A Great Prince: A Royal Bad Boy Romance (7 page)

Nikolas could hardly believe it. The Princess Francesca Albertine was smiling graciously, clutching his arm, pressing her body against his ever so slightly – just enough to imply affection without being unseemly.
What charm school did they teach that in?
he wondered.

Her little hand tightened on his big bicep, the nails digging between the muscles. “Smile,” she whispered without moving her lips, as the flash bulbs popped.

Nikolas complied, finding himself aroused by the pain she was causing… and by the heat of her firm, toned body.
Years of horseback riding and walking around with a book on her head, while I learned to fight in alleys.

No matter. The little bitch had steel in her, he had to give her that.

He’d been silent and sullen on the royal jet’s flight to Vienna. It was neutral territory, where the two royals could meet and greet the international press in front of Schönbrunn Palace, which was also the sort of place quite up to the task of “fairy tale setting” for this charade. Barnabas had rationed his liquor, giving him just enough to keep him quiet without making him drunk.

All Nikolas seemed to have in his box of tricks now were the small revolts. Little things like refusing to change out of his Man United jersey and sweatpants and into the splendid uniform of a Duke of the Old Empire, until the plane was landing, causing his handlers to fear he’d disembark like some kind of English hooligan on a RyanAir holiday.

Or by wearing Ray-Ban Wayfarer sunglasses at Schönbrunn, as a defense against the flashbulbs. Or, when the princess offered her hand to him on the steps of the Palace, handing her a pair of Chanel sunglasses instead.

She was a trouper, and a quick study, he had to give her that. She smiled, took the sunglasses and put them on, clutching his arm as if they were old dear friends.

The flashes got even brighter, the media more excited.
Shit,
he realized,
I’ve made her look like a 50s movie star. Made us look like a pair of them.

The public story was simple, cheesy, and plausible. They’d met at Davos, and had fallen in love then and there. Nikolas had laughed so hard at that he’d nearly choked. And now their love would be a bridge across the divided nation, blah blah.

“When’s the wedding!” someone shouted.

Nikolas extracted his arm from Francesca’s clutch and put it around her protectively. “Well, you know women. They get more enjoyment out of planning a wedding than the actual marriage.”

Francesca looked up at him with a smile. “And men are wise enough to stay out of the way when women make plans.”

More laughter.

“Give us a kiss!” “A kiss!” “Kiss her!”

Nikolas grinned and complied, putting his hands on Francesca’s face and planting a passionate kiss on her lips.

To his shock, he could feel her respond, the heat rising in her face, the sharp gasp of breath. And his own body feasted on the pheromones between them, his erection swelling in the tight trousers. He hoped the press could see that!
Maybe she wouldn’t be such a cold fuck after all… let’s see…

Then he pushed a bit of tongue through her lips, and felt her freeze, resist, felt her anger grow. He broke off and whispered in her ear, on the side the press couldn’t see.

“I don’t think you’d enjoy our wedding night, princess. You can see I like being a bit forceful.”

She smiled and put a hand over her mouth to whisper back in his ear. “I’ve broken wilder horses than you, Majesty.”

Nikolas laughed, grateful for the Ray-Bans then, so nobody could see his eyes widen.

“Well, you’re full of surprises.”

“Yes, and I have another. We need to talk, in private.”

Nikolas nodded, just grazing her neck with his nose as he put his lips to her ear again. He felt her shudder at the touch. Then he just nicked her earlobe with his tongue before whispering again.

“Yes, we do.”

They retreated inside the Palace, to be hustled to another entrance and a discreetly waiting car that would take them to the Burgenland Embassy for another social function to celebrate their engagement.

“We need a moment,” Francesca said in that voice that had so intrigued Nikolas in Davos. The voice of command, not to be brooked. The voice of someone who’d been raised to give orders, not to take them.

“Your Royal Highness,” protested one of the fussy little men who comprised her entourage. “We have a schedule to—”

“In there,” she said to Nikolas, indicating a small antechamber. “Wait here,” she said to the fusspot and slammed the door in his face.

She took off the sunglasses and handed them back to Nikolas. “If you borrowed these from one of your women, she can have them back now.”

Nikolas’ anger flared. “So you don’t think I picked out a gift just for you? Something to help you play this game along with me, against them?”

She blinked. “So you don’t want this, either.”

Nikolas laughed. “Hell, no!”

She laughed, at last. Nikolas was startled at how pretty she could be, when she let go of that tight-ass mask she called a face. Her pearly white, even teeth, the light in her eyes, the glow in her skin…

Stop it. She’s royalty, and you’re a Pretender, and she knows it.

“Well, you were so convincing. You seemed to… relish the idea of our marriage.”

“I relish the spotlight. I relish playing all those fools. I’d never marry you.”

Her shock was plain. “Oh? Well,” she said, collecting herself. “You are the Absolute Monarch of Danubia, aren’t you? Nobody tells you what to do, do they?”

He flinched at her sarcasm. “Ouch. Yeah… as you might have figured out from… all this, even I have people to answer to.”

She nodded. “The robbers and killers who put you on the throne.”

“As opposed to the peasant thrashers and slaughterers who kept your ancestors on their thrones.”

She flushed. “Yes, well, despite all that, I’m here now, and unlike you, I’m interested in the welfare of my people, and…”

Nikolas found it then, his own steel. “To hell with you. Listen to me.
I am my people.
I lived in poverty and filth, and I literally fought my way out. I’ve gone to bed hungry more nights than you can dream of. I know what it’s like to watch your family suffer for… nothing. For politics, for bullshit. I have more in common with my people than you’ll ever have with yours.”

Francesca watched him raptly, as if something was changing in her, before The Mask rose again. “Okay, that’s fair.” She sighed. “Look. You don’t want this. I don’t want this. So there are two things that I need to figure out…”

“Who wants it, and why. I’m not stupid, you know.”

“Y-yes. Exactly.” She collected herself.
Clearly,
Niko thought,
she was expecting to give me a lecture.

Nikolas softened, seeing the vulnerability beneath the arrogance. She could be a bitch, but it was a defense. He changed his tone.

“Listen. You know the players on your side. I know them on mine. We have to figure out where they intersect.”

“I know where they intersect.” She pulled a set of photos out from her bodice. “Here.”

Nikolas grinned. “That was a clever way to hide...” Then he looked at the pictures and his grin faded.

“Those are the bodies of Danubian women, who died in a shipping container. A container headed for Dubai, where they were to be sold into sexual slavery.”

“No,” he muttered. “János would never… he swore… he would punish…”

“He used to forbid it,” she said with surprising gentleness. “When you were a boy. But not any more. Not for years. Pretty white girls in Middle Eastern kingdoms are worth more by the pound now than cocaine or heroin.”

Nikolas stared at the pictures, forced himself to study the women’s faces. Someone’s sister, someone’s daughter, someone’s sweetheart.

“They promise them jobs as secretaries, as waitresses, anything. Then they…”

“I see what they do,” he cut her off. “I will… I will handle this. I will have them arrested and…”

Nikolas faltered. Have who arrested? The power behind the throne? The man who put him there?

He saw a Chinese vase on an end table. Some priceless antique, and how many had died, suffered, taxed to death so that some aristocrat could collect it, look at it once and forget it?

“Fuck!” He picked the vase up and hurled it against the wall. Francesca jumped but said nothing.

“My country is guilty, too,” she said. “The bankers, the financiers… they help your criminals launder their money. In fact, I am pretty sure my stepmother’s family is involved. But we can stop them, Nikolas.”

Through his fog of anger, Nikolas realized this was the first time she’d called him by name.

“We have something they need.”

Nikolas nodded. “Legitimacy.”

Francesca paused. “Yes, I was going to say a good public image, but… you’ve nailed it. Without us, they have nothing.”

He narrowed his eyes as he looked at her. “You, you’re the People’s Princess, especially after that thing at the border, with the refugees.”

“And you,” she smiled ever so slightly. “You’re the ‘Punk Prince.’ Your people love you.”

“For the wrong reasons, I guess,” he said, looking away.

“Well… why not give them a better reason?” She looked thoughtful. “You know Queen Elizabeth I?”

“Not personally.”

She laughed, and Nikolas felt odd – warm, as if making her laugh made him happy.

“In her time, they spoke of good rulers as ‘great Princes,’ and she implied that she thought of herself that way. As if she was a king, not a queen. To remind the people that she was the ruler, the monarch, not a wife in waiting for a ‘true king.’ That she deserved the title because she ruled
for
her people, for their benefit.”

“And is that what you ask?” Nikolas said quietly. “That I be a ‘great Prince’?”

“That you try.”

He nodded. “Okay. We need more than photos. We need evidence. On your side and mine. I have a few favors I can call in…”

Francesca was usually a sound sleeper. Sonia had always taught her that a sound sleep was the sign of a clear conscience. So why now, when she was doing the right thing, did she toss and turn so?

She tried to tell herself that when she thought about Nikolas, it was as part of their planning. She had to think of what he could do to undermine the forces on her side.

Then in a flash she recalled his body against hers, his breath in her ear, his tongue, hot and sharp…

Francesca shook herself. Yes, he was so magnetic, so
powerful,
he had a physical presence that she could never have. He was a beast and a
gengzter
but… He reminded her of what she’d read about King Henry VIII in his youth – virile, athletic, taller, stronger, handsomer than any man in England. Or Alexander the Great, of whom men said even his sweat smelled like perfume…

Nikolas could be a king like that. He just needed someone to help him.

“No!” she shouted, throwing off the covers. He wasn’t a serious person, he was immature and pleasure-seeking.

And a great queen behind him could…

“No, no no,” she emphasized, getting out of bed. She looked at the clock. It was six in the morning, and she’d had only a few scattered minutes of oblivion all night.

Sonia. Sonia will set me straight.
She picked up the phone and called her old governess.

A crackly recording answered. “The number you have dialed is no longer in service.”

Francesca sighed. She could have sworn she’d pushed Sonia’s number. She looked at her call history. She
had
called Sonia’s number.

She called it again, thinking it must be one of those weird cell phone traffic things.

“The number you have dialed…”

She felt cold suddenly. She
knew.

She threw on her nightgown and flew down the hall of the Palace. As always, there were two guards at the doors to the King’s Apartments.

“Your Highness…” one of them began, but she was past him and through the doors before he could get out another word.

She ran into the bedroom, where she found the queen alone, propped up in bed with her breakfast on a tray.

“You,” Francesca hissed, all the years of repressed hate, repressed anger, coming to a head. “Where is she?”

The queen’s penciled eyebrows rose in mock astonishment. “My dear girl, whatever is the matter?”

“Where is she?”

But the tone that had so impressed Nikolas had no effect on Alexandra Therese. She smiled, that awful smile of the insincere.

“Your old governess? Why, she was taken very ill and had to go home to Moscow.”

“Moscow! She hasn’t been there since she was a child!”

The queen shrugged. “All the same. She was never a citizen of Burgenland, did you know that? I just discovered it the other day. And of course she has no family here to take care of her, so we…”

“You… fucking… bitch.”

Now
she had the queen’s attention, and the widened eyes were genuine.

“How dare you!”

“How dare
you
throw an old woman on the street, how dare you use her as a pawn in your war with me!”

She heard the door open, and a child’s voice grumbling. “Mama,” Prince Leopold, “what’s all this?”

Alexandra Therese smiled and opened her arms. “Come here, my boy. Your stepsister will be leaving us soon, to go live in another country, forever.”

Leopold ran into his mother’s embrace, then turned to look at Francesca. “Good,” he said with a smirk, his eyes glittering, feasting on Francesca’s suffering.

“Where is my father?”

“At the breakfast table, I imagine,” the queen said. “Why don’t you go join him?”

More surprises awaited her in the dining room. The servants who puttered around the king were unknown to her. Where were Klaus and Amelia? Were they gone too?

“Father…”

“Ah, child. Sit down.”

Francesca sat next to her father, looking at him with shock. He was… an old man. He wasn’t just bleary-eyed because it was early, she realized. The queen had demanded all these changes, and it had taken its toll on him.

“Where are Klaus and Amelia?”

He sighed. “They have retired, Francesca, to the country.”

“That’s the lie you tell a child when their dog has died, Father. That the poor dear thing has gone to live on a farm. Did you know that Sonia has been deported?”

The king stared silently at his plate, unmoving. “Sonia? But she’s a citizen of…”

“Apparently not. Apparently, she must have forgotten over decades of faithful service that she was just a guest here.”

“I am sorry, but that’s…”

Francesca knew what he’d say. She felt a wave of pity. She reached over and took his hand. “Father. Your Majesty. This is Alexandra Therese’s doing.”

He looked at her. “I know.”

“You are the king! You can reverse all this with a wave of your—”

She stopped. He could, but she could see that he wouldn’t. The queen had stepped up her game and worn him down.

“You can have Sonia live with you, dear, in Danubia, once you’re settled there.”

“Ah. Is that what the queen said? Is that how she got you to sign off?”

His brow darkened. “Francesca. I will hear no more of this.”

She stood up. “Oh, but Father, you will. You will hear much more of this.”