The Royal Runaway Read online

  I wished I had a plan.

  The hood of my sweatshirt fell off my head as I took another sip of the third-rate whiskey, but the lights were low over our table and I highly doubted anyone would recognize me. And if they did? I could move pretty fast and make it back to the Fiat before more than a few camera phones could be whipped out.

  Cameras. The interview tomorrow.

  My stomach clenched as I tightened my grip around my glass. The thought of trying to hold it together while a reporter asked me questions about Christian was nearly debilitating.

  Nick noticed. “You all right?” His eyes followed my glass as it hit my lips and stayed there for a good gulp or two.

  “I have an interview tomorrow,” I said. The whiskey was loosening my tongue.

  “For a job?”

  “No.” I said it automatically and wondered why in the world I was telling this man anything close to the truth. “For work,” I explained, hoping to stop him from asking any more questions. A man like him should not be interested in a historian’s interview.

  He cocked his head. “It’s a big one, then? You worried about your boss breathing down your neck?”

  A strangled giggle escaped me, thinking of my grandmother the Queen as a “boss.” It was eerily accurate. Queen Aurelia was the final authority on all things in the palace, from proper punctuation to big events like weddings.

  “Yeah, she’s a hard-ass.”

  “Me? I’d skip out. Let someone else take it on.”

  “Why does that not surprise me?”

  I thought of my father then, the heir to the throne, currently ensconced at his country house as he was for 80 percent of the year due to gout and hypoglycemia and cramped toes and whatever other ailment he invented whenever Big Gran asked him to fulfill a royal duty or two.

  And my siblings, scattered around the globe, hiding themselves in helicopters, on Turkish yachts and Nepalese mountaintops, in whatever places didn’t have cell service in case Big Gran called to ask them to attend a ceremony or ribbon cutting. Nope. There was no one to take the fall for me this time.

  “I’m not a highly respected historian, though.” Nick’s words snapped me back to an alternate reality. The one where I’d told this annoying man I was a dreary academic.

  “I’m not that respected,” I said sharply. “Hardly anyone listens to me.” Another truth, accidentally told.

  He leaned over the table and through the haze of cigarette smoke and cheap whiskey, I saw that his eyes were green. Green with flecks of gold. Like those of a feral tomcat.

  “I’m sure that’s not true. I’d love to listen to you.”

  When my mouth dropped open, he gave me a quick grin. “Besides, I’m somewhat of an expert on the connection between husbandry and women’s . . . health.”

  Ew.

  “Does this work with women, usually? This . . .” I gestured to all of him. “This roguish scoundrel act?”

  “You’re having a drink with me; you tell me.”

  I looked at what was left in my glass and debated throwing it in his face. I’d never done such a thing before. What would it feel like? Could I get away with it?

  “People would stare,” he said in a low voice.

  I jerked, confused, and looked back into those green eyes.

  “If you threw the drink in my face,” he explained. “You don’t seem like a woman who wants that kind of attention.”

  With that, I tossed the rest of the whiskey back instead, discomfited by the fact that he had read my mind.

  “Another round?” he drawled.

  I was sober enough to consider using my manners. I should have said, “No thank you” immediately. But . . . for some reason I didn’t, and Nick waved to the waitress and ordered another round. As I watched him, I had a fresh wave of curiosity about the man who was steady and sober—and plying me with alcohol . . .

  “What are you in Drieden for?” I blurted out.

  It was a reasonable enough question. He was obviously a foreigner. He should have an interesting reason for being in the country. But he seemed surprised by my question and hesitated before answering. “Family business.”

  That didn’t sound right. A family business? He didn’t seem like a man who would inherit his father’s factory or law practice. Not like my ex. Not content to simply be a penniless Scottish duke (was there any other kind?), Christian had gotten a job in a respected corporate law firm when he’d moved here. And unlike this Nick, Christian would have gotten the hint and left me alone.

  Which he had.

  On our wedding day.

  “What sort of family business?” I asked, suspicion lacing my voice.

  “There was a will. Some property was left to a relation who had emigrated here. We’re just trying to track him down.” He shrugged as if it were nothing important, but I leaned my elbow on the table and placed my chin in my hand. Now this was fascinating. No one got lost in my family. There were family trees that detailed every shit some king’s bastard took in the woods. And a bequest that someone didn’t know about? My property was traced back to the Vikings, and Parliament wrote laws distributing it amongst children I didn’t even know I would have yet.

  “Who is the relative? An uncle? Cousin? Was he working here? Did he fall in love with a Driedener? Did he get citizenship?” That question reminded me that I could make one call to the home office and get the address of Nick’s long lost relative, but I couldn’t offer. I wouldn’t offer. Not for a sketchy guy in a bar.

  “And what’s the bequest?” I had to know. What could be so important that Nick would come to Drieden himself to deliver the news?

  Nick’s expression was bemused. “So many questions. I suppose this is how you write your history books or papers or whatever you do?”

  Right. My mythical historian alter ego. “I’m known as a very diligent researcher.”

  “Spend all your time with your nose in books, I suppose.”

  “Oh yes, I’m just so excited to learn about a live person,” I said, sarcasm dripping from my tongue. “It’s quite a change from the all the dead people I usually talk to.”

  The smile faded. “Dead people are easier to deal with, I suppose.”

  I lifted my chin from my hand and sat back. I had been too forward, too cavalier, even with someone who had sat down at my table without permission and bought me drinks I hadn’t known I’d needed. Nick’s concern for his relative seemed real and his family’s struggle wasn’t for anyone’s entertainment. Even a non-princess should know that.

  “I apologize, I didn’t mean—”

  We were interrupted by the arrival of three denim-clad young women.

  “Oh my God,” one breathed.

  “It’s her!” another squealed in an American accent.

  “I’m sorry, we don’t want to interrupt, but you look so much like—”

  “Are you, like, related to Princess Theodora?”

  I froze. They weren’t really asking if I was related to Princess Theodora. They were asking if I was . . .

  And oh God.

  Each had a cell phone in her hand.

  Suddenly, my cavalier attitude about being recognized seemed like another insane delusion. Me in a bar, looking like this? After four months away from the public eye? This couldn’t be how the country saw me again.

  “What, all Driedeners look alike to you?” Nick’s question startled me. I wasn’t expecting him to jump in, and certainly not in Driedish-accented English. Not when I’d just heard him speaking Scottish-accented Driedish. It was all very confusing under the influence of two glasses of cheap whiskey.

  “Oh no . . .” one of the Americans nervously said. “But she looks exactly like her.”

  Nick scrunched his nose my way. “Her? In those sloppy clothes and that greasy hair? You think our very own princess would be in a dump like this?”

  I opened my mouth to protest. I had washed my hair that night. But then I realized Nick was doing me a favor. “Americans—they think we’r
e all blond and stone-faced,” I sassed. Cheap whiskey made me bolder, apparently.

  Must remember to avoid cheap whiskey.

  Nick caught my eye as the Americans stammered their denials.

  “She’s not as beautiful as Her Highness,” Nick said, contemplating me. “But I can see a slight resemblance. Maybe you ladies have a point.”

  The three girls were in their early twenties, with rain jackets and backpacks and high-tech sneakers, probably from California or Florida, someplace warm, because they were overdressed for a Driedish summer. They shot each other dubious, embarrassed looks, and I felt sorry for them. Princess Me would always be gracious to visitors.

  “Maybe we’ve got ourselves a new business venture, love: you could be one of them—whatsitcalled—

  “Impersonators!” one of the blond Americans supplied.

  “That’s it,” Nick agreed. The risky sparkle in his eyes was back. “You could impersonate Princess Theodora for parties and such. We could make a killing.”

  “Too bad you don’t have a friend who looks like Prince Christian,” one of them said.

  “He wasn’t a prince.”

  “Not yet. He would have been if he hadn’t totally skipped out on her.”

  “Ohmigod, I am still so mad at him.”

  “Poor thing . . .”

  “Who runs out on a princess?”

  “Yeah!” her friend said enthusiastically. “A fucking princess!”

  Sounded like the Americans had been served cheap whiskey as well.

  Nick rubbed his chin as he followed along with the conversation, and even though the Americans didn’t know it was me, it still irked me. “Can we stop talking about it?” I snapped. “I’m not going to dress up like her.”

  “You could make a lot of money,” one of the girls said.

  “Just get your hair done . . .”

  “And maybe your eyebrows . . .”

  “And your nose . . .”

  My nose? Really? The light in this bar was dreadful.

  “How much do you think people would pay in America?” Nick asked them. “For someone to dress up like Theodora?”

  “Like, a hundred?”

  “Fifty?”

  “Twenty?”

  “Really? Twenty euros?” I exclaimed.

  “Twenty dollars,” an American clarified. With the exchange rate, that was an even lower offer. Great.

  Then one of the girls got excited and reached into the purse she had strapped across her chest. “I’ll give you twenty euros right now if you pose with me.”

  “Jenni!” one of her friends squealed. “It’s not even Theodora!”

  “Oh, come on—everyone back home will shit themselves.”

  I stood. I didn’t really know why.

  Nick pushed out of his chair and motioned at me. “So sorry, ladies, I’ve got to get my friend home. She has a big work event tomorrow and she’s had a bit too much fun tonight, if you know what I mean.” Since he mimed drinking out of a bottle, I was sure they understood his meaning perfectly.

  The woman who was now dangling a twenty-euro bill in the air between us waggled her eyebrows at me. “Come on, one quick pose for my Instagram.”

  “She doesn’t look anything like a princess. You’re wasting your money,” Nick said.

  The American paid him no attention and the crisp bill, fresh from an airport ATM, wiggled in front of me. “My friends back home are going to die. Please?”

  “Are all Americans this dumb?” Nick waved at my outfit. “A Driedish princess wouldn’t be caught dead in these rags.”

  “Sure,” I said to the girl, ignoring him and stepping forward.

  There was no time to reconsider my actions. There was only a lot of squealing and giggling as I pulled up my hood and made a duck face along with a strange blond American girl in the dim light of a dive bar in the theater district.

  She laughed, handed me the money, and the group went back to their table as I made my way to the door.

  “Not that way.” Nick grabbed my elbow and pushed me through a corner door and into the bar’s office, where a desk overflowing with papers and receipts blocked our way to a back door. I nearly stepped into a liquor crate when Nick closed the door behind us and laughed, a sexy, dry sound.

  It should not have been sexy. I checked the clock on the wall and swore. The interview. Dawn was only a few hours away and I had to get back into the palace before the staff started arriving. “I have to go.” I moved toward the back door but Nick stood in front of it, a strange expression on his face.

  “So soon, Thea?”

  The way he said my name, with that deliberate press of his tongue against his teeth, the contemplation in his eyes, should have given me pause.

  But I stood in stubborn disbelief, a kind of rebellion I’d practiced my whole life. “It’s late.”

  “And you have a historian job interview in the morning.”

  “Yes.”

  “Driedish agrarian animal husbandry.”

  “Exactly,” I said impatiently.

  “Tell me something, Thea.” There it was again, the slight emphasis on my nickname.

  He knew.

  “Tell me something about Driedish agrarian history.”

  I would never see him again. I could have pushed by him without a word. As a woman, as a princess, I didn’t need to answer his question.

  But as the old saying goes, once challenged, twice stubborn. I lifted my chin and looked into a stranger’s green eyes and said, “In 1732, a Driedener named Halper Malzen invented an H-shaped plow that revolutionized wheat farming in the Demble province, because of the rocky, granite soil there.”

  Nick didn’t blink.

  “My paper about the effects of his invention will be in the next University of Drieden Journal of History.”

  “Fascinating.”

  “It is, isn’t?”

  “I was talking about you.”

  I shook my head. How many times had I heard that before? I wasn’t fascinating. “I’m just a girl who likes history with a crappy job who drinks too much.”

  He didn’t say another word before stepping out of my way.

  I said good night softly, left through the back door leading to the alley, and was almost to my car when I remembered I hadn’t wished him luck in his search for his lost relative.

  The mystery of that family legacy occupied me all the way back to the palace gates.

  four

  THE KNOCK AT MY BEDROOM door came way too early the next morning. My head throbbed, my mouth felt like a thick wool scarf had been stuffed in it, and yes, when I checked the mirror in my bathroom, I analyzed the view with a magazine beauty editor’s eye. The limp blond hair could be sprayed and teased. An extra coat of mascara could make my blue eyes look more alert. But the under-eye circles were going to be the next national concern.

  In fact, I didn’t even have to wait for the newspapers to be printed. My secretary, Lucy, tutted as soon as she saw me, muttering something about Roberto and “work cut out for him.”

  “Coffee,” was all I said before we got to work. After all, I couldn’t exactly tell Lucy the shadows on my face were thanks to my late-night undercover excursion.

  “I can’t believe you’re doing this,” Lucy said for the six hundredth time.

  She poured me another much-needed cup of coffee. “There’s no need for this. You don’t have to do it.”

  I accepted Lucy’s proffered cup and thought of Big Gran. That’s what my brother, Henry, has called her since we were little. She had been just plain old Gran, sometimes stern, not particularly cuddly, but still Gran. Then Henry saw a banner of her twenty-foot-high portrait flying from the city hall’s walls. Family legend said he pointed his chubby finger and declared, “Big Gran looks scary.”

  My parents agreed; so did us kids. So did the rest of the palace. Queen Aurelia Victoria of Drieden, aka “Big Gran,” was scary. Which is why I was in this predicament.

  “She says I must do it,�
�� I said evenly, but avoided her direct spaniel-brown eyes. Lucy, who was only a year older than me and who had been my right-hand woman since I’d turned eighteen, knew better than to believe my dutiful statement.

  “There must be something we can do.” She tutted, pushing her glasses back over her straight coffee-brown hair. “You’re grieving. And humiliated. Recovering from shock. You’ve just come home. Surely, this isn’t necessary. Especially four months after the wedding. Who wants to hear about all that nonsense again, really?”

  Only Lucy could get away with such talk. Anyone else in the palace would nod obediently and immediately once they learned that HM Aurelia had decreed that something “must” be done. But this was Lucy. My Lucy.

  A distant cousin, Lady Lucy Monclere was also a goddaughter to Big Gran and had always been a favorite, along with the whole Monclere family, who were known for their jolly adventures and no-nonsense plain talk. The fact that Lucy’s father owned one of the finest hunting grounds in all of Drieden also didn’t hurt their status with Big Gran. Basically, Lucy was in a sweet spot between me and Her Majesty.

  I briefly considered her stance. She was right. A national interview about the wedding fiasco wasn’t necessary, and not just because I was still “recovering” from Christian’s disappearance on the day planned for our historic nuptials in Drieden’s breathtaking Cathedral of St. Julien. Nobody needed to interview me because the whole world had already dug up every embarrassing, private, scandalous detail. How the wedding brunch was still served to a half-empty hall after many dignitaries had simply chosen to return to their hotels. How my mother got drunk and cursed at the British PM. How my honeymoon bags were retrieved from the private plane and returned to the palace via police escort. That last one had been covered live on television. A very lonely matched set of Louis Vuitton luggage was gripping drama indeed.

  Lucy still might be able to get me out of this, even though it was so last-minute. She had done it before, when I was in university. She had gone to Big Gran to confide that I was overwhelmed, making myself ill, and couldn’t I take a semester off to refresh and rejuvenate in Argentina, tutoring schoolchildren there?