‘Sure.’ She manoeuvred him around so that he faced her desk, pulled her laptop closer to them and clicked a button to bring it out of hibernation.
Having had only a day to prepare for the trip, she’d spent hours making arrangements for herself and Toby while trying to familiarise herself with the biography she needed to finish. She hadn’t yet had the time to do any research on the island she was travelling to.
Keeping an arm around her son’s waist to secure him on her lap, she typed ‘Agon Royal Palace’ into the search bar and selected images.
Toby gasped when he saw what appeared and pressed a finger to the screen. ‘You’re going there?’
Jo was just as taken with the images, which showed an enormous sprawling palace that evoked romantic thoughts of hot Arabian nights.
‘Yes, I am.’
‘Will you have your own room?’
‘I’ll get an apartment in the palace.’
Until that moment she hadn’t had time to consider the fact that she would be staying in a royal palace for ten nights. She moved her cursor down the screen slowly, looking for a better picture.
‘Will you meet the King?’
She smiled at the eagerness in Toby’s voice. She wondered how he would react if she were to tell him that she and Toby were distantly—very distantly—related to the British royal family. He’d probably spring to the ceiling with excitement.
‘I’ll be working for the King’s grandson, who’s a prince, but I might meet the King too. Shall I find a picture of him?’
She typed in ‘King of Agon’ and hit the search button.
She supposed she should send Toby back to bed, but she really didn’t want to—not when he was so warm and snuggly on her lap, and especially not when she knew he wouldn’t be warm and snuggly on her lap again for another ten days.
The search revealed hundreds, if not thousands of pictures of the King. Scrolling through them, she thought how distinguished he looked. There were pictures of him with his late wife, Queen Rhea, who had died five years ago, others with his eldest grandson and heir, Helios, and one of King Astraeus standing with all three of his grandsons—one of whom must be Theseus, the Prince she would be directly reporting to...
She stared hard at the picture of the King and his grandsons and felt the hairs on her arms lifting. With a hand that suddenly seemed to be filled with lead, she enlarged the photo to fill the screen.
It couldn’t be.
Making sure not to squash her son, she leaned forward and adjusted the screen so she could peer at it more closely. The picture was too grainy for her to see with any certainty.
It couldn’t be...
‘Are those men kings too?’ Toby asked.
She couldn’t speak, could only manage a quick shake of her head before she clicked on to another picture of the King with his grandsons.
This photo was of a much higher quality and had been taken from less distance.
Her head buzzed and burned, every pulse in her body hammering.
Working frantically, she clicked through dozens of pictures until she found one that showed him alone. She enlarged it.
It was him.
For an age she did nothing but hold her son so tightly she could feel the thrum of his little heart vibrating through his back.
How was it possible?
Two hours later she was still there on her laptop, searching through everything the internet had to offer about Prince Theseus Kalliakis. Somehow she’d managed to pull herself out of the cold stupor she’d slipped into at seeing Theo’s face on the screen for long enough to tuck Toby back into bed and kiss him goodnight.
All that ran through her head now was crystal clarity.
No wonder her years of searching for Theo had been fruitless. She’d assumed that living in the age of social media would have made it an easy task, but she had been foiled at every turn. It hadn’t stopped her looking. She’d never given up hope of finding him.
But she might have searched for a thousand years and would still never have found him. Because the man she’d been seeking didn’t exist.
It had all been a big lie.
Toby’s father wasn’t Theo Patakis, an engineer from Athens. He was Theseus Kalliakis. A prince.
* * *
Prince Theseus Kalliakis stepped out of his office and into his private apartment just as his phone vibrated in his pocket. He dug it out and put it to his ear.
‘She’s on her way,’ said Dimitris, his private secretary, without any preamble.
Theseus killed the call, strode into his bedroom and put the phone on his bureau.