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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.
     

CHAPTER THREE
    The next day was reserved for Victoria and Marnie. The publicity blitz for her newest book had been