Free The Maverick Prince by Catherine Mann

brothers would feel at home in your new place?”
    He looked at her over the white tulips centered on the cherry coffee table. “My father chose an island because it was easier to secure.”
    Gulp. “Oh. Right.”
    That took the temperature down more than a few degrees. She picked at the piping on the sofa.
    Music drifted from the back of the plane, the sound of a new cartoon starting. She glanced down the walkway. Kolby was buckled into a seat, munching on some kind of crackers while watching the movie, mesmerized. Most likely by the whopping big flat screen.
    Back to her questions. “How much of you is real and what’s a part of the new identity?”
    “My age and birthday are real.” He tucked the laptop into an oversized briefcase monogrammed with the Castillo Shipping Corporation logo. “Even my name is technically correct, as I told you before. Castillo comes from my mother’s family tree. I took it as my own when I turned eighteen.”
    Resting her elbow on the back of the sofa, she propped her head in her palm, trying her darnedest to act as casual as he appeared. “What does your father think of all you’ve accomplished since leaving?”
    “I wouldn’t know.” He reclined, folding his hands over his stomach, drawing her eyes and memories to his rock-hard abs.
    Her toes curled again until they cracked inside her canvas sneakers. “What does he think of us coming now?”
    “You’ll have to ask him.” His jaw flexed.
    “Did you even tell him about the extra guests?” She resisted the urge to smooth the strain away from the bunched tendons in his neck. How odd to think of comforting him when she still had so many reservations about the trip herself.
    “I told his lawyer to inform him. His staff will make preparations. Kolby will have whatever he needs.”
    Who was this coolly factual man a hand stretch away? She almost wondered if she’d imagined carefree Tony…except he’d told her that he liked to surf. She clung to that everyday image and dug deeper.
    “Sounds like you and your father aren’t close. Or is that just the way royalty communicates?” If so, how sad was that?
    He didn’t answer, the drone of the engines mingling with the cartoon and the rush of recycled air through the vents. While she wanted her son to grow up independent with a life of his own, she also planned to forge a bond closer than cold communications exchanged between lawyers and assistants.
    “Tony?”
    His eyes shifted to the shuttered window beside her head. “I didn’t want to live on a secluded island any longer. So I left. He disagreed. We haven’t resolved the issue.”
    Such simple words for so deep a breach where attorneys handled all communiqués between them. The lack of communication went beyond distant to estrangement. This wasn’t a family just fractured by location. Something far deeper was wrong.
    Tucking back into his line of sight, she pressed ahead. This man had already left such a deep imprint on her life, she knew she wouldn’t forget him. “What have your lawyers told your father about Kolby and me? What did they tell your dad about our relationship?”
    “Relationship?” He pinned her with his dark eyes, the intensity of his look—of him—reaching past the tulips as tangibly as if he’d taken that broad hand and caressed her. He was such a big man with the gentlest of touches.
    And he was thorough. God, how he was thorough.
    Her heart pounded in her ear like a tympani solo, hollow and so loud it drowned out the engines.
    “Tony?” she asked. She wanted .
    “I let him know that we’re a couple. And that you’re a widow with a son.”
    It was one thing to carry on a secret affair with him. Another to openly acknowledge to people—to family—that they were a couple.
    She pressed hard against her collarbone, her pulse pushing a syncopated beat against her fingertips. “Why not tell your father the truth? That we broke up but the press won’t believe it.”
    “Who says it’s not the