A Great Prince: A Royal Bad Boy Romance (8 page)

Nikolas brooded in the back of the Maybach as the huge car sailed silently down the freeway, surrounded by black Suburbans.

István had laughed at him.
Laughed at him!
As he sat on his throne!

“That photo is a fabrication, Your Majesty. Or a photo of some Russian girls, that’s all.” He sighed. “Niko, Niko, relax. This wedding, it’s a good thing. Our country will prosper, and you, well, the life you like to lead? It need never end. Plant a baby in the woman and never touch her again.”

Nikolas didn’t even remind him not to address him as “Niko.”
Why should I?
he thought glumly.
Why should I demand to be addressed as king when I’m nothing but a pawn?

“You never had a problem with our activities when you were on the street. Why bother now?”

Nikolas got some energy back at that. “That was my responsibility when I was on the street, to do as you told me. Now I’m a king, I have new responsibilities.”

“Yes, like producing an heir. Insuring stability. The prosperity of your people.”

My people. Right. Like they’ll see any of the new wealth you’ll get.

He stood up. “You’re right. I need a short vacation. I’m going to my country
dacha.”

István smiled, a real smile at last. “Excellent choice, Your Majesty. Relax, enjoy yourself. I’ll make sure you have
everything
you need out there.”

Nikolas felt sick. How many of the “translators” who’d serviced him had come in a shipping container, slaves of the
gengzters?

Baron Erik was there at the country estate to welcome him. Nikolas smiled as he hugged his friend, his only friend.

“Come inside, Erik. We need to talk.”

Erik was a good man,
his
man. Loyal to
him.
And he did what Nikolas asked without question.

It was two a.m. when the door to Nikolas’ study opened, and Karl Lengyel stood in the doorway.

“Nikolas.”

A wave of relief and sorrow washed over Nikolas. Karl was alive, and unharmed, but clearly very tired, and not just from the hour.

“Karl.” He took Karl’s hand and then pulled him in for a hug. “You’ve lost weight.”

“Yes, yes. No matter.”

“I told them if they harmed you…”

“They haven’t, no. A bird in a gilded cage, thank you.”

Nikolas flushed with shame. “I… I need your help.”

Erik brought coffee and Nikolas motioned to him to guard the door from prying ears. Then he told Karl everything.

Karl came to life, his mind turning as Nikolas laid it out for him – the wedding, the likely alliance of the Burgenland bankers and the Danubian oligarchs, his own alliance with Francesca to stop it.

“Somehow,” he finished. “But I don’t know how. What do I do? Can we get evidence of their crimes, get them in front of, I don’t know, The Hague for human rights abuses or—”

“No, no. That’s not going to work.” Karl poured himself more coffee, looking younger already. “Nikolas, do you remember our first conversation?”

“Of course.” He laughed, grinning and getting a smile out of Karl for the first time.

“What did I tell you was the one thing they need most from you?”

“My name, my ancestry, my claim to the old throne. Without me, they’re just… bandits.”

“Yes. They need you more than you need them. They can’t just depose you. You’d have to be guilty of ‘treason,’ but how can a king be treasonous when he’s an absolute monarch? Your will is law. And the people love you.”

“No, they don’t. They love
him,
the guy in the tabloids.”

“Why?”

“Because he fucks supermodels and jets around the world and…”

Karl cut him off. “You underestimate them. You’re handsome and charming and sexy and entertaining, of course. But you’re also one of them, up from dirt, up from the streets. They know you are. And they see you thumb your nose at power, even if so far it’s only been as a ‘bad boy.’ The
gengzters,
they can take away all this,” he waved at the opulent surroundings. “They can cut off your allowance and your pleasures, but they can’t take that away. Are you prepared to give up those pleasures, to live hard, to fight?”

Nikolas thought of the photo, the dead women in the container. “Yes.”

Karl’s bright eyes drilled into Niko’s. “They will follow you, Nikolas, if you will only be the man to be followed.”

“You’re talking about a revolution.”

“Yes. A Velvet Revolution, an Orange Revolution, people in the streets, peacefully but in massive numbers. Enough of them to overturn the government.”

Nikolas didn’t need to think about it.

“Okay. Tell me what I need to do.”

The one advantage Francesca and Nikolas had in their plotting was the ease with which they could meet. After all, both sides were eager to see them together, right?

Of course, Burgenland’s Palace and Niko’s bosses wanted them to meet in public, somewhere they could be handled, managed and spied on.

But the Palace was delighted when Francesca suddenly expressed an interest in a topic as innocuous as national parks. It just so happened that Nationalpark Neusiedler See had a sister park across the border in Danubia, the Fertő-Hanság National Park, and of course what could be more romantic than a lakeside picnic between a king and a princess?

“This was too easy,” Francesca said, her spirits still low from the loss of her friends at the Palace. Klaus and Amelia, were they really “retired,” or had they too been packed off somewhere? She felt… despair. That was the only way to put it.

She desultorily picked at a roast chicken as they sat at a portable picnic table by the lake. It wasn’t the most attractive spot, she thought. The ground around here was flat, treeless, marshy, the spring sky low and spattered with clouds that hadn’t yet decided whether to be gray or black. Hardly the spot that any handler would choose for their “Alpine romance,” but then again, that made it all the easier to dissuade the Palace from sending photographers.

“Not at all,” Nikolas said, eagerly tearing into his chicken. “None of them know what we’re up to yet. Surprise and stealth are our allies.”

“Did you learn that lesson on the streets of Szombathely?”

Nikolas laughed, his head falling back. Francesca tried to ignore the heat that rose in her when she looked at his neck, his taut muscles, his healthy skin.

“Yes, princess, I did. Better to hit a man from behind, than give him time to turn around and hit you first.”

She sighed. “Maybe we should just marry and move on. I need to save Sonia, my father is powerless, I should just…”

Nikolas stopped eating and looked at her. “They really knew how to get to you, didn’t they?”

She nodded. “Sonia was…”

She shocked herself by bursting into tears. Tears of exhaustion, she knew, as much as of loss. How could she fight, she was just a silly girl who had no power.

Nikolas wiped his hands on his pants, then reached over and took her hand.

Her eyes flew open. His hand was so big, so… un-aristocratic. As hard as armor, thick and rough, a working man’s hands, built from hard labor. And so warm.

What surprised her more than anything was how gently he held her little hand in his meaty one. How soft and tender his eyes could be, when that wicked glint left them.

“Princess, are you telling me you’re not the Ice Maiden after all? I thought you were invincible steel.”

She laughed through her tears. “No, I’m not. I’m so tired. I’m alone in all this and I…”

“No,” he said firmly. “You’re not. We’re in this together.” Suddenly he blushed and withdrew his hand.

He sighed. “Look. The bankers in Burgenland, the oligarchs in Danubia, they’re all tangled up. If we marry, they can strengthen their ties, they can make the border more porous, and all the Eastern European crime syndicates can get women, drugs, etc. into Western Europe through Burgenland and then Austria. I know we’re not going to marry, that there’s nothing between us, but… we have our parts to play, in sync.”

Francesca felt a strange sorrow at those words. Why? Of course they weren’t going to marry, of course that was the whole purpose of all this.

“No,” she said coolly, “I don’t want to marry you, either. I’m content to be like Elizabeth I.”

It was the old Niko who grinned, winking. “Married to England?”

Her eyes widened. “You know that history.”

“I’ve had a good teacher lately.”

She looked at him curiously.

Nikolas paused. “Do you know Karl Lengyel?”

“The dissident? Your enemy?”

She was surprised by the wry grin on his face. “Not my enemy, no. I met Karl the night they came to give me the throne. I wanted him on my council, I
had
him on my council, but… he wouldn’t stay. Not with all of István’s cronies on it, lining their pockets.” He frowned. “I tried. I tried to do this right, when I started, but I didn’t try hard enough. Maybe I’m not a good enough person.”

“I… I had no idea.”

He shrugged. “No matter. I had a moment, I let the moment go, and… here we are.”

She sighed. “But no matter what we do, that rotten little Leopold will be on the throne.”

“Maybe not. What if we can show the collusion, the guilt? What do governments run on, Francesca?”

She was surprised by his tone, the look on his face. She’d thought him — admit it — an idiot, possibly illiterate. “Money, influence, connections…”

“No. The consent of the governed. If your stepmother, her banking family, is found to be colluding with gangsters, what would that do to the succession?”

“I… I don’t know. There’s the Landtag
,
our legislature, but it’s like the House of Lords, it’s not an elected body.” The wheels in her mind began to turn. “But they could overturn the succession. It’s been done before, not for a long time, it’s not like the king is an Elector, but…”

Nikolas smiled. “Now you’re talking.”

She nodded. “So what can we do?”

“Gather evidence. You have friends, princess. Your people love you. Your loyal servants, the ones the queen has banished… I bet they’ve kept a lot of Palace secrets over the years. We get as much evidence of collusion as we can and we go public, in a very big and loud way.”

“What do you mean?”

“Revolution. We can be like Juan Carlos I in Spain.” He winked. “Another lesson Karl’s taught me.”

Francesca laughed. The king of Spain had moved to dismantle the Fascist regime after the death of the dictator Francisco Franco, and a military coup had nearly toppled his reform government, but he’d triumphed and brought democracy to Spain.

“The leaders of the coup claimed to act in the name of the king,” Nikolas continued. “But during the coup, the king got on TV and gave a speech to the country, denouncing them and urging the people to resist.”

“You have been doing your homework,” Francesca said, seeing Nikolas with new eyes.

“Like I said, a good teacher. Just… be careful,” Nikolas said, looking at her seriously.

“What do you mean?”

“You don’t want to end up in an ‘accidental’ car crash like Princess Grace, or Diana.”

She swallowed. This wasn’t like a speech at Davos, this was… serious. Dangerous. She was poking the bear. Even if the bankers didn’t operate like that, their counterparts in Danubia certainly did.

“You can back out if you…”

“No,” she said, the steel returning to her voice. “We’ll do this. And we’ll act at the same time.”

Nikolas grinned. “Make them fight a war on two fronts. You are a great Prince, Francesca.”

She laughed. “Well, you’re getting there. You’re very brave.”

Francesca was surprised by the look on Nikolas’ face. Startled, he said simply, “Thank you.”

He reached into his coat pocket. “Here,” he said, handing her a burner cell phone. “Untraceable. Though we can only use them a few times before someone catches on.” He paused. “Francesca. Are we brave? Or just reckless? People… people might die, in both our countries. Innocent people.”

She thought about it. “If we fail, we were reckless. If we succeed, we were brave.”

Nikolas laughed. “History is written by the victors. Another lesson from my mentor.”

She smiled. “Anyway. Let’s not worry about that now. Let’s get to work.”

There was one advantage to losing her own people on the Palace staff. Her old bodyguards, Hansel and Gert, knew her all too well – they were onto all the little stratagems she used to escape their stultifying presence everywhere she went. She used to call them Hansel and Gretel to get their goat, and it worked. She smiled, missing them suddenly.

But the new men, the queen’s men, they were… well, dumb as a box of rocks. They escorted her to a restaurant where she met with her old school friend from Le Rosey, her Swiss boarding school. The restaurant was of course empty save for the two of them and the kitchen staff.

HRH Princess Jasmin, one of the several thousand princesses of the House of Saud, well understood the restrictions of the life of a real princess. She and Francesca had held each other and roared with laughter, sprawled on the common room couch at school, watching Disney movies about princesses and what wonderful lives they led, ending with a marriage to the handsomest available prince.

“They married me off to this horrible old thing,” Jasmin shuddered, sipping wine from a coffee cup discreetly but regularly refilled from a silver pot. She had to be careful, in case any photographer captured her drinking alcohol. Even on royalty, that would bring down the wrath of the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, Saudi Arabia’s fanatical religious police. “But Allah be praised, he got me pregnant the first month and I had twins, boys, and now he leaves me alone.”

She gave Francesca a raised eyebrow. “At least they’re marrying
you
off to one of the officially Sexiest Men Alive.”

Francesca snorted. “He’s a beast.” But after she said it, she felt a twinge of guilt. Nikolas
wasn’t
a beast after all, was he? Well… maybe in the bedroom…

She shook it off. “Thank you so much for doing this for me.”

Princess Jasmine winked. “Anything that tweaks the nose of a Palace bureaucracy, I’m game. Are you ready?”

Francesca took a breath. “Yes.” She stood up and walked to the bathroom. Inside, she was startled to see the doppelganger the princess had provided for her.

“You’re… it’s uncanny.”

The young woman smiled. “Good evening, ma’am. Shall we?”

The “princess” returned to her seat in the dining room, with her back to the door (and the guards), ready to make silly chit chat with the other princess, dressed in the outfit Francesca had just exchanged with her.

The kitchen staff knew Francesca well. She had eaten here for years, and had always tipped lavishly enough to more than make up for the income lost from all the empty tables. Once, the Palace biddies had swept in after she left, and recollected the tips as “an extravagant mistake by Her Royal Highness.” She had returned the next night and tipped them quadruple what she’d tipped the previous night, in the presence of the Palace staff. That was the end of that sort of interference, anyway.

Now the staff was more than happy to be blind to her presence, as she walked through them and out the back door to the alley, wearing running shoes, jeans, and a hoodie with the hood pulled down over her face.

The night air was cool and crisp, and Francesca could hardly believe it. She was free! Just a girl, on a street in a city, alone, unsupervised! She felt truly happy for the first time in a long time.

But of course she couldn’t go far, the ruse couldn’t be kept up too long. At the end of the street, there was a crowded bar, music and people spilling out onto the sidewalk, young men and women laughing, talking, smoking.

Her contact recognized her immediately and broke off from the group. “Your Hi… um, hello I mean.”

She hugged him, like the old friend he was. He responded stiffly, having never touched Her Royal Presence before. “Viktor. Thank you.”

“It’s my pleasure to serve, Your H… ma’am.” He handed her a flash drive. “It’s all there.”

She smiled. Viktor had been driven from the Palace staff, not for being gay (all those old queens could hardly exile him for that) but for being openly gay, living with his partner and daring to bring him to a Palace staff party. But he still had his own contacts in the bureaucracy – men whose own secrets he knew well enough to use.

“It’s the proof you need. It documents the queen’s family’s money laundering for the
gengzters
. And
her
name is on some of the transactions!”

“No!” Francesca was delighted; it was too good to be true. “Could they be so stupid?”

“Overconfidence breeds arrogance, ma’am. And it’s always the same percentage of the transaction, every time.”

“So, clearly a kickback.”

“Yes. Ma’am… we’re all behind you. Everyone but
them,
of course.” Viktor paused. “Your father… you should have him guarded. There’s a danger.”

“What!”

“They know that Nikolas is moving, looking into things. That he’s met with their opposition. Someone in his staff is an informer.”

“What does that have to do with my father?”

He bit his lip. “If his Majesty dies, then the coronation of Leopold will be performed hastily, and…”

“Tell me.”

“Nikolas will be removed from the throne, and the reunification process will begin. Leopold will be king of a reunited Burgenland.”

“They… they would kill my father? Commit
regicide?”

“Yes, ma’am. I believe they would.”

“Viktor. Thank you. I have to go.” She ran back to the restaurant. When she came in, the staff gave her doppelganger a discreet signal from the kitchen door, and the woman joined Francesca in the bathroom for a quick change.

Francesca was breathless when she returned to the table. “I have to go. My father is in danger.”

Princess Jasmine nodded. “So it’s come to that.” As a member of the Saudi royal family, she knew all about sudden illnesses and disappearances. “Go. Hurry.”

“Faster!” Francesca shouted at the driver.

“Your Highness, I can’t go faster than the security detail in front of…”

“Honk your horn!”

“Your Highness, if I do that, they’ll think there’s a problem, and they’ll stop.”

She bit her lip, every inch a mile until they finally got to the Palace.

Too late.

She knew it, the minute they turned through the gates and into the drive. An ambulance was already there, a commotion in the courtyard.

Queen Alexandra Therese was there on the steps, her face a mask of false pity and sorrow. “My dear girl… a heart attack, so sudden…”

Francesca raced up the steps and slapped her.

“You killed him! I know you did! I’ll have your head!”

Her men grabbed her, took her away, the queen’s horrible soft voice trailing behind her. “She’s hysterical, give her a sedative and put her to bed.”

Francesca felt the jab of a needle in her shoulder. She knew that struggling would only hasten the drug’s entry into her system, but she screamed, she cried, she wouldn’t be silent.

“My father, she killed my father, arrest her, I order you, I order you…”

The queen couldn’t resist. She hugged Francesca as she weakened, and whispered in her ear. “Don’t worry, dear, you won’t have to marry that awful man now. He won’t be on the throne much longer anyway. My Leopold will rule the reunited Burgenland. And you can take holy orders, we’ll find you a nice nunnery in the mountains.”

The last thing she saw before the drug took her down was Leopold, sitting on the staircase, grinning at her like a predator before it finally kills its prey.