Single Mum to Countess - Chapter 5
‘And he demanded that I give him an explanation! The cheek, the nerve, the actual audacity!’
Sally strode up and down the pretty open-plan kitchen, aware that she was wringing her hands like a Victorian heroine. But then again, what was more Victorian than being seduced and abandoned by the local lord of the manor?
Clem and her sister shared a concerned look.
‘Are you okay?’ Arrosa asked, then shook her head. ‘Sorry, stupid question. Of course you’re not. I should have asked, do you want help plotting revenge? We still have working dungeons at the castle you know.’
Sally still couldn’t believe that the mischievously smiling woman was a princess and would one day be queen of the pretty mountainous country. Sitting at her kitchen table in the villa she preferred to her family palace, she looked more like the tourist Sally had become close to than a crown princess.
Slumping into a chair opposite the sisters, Sally realised how bone-weary she was. ‘I’m just so angry.’ The statement didn’t come close to capturing the kaleidoscope of emotions jostling within her, but, she realised, anger was one of the most prominent.
‘We’re all angry,’ Clem said, pushing over a glass of wine. It was almost funny, Clem and her in ball gowns, Arrosa in silk pyjamas and a robe. ‘The nerve of him!’
‘But I don’t understand—you told him you were pregnant, didn’t you? So how can he deny it?’ Arrosa handed Sally the chocolates she had just opened and Sally took one gratefully.
‘Of course I did!’
‘What’s he got to gain from lying?’ Clem mused, selecting a chocolate.
‘I have no idea. None of this makes any sense. I was nineteen when I met Ben,’ she explained to the princess. ‘We had one perfect summer together but we knew it couldn’t last. I was about to start the second year of my archaeology degree—he was off to Ecuador for a PhD. Our lives were about to diverge so we decided that rather than keep in touch, we’d leave our future to fate. At the time I thought it was romantic.’ She swallowed. ‘I was a fool.’
‘And then you found out you were pregnant?’
She nodded. ‘He’d switched phones when he moved. I didn’t have an email address for him and he didn’t do social media. But his parents had a holiday home in Polhallow so I wrote to him there, and his mother got in touch and offered to forward an email to him for me. He replied within a few days, making it very clear that he was starting a new life, that he had no intention of coming back. Instead he authorised his mother to make a one-off payment in lieu of child support.’
Arrosa muttered something in Asturian that sounded very much like a curse.
‘His mother was kind, but said she didn’t feel under the circumstances she could be involved in our lives.’ She looked down at her hands. ‘Now you know why I never wanted to lay eyes on Ben Montgomery again.’