day and the damn thing was hidden under a sheet of architectural drawings.

      The caller’s voice caught him at once, though, her anxiety as loud and clear as her voice was furtive.

      “I’ve got compromising photos of your wife and my husband. He’ll kill me if he finds out I hired a private detective to follow him. I’m too scared to use the pictures myself, but the bastard deserves to be humiliated. The pictures are yours if you want them…just be careful. He’s chief of police…”

      She’d gone on to name a waterside restaurant across the river. She’d get her sister to drive her there. “Meet me in one hour…”

      By now he was living on his boat, a thirty-two-foot cruiser with two powerful gasoline engines, and his mind raced as he plotted a course across the river. Her last murmured, “Make sure you aren’t followed,” trailed him all the way down to the marina as he threw cautious glances in the rearview mirror.

      He’d known his wife was seeing someone but the chief of police? Who was the chief of police, anyway?

      The big engines started at once and he cast off the dock lines without fanfare, replacing his tailored suit jacket with a heavy wool coat as April was cold this far north. He’d crossed the river many, many times, often after sundown. He kept his gaze on the buoys and distant landmarks. He knew the channel, was comfortable with the strong currents. He was an experienced, methodical boater.

      But in his mind, the caller’s frantic voice tangled with the memory of his wife’s. She’d promised to ruin him, to take his child…

      Not if he could help it.

      Revealing, embarrassing pictures might be enough to get her to back down…it was a chance worth taking.

      He heard the other vessel before he saw it, a distant buzz that grew louder even though no lights shone on the water. He turned off his own cockpit light, thinking it might be robbing him of night vision, and then he saw it, a black hull, low freeboard, racing toward him like a SCUD missile.

      He blinked his running lights back on and flipped the switches of every other light he could reach until his yacht shone like a Christmas tree. Still the smaller boat raced toward him. Mesmerized, it took him too long to admit he was the target, that if he didn’t do something right now he was going to be blown out of the water.

      Climbing up on the stern gunwale, he dove into the black river, taking deep, strong pulls with his arms to move as far away from his own propeller and the impending explosion as possible. The coat weighed him down, slowed him down and he slipped his arms free as he surfaced. At that moment, the two vessels collided, filling the night air with fire and smoke.

      Debris rained down, falling close by, scorching his face and hair, sending him back below the surface to the quiet depths of water too cold to keep a man alive for long.

      Chapter One

      April 11, San Francisco, California

      With an anxious glance at the clock on her dashboard, Julia Sheridan pulled into the San Francisco airport short-term parking garage. She was more than an hour late, her margin for safety eaten up by a flat tire and the bumbling Good Samaritan who had stopped to “help” her.

      As if she couldn’t change her own tire.

      The first empty parking spot she found was four flights up and toward the back. She was out of the car in a flash, hair, jeans and leather flight jacket damp from her adventure beside the freeway. Straightening the white wool scarf around her neck and slinging her huge shoulder bag over her arm, she hurried toward the elevator, heart pounding in anticipation.

      Once aboard the elevator, she slid to the side and took her cell phone from her coat pocket, punching in the lawyer’s number. As before, she was directed to leave a message but this time she didn’t bother.

      She should have given herself more time for potential problems. As an air transport pilot, who knew better than she the inevitable last-minute crisis that threw the best-laid plans awry? But she’d been rushing around this Saturday morning like nobody’s business, buying baby furniture and diapers, a car seat and special shampoo. Even the stuffed blue elephant she’d left on the passenger seat of the car still sported tags dangling from one floppy ear.

      The elevator made the ground floor in seconds. As she made her way through the crowd waiting to get on the elevator, she spied several families with small children and her heart lurched. One woman with deep-set eyes and long, dark hair clutched a blanketed baby to her chest while a tall man in a raincoat put a protective arm around her shoulders.

      Julia was riddled with self-doubt. Without a husband, could she make a family for Leo? Would she be enough?

      The twinge in her heart was replaced by a vow: she would be all the family little Leo ever needed.

      She’d spoken to the lawyer two or three times in the week since Nicole’s death, each time struggling to understand the lawyer’s thick French-Canadian accent. He’d emigrated from Quebec to Seattle years earlier, he’d explained, but the accent was part of him and he couldn’t seem to shake it. He’d told her she would recognize him by his dark mustache and bald head.

      She also assumed he’d be one of very few men holding a ten-month-old baby.

      As she hurried toward the gate where he’d told her he’d wait, she found herself crossing her fingers that he was a patient man, that he wouldn’t have given up and caught a flight back home or that Leo wouldn’t be howling…

      She found the lawyer with no trouble, his mustache small and tidy. He wore a camel-hair coat over a black suit, his shoes as polished as his balding dome. He sat on a chair near the windows, a briefcase on his lap, a book in his hand, which he seemed to be studying. There was no sign of Nicole’s baby.

      Your baby now.

      Julia came to a stop in front of him. “Monsieur Henri Pepin?” she gasped.

      Lowering the engagement diary, he looked up at her with round, brown eyes. “Oui.”

      “I’m Nicole Chastain’s cousin.”

      The man blinked a couple of times. His gaze raking her up and down, expression guarded, he said, “Mademoiselle?”

      Julia finger-combed long, damp, dark tendrils away from her face, tendrils that had escaped her habitual ponytail. Assuming his hesitation had something to do with the fact that she looked more like a